Shattering my dream of being a novelist

I have wanted to write novels for as long as I can remember. Books have always been a monumental part of my life as a reader, a collector, and an aspiring author. I read Steinbeck and am in awe of how he so beautifully scratches beneath the surface of what it means to be human. His prose is clean and powerful, and his stories seep into your bones where they make a forever home.

I always said, if I could merely write half as well as Steinbeck, then I’d be happy. This limiting mantra often left me paralysed, unable to write at all, or judging what I had written to the point of abandonment.

I’m naturally an ideas person. I am never short of ideas. Executing them on the other hand isn’t my strong suit. I start with a punch, but I eventually lose the wind from my sails. And then, another idea pops up. I’ve identified this as a form of self-sabotage, something I’m working on, mostly unsuccessfully. The most obvious place this showed up was in my writing. I would have an idea, plot, plan, get excited, think about it constantly, research, take notes, and when it was time to sit downand write, I would be inspired. Soon, I’d lose my way, I’d feel like I was drowning beneath my own ideas with no clear path ahead of me. I couldn’t ever get to the finish line, no matter how many different strategies I tried. Did I give up? Nope. I just got busy, too busy to work on my novel, but that still allowed me to continue saying I was an aspiring novelist.

Being a writer had become a part of my identity. And when something outside of you becomes a part of your self worth, you step into dangerous territory.

The ideal of being a novelist became bigger than me, my standard of what I expected of myself didn’t spur me on, it hindered everything. It was always an ideal that I was striving for, never a tangible thing. My path to being a novelist was laced with self-imposed failure. In a sense it became my Lacan’s Object A.

I couldn’t get out of my head long enough to turn my dream into any sort of reality, but the thought of giving up never occurred to me, because without that thread I had been following blindly — who was I?

This journey/battle has been going on most of my adult life. And yet, something interesting happened during this current period of Nanowrimo 2019. As your 30’s often does, it strips away the bullshit you’ve been carrying around, and you begin the magical expedition of giving less and less fucks of what people think of you. My 30’s, so far, have been a time of honest introspection and immense growth, and this turning point has been no different. So, during yet another attempt of Nanowrimo which I was likely to not complete, again, I found myself doing something else instead of working on my novel. I was writing poetry.

Poetry has been a form that I’ve been playing with for a few years but have always just used it as a way of giving voice to my complicated soul. Poetry came easily, I never had the pressure that I felt writing fiction. Because I expected nothing from my poetry, it could just pour out of me, without judgement. I was relaxed writing poetry, unlike the tiger-mum mode I went into with writing my novel.

I was writing 1–4 poems a day during the first week of Nano. As my actual word count crawled along, my poems gave me comfort that at least I was writing something. After a friend’s suggestion, I had the absurd idea of switching my Nano project from my novel to a book of poetry. I poked fun at this, laughed at it, rolled my eyes at it, but still the idea tugged at me. My inner dialogue argued back ‘but I’m not really a poet, I’m a fiction writer’. And then I looked back on the mountains of poems I had written, compared to the abandoned manuscripts that taunted me from my desktop folder named Writing. How could I not really be a poet when the first thing I seemed to do to still my mind was write poetry. I even feel urged to write lines while I’m cooking, as I change nappies, and at traffic lights.

This may not sound all that revolutionary but I did something this week that I am still trying to process. I have mentally put away the idea of being a novelist for the first time — ever. I have reluctantly closed the door on that dream to give space to something that has helped me process, explore, and travel to new depths within myself. I have deleted this line twice, but now I will say, publicly, I am not an aspiring novelist, I am not a fiction writer, I give up my dream of writing novels. I am a poet at heart. And although all of that still feels incredibly uncomfortable to say, a part of me can actually breathe for the first time, maybe ever.

I feel a sort of grief to no longer be giving energy to my current manuscript, it had so much potential… if only it didn’t pick me to be the author. Perhaps, after I allow myself to get comfortable as a poet, to publish and dismantle the self-imposed pressure around writing, perhaps then, I could give the novel thing another go… or maybe I won’t even miss it at all.

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