Member-only story
Any Idiot Can Write a Novel
But are you doing it for the right reasons?
My hand hovers over the page
The pen fits perfectly into the groove on my index finger, the skin dented and grown around an absence like a trepanated skull forming new growth at the edges of the hole.
But I don’t write anything.
I’m not ‘blocked’. That’s a notion I’ve always found pompous, a way of calling yourself a writer by not writing anything. When I was an exterminator, I never suffered from exterminator’s block.
I could write if I wanted to. I could write anything I want to, the irresistible temptation of a blank page reaching out and plucking at every corner of the universe where everything is connected to everything else.
But the truth is, I’m simply scared.
Because if I write this last scene, it’s over. I’ll have finished my latest novel. Yeah, I know; a first draft. But still.
It’s still an unruly slab of 115,000 words or so, begun in a different country living a different life. And when I write that last word, even knowing I’ll almost certainly come back and change it later, I’ll be saying goodbye to the last ten years of my life.
