Doomed Novels

Having built a career by forging ahead, I now find myself tripping backwards, wading into the waters of novels I never finished, books no publishing house ever wanted to buy. There are stacks of both here; I wonder at my own tenacity. I wonder, too, if it is good to look back—if it's a teachable exercise.

What, for example, do you learn from a novel you wrote and rewrote some 80 times? Five years, 80 drafts, and when I look at it now I see what I could not see then: the novel's failure was inscribed within its very opening lines. The book forecast its own doom. We writers are required, always, to rise above ourselves. For five years (and how is it that I only see this now?) I worked on a novel that wallowed. Here's how it started. Here's what I will hope to never do again.

She was forty-two, and the truth had come to claim her. She was at war within herself and rarely slept.

What the slightest sound could do, to a woman like that. Sound, or the smell inside the spine of a forsaken book, or the way the window held the moon like some gold trigger. An open bottle of vanilla wrecked her. A sprinkling of spices frayed her nerves.

She had tried to write a novel; she had failed. She had taken a comfortable distance from her protagonist’s regret, and the prose had left her cold. It had left her empty, standing on her own made-up terrain, talking to characters who didn’t exist, railing at them, urging their confessions. Who was the old cook in the book she had written? She was herself, disguised and disguised again, way past the mark of any measure. Once someone had asked her what a character was, and how a writer worked to forge one. She had answered, the way she did then, with the posturings of a critic, keeping the article in front of the noun so as to avoid the larger question. Character. It was a big word. It was, or it could be, a condemnation.