My Novel Has Been 'Almost Done' for Nine Years
Friends have stopped asking; the document has trust issues.
In September my unfinished novel turns nine, and I am considering throwing it a small party. Cake, balloons, a banner that says CONGRATULATIONS ON EXISTING DESPITE EVERYTHING.
Nine years old. If my novel were a child it would be in the fourth grade, learning long division, coming home with opinions. Instead it lives in a folder called WRITING, inside a folder called PROJECTS, inside a folder called NEW, which was named in a different era, by a different man, who believed things.
It began on the 6:40 local, in a spiral notebook, in blue ink, with a first line I still think is good. It is called The Long Monsoon, and it is about a man who returns to the hill town where his father vanished, and if you ask me what happens after chapter eleven I will suddenly remember an appointment.
The file names tell the story better than the file does. TheLongMonsoon_draft1. Then TLM_FINAL. Then TLM_FINAL_v2, which should have been a warning sign visible from space. Then TLM_ACTUALFINAL, then TLM_FINAL_no_really, and finally the current version, TLM_v11_march_fix, where the march in question was three years ago.
The word count has sat at around sixty-three thousand for four years, and do not be fooled by the stability. That is not stillness. That is a treadmill. In a good week I write two thousand words. In the same week I delete two thousand one hundred. I am the only novelist I know whose book is actively getting shorter, like a glacier, or a savings account.
My friends went through stages, the way people do with any long illness. Year one: pure excitement, wine raised, "I want a signed copy." Year three: "How's the book coming?" asked at normal volume, in normal rooms. Year five: the same question but in a softer voice, near the coat rack, at the end of the evening, the way you ask about a separation. Year seven... silence. A kind, upholstered silence. They talk to me about cricket now. I have never followed cricket. We manage.
My mother never stopped asking, but somewhere along the way her grammar shifted into the past tense. "Whatever happened to your book?" she says, the way you ask about a schoolfriend who moved abroad and stopped writing home. Nothing happened to it, Ma... That is the whole problem. Nothing has happened to it since the coalition government.
I have told lies about this novel that were better constructed than the novel. "It's with a friend for feedback." The friend was my own second email address. "I'm restructuring the middle." I was watching videos of a man in Norway building a shed. "It's basically done, I'm just polishing." You cannot polish a staircase that ends in mid-air. I know because I have tried, cloth in hand, for the better part of a decade.
Then, last October, my laptop died.
Not gracefully. It died the way appliances die in comedies, with a click and a small ambitious smell.
I did everything you do. Held the power button like a grudge. Unplugged things and plugged them back in with ceremony.
And for about forty minutes, before the man at the shop found my files intact and charged me an amount I told nobody about, I genuinely believed The Long Monsoon was gone. Nine years. Sixty-three thousand words... Gone.
Here is the sentence I have typed and deleted eleven times, even now, even here.
Some part of me exhaled.
Not grief. I checked, the way you probe a tooth. Under the panic, where nine years of work should have been screaming, there was a horrible little pocket of quiet, and inside the quiet, relief.
For forty minutes I was not a man finishing a novel. I was just a man. The lightness was obscene.
That was the turn, though it took me until December to understand it.
The novel was never a house I was building. It was a shield I was carrying.
As long as the book stayed almost done, I never had to find out whether it was any good, and neither did anyone else. "Almost done" is a fortress with excellent plumbing. You can live in there for years. I had the mail delivered.
The novel was never almost done. I was almost brave, and those turned out to be very different sentences.
Around then I read an essay on why safe poems lose, and it was about poems, technically, but I read the whole thing with the specific discomfort of a man hearing his own diagnosis through a thin clinic wall. Safe poems lose. Safe novels do not even get to lose. Losing requires entering.
So I tried something humiliatingly small. I found a prompt that said, "Write about a room you cannot return to," and I wrote about the 6:40 local, which is not a room, but grief does not check tickets. Fourteen lines about a notebook, a window, a younger man's handwriting. It took forty minutes. Forty minutes, against nine years. Then, before the fortress could talk me out of it, I posted it on a community wall for poets and shut the laptop like it was hot.
By morning, three strangers had said the poem did something to them. One quoted my own line back to me. Fourteen finished lines had gone further out into the world overnight than sixty-three thousand almost-words had gone in nine years. I sat with my tea and let that be true, which took most of the tea.
I want to be careful here, because this is the part where a tidier man would tell you he then finished the novel in a blaze of clarity... I did not. It is still not done. But two things are different, and I can prove both.
First, the rule. The new rule, taped above my desk in handwriting my school would still penalize: It is allowed to be bad. It is not allowed to be almost.
Chapter thirty exists now. It is bad. It is gloriously, honestly bad, and I have left it bad and moved on to chapter thirty-one, which is worse, and the book is longer this month than last month for the first time since the glacier began.
Second, the name. I retired the whole screaming family of FINALs and renamed the file the_long_monsoon.docx. Lowercase. No version number. No pleading. Just its name, the way you would write it on an envelope to a friend, because that is what I want it to be when it grows up: not a monument, not a shield, just a long letter that finally gets sent.
My friends do not know any of this yet. I have stopped making announcements; announcements were always part of the fortress. But last week one of them slipped, at the end of the evening, near the coat rack, old habit: "How's the book?"
"Growing," I said... and for the first time in about six years, it was not a lie, and something in his face un-braced itself, and we stood there grinning like idiots among the coats.
Next September, if the novel still needs a tenth birthday, I will bake the cake myself and write something true in the icing. But I have been watching the sky out the window of chapter thirty-one, and I am telling you, with my hand on sixty-five thousand words and counting.
The monsoon is finally moving.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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