Any Idiot Can Write a Novel

But are you doing it for the right reasons?

My hand hovers over the page

The pen fits perfectly into the groove on my index finger, the skin dented and grown around an absence like a trepanated skull forming new growth at the edges of the hole.

But I don’t write anything.

I’m not ‘blocked’. That’s a notion I’ve always found pompous, a way of calling yourself a writer by not writing anything. When I was an exterminator, I never suffered from exterminator’s block.

I could write if I wanted to. I could write anything I want to, the irresistible temptation of a blank page reaching out and plucking at every corner of the universe where everything is connected to everything else.

But the truth is, I’m simply scared.

Because if I write this last scene, it’s over. I’ll have finished my latest novel. Yeah, I know; a first draft. But still.

It’s still an unruly slab of 115,000 words or so, begun in a different country living a different life. And when I write that last word, even knowing I’ll almost certainly come back and change it later, I’ll be saying goodbye to the last ten years of my life.

They say 81% of Americans think they have a book in them. It’s an old survey, but I doubt the numbers have changed much. Maybe a few have been peeled out of the pack to go start another pointless podcast somewhere.

But in the kingdom of narcissists we have built out of crackling Wi-Fi signals and the mindless social media torrent of validation and hate, I doubt the number’s gotten much smaller in the past couple of decades.

For the staggering majority of those approximately 272 million people, inside them is exactly where their book will stay.

A popular stat bouncing around online is that 97% of people who start writing a book never finish it. A statistic without a source is also known as a lie, but you don’t have to go very far, online or in person, to meet people who are perpetually working on a project but never getting to the end. Tantric writers hovering on the edge of completion but never quite getting there.

Like unrequited love, it’s better in some ways. The novel you never wrote will always be more beautiful, more perfect, more exquisite than anything you could ever actually produce.

Finding the right words to say what’s in your heart is like trying to wrap your fingers around your shadow’s throat. When you reach out for that gorgeous shining masterpiece you can see right in front of you, you come up with a handful of cobwebs and desiccated moth wings.

If you have a Why, you can put up with almost any How. But so many wannabe writers wash out because their Why isn’t equal to the How. The long slog of late nights, the isolation, the crippling self-doubt, the inadequacy and self-loathing. A thousand words or 10,000 words or 50,000 words in, they realize that the game isn’t worth the candle.

There’s nobility in that, I suppose. There’s no shame in knowing what you’re not equal to. Like people, ideas are born different from one another, some sickly, some blessed with irrepressible health. I have my share of abortions behind me, half-finished or fully-finished novels that will never see the light of day, tucked away in shoeboxes and on hard drives because I can’t bear to throw away the crumbling corpses, but can’t stand to look at them, either.

But the nights, the isolation, the music, the cackling demons and whispering gods — that’s the whole point. That’s what it was all for. A novel, in the end, is a big pile of paper covered in words that most people on the planet can’t read, and almost no one on the planet wants to read.

The journey is the destination. The point of writing a novel, the only way to make it in any way worthwhile, is just to write.

Recently I got an unsolicited email from another writer

A ‘writer,’ actually.

I mean, technically they write. They make a living from it, or so their nonstop puddle-deep posts claim. But you can always tell a crook nowadays, because they want to teach you something.

This person bothered to track down my email, which isn’t immediately apparent from my online profiles, although it’s no great secret either.

They emailed me to tell me how good I am at writing, but how much I stood to benefit if I just gave them some money. They could teach me how to get seen online. They could even help me come up with ideas.

And why, I muttered to myself as I sat up in bed, scowling bleary-eyed at the morning’s harvest of worthless emails, would I want to do that?

I know this isn’t a popular opinion in the world of online writing, but you don’t have to say anything if you don’t have anything to say. No one (hopefully) has a gun to your head.

And don’t let the follower count fool you; no one is breathlessly waiting for your next pearls of wisdom to brighten their dreary uncreative life.

They’re out there doing things, studying for exams or feeding their kids or driving a truck or stitching the ventricles of an exploded heart back together. Your words might brighten their day just a little, give them something to laugh at or think about. But make no mistake; we are all, talented or not, utterly dispensable.

If you don’t have any ideas, don’t write anything. Do something more productive with your time, like picking up garbage around your neighborhood or trimming your cat’s nails. If you have nothing to say, say nothing at all.

That’s the difference between a writer and a ‘writer’.

Not every novel needs to exist

In fact, we’d be better off without most of them.

We’re absolutely drowning in mediocre words. Including self published authors, more than four million new titles hit the shelves every year. No wonder the average book fails to sell more than a thousand copies in its entire lifetime.

Many of them, frankly, don’t deserve to exist. I’m thinking of the rewrites, the endless rehashing of Jane Austen, the poor woman’s bones barely knowing a minute’s piece before another hack digs her up with a clumsy pen.

Don’t have an original idea in your head? Don’t worry. Just “remix” a classic, gender or race-swapping characters to suit the preoccupations of the day. If all else fails, add zombies.

This is how a hack makes a living. This is the best idea of someone who wants to have written, but doesn’t want to write.

Someone who doesn’t know about the nights of music and fire. Someone who’s never looked into the laughing eyes of a god or demon as it squats and pisses all over your carefully inked pages.

“You will ride life straight to perfect laughter,” Bukowski promised. Alone with the gods. The only good fight there is.

But hacks don’t fight. They string a few words together, pump it out as quickly as possible, cash the check, then turn around and try to sell you a course in doing the exact same thing.

Any idiot can write a novel

And lots of idiots do.

Depending on genre, the average novel is around 80,000 words long. I could write that in two weeks and still have time for other work.

It wouldn’t be a good novel, mind you. But most ‘writers’ don’t care about that.

It’s just a matter of putting one word in front of another and not thinking too hard about it.

Don’t reach for anyone’s heart. Don’t try to phrase something in a memorable way.

Don’t structure scenes like nobody ever thought to do before, or create characters so real that they graft themselves onto the hearts of readers and stay with them for the rest of their lives, symbiotically sharing blood and whispering dark thoughts to one another while the world grows steadily colder.

It’s easy to write a novel. Writing a good one is almost impossible.

So here I sit, a blank page in front of me, the pen unmoving in my hand and the weight of ten years of intermittent work on my shoulders. Because I don’t want to be a Writer. I just want to write.

I know what it takes to make a living as a writer these days. Marketing. Podcast appearances. Sticking rigidly to the confines of genre. Writing to the market.

Never challenging anyone. Posting multiple times a day on social media to be abused by the biggest losers in the world. Selling courses.

And I wouldn’t take that job if it lay by the side of the road.

I’ll just be here with my pen, with the gods and the demons. And I’ll go, when it’s time, into the dark, unknown and unremembered, and the demon will find some other poor bastard to whisper to.

But first, for reasons I don’t completely understand, I need to finish this damn novel.