A Novel Idea

Writing a novel seems like such a demanding and complex undertaking, I've never seriously considered doing it. Where does a novelist start? How do you get from A to Z in an artful, or even interesting, way? How can you sustain interest in something for so long for both the reader and the writer? How can you make the daily commitment of breathing life into your novel without eventually getting bored and just shoving it in a drawer, never to see the light of day again? I have anxiety even making the commitment to watch a new tv show every week, much less taking on the daunting task of creating a novel.

I've come to believe that making a marriage or any long-term relationship work is as difficult as writing a novel. Admittedly, I haven't been successful at either one, which, I realize, makes me sound like I'm full of shit. And maybe I am. (As if *that's* ever stopped me from talking out of my ass.) If I *had* known marriage would be as hard and as complicated as writing a novel, I don't know if I would have actually gotten married. At the very least, I would have given the idea of marriage much more thought than the brief consideration that I did. Truth be told, my marriage was as ill-considered as the plot to a movie about high school cheerleaders trying to raise money by having a carwash.

If marriage is similar to writing a novel, then divorce is stopping in the middle and giving up on it. Or, as in my case, throwing the 400-page unfinished manuscript in the fireplace and burning the only copy of a story featuring two main characters I no longer liked. One of the most difficult aspects of writing a novel is going back and ruthlessly revising a story that isn't quite working. As my novelist friends have shared, it's brutal having to revise your work, because it's often the most cherished stuff you've written that needs to be cut. I think any long-term marriage needs that brutal, but necessary, revision in order to survive. Even then, the revision isn't always enough to make it worthwhile.  

I've heard that one of the big psychological "tricks" to successfully tackling a gigantic project like a novel, is to have a general idea of what you want to accomplish, but to be okay with not knowing exactly how you'll do it, and believing that you can get there by writing one page at a time. Serial double-digit novelist Orson Scott Card once said, "You can't write a novel all at once, any more than you can swallow a whale in one gulp. You do have to break it up into smaller chunks."

And that's how I'm trying to reframe my approach to long-term relationships. Instead of being hung up on whether I'm in a relationship that has the stuff to survive the next 30 years, I'm breaking it down into bite-sized pieces by looking at what I want and need in a relationship over the next year and the next five years. I'm banking on the idea that by paying close attention to the now and the soon, I will be in the best position to nurture a satisfying relationship that can survive merciless revision, as well as my own skittishness about marriage.

I don't know if that will work, but I do know that I will write a novel before I get married again. I can also state with equal certainty, I will be appointed the U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan before I get married again. That's not to say I won't write a novel. I may, in fact, write one. I just won't be married when I do it.