Don’t make me write a novel

Memoir is dead. Everyone says so.

Unless you are really famous, memoir is dead. So where does this leave life writers? How do we get our stories out there when publishers are saying no one wants to read them?

The thousands of personal essays posted on Substack every day suggest that people certainly have plenty to say. There is a market for stories about people’s lives, but currently it’s almost impossible to get them onto the shelves.

I enjoy writing personal essays, but there is something about the deep dive of writing in long form that is special, a particular creative challenge. I love writing books, and I want to write another one.

Write a novel, people keep telling me. And I’ve started. I’ve got 45k words sitting in a folder, some of them beautiful, but the overall idea is not yet compellingly structured enough to hit hard. Also I need to finish that novel before anyone will look twice. I’m not sure I really want to write a novel anyway.

What I want to write is a Book Of Love. I’ve started that, too. But I’m hesitant because agent after agent has told me that it is unlikely to sell. I am scared to put hours more work into a project that might never see the light of day.

But as I type this, I know I’m missing the point. If I want to make money from my writing I have to write something publishers can sell. If I want to write because I’m passionate about my idea and craft something beautiful, I must write it in the knowledge that it may never be read by anyone else. Either I write a novel with a clear target audience and an amazing hook, or I follow my heart and write another non-fiction book and hope that it will be so incredible it will buck the trend. .

In the act of writing this post, I can feel that I’m persuading myself to return to my Book Of Love, even though I can sense the eye rolls of exasperation from those around me who think I should crack on with a novel. What if this is the book that changes things? What if I can be original and heartbreaking, and make people sigh in recognition and delight as they turn the pages?

True to say I am exhausted. I’ve just moved house again, and I’m ready to drop. I also need to get another job that pays me some money, alongside the full time caring and educating. Have I got it in me to keep tapping words onto the screen?

Can I build a writing routine in this new flat in the sky, where my desk unbelievably looks out only over trees, despite being in the middle of the city? Can I set my alarm to wake early and write while my children sleep? Or gently close my door against the girls after I’ve fed them tea, summon some energy before bed? Can I trust my knackered brain to seize pockets of time here and there, write in snatches as I have done so often in the past?

This is what it means to be a writer. You just have to keep writing, that’s all there is to it. I’ve always written in the margins. It pisses me off, that I don’t have enough time to write down all of the thoughts that arrive in my head. It’s annoying that my phone is full of half-finished thoughts I’ve typed in traffic jams or in between the dishwasher and the hob. But it’s too easy to use writing in the margins as an excuse not to keep trying. True, I could write more and possibly better if I had lots of time available to me, but also there is something about the constraints in my life that make writing a compulsion and give my words energy.

Perhaps if I step away from the hamster wheel of publishing for a while I can let myself fall back in love with my words. At the moment I am seeing it as a job,. I’m scared I’ll be forgotten if I don’t keep manically writing and trying to secure an agent or get another book deal. It’s no way to produce good work.

If I frame writing another memoir as a treat, a delicious stolen luxury just for me, perhaps I can separate it from the things in my life I absolutely have to do, like caring for my kids, or hanging out the washing, or applying for jobs.

I can light candles while the city is sleeping, put lavender in a vase on my gumtree desk. I can pour myself onto the page and see what emerges. Read books and underline sentences that leap out at me. Dance in between the thoughts of other writers, make myself breathless.

I’m best with a deadline. I’m even better when people tell me no. Maybe this third book will be the one everyone talks about. I’ll never know unless I write it.