A Novel Idea
on writing a novel and never writing another one
I wrote a novel.
Some of you may have read it on here, in serial form. Some of you may have read it in PDF from for which you paid a couple of dollars. But no one has read it in book form, because there is no book. It hasn’t been published, except by my hands in small forms. I blame myself for this, because I gave up on the publisher search early in when it was clear it was going to be an arduous, demeaning sort of endeavor. I am just not cut out for that.
I spent years writing “There Goes The Neighborhood,” more years than I care to tally. I started writing it during one of the first National Novel Writing Month exercises, which tells you how long I was at it. The characters lived with me for all those years, became part of my life, my being. I spent my days thinking about them and my nights and early mornings breathing life into them by way of typing out words. They were fully formed people, bloated with personalities and quirks and qualities. That they were figments of my own imagination never deterred me from acting as if they were real because to me, they were.
Once I finished the novel, and then finished editing it, I put the words “The End” on the bottom of the last page and I cried. I was ready to send my story and its people out into the world. But the world and its publishers and agents did not want it. Or they wanted different versions of it. They wanted more, they wanted less, they wanted something other than I was offering them. They wanted changes that would upend the entire novel, they wanted a different ending, a quicker start.
I was protective of my creation, maybe too much so. My heart and soul were on those pages and for people to reject my words was to reject my very being. I felt hurt and dejected and sad, and decided that the only way I was going to put the novel out there was on my own terms. I just did not have it in me to deal with the publishing world anymore. My self-worth couldn’t take any more hits.
So I stopped sending out queries and cover letters and sample chapters. And my novel just sat there, unread, gathering metaphorical dust in its little folder on my MacBook. I would stare at that folder every day, feeling forlorn and empty in a way. I had created something I was very proud of and it was under wraps, in the dark, like a classic car stuffed in someone’s garage under a tarp.
To labor away on something for years and years and finally complete the project is a cause for celebration. Yet the celebration is brief when you realize that project is going to go unseen by anyone other than you and people who rejected it in whole or in parts. You wonder if all that time spent on it was wasted, if the work you put into it was thankless. You think of those characters just sitting on pages waiting for someone to read their words, care about them, or even hate them. The plot points so carefully construed, the twists and turns and surprises, the world building and myth building that went into, all for what? So it could remain just a file in a folder?
All I wanted was for people to read my story. I didn’t want to make money off of it or become famous or have the movie rights sold. I didn’t care about seeing it in a bookstore and signing copies for friends. I just wanted it to be read. I wanted what I created to be seen, to keep the feeling of incompleteness at bay. So I put it on the internet for free, for anyone who subscribed to my newsletter to read. I put it up chapter by chapter and each day people read along with it and took that journey with Stu and Grant and the rest of the gang and I began to feel complete. It didn’t matter to me that they were reading it on a website and not in book form. It didn’t matter that it was out there for free. It just mattered that something I labored on for years was finally being seen. My characters were set free in a way; they no longer belonged to me but now belonged to a few hundred people who were on their journey with them.
Once the last chapter was published I felt like I was able to breathe for the first time in years. I had put it out there, on my own terms, the way I wanted it to be seen. It may not be what I envisioned when I first started writing it, but in the end it was the best way.
I will never write another novel. I have several started, several more ideas floating around in my brain, and I think all those ideas and starters are good and worthy of exploration. But I don’t have it in me to repeat the process of novel writing only to have the finished product sort of just linger in limbo. I don’t have the stamina to spend years with characters that might not ever see the light of day. I don’t have the inclination to get to know a whole new set of people who will live in my head and consume my life and invade my sleep.
I will write very short stories and publish them here. But the process of writing a novel again is not for me. I’m glad I did write “There Goes the Neighborhood” because I completed a life’s dream. I wrote a novel. And that is enough.