Balckwell Rising!

I started this year with one new year’s resolution. This resolution was the same resolution that I carried into 2022 and 2023: I wanted to finish a draft of my novel, Pierre, or, Knights, Snails, and Plastic Boogie.

Now, this is one of those resolutions that’s perfunctory at best and wholly meaningless at worst. If I have the desire to write a novel, I’m going to do it, and if I’m doing it, then eventually it’s going to get done. Whether this occurs during one calendar year or another is not of much importance, neither to me nor my shareholders. We’re all so fabulously rich from the first one that we never have to work another day in our lives.

However, I make such resolutions for several reasons. The first is to respond to that little itch one always gets around December the 27th. One looks backwards, and then looks forwards, and then starts wanting to make promises. The easiest promise to make is the promise to do what you were already doing anyway.

The second reason has to do with fear. I’m afraid of the novels I’m trying to write. I always have the feeling that they’re about to get away from me. I feel that if I don’t finish a novel quickly enough, I’ll forget why I was writing it in the first place, and all those words will just sit there as a big blob of work that can never be formed into anything meaningful.

This most recent novel has been on the verge of such a fate several times. I have now abandoned it on at least four separate occasions, each time with more vehemence and resoluteness than the last. Most recently, I threw the book into the garbage bin on the fourth of this month, after having spent most of December circling around and poking at it with my nose like a curious coyote. I threw the book into the garbage bin so forcefully and with such vehemence and resoluteness that my entire house shook on its foundations, and when my wife rushed into the room fearing an earthquake, I told her that I had decided to quit writing novels forever. I told her that I don’t believe in novels anymore, that they are stupid frivolous things of no worth to anyone, and that they’ve caused me nothing but pain and anguish for the portion of my life I’ve spent dealing with them.

She said to me, “That’s fine. If you don’t want to do it, then just stop.” So I did, and I experienced such a wonderful free-and-easy feeling for the rest of the day that I was sure I had made the right decision.

Later that night I was lying in bed thinking about how happy I was to have quit novel writing altogether for the rest of my life, and I began to think about how I would approach my next novel. The problem with this last novel, I determined, was that it was too big. There was too much to it, and I could never get my head around the whole thing. I thought that I should make my next novel a lot smaller.

Absent-mindedly, I began to dissect the novel, trying to figure out where it had become bloated, and what I could do to simplify the story. As I travelled from scene to scene, I realized that there wasn’t much to the story at all. It was, in fact, quite streamlined. It was a nice story. I mean, there were bits and bobs that didn’t make much sense, but they could easily be squared away in later drafts.

A suspicion occurred to me. This suspicion drove me from my bed to the study. I opened up the draft of my novel. I reviewed the chapter headings. I followed the plot from point A to B to C. Then, my brain exploded.

I had been telling myself for months that I was two-thirds of the way through the book. What I meant by that was that I still had one-third of the book left to write. I didn’t have a specific word or page count in mind, or even a collection of unwritten scenes that I still needed to put on paper. All I had was an empty void surrounding the manuscript. I had labelled this void “one third of the book.” This one-third was supposed to be the part that made all the rest of the book meaningful. Unfortunately, I had no idea what it was supposed to be.

What I had written so far was certainly not “two-thirds” of a book in any meaningful sense; it was just part of a book. It would be like calling a right triangle half a square. It could be that, but it could also just be a triangle, or it could be part of some other, geometrically obscure shape. It might even do to cut bits off from it to form some smaller thing.

I had become so obsessed with this idea that I had two-thirds of a book that even when I added scenes, they did nothing to fill the blank one-third that remained. There was always a third left to be written. Once something was written, it became impossible to include it in the unwritten third, because the essential characteristic of the unwritten third was that it remained unwritten. I had constructed a terrific paradox, and with it, an unfinishable book.

It was only after combing through the manuscript with the free-and-easy-ness of a retired author that I realized the essential truth, which was that the novel was not two-thirds of the way complete at all, but was just about done: that the last scene I had written was in fact the penultimate scene of the novel.

And thus I learned, for the eighteen-thousandth time in my life, this essential lesson:

“Sometimes giving up is the only way forward.”

I am now free from this curse of the unwritten third, and can point my prow toward more meaningful resolutions. As of now, none of these resolutions have taken on any concrete form; they remain but shimmering glimpses on the horizon. With time, perhaps, and with the approach of my sailing craft, I will come to see their natures more clearly, and grow able to chart a course. Thus I say:

“Heave ho!”

A month has gone by, and already I have pried a mighty silverback from my shoulders. What more awaits in this year to come? Might I — dare I say it — become the most free-and-easy man on this Earth? Might this free-and-easy-ness grant me the power to achieve feats never before imagined? Perhaps! That is, if the Earth doesn’t open up below my feet one day and swallow me whole!

There’s only one way to avoid such a fate!

BALCKWELL RISING!!!!