Rant Rant 5: How to never finish writing a novel

Hang yourself up on the unattainable word. That always helps. I myself am looking for a specific word that means “a cabin that you sleep in whilst on a train.” It is out there. I know it. Everything has a name but not everyone knows the name. My suggestion for all the writers out there is to pick a very vague concept. When your friends ask, try to explain it but not very hard. Agree with them when they try to clarify it in their own words. When they suggest up a word, and they will, tell them “No, that’s not quite right, something is missing. I don’t think we’re on the same page.” The great thing about this is that you can reuse it over and over. Vagueness is the key; it has worked in every election. It has worked to fill in plot holes. It’s a good sedative. Vagueness is an ally. Choose carefully, people know more than you.

Circular logic is always good. What I mean by this is never try to move ahead in the novel. Make August Mobius proud. Find a problem with your story line and try to resolve it within the pages that you have written. Then, re-evaluate the beginning and find that the end doesn’t really match. Retell the beginning to match the end. During this retelling, you will change the entire story all the way through and then the new beginning will not match the new ending that you have created. Repeat. See the beauty of this? This assures that you will be hung up endlessly on the same four or five pages.

When you reach a critical juncture in the novel, start writing something different. That’s right, walk away from what you have written. You find that you have sent your main character to the doorstep of his lover. He rings the doorbell. She answers. Their eyes meet. He has been a bastard and has known it for sometime. She accepts him for all his flaws. Her anger falls away from her like down sprinkled from an upper story window at the sight of him. The softness is apparent to him. It makes him feel sorry for everything that he has ever done to her. How could she still love him, but she does. He knows he doesn’t deserve her. He knew it the day he meet her. He was a fake, a sham. Everybody at the circus knew it. He hadn’t been to clown college. He had been lying the whole time. She knew from the beginning that he was lying; lying to impress her. She liked the attention and the fact that she could make such a seemingly important man nervous by her presence. And he, the droll clod had her. Had her in the palm of his hand. They could have had many years together, happy, in an overgrown Conestoga wagon going from town to town with its metal fry pans and skillets banging loudly against its wooded sides with every bump in the road. Instead, he cheated on her with a woman who could whittle miniature feet out of poisonous mushrooms. While he was in Vermont smoking mushroom shavings with the hairy adulteress, his love was stuck in a shabby brownstone near Central Park, toiling endlessly over spring fashions and imported Brie on Melba toast. It had been thirty-seven years since their three-day romance, and not one day had gone by without her thinking of him and what could have been. Sometimes she would walk the parks checking for people under benches, or sleeping in their own filth, in case he would turn up. She had just about given up hope and here he was. What would he say … Once upon a time, Myrtle liked vegemite. But not since he actually tried it. Do you see how that works? That critic juncture was reached and we were all eager to see what would happen. We wanted to see the love rekindled and the story end happy with what should have been. But, instead, I turned to the amazing story of Myrtle and his unexplainable cravings. And when we get to the point where Myrtle is going to finally discover the ingredients to Kim-chi, I will start another story. In this manner, we will leave a wake of endless unfinished stories. For supplementary reading on this, consider reading my related text, ‘How to Avoid the Climax At All Costs.’ Apparently, this title sold well until people realized it was about writing, not masochism.

Find a friend who will persistently draw your attention away from your writing. If you don’t have a friend, don’t worry, you can easily substitute friendship with a close range metronome or talk radio. Every time you sit down to write, invite that friend over. Or for those without friends, turn on the radio or set the metronome at a disagreeable tempo. I know, I know, I get the following question all the time: “How do I know which tempo is most disagreeable to me?” Well, I have devised a time intensive method for determining this. First, listen to about an hour of talk radio from each program that is available in your area. Don’t forget the AM radio stations. When you find a program that really irks you, find the meter at which the host of the show talks. Try the match this meter with a set tempo on the metronome. For example, I myself find a particular distaste the malformed brain of Dr. Laura, and her self-righteous cackle lets me know I’ve hit a gold mine. Now, determining the tempo of our fair Harpier can be quite difficult. Dr. Laura in known to take odd tempo-ed pauses to let to righteousness build steam. Dismiss these pauses as crescendos and holds. Try to visualize in your mind the rate at which she would wave her pointer finger while giving the malformed hokum. That, my friends, is the tempo at which you want to set your metronome. But, that isn’t it. Once you have that tempo achieved, write it down. Her pace is usually in the lower limits of a presto. Next, we want to average that out with the tempo to your personal pick for the worst song on Abacab. For me, that track is easily “No reply at all” which has a somewhat allegretto pace. So, I set my metronome at a compromise between these two paces and fwham!, non-productivity a go-go.

Let other writers intimidate you. Everyone is better than you are and you know it. Stephen Crane wrote The Red Badge Of Courage in only two days. How does that make you feel? How can you ever be confident of yourself with people like him easily finding their muse? One time I had several pages of text. It looked like I was going somewhere with my writing. But, I was spared completion by the words of none other than Kurt Vonnegut. In one of his thinly veiled retellings of his life, he mentioned that he had gotten this far in life (by then he was at least seventy-something) without ever using a semicolon. He detested them; they were completely unnecessary. Well, that was it. I had been using semicolons all along. Since they were an accepted part of speech I had no idea that I shouldn’t have been using them. I sank into some low feelings. How could I have been so wrong? I immediately thought of myself as an inferior author and it took days before I approached my writings again. Even when I did finally readdress them, I had to spend weeks telling the story without semicolons.