According to writer Joseph Epstein, 81 percent of Americans have a book they want to write. I have five. Here are descriptions of three sufficient to prove my ambitions while also not giving my ideas away:
a) The story of a high school student struggling with that stage of life’s typical problems…while also losing control of his place in time.
b) An exploration of modern college life, with a focus on the pros and cons of Greek life
c) A paranoid conspiracy thriller featuring aliens and UFOs
Though my desire to write a novel may surprise some, my choice of subject matter for at least two of them would not surprise anyone who has known me over the years: In 8th grade, I was voted both “best conspiracy theorist” and “likeliest to build a time machine.”
Ideas are — for me, at least — the most fun part of trying to write a novel. My friend Michael Shaw ’13 likes to say there’s nothing better than the first 15 minutes of an idea. But the would-be novelist’s struggle begins as soon as that 15 minutes is over. It is a struggle defined by the ever-looming question “What do I do next?” It is a struggle haunted by the way that the stark fact of a work’s incompleteness (or even nonexistence) eats at your soul. And it is a struggle that has changed my life.
My creative faculty is such that I cannot control when ideas to flesh out my novels come to me. Light bulbs have appeared over my head while I am running, when I’m eating, while I am in the bathroom, and, probably most often, when I’m trying to go to bed. The last of these tendencies often makes sleeping difficult: A year ago today, I was comfortably in bed until an entire scene burst into my half-conscious head; it wouldn’t let me sleep until I wrote the whole thing down.
This uncontrollable idea generation has combined with my own paranoia about forgetfulness to compel me always to carry around notebooks and some kind of writing utensil, lest I fail to capture an idea before oblivion claims it. I also collect these fragments of ideas, along with random Internet articles, facts, ideas from other sources, plot fragments, etc. into Google Docs under overarching folders for each novel, each of which probably contains hundreds of thousands of words.
I have also read multiple books on how to write novels, and talked to several authors to mine them for ideas and techniques. I have even enlisted freshman Chandler Ryd, who founded the Creative Writing Club and actually knows what he’s doing, to bother me about writing every time he sees me.
But all these steps I’ve taken haven’t gotten my novels much closer to being finished. For though these small half-measures have largely kept me from forgetting things, I’ve reached the point now where I am mostly using them to mollify the internal pressures I feel from all the laughters and the follies that are locked inside my head, and to make me feel like I am doing [something]. What keeps me a [would-be] novelist is not inspiration — I’ve got plenty of that — but time and dedication. Between the Collegian, the Gadfly Group, school, running every day, and figuring out my future (not to mention sleeping and eating), I simply don’t have time to write a novel right now. Now, I’m of course aware that’s what all would-be novelists say. There always is and always will be an excuse not to work.
The only way actually to write a novel is to make writing a daily habit, not just the erratic hobby I’ve made of it. But even if I don’t have time now, and even if these novels’ non-existence deprives no one but me, I refuse to give up. These ideas will linger in my mind whether I want them to or not; putting them on paper is the only way to get rid of them. Sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, page by page, chapter by chapter, novel by novel, I’ll put it all together. Someday.
And then I can get started on my romantic comedy screenplay.
Jack Butler is a senior studying political economy. He is also studying journalism through the Dow Journalism Program, and the president of the Gadfly Group. Please buy his novels when he finishes writing them.