Chop Shop

For the discerning ne'er-do-well wordsmith

For four coffee-stained years, I devoted myself to my novel. It was to be a cautionary tale: perceptive, tender, yet wildly satirical and entertaining – a stark look at the world made bearable through presentation.

The book became a crucible for all I cherish in craft and in belief. My identity and my claim to legitimacy. Who I am and what I believe. My reason for getting out of bed.

Yet, it unraveled despite all efforts. Effort, whether redoubled or relaxed, seemed only to push the work further from my vision.

So I am stopping.

The moment of realization was unceremonious, arriving via movie preview. There on the screen flashed my book, but better. This wasn’t the sole reason for halting – I am familiar with “there are only so many stories” and “my voice is unique” – but it was a signpost.

Despite being armed with skill and passion, envisioning a battle of wits I could win, I found myself at odds with my work for nearly the entire four years. I believed that with enough precision, focus, energy, and writing ability, I could make it work. As the pages accumulated, so did the work’s inadequacy. Sentences, then pages, then characters, plot, and message – all crumpled. But questions of capability haunt every writer, yes? Isn’t a book nothing more than countless decisions? Just fix it.

“Fix it” was my daily mantra for the last three years. With each attempted fix, new problems emerged. I mistook determination to patch up cascading disasters as a well-defined writing process. Let it sit, come back, remember why I started writing, more research, less research. Keep it to myself. Share it. Writing courses. Different times, places, ways. Illustrations. Iterations. Incantations.

It was a relentless test of artistic endurance. More, harder, better. Any progress was never binding.

There is a quiet and small kind of madness in continuing to write a book that fails to thrive.

The book remains as far from being satisfying, cohesive, substantive – most precisely, good – as it was three years into its drafting. And almost as far from The End.

This is a mercy killing.

With a thimbleful of courage, I acknowledge the end of this story’s journey.

This is a hard thing.

The once robust potential of the “Shitty 1st Draft” withered into the “Shitty 18th Draft.”  A failure of sorts, but the greater failure would be to persist in futility.

This is a demoralizing thing.

The novel was like that okay-ish boyfriend from when you were 27 – the relationship you stick with because the alternative seems worse. Both the ex-boyfriend and this book offer harsh truths: the impossibility of manufacturing something good with only jaw-clenched sheer will, the futility of persisting with the untenable. Lessons in limits and misalignments of perceptions, and whatnot.

In the aftermath, I strive for equanimity, grappling with the singular shame of abandoning a four-year project, a project that, in my stubborn moments, I contend I should have been able to complete. I also seek to embrace the dizzying liberation that accompanies this loss.

Shockingly, this good and right decision does not come unencumbered by pesky human emotion.

There were good enough parts: some great passages, some solid scenes peopled with strange and familiar characters and their strange and familiar delights and horrors. Yet, a few bright sparks could not ignite the whole.

Still, oh, the legitimacy of writing a novel! Claiming space among the revered, the excellent, the mighty. Those with stick-to-itness like oatmeal that’s overstayed its welcome. But I’ve gotten this far without being outrightly dismissed as a dum-dum, so perhaps my place among novelists remains waiting. For now, I can only plant my flag in other places where I have already staked a claim.

The task now is to reset the board and pulverize the “If I stop writing a novel will I just…disappear?” and the “Am I nothing but a wordsmithing ne’er-do-well?” and the brief isolation this moment brings.

My early writing thrived on humor, political, and cultural essays. It’s also an election year, and the world isn’t getting less nutty. A visit to those realms is in order, but I’m wary of committing too quickly even though I expect my first (rebound) piece will be smoother, better, and fun. And likely shorter.

Some people might urge me to revisit the unfinished book. It’s tempting to romanticize a future reunion in 5-10 years, that I’m just exiling it to the hinterlands, or letting it hang out in the transporter’s pattern buffer. But I’m a realist. I can learn a great deal from my novel’s absence and gain much from its years-long presence.

In other words, I’m chopping it up for parts.

Say what you will, but I never did that to my ex-boyfriends.