/lit/ - Literature

I am afraid to try to write my novel for two very basic reasons: firstly, I have never succeeded, not in in anything, and have perversely never really tasted the consequences of my failures, instead being permitted to drift on and on and on to the next thing - usually the bookends of a new woman and a new job - which would round out my life with some sort of contour of purpose and meaning. Flunking out of high school meant nothing, because the army has insatiable need of warm and throwaway bodies. After the neither exactly success nor failure of my tours of duty through shamming, inattention, imitation and utimately indifference to whatever purpose this military has was college not off the table as a consequence of steadfast American commitment to egalitarianism and its mediocrity. Following my botched and still-incomplete university education, where I am neither barred from returning nor especially welcome to return, I was paradoxically rewarded with a defense sector job requiring virtually no effort (nor even regular attendance) and only two qualifications, which I possessed before I ever attended university anyway: a top-secret security clearance, and a foreign-language certification, which meant only passing an exam, something I did, and not actually speaking the language, something I cannot. On top of that, there was never any actual need for the language to begin with.

Secondly, though I appear to be a capable storyteller and wordsmith, and have developed an omniverous and hungry reading habit over the decades, I still don't understand the intent of the novel or of the novelist, and I suspect purity of whatever those intents may be to be the most salient aspect of purpose. My intents are not pure: I want to win, I want to show my enemies that I have vanquished them, I want to show them that they merely exist inside the confines of their tax statements and mortgages and their fucking ugly, stupid children they waste their lives shuttling back and forth between their useless hobbies and their miseducations. I want them to feel anger every time they pass a bookstore. I want their hands to shake with sour and anguished memories of my face when they finally submit to their hateful curiosities and open my work.

Is that sufficient? Ultimately, I don't think I have anything meaningful to say, only a method of saying it which is poetic and interesting, if perhaps just in passing. The world and its readers would glean nothing. Do other novels and novelists have greater purpose than my life and its emptiness swaddled and drowning in its teary vinegars? All I want to share is my bitter sense of nostalgia to smother the faces of my critics in it, and convince myself that my thoughts and feelings somehow matter more than theirs. A published novel would be a kind of trophy rendering that position indisputable. They could have no reply, not a single word.