/lit/ - Literature

For all the years I've insisted to myself I wanted to be a writer - more specifically, a novelist - for all the time I've spent mewling that I have the prose talent and humanitarian insight to write a novel worth adorning your shelves and whispering in the corners of your minds, in all that time - well over 20 years - I have wept and spattered and vomited thousands of laughably unreadable pages, starting no fewer than a dozen different novels and finishing exactly just one which was promptly committed to a fireplace, and this is to say nothing of my fucking garbage screenplays and short stories and novellas.

That was the pattern for those 20 years - frantic, entitled, hopeful scribbling yielding nothing important, nothing usable, nothing I would ever have the nerve to show an agent or a publisher or a casual reader or even a polite and subliterate friend to fish for an easy compliment ("It's different!"), until finally one day it did present itself on the page and spread out over chapter after chapter, almost uncontrollably so, and I finally had the novel I'd been so desperate for all of my adult, thinking life. Hours passed like seconds as I scrambled to keep pace with my finally blossoming imagination.

And then I couldn't finish it. I couldn't disentangle the unrequitable, invisible end from everything that came before, because then I no longer had my novel. I inexplicably had a narrative that was cohesive and meaningful, pregnant with gorgeous language and pith, and somehow unable to resolve itself.

I thought I had finally done it, given my life the purpose and meaning that has eluded me for nearly a half-century. Instead, I just once again proved my constant, present suspicion that I am a fucking joke of a moron whose only real use will be giving the coroner something to do for an hour after I eat my gun, and yet I still find myself unable to believe that that's all I'm worth, that there is some key somewhere which will guide me out of this. I just sit around, weeping convulsively, wondering if I'll ever figure it out where it is.

I don't think I'm going to make it.

>>11635886
That never happens.