Fenland Woman: Why I'll Never Write A Novel
Claire abandons her ambition to be a novelist - with some regrets.
These days when I hear someone say that he or she wants to write a novel I smile. It seems to be a universal desire in Britain. For almost half my life I didn't want to admit what a common ambition it was.
I decided I wanted to be a novelist when I was 14. Back then I thought the ferocity of my need marked me out as someone special and would put me on a level with writers such as Milan Kundera, Salman Rushdie and Martin Amis. It hurt to think that there were thousands of young people just like me.
The years passed and I became less ferocious but continued to believe that a novel would come. I magicked up plot after plot and they bored me. Getting beyond the first paragraph of the first page of the first chapter was a pain.
It was never meant to be. I loved the novels I read but I am not a fiction writer. If I were it would not have been such a struggle to think up convincing stories. There would have been more pleasure in what I did.
There was also the way that I only thought about being a novelist when I wasn't happy with life. I think dissatisfied people often want to write novels because they seem like an easy route to fulfillment. There is no need to even leave the house when you're creating fiction.
A few years ago it occurred to me that I might be focusing on the wrong kind of writing. Was I a poet? an essayist? a history writer? I wasn't sure. I felt and still feel a sense of disappointment about not being a novelist. I'm sure it's because they are the media's darlings while essayists quite simply aren't.
This morning I was writing about two women for an assignment on my journalism course. I had to think of ways to link their words together without making my article look like a long list of quotes. I also needed to give color to my story so that the women would stand out from the page as rounded human beings. It was fun. It felt like writing a novel without the pain of making things up.
I wonder if it is possible to be a novelist and only write about reality. Is that what journalists do? I thought that fiction and journalism belonged to separate universes, but perhaps there is just a paper-thin wall between the two.
