How Not to Write a Novel: Essays on a Novelist’s Relationship to Creative Practice, Artistic Integrity, and a Novel that Resisted Being Written

Summary

A novelist, unable to write a planned novel, instead creates a multi-genre autocritical text that merges memoir, confession, Buddhist practice, psychedelic therapy, cultural analysis, and photography. The work traces how the writer's life experiences, fears, and relationships, amid destabilizing normative truths, transformed the original project into a literary work of a different content and genre. It offers an illustrative guide for creative writers on technical, psychological, and spiritual practices, testing what happens to art-making when faced with external censors, formal resistance, and the ego's obstruction. The narrative illuminates generative possibilities that emerge from surrendering to the text being written.

Study at a glance

Abstract

This thesis is the record of a novelist in the process of not being able to write a novel. What began as an attempt to complete a draft of a novel became instead a multi-genre text and an autocriticism in which a fiction writer’s process becomes the subject of study at the same time it generates a novel work of creative writing. This took what was once to have been a two-part thesis comprising a novel and an exegetical reflection on it into a unified text, in which the creative and critical form a kind of conversation about structure, style, artistic fear, and meaning. It combines theoretical explorations of genre and creative writing with investigation of my lived experience as a writer in the context of 2020-era cultural shifts and traces a writer’s journey towards a personal framework for truth necessary to artistic practice. The purpose of this study is to track how my life experiences, fears, barriers, and relationships in the context of a destabilizing normative truth began inserting themselves into the project until it was transformed into a literary work that departed from the original intention in both content and genre. The resulting thesis takes the form of explorations in memoir and confessional writing, practices of Buddhism, psychedelic therapy, cultural analysis, photography, and samplings of endeavors to build a fictional world. As an illustrative rather than prescriptive guide for creative writers, this study offers access to in-process technical, psychological, and spiritual practices as a model for how fiction writers might increase awareness of their subject matter. It is a test of what happens to art-making in the face of external censors, formal resistance, and the obstruction of the ego. Ultimately, this study aims to illuminate, through a narrative structured by a chain of discoveries, the generative possibilities that emerge from an artist’s surrender to the text she is writing. It serves as a craft guide, an autocritical reflection, and an artifact of creative process in the act of unfolding.

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