The Novel I Never Finished

I began a novel at twenty-nine that I abandoned at thirty-two, and I want to try to say something honest about this, which means saying something honest about failure, which is harder than it sounds because the available language for creative failure tends toward either self-flagellation or redemptive narrative, and I am interested in neither.

The novel was about a city. This is an inauspicious description and it was an inauspicious beginning, because "a novel about a city" is what you say when you don't yet know what the novel is about. I knew the city — I had lived in it for six years, I knew its texture and its routines, I had the specific intimacy with a place that comes from choosing it consciously rather than arriving in it by birth or accident. I had, I thought, something to say about it.

What I had, in fact, was a setting. This is an important distinction that I did not understand at the time.

The first year of the novel was productive in the way that first years often are: the newness of the project carrying it forward, the sense of beginning providing its own momentum. I wrote pages. Some of the pages were good. I had characters — a woman architect, a middle-aged man who repaired instruments, a younger man whose function in the narrative I was never quite clear about — and the city moved around them with what seemed, to me at the time, to be purpose.

The second year was different. The momentum of beginning had exhausted itself and what remained was the actual novel, which required something I had not yet identified. I continued writing. The pages continued to accumulate. The architect did her work. The instrument repairer did his. The younger man remained present without becoming necessary.

Around the eighteen-month mark I had what I can only describe as the experience of looking at what I had made and not recognising it as the thing I had intended to make. This is a familiar experience to anyone who has made things over a sustained period, but it loses none of its vertigo in the familiarity. I had written sixty thousand words of a novel that seemed, from the outside, to be about a city, but which seemed, from the inside, to be about something I couldn't identify, and the gap between these two views was where the novel lived, uncomfortably.

I tried everything I had been advised to try. I reread what I had written and made notes. I abandoned what I had written and started again from different points. I changed the architect's history, which changed her present, which changed her relationship to the city, which changed the novel in ways that seemed significant for two weeks and then revealed themselves as cosmetic. The instrument repairer acquired a past that explained him, which is the wrong thing to do to a character, though I did not yet know this.

In the third year, something clarified that I wish had clarified earlier.

What clarified was this: I did not know, at the level of understanding that fiction requires, why these people were in this city at this time doing these things. I knew what they did. I had assembled their lives with considerable care. But I did not know why it mattered. And fiction that does not know why it matters is decoration.

The architect and the instrument repairer were, I came to understand, reflections of things I was thinking about at twenty-nine — questions about the relationship between making things and being accountable to their impermanence, about what it means to practise a craft in a world that does not particularly value craft. These were genuine questions. They were not yet, at twenty-nine, questions I was able to answer at novel-length.

I stopped writing it at thirty-two. I did not stop in a dramatic way — there was no moment of decision, no formal abandonment. The novel simply became, over several months, something I was no longer working on. The file remained open on my computer for another year. Then I moved it to an archive folder, which is the contemporary equivalent of putting something in a box in the attic.

What I learned from the failure is harder to summarise than the failure itself.

I learned that a novel requires not just knowledge of its subject but a relationship to that knowledge — specifically, the relationship of someone who has arrived at what they think and is now trying to say it rather than someone who is using the writing to find out what they think. Both of these are legitimate processes. But the first one is more likely to produce a novel and the second is more likely to produce the material from which a novel might eventually be made.

I was, at twenty-nine, very much in the second category. I was using the novel to think through questions I had not yet finished thinking through. The novel was doing useful work — it was clarifying my thinking in ways that could not have been achieved by other means — but it was not accumulating toward a thing that could be finished, because the finishing would require a resolution that I had not yet reached.

I have a different relationship to this now than I had at thirty-two, when the abandonment still carried the sting of failure. I understand now that the three years of work were not wasted but converted — transformed into a different form of preparation, a preparation for writing that would come later and that is better for having been preceded by those three years of attempting the wrong thing.

The city is still there. The architect and the instrument repairer are still in their archive folder, living their described lives, waiting without impatience. The younger man whose function I was never clear about has been waiting twelve years for me to understand why he is there.

I think I am close to understanding. I am not ready to open the folder yet. But I have started, in the way that means something, to think about it again — which is, in my experience, how it always begins. Quietly, through the back of the mind, the material returning, waiting to see if you are ready for it this time.

I don't know if I am. I know that I am different from the person who failed to finish it the first time, which is the necessary condition. Whether it is the sufficient one, I will not know until I open the folder.

The folder sits in the archive. The city waits. The questions I was trying to answer at twenty-nine are questions I have now, in some form, answered, and the answers are more complicated than I thought they would be, and more honest, and possibly worth the novel they were always intended to inhabit.

Possibly.Let me say something more about what the novel was teaching me while I was failing to finish it, because I think this is the part of the story that has been most useful and that I have not yet adequately described.

The three years of writing and failing to write the novel were not three years of wasted effort, though they felt that way for a long time afterward. They were three years of a specific kind of education that I could not have received any other way. The education was in the nature of fiction itself — what it requires, what it resists, what it will and will not do.

Fiction, I learned, cannot be sustained by setting and character and incident alone. It requires what the writer John Gardner called a "vivid and continuous dream" — a state in which the reader is inside the experience of the characters, present in the world of the novel, experiencing it rather than observing it. Sustaining this dream over the length of a novel requires the writer to know not only what the characters do but why they do it in a way that feels inevitable — not determined, but coherent, the kind of coherence that a life develops retrospectively.

My characters in the abandoned novel did not have this kind of coherence. They had biographies and they had personalities and they had, in some cases, strong individual scenes. What they did not have was a reason to be in the same novel together. The architect and the instrument repairer existed in the same city but not in the same story. They shared a setting but not a necessity.

I did not understand this clearly until I had spent a year trying to make them share a story and failing. The attempt taught me what the problem was. The problem was not that the characters were wrong — they were, in many ways, right, or at least interesting. The problem was that I had assembled them without knowing what they needed from each other, and fiction is, at its core, about what people need from each other and whether they get it and what happens when they don't.

This seems obvious stated plainly. It is obvious. But some things that are obvious when stated need to be discovered in practice before they become real knowledge rather than theoretical knowledge, and the discovery can only be made by trying and failing.

I came to understand this at thirty-two, after three years. I came to understand it the way you come to understand anything through practice: not as an idea but as a felt sense, something in the body rather than the head, a recognition rather than a conclusion. I know, now, when characters in a novel have a necessity with each other and when they don't. I can feel the difference. I could not feel it at twenty-nine.

The other thing the three years taught me is about the relationship between ambition and skill. I was, at twenty-nine, more ambitious than I was skilled. This is not unusual — ambition tends to run ahead of skill, because ambition is a response to what you have read and admired, while skill develops only through doing, which takes time and practice and a tolerance for failure that ambition does not automatically provide.

The best writers I know are people who have been, at some point, much less good than they are now. The gap between what they wanted to do and what they could do was, for some of them, very large, and they had to work through the large gap to arrive at the smaller one they now inhabit. The working-through is the education. There is no shortcut.

My working-through was the novel I didn't finish. I am grateful for it, finally, in the way you are finally grateful for formative failures — not immediately, not for years, but eventually, once the sting has faded and the learning has settled and you can see the shape of what you gained from what you lost.

The folder is still in the archive. The city is still there. I open the folder occasionally, not yet to begin again but to sit with it — to see whether the recognition I am waiting for has arrived. The question is not whether I will return to it. The question is whether I will be the right person to return to it when I do.

I think I am getting there. The feeling when I open the folder now is different from the feeling at thirty-two. It is warmer. Less like failure and more like preparation. The novel is still unwritten. But I am, increasingly, the writer who could write it.

That will have to be enough, for now.

The city, for its part, does not care whether I finish the novel. It continues to be the city, accumulating its own time, changing in ways I will notice and ways I will not. The architect still exists somewhere in the archive, doing her work in a building I described badly twelve years ago. The instrument repairer still has his shop, his patience, his knowledge of what makes things sound the way they should. They are waiting without urgency. They have no choice. I am the one who has to arrive.

I will arrive. I am not in a hurry. Some things need exactly as long as they need, and the only error is in thinking that the length of the preparation is a problem rather than a condition. The condition is fine. The preparation continues. The novel will be written when I am the writer who can write it, and not before.

This is, after many years of thinking about it, what I believe about creative failure: that it is almost never actually failure. It is almost always preparation that has not yet found its occasion. The occasion comes. You have to be ready for it, which means you have to have done the preparatory work, which means you have to have failed at the right things for long enough.

I have failed at the right things. I have done so for long enough. The folder is in the archive. The city is still there.