August 2025
August 2
Last week, I became a man with two cats. Soon after, I became a man who has written two novels.
For a long time, I was a man who had written one novel. Immediately after finishing that one novel, I set about writing a second one, which crashed into the ground after about 50,000 words. In the middle of writing that second one, I composed the first chapter of what would become my third novel. (At some point in all this, I threw together several chapters of another novel so ethereal as to be non-ordinal.) Later, I returned to that third novel, which, upon completion, has now become my second novel.
This second novel, previously known as Knights, Snails, & Plastic Boogie and now known simply as Pierre, has caused me much torment over the past several years. But I’ve spent enough time whining about all that. Now, I am pleased, for the novel is in a state I will call “feature complete,” meaning that it has everything in it that needs to be in it. In several months, I will perform a final combing-over, and be left with a polished manuscript. I will then sit on that manuscript for as long as it takes for me to feel like releasing it to the public. At that point, I will try to remember how to turn a bunch of text into an e-book, inevitably get frustrated along the way, give it up, return, give it up, return again, & then eventually white-knuckle my way through the process to the point where the book is available for all in this grand & open world to download and read to their heart’s content.
Finishing one’s second novel is an important achievement, in my eyes, because it transforms one from a “person who has written a book” into an “author.” It was a terrible feeling to realize, after finishing my first novel, that I had not learned during the process how to write a novel. I had only learned how to write the particular novel that I had written. When it came to the second, and then the third (which is now the second), I had to essentially re-learn the whole process from scratch. This was more frustrating the second time than the first. There was no longer the sense of novelty, and I was less forgiving of myself than I was when I was a beginner. Eventually, I completely forgot what it had felt like to finish a novel, and looked back on the first book as a miracle akin to the virgin birth.
Anyone will tell you that it’s very difficult to tell when a novel is finished. All stories contain omissions, holes that could potentially be filled in. It is not always clear when it’s okay to leave a gap, and when it’s not. You could conceivably continue to add events and details until the end of time. The only way to understand when this is unnecessary is to have a clear conception of the book as a whole. Not only as a story with a beginning and an end, but as an entity with a particular purpose. It is only once this purpose is fulfilled that the book can be said to be complete. A writer stuck in a novel is like a person with their head stuck in the ground. It’s very hard to tell that the Earth is a sphere from down there.
This is why other people exist. (I must add, however, that it is not the only reason.) When other people read your novel, they see it all as one piece. They don’t know what was written when and for what reason. They don’t know which scenes were carefully re-written multiple times, and which ones were thrown together and then immediately forgotten about. (I often re-read my novels and find entire chapters I have no recollection of writing.) They see it as a book like any other book they could take off the shelf.
If someone can read the book and come back with a pretty good estimation of what it’s all about, and that estimation is fairly close to what you had in mind while writing it, then the novel can be called “finished.” It may still need work, but that work is primarily in polishing rather than building. You’re past the point where you need to come up with new big ideas. And that is a very nice feeling.
I’ve decided that I would like each of my novels to communicate a single idea.1 Thus, my novels are fairly short. Other authors may have a lot of thoughts they’d like to fit into a single novel. That’s too difficult for me; I’d rather start a new book each time I have another idea.
I need to keep my books simple, because my writing process doesn’t make any sense and easily falls apart. There is a level of complexity where I become entirely unable to corral all the threads into anything resembling a cohesive plot. I have great respect for those who can, but equal respect for those who can’t. Even writing a simple book is quite difficult.
I once dreamed of writing one of those massive, “everything” books, but I don’t have it in me at the moment. And then I dreamed of writing a whole lot of smaller books, but I don’t know about that either. I’m just going to keep writing whatever book occurs to me, and we’ll see how many I get done before I kick the bucket.
When I think back, one of the first novels that made me think, “I could write a novel,” was Of Mice and Men. I didn’t even particularly like the book, but I appreciated that it was short. I hadn’t realized before that a serious book could be so short and still effective. The shorter the book, the easier it is to have all the various scenes cohere into a comprehensible theme. I was sixteen, I think, and I figured that I could probably write a novella like Of Mice and Men. Which I guess I have kind of done now, twice.
At the time, I had this thought in a “I’m not good enough to write a long novel, but I could probably do this…” sort of way. When I ended up finishing my first novel many years later, I was embarrassed to even call it a novel, because it was under 150 pages long. If someone congratulated me on writing a book, I’d say, “Well, it isn’t very long…” It felt silly that I had spent years on this book, and had so few words to show for it in the end. As it turned out, no one cared about this except me. That’s just not something people really think about.
I realized the other day that I’m no longer writing in order to prove something to my parents (or to anyone, for that matter.) With my first novel, it was very important that I finish it and show it to them, so they would know that I was doing something with my life. I started Pierre with a similar idea. However, Pierre itself turned into a criticism of this sort of motivation, and over the course of writing it, that whole idea just slipped away.
I love my novels. I’m proud of them, and I like to read them. They surprise me, and reveal aspects of myself that I didn’t even know I was expressing. It’s a sort of magic. They grow into something weird and inscrutable, but somehow complete. When I can step back and read my novel as a novel — as an individual entity rather than a collection of disparate sentences and scenes — it’s truly amazing.
1. “Not withstanding all my endeavours, I could find no shorter way of imparting it than this whole book.” Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation