For over a year now, I have been working on various ‘large-scale projects’. They rule my life in private. When my father died, when I moved to Mongolia, when I moved back to the UK, and now that I am working at a startup and living in a nunnery, I have been preoccupied with the spectre of the large-scale project. The spectre takes on many forms. Each one is final and equal to the totality of my life. Each one, in a matter of months, is superseded, not by an entirely different project, but by growth in various directions, the transformation of some parts, so as to throw the whole amorphous whole on its head. For the sake of my sanity, I must write, for once, about writing a novel.
I release writing weekly on Substack. This schedule is perfectly in tune with my natural rhythm. At university, I was often required to write two essays a week. Without fail, the second of these essays would turn out aborted or stillborn. I do not suffer from writer’s block in my weekly routine unless I am ill or depressed. Without fail, I am capable of having one idea a week, and this idea usually comes to me at least a few days before it is time to post. My weekly idea is the base unit of my ritual calendar. I am universally successful in bringing my weekly idea to fruition. I am not capable of fine-tuning or repeatedly developing my pieces, since they are the product of week-long ideas, and if I do not finish them in a week, they vanish.
How, then, can I approach a work of writing that must, by necessity, take far longer than a week? When writing a novel you must be patient. You can’t get greedy and expect the whole picture to show up immediately. You must trust that by walking a few miles a day, you will, inevitably, by sheer inertia, complete a journey of a thousand miles. The problem in this process is that my internal compass draws me in many different directions. When I used to swim as a boy, I kept my head down low and did not suffer to raise my head to survey my surroundings. As a result, I would gradually turn over the course of a lap, turning rightwards, ever rightwards, until I barrelled into the swimmer to my side. In short, a journey of a thousand miles might end up being a journey of a hundred miles, then a hundred miles in another direction, then a hundred miles in another direction… without ever being accomplished.
There are a few ideas that have preoccupied me for multiple years now and which I am sure will end up in whatever sort of novel I will produce. First of all is my obsession with Aeschylus’ Oresteia. My first attempt at writing around this obsession produced a modern mythicization. In my next attempt, episodes from the Oresteia were scattered languidly across an otherwise unrelated novel, in between more well-defined episodes. I have had ideas ranging from focusing on modern characters descended or reincarnated from the heroes of the Oresteia, to simply placing the Oresteia alongside a modern narrative without further elaborations, as a contrast or an exercise in developing two narratives at once, which might then interconnect in some way at a later point. I have had the idea of a modern researcher in a temporal long-distance relationship (long-range?) with the mythic Cassandra, and of modern characters needing in some way to relitigate and resolve Orestes’ blood debt. I’m not quite sure what to do with it.
My other fixation is with Latureamont’s Maldoror. In the first incarnation of my novel, I used Lautreamont’s evil vampire alter-ego as a character. It was quite fun to simply steal a character, name and all, and place him in my own work. My idea was a story in which Maldoror, the haunter, was narrating the story of the protagonist, an autofictional version of myself. Maldoror would be at once similar to the desire to impose narrative order on your own life, and the real Cartesian demon who kept my hero in a world of illusion, a demon he would have to defeat, somehow. And, in later incarnations of my novel, Maldoror became a more ambiguous figure, occasionally mentioned in dialogue, starring obscurely in some episodes. There were direct references as well: I wrote, at one point, a protagonist who believed he was the reincarnation of Lautreamont, as Pythagoras believed he was the reincarnation of Euphorbus.
Why is it that I keep failing to complete a novel? What is it leading me astray? Part of it is simply inconsistency and a lack of certainty. It is very simple to impose order on a work of 1,000 words. Whenever a work gets above the 20,000 word mark, it is harder to think of what could tie it all together. Or rather, with a shorter work, there is only ever one solution, which appears by necessity. With a longer work, there are many possible solutions, or seemingly possible solutions, which the writer must thread the needle through. The longest novel draft I have is at 60,000 words and I have no idea what to do with it. When I read it through, it noticeably changes direction every 10,000 words, so that it is not really a novel, but a ship lost at sea driven by contrary winds.
Should I simply stick to a plan and keep plugging away at it? Probably. In this post I am trying to use my weekly writing routine to tackle a wider creative problem, which has run parallel to my weekly releases for over a year. If I can give sense to the process of writing a longer work within this shorter piece, where I usually succeed at creating a tenuous sense of order, then the matter might be resolved. Although it sounds nice to find a scheme and stick to it, it requires a forcefulness and rapidity that is inaccessible to me. I probably could not stick to any one plan for longer than a month. Within that month, I would have to produce a complete draft, plain and simple. However, I work 48 hours a week, and I have a weekly release schedule to maintain. I have also considered allotting a weekend in which I do nothing other than put everything in order. I will take all the scattered bits I’ve written so far, all the notes and separate documents, and spend a weekend shoving it together. According to Benjamin, you should never count a work finished until you work at it overnight. I could hash this whole thing out over a weekend. He also says the decisive blow is always struck left-handed. Why not take the novel by surprise in an unexpected blitzkrieg?
One issue that keeps on leading me astray are the multitudinous possibilities of form. Is it a novel I want to write, or a novella, or a short story collection? What sort of novel should this be — one with traditional characters and plotting, or a collection of thematically interconnected vignettes? Should the narrator be an identifiable narrator, an autofictional one? These are the most basic problems of novel writing, and I struggle with them. I am, possibly, interested in too many forms at once. These problems trouble me more than they should because I am not just writing a longer work, I am writing my first longer work. Would I be satisfied with just putting together some short stories I’ve already written and calling it a day? Rather than simply writing something, a story that makes use of one or two of my ideas, shouldn’t I put together everything I’ve done so far? Isn’t putting everything together exactly what a successful novel should do? To decide on one possibility in this case is intimidating.
My long-term concerns are not just with novel-writing. Once I have published a few works, and once I make a reasonable stipend through my writing, I would like to open a small press. I would like to learn how to properly print and bind books. I would like to produce card decks, contraptions, and books of irregular shape. I am particularly interested in combining my writing with small objects, or automata, or Tamagotchi-like toys —things of this nature keep cropping up in my writing. I am interested in creating weird literary objects, like charms, which combine written expression with statuary or mechanics, just as how calligraphy combines writing with painting. When I was young, it was not really writing that first interested me, but the physical activity of bookmaking. I made encyclopaedias of dinosaurs I knew on miniscule interlinked pieces of paper. I have, of course, also considered writing a novel in the form of an encyclopaedia, or a catalogue.
Do I need to know the overall plan of my ‘big project’ in order to continue it? At this stage, the answer is a yes. I spent the last year writing a great deal, going in different directions. My first draft, for all intents and purposes, is complete, and I still don’t really know what I am writing. There is only one serious task that awaits me: putting it all together and seeing what to do with it. Then, I will see the parts that I need to add in, once the form is hashed out. But, I keep on avoiding this formal task. In various documents I test out different forms, like trying on new sets of clothes, and these documents go untouched for months afterwards. All I must do at this stage is put it all together and see how it fits.
It might be that I need to stop thinking about the effort behind it all. I am making this into a great demon in my head. In reality, I have done the hard part — I have written about 100,000 words. Now, all I need to do is put it all in one document, and find the easiest, the simplest way to ‘complete’ the whole thing. I am a working man; I do not have time to stew over formal intricacies. If I could simply get everything into one document, put things in an order that makes sense and make brutal, instantaneous cuts, then I am sure the result would constitute progress. I ought to stop thinking about tasks that require effort, and instead find the easiest way to the finish line.
I think, perhaps, I take too much joy in stewing over formal possibilities to take such drastic action. When I am considering various shapes my novel can take, I am writing, after all. I am engaged in literary creation as meditation. Compare me to the swordsmith who folds his steel one hundred times before forging a katana. I am contemplating the shapes and rotating them in my head. I am constantly sharpening these shapes, drawing them in tension between heaven and earth. What would it mean for one of these ideas to dominate the form of the novel? Should I just pick one idea and run with it, or continue to try and combine them all together? Should each of these narrative ideas really, in truth, be its own story, and should I write a novella focused on one of them, so that I can try walking before running? I have fallen in love with thinking such thoughts over the course of my day, and taking a decisive step would mean severing this pleasant trance.
I have previously written about my dissatisfaction with the novel form. Why should the novel remain the preeminent literary form, even after the circumstances that made it vital have faded? I have also said that this dissatisfaction is not much more than an incapacity. I am unable to complete a novel — I will remain unable to complete a novel until I complete one. I am unable to negotiate the relationship between literary part and whole. The Oresteia ends with a decisive step forward, a new order on the mortal plane. The gods are each allotted their proper place, a process for deciding human justice is decided upon. The trilogy is able to end because the deliberation is over. Retroactively, justice has been imposed, and an aesthetic unity has come about. I am unable to enforce such an order, until I will be able to.
Perhaps I should just wait for ‘the moment’, and keep writing until that moment is realised, deliberately putting thoughts of the whole out of my head. Or, I could eschew the idea of effort entirely. My work will always, ultimately, come out of my real life. My novel will not magically emerge from beyond myself. The novel I will create will be the novel I can create. Unable to spend my waking life tweaking the formal organization of my work, what I will be able to do is put it all together in a matter of hours. I can follow my instincts and simply put the broken parts together, tighten a few nuts and bolts, and call it a day. I can produce, essentially, a failed novel, in the vein of Kafka, the novel of a man with a full-time job whose life is dominated by contrary concerns.
What is the nature of the novel in the present moment? Who is its protagonist? I do not want to propose any far-reaching answers. Matters on earth are driven equally by the unfolding of Spirit and by the dumb brutality of market forces. Personally, I am interested in occluded, abstract, and non-human characters. The protagonist of Seiobo There Below is the aesthetic tension between Heaven & Earth, embodied in the divinity Seiobo. Increasingly, we ascribe unfeeling, abstract, and microbial agents power over human affairs. We ascribe moral worth to hormones and neurotransmitters, and rather than fate we live in deference to markets and world-historical tendencies. The human subject is no longer an unimpeachable island whose inner life can be cordoned off from everything else. In ancient geographical thought, the far limits of the known world became the site for anthropological speculation. The appearance of the mythical in life is a way of exploring the real possibilities of existence. I have been called a mythic and animistic writer, and I accept these labels. I do not insert the mythic into real life as a way of casting light on reality. I use the mythic process to generate a reality, which gives birth to a new subject and world, as a means of escaping the ongoing assault on the subject. These are, in short, the sorts of things I will deal with in my novel.
great stuff; as the Oresteia puts it, we must suffer into truth….
i would like to buy you a beer. is your nunnery near london