THE JOYS AND PITFALLS OF WRITING A NOVEL IN YOUR 20s

A correspondence from the writer's forge sent up in the canary's beak

Remedios Varo - Creation of the Birds

Earlier this month I turned 30. If I remember correctly, I was 24 when I sat in the office of an agent who worked for the company that managed J.K. Rowling.¹ Outside the glass walls of his office rows of people sat typing at desks, seeing to the upkeep of who-knew-what magical corners of the Wizarding World™. It was a pleasant day in London – a city hardly more familiar to me now as it was then – and bright sunlight was making everything seem a little unreal.

Only the night before I was at an event brushing shoulders with literary agents, the stem of a wine glass pinched between my fingers. Any of them, it seemed, might be the one to champion my work. I had just finished the first draft of my first novel, and it was being noticed. So much so that in the privacy of my own thoughts I might – once or twice – have even allowed myself to think the word debut (being noticed invariably makes young writers want to use French words).

My almost-but-not-quite fully developed prefrontal cortex was convinced it could hear the doors to the life I had dreamed for myself as a book-devouring seven-year-old finally creaking open. Not only was I going to be a capital W Writer, but my name was to be inscribed on spines which would sit side-by-side with childhood heroes of mine – the Rowlings, Pullmans and Tolkiens of the world.²

Now, at 30, that same novel has fallen back into my lap once again, six drafts later. And I’ve never been more aware of its shortcomings. Until a few months ago, it was a while since I’d returned to it with real intent. In the intervening time I’ve written other things, including a short story collection for which the hope is that it will be pitched alongside the novel when the time comes. That one came easier – I felt that I had grown as a writer, and having one “finished” work under my belt I found that I could pursue this second one with a little less fear and a little more freedom. I’m proud of that collection.

But the novel is something different. Perhaps, being my first, it will always be something of a different entity to me. It was the first great whale on which I set my sights, and it wounded me in the process. It was a struggle. I felt called to pursue it, yet I didn’t feel ready for it. I wonder if anyone feels ready to write that first novel until it’s finished. Until you have a version you can hold in your hands and toss into the fire, or try again.

Unlike Ahab, it didn’t take my leg, but it is possible that it took my sleep. Around the time that I began to write it I also began to experience what you could call a kind of recurring night terror – this is something I have briefly touched on in my post Call Back Your Avatars. These terrors are jolts of adrenaline in the chest which happen as I’m trying to sleep. Often they’re paired with very brief visual hallucinations, a greatest-hits reel of which would include: figures appearing next to my bed, a tree of effectively infinite branches, a crucifixion, my old bedroom and other entirely new rooms, a small man in a Hawaiian shirt and sunglasses, non-existent flowers, and, once, a human heart landing on my skylight window with a definitely audible splat. Others are too abstract to describe, though lately they have mostly taken the form of lights appearing in the darkness of the room as if from a great distance.

Since they began these experiences have happened every night without fail, besides the odd occasion when I’ve been drunk enough to pass out in a merciful Pavlovian slump at the sight of a pillow. While I don’t wholly believe that they are directly correlated with the novel, the time of both of their beginnings is so aligned that they might as well be. My early-to-mid-20s were a cauldron of stresses, but one of the most significant ones was certainly the pressure I was putting on myself to write the novel. As I have said, it was a task that seemed beyond my doing, and yet one that I felt I had no choice but to do.

I appreciate now that my hyperfocus on this self-appointed quest was causing me to neglect my body and my life in the world beyond my desk. My attention and energy were primarily being funnelled into the work, and my life outside of it – and inside of myself – was atrophying as a result. This was exacerbated massively during the Covid lockdowns, when the healthy distraction of an actual job was taken out of the picture. It’s only in the past year or so, through meditation and yoga, that I’ve begun to really understand how much stress I have carried and continue to carry in my body. It turns out the hermit’s life is not particularly conducive to well-being. Not for me, anyway.

So as someone who spent much of his 20s alone, working at something, the obvious question can’t help but come to mind: have I sacrificed too early? And will the investment of that sacrifice ever pay off? The novel is still unfinished, after all. The old work remains to be done. The old work wants to be made new.

One of my main promises to myself as I move into my 30s is to pursue writing more in confluence with experience – to not hole up inside the diastole like some fugitive hoarding a store of dynamite in the hopes that its eventual explosion will be spectacular enough to offset the years of withdrawal from life. I can’t allow writing to be the locus of my experience. I believe that writing can be a conversation with yourself, and that this solitary act can enrich and expand experience in the same way – and even more so – that reading can. But there must be a life outside of literature, it is not supposed to be the principle arena of living.

Henry David Thoreau expresses a similar sentiment beautifully in Walden:

‘I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one… I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now.’

And on only the next page he offers reassurance to those like me who have spent years doing the work of the mind and neglected the work of the body:

‘If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.’

I don’t just want to read anymore about Thoreau building his cabin in the woods and living off the land – I want my own hands to know the ground. My fingers are so familiar with the keyboard and the pen that those motions have become second nature. How much more novel might it seem if each time I returned to my desk to write my hands had been active with other work, not just the passivity of scrolling or the drudgery of laundry, but genuine work. I’ve dabbled briefly in farmwork and construction jobs in the past, but it wasn’t enough. I need to inhabit the life of my body even as I pursue the work of my mind. I need to rein myself back in from the plain of mental escape, that detached miasmic world in which thought clashes only with thought, in which the steel that is tempered dissolves in air. 

But my 20s wasn’t all futility and intellectual vanity. What is the worth of the work that I have already done? What body does my ‘castle in the air’ have? That was the question I was forced to ask myself when, having just turned 30, I had an inkling, an intuition like a gleam on the bed of some inner valley floor, of the same grail that had lured me on my quest in the first place. It was like the revisitation of an old dream. I had almost forgotten the magic of that tantalising gleam in the years I had spent, head down, trying to reach it. But for some reason, now I was being blessed anew with a flashing impression of the novel as it had appeared to me before a single word of it was written.

At the time I was about two months shy of my last idle attempt at yet another redraft. I had decided to let it lie for a little while. Then, when I felt that it was time to give my agent an update on my progress, or lack of it, I saw the gleam, and realised that I would have to start again.

It suddenly became clear to me that in the years since, I had strayed far too little from that first draft. I had grown to prize it over the initial intuition of which it was only an attempted manifestation. After all, it was that version of the novel that seemed as if it was going to be my golden ticket into published authorhood. And I had held onto that hope for years, throughout the five subsequent redrafts, always retouching more than rewriting, trying not to mar the face of something that had already been touted for success. But what had been touted, really, was the novel’s potential. It was not a finished work – far from it – yet I was no longer allowing myself to wet the clay, only to polish it.

After finishing that first draft at 24, I was in a bind. Though I had “finished” my novel, I was still an inexperienced writer, and what I had achieved did not feel entirely within my understanding – I was not convinced that it was even repeatable, let alone improvable. Writing is a process of discovery like sounding out the deep waters of the self, and often what surfaces has its origins in a region far removed from the conscious mind that baits the hook. Before I had written a novel, doing so seemed like an impossible task. After doing so it seemed not quite impossible, but certainly mysterious. Not the kind of thing it would be easy to justify detail by detail in one of those writer’s Q&As, to defend it like a PhD. To explain why so-and-so said such-and-such on page X. It would be like justifying a dream.

Yet what a wonderfully substantial dream a novel is. Not to mention externalised, able to be shared. An artefact of soul. But faced with the duty of refining this artefact, I became more like a caretaker than a sculptor. I was no longer allowing myself to perform my craft. And therein lies the problem of applying the metaphor of the holy grail to a work of art – I had the grail. The grail was a lump of clay. There is no sudden striking of gold for the writer – though there is no limit to the opulence of their flashes and visions. If it is real, solid gold the writer seeks, they must take themselves instead to the forge, and work the alchemical work of literature. It demands long hours of prolonged focus, willingness to mould and remould the material – the toil of sublimation. For years I restricted myself from this work. I was made impotent under a cloud of potentia.

M.C. Richards asks:

‘How do we perform the Craft of life, kraft, potentia? Potentia, like so many other words, has had its meanings separated out, and has come, in our day, to be both potency and potentiality ­– that is to say, both the power present and the power latent, that can but has not yet come into being. In Latin these are the same word. And this is a wisdom. For the potentiality is also a present power with which we must deal and to which we must speak.’³

Potential can work against the success which is its own fulfilment when it is praised too much as a merit in itself. As Richards says, we must learn to deal with it and to speak to it. As, ideally, we must with all the disparate parts of ourselves. As for me, potential held a power over me that made it hard to write, and it accumulated likewise around the finished draft of the novel, like an aura that could easily be sullied at my touch.

I knew with a tentative knowledge that I had talent as a writer. But the doubt that all writers must know, especially early on, was a devil on my shoulder – what if that talent is gone? What if it was an accident, or only a flash of inspiration, irretrievable? What if, when I next advance the cursor across a blank Word document, I find myself writing drivel? So I stayed away from the blank page, instead preening the ones already filled, deferring to my less experienced self as one who somehow knew better, though his value as a writer was only in potentia.

Potential, internalised, is also a kind of false pride, and just as fragile. Pride is the inverse of shame, and the two can easily flip back and forth when the source of the pride is unstable or falsified. Likewise, potential is by definition the potential to fail. It is also the potential to succeed. Each word that I altered as I redrafted the novel felt like an attempt to tip those scales in my favour. Each word came weighted. But really, what is success when it comes to literature, or art in general? Monetary and reputational gain might come to the writer, but to the extent that the writer is an artist what final success is available to them? What clay truly turns to gold? Nowadays, I would be inclined to suggest that any sincerely great artistic achievement is also a failure.  

This is a sentiment echoed by William Faulkner, a man whose works are considered by some to be the pinnacle of American literature. Talking about himself and his contemporaries, he said:

‘All of us have failed to match our dream of perfection. I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible. If I could write all my work again, I’m convinced I can do it better. This is the healthiest condition for an artist. That’s why he keeps working, trying again: He believes each time that this time he will do it, bring it off. Of course he won’t.’

The dream of perfection is the prerequisite for the splendour of the failure. The writer’s forge is a factory of the unrealisable. What is perfect is fundamentally unable to be made manifest, this is the essence of perfection as a concept – if it was achieved corporeally we would then have to conceive of a yet higher perfection in order to even know what it would mean to speak of this object as perfect, and by doing so its perfection would immediately be voided. What is perfect is always only ideal, in the Platonic sense of the word. But when a vision that has the pull of perfection’s promise appears to the writer we chase it like that great whale, and it leads us across channels and through archipelagos which, though it may be our own internal seas on which we sail, we would not have discovered without it.

This is the gift that a novel, even a spectacularly failed one, gives to its writer. It is a map. A map by which previously unknown territories of the self can be brought to our attention. And now, at 30, the novel that was both the great whale and the millstone of my 20s has come back to me, asking at last to be written again, to be remoulded, given new life, to be dreamed again. As if my life has chosen this time to tell me: look; look at what you’ve done, and at what you’ve failed to do, and at what you must do now.   

Because now it feels as though the real work has to begin. And for this I’m grateful. What better gift to give myself on my 30^th birthday than the map, the artefact, the dream-work of my 20s?

And as I contemplate that dream-work, down in the smoky, steaming depths of the forge, I realise something truly significant. The narrative at which I have spent the last six years chipping away seems to contain within itself an analogue of the journey I now feel compelled to take in my own life. Without revealing the specifics, the novel deals with the dashed hopes of a society when a vessel prophesied to carry them to a promised land fails to arrive, and with a boy’s commitment thereafter to building that self-same vessel with his own hands.

The central symbol of the novel – the dashed vessel, the broken promise – seems now a kind of envoy from my past self to the me that sits here now. Do not wait. Do not bank on the promises of others. Use your hands. Build.

1. This was before she went all-in on contributing her personal cess to Twitter’s pool.

2. The hubris and naivete of being 24 is a potent concoction. Doubly so when the fuel of genuine possibility is poured onto it.

3. M.C. Richards - Centering in Poetry, Pottery, and the Person