What it Takes

The room is small. The fan is loud, just a few feet above the bed. There is no window. There is only one light, a flourescent tube that burns everything into clear detail. The only way to establish any sense of halfway truth is to turn on the light in the bathroom and leave the door half-closed. This is the landscape of doubt. This is not pleasant. It is the place that I have brought myself to in order to create my next novel. Of course, it's not the only place that this novel will be written. But it is one of them, and an important one. Every other room, comfortable or awful, will be a version of this.

It makes me think of the incredibly private cost of a novel. It makes me consider why I pursue the most difficult and wonderful form of human expression. There is nothing like the novel. A beautiful novel is the hardest thing in the world to create. I'm tired of adding depreciating little addendums, tacking a little of course qualification onto a statement like that. Chopping down what it takes. I know what it takes- i've already done it. And now that i'm right in the center of the next novel, the cost of it is becoming clear. It's a big thing, it's a hard thing, it's the most demanding creative process of all. And it takes from you, it takes so much that it can be dizzying when you stare up from the dirty sheets of your guesthouse bed and contemplate the throbbing fan, the humid city, the yellow light from the bathroom, the loneliness.

The characters are now people rather than ideas. They are people that live in my head. I love them all equallly because they are more than my children. The people in this place need me to complete them. The human foetus develops of its own accord. There is no halting the momentum of biology once the process has begun. The fictional character, and I have to create many at once, is also a person that requires creation. Once you reach the point of total commitment to whatever that end-point may be, they demand to be created. You are not forming a crying infant, a blank canvas. You are creating someone whole, someone with a story and an explanation, somebody who must be so real that you miss them bitterly when the novel is finally finished.

The terrible haunting reality of it all is that you can stop creating these people at any stage. You can down tools and leave them half-sculpted. A beautiful profile with mutilated limbs. Something gorgeous and loved made awful by your neglect. Something that could have been a part of something wonderful and now has become a dreadful guilt that only you could ever understand. Imagine a workshop of half-formed sculptures begging you to animate them. You can see how majestic each could be, and their incredible potential is clear despite their grotesque absence of certain essential parts. When you see them unformed, you imagine them whole. But there is only one chisel. There is only so much marble. Not all of them can be made. You must choose who, and you must choose how.

It can be done. I've done it. It took me years. There were hours of doubt. There were moments where I looked at what i was making, even when it was inches from completion, and wondered if even one minute of my time had been spent on something worthwhile. That was right at the very end, when you can taste completion on your lips. When the ghosts are sculpted to near-completion and they thank you with fresh dialogue and action that comes from a place that seems far beyond your imagination. Even then, there is still doubt.

Is it even worth talking about everything else? The room, the fan, the light from the bathroom? The stage, the curtain, the audience. On a simple human level these have cost me everything. Novels are not written on the periphery of normal lives. The hall of the half-made is not a place one can visit between other responsibilities. As awful as it can be, that place must be a home that you carry in your head. There will be certain things that you will have to sacrifice for it. No price you pay is any guarantee of satisfaction. When all of the sculpting and chiselling is complete, when you've made these new people and loved them and given them breath and form to strut and fret their hour, you might be left with something you grow to hate.

That is the cost. It's what a fine novel demands. If you do it properly, the rewards this process offers will not be seen within your lifetime. Success, and by that I mean the success of seeing your creation through from beginning to end, will simply raise the demands of that place the next time you visit it. The figures of your imagination will loom larger. There will be more of them. They will be more beautiful and more incomplete. And once again they will take you to a dark room with a loud fan and a solitary drink. A place where nobody really understands exactly what you are forced to do.