Now You Know
by Jonathan Penton

Short answer: I tried to write a novel. I failed. Fuck off.

Standard answer: I tried to take a concept that was good for at most 50,000 words and stretch it into about 100,000. About two-thirds of the way through, I realized that I had been writing mostly filler and almost everything would have to be scrapped, moreover, I didn’t know where to begin again. I decided to go back to publishing and let the novel thing gel some more. I had promised to be back in six months anyway.

More true answer: I thought I could live outside of my circumstances.

A publisher lives almost completely outside of his circumstances. First, he is the creator and arbiter of arbitrary deadlines. He picks a spot on a calendar and says, “that is when the project will be DONE.” There’s no logic to it, yet if he doesn’t do it, nothing happens. The Einsteinian implications are confusing at best; we won’t go into them.

After creating spots on the calendar (an invention to measure something that doesn’t actually exist) and giving them meaning, he then has to make things happen in accordance with those spots, and then make money appear to give those deadlines a physical realization. And it’s at this point I’d like to mention how glad I am to be an American. True, more civilized nations actually subsidize the arts, but America has actually built an economy which relies on people like me who borrow vast quantities of cash, with no intention of ever paying it back, over and over again. It’s rough on writers, but it’s great for publishers with flexible financial ethics.

Right, publishing. A publisher lives outside of personal circumstances; a publisher will leave his wedding before the vows to make a deadline. It’s a non-issue. A publisher will not only work while exhausted; a publisher will work while delirious from illness, or just deliriousness. Death in the family? Not an issue. Death of the author? Not to be flip, but have you picked up a copy of V. C. Andrews’s latest novel? She died in ‘86. Death of the publisher? OK, I’m exaggerating now. Still, only once has Unlikely Stories failed to go out, and that was the month I lost my job because I was spending several hours a day talking to invisible dead fetuses. Normally, when I’m only talking to my pickup and my lava lamp, everything’s cool.

Equipment failure? Don’t even make me laugh. I learned engineering so that I could run a web site. Publishers are nothing if not thorough.

Novelists can’t live outside their circumstances, it seems. Novel-writing is a job custom made for pussies: if everything is not just so, you’re wasting your time. In high school, I wrote a role-playing game (stop snickering, I was a perfectly socially well-adjusted teen and not a virgin, ever, thank you). Writing an RPG is a lot like publishing: you sit down and do it. Maybe you’re good at it, maybe not, but you can sit down and get it done.

There are, as I’m sure you’ve observed, scads of books on how to write a novel. They offer different and often diametrically opposed bits of advice. Seeing this phenomenon, I was able to learn that no one can tell you how to write a novel, and that you could get an advice book published if you’re willing to pretend otherwise. Despite this, it never quite dawned on me that writing a novel was damned difficult. I just figured that writers don’t have a publisher’s willpower; Lord knows I know a few who are lazy as shit.

You know something? If a writer goes nuts, they stop writing.

If a writer gets sick, they stop writing.

If a writer has fucking gas, they’re gonna write real slow.

A writer’s gotta have their groove on. Not for essays or articles, not really. Poems are often edited for hours or days, but they usually come out in bursts (epics don’t count): groove is all but irrelevant. One has to have a groove to write a short story, or short novella; I failed to extrapolate from this knowledge the understanding that a deeper groove would be needed to attempt bigger projects. After all, it’s not like one can write a novel in chapters. One must have the whole novel in one’s head at once, every time one sits down to write a few pages. Otherwise, those pages won’t have shit to do with the rest of the novel, and won’t have shit.

That’s universally true, isn’t it? Does everyone feel that to be true? If not, I’ll just pretend that it’s true for the sake of the writing-instruction book I might someday write.

I work full-time, and I work hard, and I come home tired. I never want to stop; I never want to be like Stephen King (seriously), slowly forgetting how to write any character other than professional writers. I’ve tried working in a bookstore, it was fun, but one doesn’t keep in touch with humanity by hanging out with the most bored and lazy aspect of the bourgeois. Fuck teaching. No offence to teachers, unless you were one of my public school teachers, in which case fuck.you (unless you were my ninth grade English teacher, in which case call me? please?).

Fairly late in my sabbatical, I figured out how to get my groove on, day-to-day. About that time, I was able to step back and realize I was writing filler. Which would be cool, but part of having your groove on is having your life together, and as I was getting my day-to-day groove on my life got fucked up, as lives are wont to do. So that’s that. Back to work. I’ll get a short story groove on and work from there.

As if you fucking asked.

Jonathan Penton is the overworked editor and publisher of Unlikely Stories. Check out his literary works at this site.