I’ve never quite understood—or been able to identify with—people who seem to have an endless stream of ideas. Writers and dreamers who have ideas for characters, settings, lives, plots bursting out of their heads with such violence that they worry they’ll begin leaking from their ears. Because I have a finished novel, an agent, a writer’s approach to the world, most people think I’m among the ideamongers, and I get generally sad to admit that I’m not, which is usually followed by an intimate disappointment in myself. Sure, I have an endless stream of clever first lines, but those don’t matter much when the rest of the page disintegrates under the weight of a poised pen.
The thing about writing a first novel, for me at least, was the piece that became Slope was never meant to be a novel. Referring to it as “the novel” was, at first, half a joke, and half a dare to myself to see if I could continue to take it somewhere. I’m lucky that it continued. But what’s most important is that its evolution (the first draft, at least) was natural, not bred out of pressure.
Now I’m in a place where, embarking on the next pieces, be them short or novel-length, I feel like there’s a pressure to produce “the next one.” The source of the pressure is irrelevant, but the fact that I’ve breached the natural gestation period of “the first one,” which is allowed to take many, many years, creates expectations for “the next one.”
And that’s when I get scared. What if “the next one” doesn’t come for years? What if it never comes? How long is it appropriate to wait, and at what point do I get scared? Perhaps I’ve identified my deepest-seated jealousy; a jealousy that used to be purely physical, now purely psychological.
M
