I think I am writing a novel.

Well, I am writing a novel, and I think I will continue writing it, but today I have been feeling like it's worse than the worst piece of horrible literature anyone has ever read, and so I feel very down about it. My boyfriend calls this not trusting myself, which I don't. I don't trust myself to talk, anyway, so I have always hoped that I could redeem myself in writing. But this novel, which, if I had never thrown any of it out would be over 500 pages by now, is a mess of feelings and disconnected events and wistful passages of people thinking, like what I do a lot, sans conflict. It's very reflective of my life: not a lot of external conflict, a LOT of thinking. A lot of sitting around in bars and going for walks, and an inconsistent narrative voice that sometimes pops in and comments on the characters, and sometimes even uses first person, mysteriously.

The strange thing is, writing this all out, unedited and as I think it, makes my novel sound not as bad, but actually quite good. I don't particularly like novels that have a clear, unilateral arc, and too much action. I like cerebral, multi-facted character sketches. Plus, life-like is good, right? And if, as Gina once said, it is the responsibility of the artist to depict what she sees in her world, then I am doing a great job. My novel is confusing, inconsistent, muddly, and at parts, not all that bad. So why do I have to fight off the urge to throw the whole thing out?

Johnny, when writing music, goes by this rule: If you have to convince yourself not to scrap a part, you should definitely scrap it. I wish it were that simple. As a rather aggressive editor myself (apropos, the lost 420 pages I alluded to earlier), this is terrifying. If I follow Johnny's rule, I will have nothing to show for the past 3 years of my writing life. I will have essentially killed off my characters because nothing was happening to them, which is not their fault.