The end of a story.
By: Novel To Novel
Tags: Books, Novel Writing, Writing Life, Personal Essay, Reading

(Some kind of) Beginning

After a couple of years within which my relationship with writing has felt akin to a clandestine affair, I’m keen to return to an empty open air arena.

Instead of creating, I have rather impolitely polished off ninety-nine books, and am in the process of consuming my one hundredth book of 2020. I find, increasingly, that whenever I read I have very little control or decorum. I read and I am briefly satiated — and I move on to the next one. I do not think of the books that have come before until I am asked to recommend a favourite (and then I scramble to think of a title). I am sure this process could be revealing of some greater internal pathology of excessive consumption. I am also sure that it would have been good for me to try combatting this impulsive desire rather than indulging it.

I may have exercised more self control if 2020 had not been a year of such personal and global extremes. I seesawed between the lows of self-loathing and the highs of a maniacally inflated ego, while being dragged through a rose bush at a breathtaking pace by an iron fist.

Such frenetic and frenzied activity is not conducive to writing.

I have been deeply, hopelessly preoccupied with myself.

This is therefore an attempt to let go of the ego that has prevented me from realising the satisfaction that underpins moving on. I am purging myself of the books that I have chewed up and spat out unceremoniously in the past twelve months.

(Coming to a) Conclusion

I have read widely this year, perhaps unwisely. I think that the haphazard heap of words that I have collected speaks to a wider sense of not knowing what brings me a lasting satisfaction. An unsatisfying read, for example, was Gods of Jade and Shadow. I do not think that this is any fault of the book itself. The fault lies in my relationship with fantasy as a genre. I have come to the conclusion this year that these books are unsatisfying (at this point in my life) because they do not scratch a proverbial itch that my ego has to see itself reflected in words. My feelings towards Gods of Jade and Shadow were not created by some lack in prose or other aspect of content. I was not swept away by it because it revealed nothing to me about my own existence.

I had read a story, but what I had wanted was to write. I wanted to devise and perform my own plot line. I felt similarly about Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, as well as Strange the Dreamer. I enjoyed them momentarily because they allowed me to escape an irrevocably desolate stage of the year. I could be swept up in the descriptions of other worlds that had nothing to do with my own increasingly isolated one. I could further push back the ominous job of writing.

The escapism I found in mythical worlds momentarily quelled my hunger, but I constantly found myself returning to the familiar embrace of writers like Jhumpa Lahiri, Zadie Smith, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Kiran Desai, and James Baldwin. At the risk of generalising, these writers are absolute masters of character. I believe that they are so because their writing is a vast, sprawling exercise in human empathy. Their prose is, of course, not perfect. Their stories are often bloated and could end much sooner.

This does not matter to me.

Their craftsmanship is rooted in hyper-awareness of the fact that humanity is not rooted so much in space and place, as it is within a realisation of the self as hopelessly real. I say ‘hopelessly real’ not because their characters lack hope, but that they are consciously, aggressively flawed and (mis)guided by space and place. It is not physical temporality itself that makes these characters so brilliantly full, it is their awareness of how concrete and effectual they are that makes them human. We — just like these characters — are buffeted by self-created consequences and the finality of our actions.

Irrespective of whether these consequences are intended, we can rest easy in knowing that at least there are countless more choices that remain.

However, if we conceive of life as being a serial rather than a pause-less narrative, there has to be a space and place where the choices made lead into a batch of new ones. Just like serial publications, I wanted my life to be divided up into controllable, distinct moments that have discrete pauses. I needed these writers’ characters because the phases that their stories depicted had to end. I desperately needed to see the conclusiveness of choices in the absolute nature of these narratives, because one of mine was going on for far too long. These books were deeply satisfying on a visceral level because they allowed me to conclude a self-serving spiel that I was dragging out with no end. I have been exhausting myself, and have been an exhausting presence to those around me.

(The big) Conclusion

I suppose then, what I learned from (almost) one hundred books is fairly simple, and it is a lesson that makes me a better writer.

I learned how to make a choice that would end a story.