i am (still) not writing a novel
some self indulgent whinging on my ongoing lack of creative output
It’s ironic really. Having mulled over this post for a week and its subject matter even longer, upon opening a blank document, I found myself with nothing to say.
I used to be one of those people who really, really, really considered myself a writer. I watched lectures, listened to podcasts, posted on forums. I had word count tracking apps and social media dedicated to my craft and a hundred carefully cultivated Pinterest storyboards. Under my bed are box files full of papers, in my drawers, dusty libraries of Muji and Moleskine notebooks, stuffed to bursting with post-its. When I won NaNoWriMo, the November writing challenge in which you aim to write 50’000 words in a month, I treated myself to the professional software Scrivener.
The form I wanted to work in varied, but the motivation remained the same. I had all these stories inside of me, and I had to get them out.
I finished my first novel length piece when I was seventeen, a 90’000 sci-fi mystery about a girl whose investigations into her father’s death lead her to Martian night clubs, criminal dens, high political schemes, and found family. I’d get home from the library during revision for my GCSEs and A-Levels and run to my laptop, brain overflowing with snippets of dialogue and nuggets of world-building lore. For months when I was struggling with friendships and relationships, I could lose myself in my characters — their deepest fears and bravest hours, their found families, the friendships and relationships they formed even when I didn’t. Writing made me feel powerful, meaningful, free.
After five or six re-drafts of the sci-fi mystery I optimistically submitted the manuscript to agents, and had a writer friend of my parents’ give me mentorship. Obviously I’m not a published sci-fi wunderkind, but the feedback I received was inspiring. I kept writing — entering NaNoWriMo, Escapril Poetry Challenge, YoungPoetsNetwork challenges, magazine competitions. Penning novels, short stories, poems, plays, monologues, and so on. In my first year at uni I gained enough of a platform to be invited to read my work twice. And when lockdown stopped that I felt like I was bursting with poetry and prose, usually about the natural world I was suddenly hyper-aware of. I even co-wrote and staged my own play.
And then I stopped.
And then the blank page, the line break, that stupid little space between period and capital letter.
It wasn’t that I didn’t want to write anymore — I did, more than anything, and perhaps that was part of the problem. I felt like I’d reached an edge, a brink, and once I managed to clamber over it everything would be downhill, clean-sailing. But on looking over the edge I found only a plateau.
There are rational explanations for this, sure. They say it takes 21 days to build a habit, and I fell out of mine. Since 2019 I’ve spent a lot of time sick, and struggling mentally. I overflowed with writing in lockdown, like many who found solace in creative hobbies, but the strange, post-lockdown phase of society has been difficult for everyone — not a new normal, not even the old normal, but something far worse. And I did write in a way after summer 2020: I had essays to hand in. Perhaps after a first year of cancelled exams, academia pushed out my creativity, novels replaced by dissertations and masters proposals instead of letters to agents. Maybe I’ve just been too busy, and the knack will return when I finish my studies.
But there’s a worse possibility, and it’s the only one that in darker moments I let myself wallow in.
I’m just not a writer anymore. Whatever wavelength I was tuned into during my teenage years, whatever allowed me to tap into this wellspring of creativity and wonder and unleash the intimate yet communal ancient thrill of story-telling, is now too high a frequency. Or to put it plainly —
All the stories have left me.
I’ve fallen head-first into nihilism recently; about the climate crisis, about politics, about my personal life. To be frank, the only times I’m not ridden with anxiety-related stomach ache are when I’m having sex or at the gym (I lead a thrilling life). And writing has become a focal point for that overwhelming, suffocating fear. Unlike when I believed in my juvenile work enough to send it to agents, I now dread that I lack the talent or drive to ever succeed, let alone support myself. Even attempting to write as a hobby seems futile. Creating new worlds felt like a colossal waste of time when our own is so obviously going to shit.
On the flip side, maybe stories are more necessary than ever, as a guide and comforter through an ever more uncertain world. But paradoxically that thought doesn’t help me either — it simply adds on the pressure, the responsibility, the need to perform for others as well as for myself.
When people see you as a writer, they load you with expectations. Everything you create should be concrete, tangible, easily monetised. It should do something profound, or something exciting. They don’t quite know what to do with you — should they be proud, or apprehensive? What if your work isn’t very good, if they don’t like it? My father’s longstanding response to the idea of a creative career has been a pragmatist’s one — you’re only as good as your most recent piece of work. You have to keep creating to stay afloat. The notion of writer’s block is navel gazing pointlessness. You can’t afford to stop.
Sometimes ideas and snippets of text rise up to the forefront of my mind, like bubbles in a simmering pot, but I can’t get them to coalesce. Sometimes I construct whole worlds and narratives in my head, or find a voice that isn’t my own drifts before my unfocused mind. Yet when I try and put pen to paper I can’t find the words, can’t change thought into text. Something is lost in translation.
Whenever I think too hard about writing all the shimmering, half-formed ideas scatter away from me, reminiscent of the soot sprites in Spirited Away. I start choking on my own voice or a lump of tears.
Maybe it’s the pressure, the feeling that if I want to write I have to turn it into a career, which has led me to stagnate. If it isn’t a side hustle or a productive job, it’s just not worth it. The world feels so uncertain, why destabilise it further? Why look at things the way writers do, in squinted murky half light, a gaze tilted inquisitively sideways, when your vision is already rocky enough? I’ve always thought that good art should help us make sense of the world without telling us what to do or think, but by my own standards, nothing I am making is good.
Recently, on meeting the agent of a writer friend at dinner, my mother launched into a slew of unsubtle professions of maternal pride, including the inevitable: My daughter writes all the time. I didn’t know how to respond to the agent’s questions, couldn’t explain why I didn’t have a project or a WIP, or even what sort of work I wanted to produce. I just smiled awkwardly — well, I used to.
My mother shook her head at that. For years she’s said the same thing about me; that I must be a writer, not because I want to be, but because I have to write. To live.
Which is all very well, but what if there’s more than that? What if you have to write to live, but you’re not alive enough to figure out how?
Neil Gaiman recently tweeted about ‘bad writing days’ and ‘good writing days’. I’ve always found this sentiment reassuring, in comparison to the oppressive notion that writers must always be writing. Days of feeling stuck are often followed by days of luminous productivity and clarity, a drawing back of the curtains to reveal the creative sunlight beyond. Extending the metaphor helps me understand why I stopped writing. For a variety of reasons, I’ve been lying in the darkness, the covers tugged up over my head. But the curtain doesn’t draw itself back. At some point I need to get up and pull it.
I don’t really know why I’m writing this post. At best it seems self-indulgent, at worst, pointless. It could be pure whinging, a way of getting a burden which was once a blessing off my chest. Or it might even be the thing I dread more than no writing — bad writing. I guess I hope it will jump-start my inspiration, pull me out of bed and tackle my fear of the blank page. Maybe I’ll send it to my parents, as an answer to their dreaded question, which creeps up behind me at mealtimes or evenings and grips me cold around the neck. Why did you give up?
In reality it’s just cathartic. The way writing always has been.
Perhaps I should have simply left its contents blank, for dramatic effect.