Of Moss, Jung, and My Final NaNoWriMo

For much of my life I have wanted and planned to be a novelist.  I have participated in National Novel Writing Month a few times without "winning:"  making it to the 50 thousand word finish line.  I started again at the beginning of last month and planned to create a fictional version of our "family tragedy."  I started strong.  I built some characters.  I had a sense of where the story was going.

But then self-awareness intervened.  After a windstorm in early November I got up on our roof to sweep off the pine needles while thinking, "When I'm done I'll get back to work on the novel."  But while I was up on the roof I noticed that many of the shingles on the north side of the house had bits of black moss growing on them.  So I went down the ladder, got a butter knife, and climbed back up onto the roof to spend another hour and a half picking off each little piece of moss.  And it was then, finally, that I realized, "I would rather pick moss off a roof than write fiction." 

And that was that. 

I have some grief over this realization because I've held the thought that I would become a novelist for almost five decades.  I've bragged to people about books I would write.  I've started at least six novels. The only one I finished, however, was at a severe cost.   The engine that allowed that book's completion was a relational obsession that ended very badly.  This was the sort of motor that tears apart its vehicle. Not a power I ever wish to harness again.

Why is it so difficult to let go of this image of myself as a long-form fictionist?  Carl Jung, read through the work of depth psychologist James Hollis, had the answer.  In the latter's book, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life, he quotes from Jung's writing on The Development of Personality, "What usually has the strongest psychic effect on the child is the life which the parents . . . have not lived."  And guess who also wanted to be a novelist?  But who never succeeded?

If you guessed, "your dad," you're right.  He was a newspaper man who dreamed of writing the long book but never did.  He was so proud of me when I sent him my completed novel -- he wrote a long, unprecedented personal letter.  (But then, after he read that work, with it's gay romance and sex scenes, he never mentioned it again.)  So giving up this mistaken dream of crafting the long work is also giving up a finding approval from my deceased dad.  (Are we ever done with our parents?)

Another reason I know I'm not meant to be a novelist is the way my body responded to the work.  My friend and life coach, Barb Morris, has said over and over again that we should listen to our bodies to know what we want.  What I experienced when writing long form fiction was physical discomfort at staying still for such lengthy periods of time.  I do not experience this discomfort when working in other art forms.  In fact, when I have been on writing retreats for the purpose of producing poems I have sat so long my bladder nearly burst because I couldn't leave the thoughts uncrafted into beauty.

So this is good-bye to that particular dream.  When I was getting ready to retire in 2014 I told friends that my first year would be a "fish or cut bait" year for novelizing.   I thought I'd be fishing for great plots.  Now I've been retired for a year and a half and have no novel.  I think that's good proof that it's not what I'm meant to be doing.  So instead of trying to hook the trout of the long story, I'm cutting bait to toss in the water of my unconscious to tempt back Euterpe, Erato, and maybe even Clio.

I'm still a writer, after all.  Just not a novelist.