Why My Novel is Unfinished

I thought one of the main things I would have done with my life is write a novel. That has not yet happened. I started one about eight years ago, powered through the first hundred pages or so in about a month, but I've done precious little since then. Still, I think about the characters, the story all the time.

I'm left wondering why I don't want to write it now.

• It's not that I don't have time, but that I don't make time. I've got a half an hour each way of my commute every day that I could devote to writing, but I don't.


• So maybe I don't write it because there's other things going on in my life. I know that I was unhappy and lonely when I wrote most of that story, and so maybe meeting Wendy disabled my desire to write--but it's not fair to blame it on her.


• Of course, there's always the fear of failure thing, too--not that I'm afraid of the humiliation of failure, but more the misspent time--something no one can afford during their horribly finite lifespans.
  
• Another reason I don't write is that by writing it down, I am limiting it's possibilities (whereas unwritten, it is limitless).


• I fear that my appreciation for the art of fiction has outpaced my talent, and that I would never be able to make it on the whole enjoyable to myself, let alone to others. Likewise, I fear that I'm just smart enough to recognize the intelligence of those much smarter than me.

But I also wonder why I wanted to write it in the first place.

• I first thought I wanted to write a book when I was in high school, and I think, if I remember correctly, it was right after that time in 1986 when two grandparents and two aunts died within 10 or so weeks of each other. I wanted to have something that would outlive me, some way of expressing my unique, though unspecial, pattern. Is it vanity to want to be noticed after you're gone?


• Sometimes, creating it was pure joy. I would work on it for hours on end and not sleep and not eat but just drink coffee and create and govern a whole world. Rereading it, however, was never as good. Many times I tried to write and it wasn't coming out like it had before, nor was it as fun, and I felt discouraged.