How to Fail at Writing a Novel

5 Easy Steps Toward Alienating Your Loved Ones

My current novel has reached a milestone that means I won’t be working on it for a while. But it only got there because I’ve done a lot of work on it over the past few days. So instead of attempting to have a #take about a piece of narrative art by someone else, I’m going to try to making fun of myself again.

It’s easy to make fun of me, for a lot of reasons. One of those reasons is that I’ve spent the last 4.5 years working desperately to Become A Novelist. It’s an annoying way to live, both for myself and those close to me. Rather than talking at you sentimentally about all the ways in which it’s irritating, I thought I’d tell you how to be like me, in five simple steps.

Step 1: Vonnegut in the stairwell

You were an eager reader as a kid, but that ended around the time you got an Xbox and started mainlining Morrowind and Halo: Combat Evolved. During those years, you wore olive green, zip-off cargo pants so baggy they could have doubled as a Korean War pup tent. By the time you’re a junior, the pants will be a little less ridiculous, but your hair will still be a vaguely curly helmet. You will have friends and play sports—no, for real, I swear—but you will also feel an instinct rising unbidden within you. That impulse known to all teenagers: The overpowering need to read mid-century novels.

When you don’t have a club meeting or a desire to drive to Wendy’s, you will take your lunch into the stairwell and read Rabbit, Run. Years later, it will remain unclear to you why this was one of the first Literary Novels you read on your own. You will read A long and happy life by Reynolds Price because he teaches at one of the colleges you’re looking at. You will read The Van by Roddy Doyle by accident, not realizing it’s from the Nineties and also the third in the trilogy. Eventually, much later, you will go back and read The Commitments.

Slaughterhouse Five will blow your mind. Serious Literature can be like this? In the twilight of a late summer day in Missoula, on the downslope of a deeply weird year, you will realize this was the moment your fate was sealed. You would eventually write stories about things that could not actually happen.

Step 2: Learn how to read Willa Cather

Willa Cather wrote sentimental stories that affirmed the rosy-cheeked myths of the American West. Her characters would confirm all your theories about Real Authentic Americans. Ántonia Shimerda would definitely have voted for Trump, not out of any poorly veiled bigotry or economic self-interest, but because it’s the red-blooded thing to do.

Or maybe—if you learn to read Cather correctly, preferably with help from someone who knows what they’re doing—you will see that her stories are really about the dissipation of all those myths. Get assigned A Lost Lady and come to understand that it’s about a little boy’s fantasies about both a beautiful woman and his picturesque Nebraska home evaporating with the brutal thoroughness of the morning dew.

This will be when you learn that the best novels are often about characters struggling against the collapse of the stories they’ve told themselves.

Step 3: Blow it all up

You surely agree that 23 is the worst age of all.

How to survive the misfortune of being in your early twenties and not yet being an astounding success? Read Tom McCarthy and Michel Houellebecq and Eimear McBride and László Krasznahorkai and other living writers who are at war. They mount up, ride out, and run their lances through the dainty armies of the conventional novel. All this savagery satisfies you. It feels like you’re sharing in a revenge.

Stop writing straightforward realist stories and begin a weird little novel about ghosts. It’s not bad, but you’ll end up scrapping it until September of 2020, when you consider reviving it to be your second workshop story of the semester. At 23, you’ll still be a long, long, long way from being comfortable with writing something that could be called “fantasy” or “science fiction,” but you’re already forgetting why.

Step 4: Stoner in Dar es Salaam

It’s very hot all the time, even when it rains, but at least you have John Williams. Like some of Willa Cather’s work, Stoner is about a son of the soil made good in the academy. And like much of her work, it’s also about regret. You think, anyway. You remember it being gorgeous and you need to reread it sometime. Maybe, more than five years later, you’re still too close to those sauna-like nights in that little hutch along Kimweri Ave to know what you got out of them. A lot of chicken biryani—that’s one thing you definitely got.

The lesson here is probably some iteration of “keep going.”

Step 5: Fail

You spend three years writing a novel that doesn’t work. It makes it through various stages of the process by which novels are sold, and doesn’t sell. You decide to stop trying to sell it—not because it hasn’t sold, but because you’ve outgrown it. You’ve rewritten it in its entirety roughly six times. You’ve lost count.

And then you will find yourself in a tiny studio in Montana full of secondhand furniture and dirty laundry. It will be getting late. You have workshop in the morning. You will be looking forward to hearing what everyone says about your story, which is about a sentient robot in Antarctica.

The lesson here is—

Calvin and Hobbes Corner

You can’t go home again:

Or can you? Calvin and Hobbes often relies on the conceit of Calvin believing things that perhaps no one else believes. This might be most crucial in the case of Hobbes himself. Whatever you think about the complicated metaphysics of the stuffed tiger who’s also seemingly alive, none of this is happening if Calvin doesn’t believe. As I was saying above, Calvin is a character fighting with the stories he’s telling himself.

In this case, no one except Calvin believes he’s managed to secede. To re-up an analogical strain I’ve used before, Calvin is the equivalent of a Sovereign Citizen. He has a story he told himself about his legal and political standing, and it has powerful sway over him, but no one else has to allow themselves to be made a character in it.

Hobbes is taking advantage of this self-delusion to torment Calvin. Hobbes is at his meanest in this arc. It almost feels gratuitous. Maybe next I’ll have to do a story arc where Hobbes is the only thing propping Calvin up, rather than this bullying big brother routine.

Other fun things:

I may mix up this section or eliminate it entirely, since I just don’t read as many off-the-beaten-path articles each week as I once did. But here is one thing:

— This interview with Ben Lerner, one of the best contemporary novelists writing in English, is interesting on many levels. I especially appreciated what he had to say about the problem of authenticity in the novel form

Also don’t forget to subscribe to Discontents, the newsletter collective this letter is a member of. The newsletter has original content as well as aggregation, and it’s well worth getting in your inbox each week. I’m doing the intro to the next one!

A poem

Jim Harrison is on a short chain