I’ve been writing nearly every day of this summer. Ten minutes, six hours, the daily duration is variable, but I’ve been writing. For months. Every writing project I have ever endeavored pales in comparison to my obsession with this new project. It’s the only thing I think about some days. I started this project in November of 2023, Nanowrimo. I thought I could pound out a novel in a month, but the more I wrote, the greater the project’s scope expanded, and it became clear after the first week that I could not possibly complete it in a month.
Thirty-six thousand words. Of notes, and I’m not remotely finished. I reckon there’s another 30,000 in there if I don’t get lazy. The story involves the characters traveling between several worlds, and I want to write in detail of the places, people, nations, religions, social norms, and so forth of each world. I want each world to feel like a real world by merit of all the lore I have developed; rich with history and factions and culture and peoples. I also have to develop some “magic systems” due to the fact that it involves supernatural elements, so I am dabbling a little into fantasy races, but not very heavily; the races are largely supernatural and only semi-corporeal; they are metaphysical properties of a universe corporeally populated by humans.
Donna Tartt, whose novel I adore, I think she has helped me create, my forever-imperfect work is somewhat more “perfect”, the perfectionist within me is a little more sated. I rushed a manuscript once, and it fell short so heavily. Not rushing, even if it will take years, decades, “completion” cannot be rushed if you consider “completion” to be a form of perfection, an act of transhumanism.
Donna Tartt, the novelist. The Secret History took her 8 years to write. In an interview, the host opens with, “how did you do it?” Her response was that she “worked every day, worked every day for 8 years”. Reading that novel is an act of worship for me. Eight years for me sounds too distant to be fulfilling, too distant to be worthwhile, but reading the book makes me feel like I am rising from my flesh and descending (in)corporeally into the story.
GRRM, the great high-fantasy grimdark novelist, his writing is monolithic to me, I worship him in a different way. He takes decades to write his books. He has missed promised deadlines time and time again. But his sheer mastery of the art of writing, it appeals to my psyche in a way that is hard to describe.
Eight months of the Tartt method under my belt and I feel a little defeated because I haven’t produced a page of draft, but I am choosing to accept it.
Perfectionism may be a creativity killer, but some blood relative of perfectionism has to be what has possessed my psyche recently, enthralled, enraptured, enslaved. I welcome it with open arms and an open heart, to use me.
There is a light at the end of the tunnel, and in that light I will be complete. The tunnel is long and tenuous, but publishing my eventual manuscript, if made a thrall to perfectionism’s time-unconcerned blood relative, that’s what’s getting me through. I seek completion, and I’m beginning to find a source of hope. My hope in Jesus has withered; meaning arises in this world I have created, this novel.
My illness has drained me of vitality like a vampire, and smothers me in an endless cycle of hope and letdown, hope and letdown. At times it has brought me into a morose disposition. Nothing feels sacred, not Jesus, not prayer, it feels meaningless, empty actions, thousands of years of human hands writing human words. I am beginning to wonder if this trend is because I am eclipsed in the shadow of my illness. It makes me feel nauseated at times if I think about it, and I have found that, to protect my fragile happiness, I do not think about it.
This one thing I want to create, it the thing I have fortified my fragmented psyche around. I am putting off friends, family to write it. I am silencing phone calls or otherwise putting off offers to hang out. My grandmother moved from out of state to 10 minutes away, but I haven’t visited her more than twice a month. She is important to me, but not terribly important. I want to love her more, but I just don’t. Though I find that it’s not easy for me to love someone, even if I wanted to.
Once I’m through writing this, maybe in a decade from now, I will be meaningless, but I won’t mind. I will be complete. The work will be done, and I will be perfect.
I want to write more, but I am out of words and the thought of writing more tonight nauseates me. This is the post. Enjoy.