Writing and My Life

Novel Writing and My Life

Of course, I have thought for years about writing a novel based on my life. We write about things we know best and feel strongly, right? Yes, the novel would fill the blanks that exist in my daily blogs. My critic was right. It would give an arc to the narrative of my blogs, to what I am trying to say. My pieces would no longer appear opaque and incoherent. But I don't know how to start. And there is no strong compulsion that exists inside me. 

Writing a novel takes a strong commitment of time and energy. Yet, every year, tens, if not hundreds of thousands novels appear worldwide. Out of those, probably no more than 20 would make a literary impact and are translated into other languages. The novels will be studied in school and their authors will be part of literary history and eventually of literature. The rest of tens and hundreds of thousands novels are trash and soon forgotten although some would sell well enough for the publishers recoup their investments. Of course I am not talking about perennial best selling authors who prostitute themselves in writing light fiction and "thrillers". These authors are all rich and famous, but they know their books are trash, written on the basis of formula, and making no lasting impact. Their readers are like sugar or drug addicts who need the fix annually or even shorter time frame. The books and their authors will all soon be forgotten. There is no ripple as a Hemingway, a Styron, or even a Mailer book would make. 

If I write something, I want it to make an impact and memorable. Some of my own poems and my poetic translations are of that nature. Likely these poems and translations will endure after I die. If I write a novel, I want one that has the same impact. 

So far I have been content with attempts at short fiction that occasionally pop out of me, from somewhere in my subconscious. All short stories of mine were written unplanned and as a response to an itch, a sensation that demands me to address. They are not good, but they are not trash, at least I think so. But I could be wrong in self-assessment. That was why I have not sent any for publication. 

"Julian" by Gore Vidal is the kind of novel I myself wanted to write. Smooth, literary, urbane, assured, flowing, characters well developed, coherent in plot, and thematically unified. I know the requirements of the how. I am missing the what. But I am not worried or pressed for time although my faculties are declining. I am not motivated for fame. I primarily go after peace and love which is in short supply in my hermetic world. 

It's not like I haven't started writing that "first novel". About two years ago, I sort of did that. Interested reader could go that far back in my blog and dig for that. I haven't pick up the thread because I still search for a theme. I must know what I want to say: what the story means? What's the morality, the message? There has to be a tension in the story that propels the reader to keep on reading and when he gets to the end, he gets exhausted but transformed and wishes the story has not ended because he enjoys the ride and because he knows he is becoming wiser and kinder after being exposed to the story. He then has a crazy, ambitious idea that maybe he should tell his own story. 

A first novel is like the first love. If it is real and true, it's very good. It says everything about the writer in which he gives his best shot, delivers his best punch at his demon, aims his first shot to the moon, especially if the writer is 64 years old and has been through Hell in love, money, power dynamics, and flirted with suicide and homicide. It's a vehicle through which the writer gives his views on sex, culture, and human nature. But in the end, it is a statement he wanted to say to his first budding, suffocating, exhilarating, haunting love. It is a statement, a message he wants to make while she's alive and in full control of her faculties so she could go back in that Summer of 1967 and see with fresh eyes what it meant to fall in love with a possibility, a potential; what it meant to have an itch and yet couldn't scratch it. He wants her to know his post-1967 development as a human being stemmed from that unfulfilled wish, a simple wish but never realizable, and yet in the back of his mind, he always wonders if she is that good and wonderful or she's only a figment of his overdriven, supercharged 18-year-old half-boy, half-man's imagination and wish.

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