A Season in Hell: November 17-22, 2022
The lost epiphanies of King Arthur; vainly searching for excuses for writing badly; and my next novel considered as Paul Rudd's second wife
A Season in Hell is a series of entries from my journal from 2022-23, chronicling the last few torturous months I spent working on my novel The Bright Sword—going from stuck to unstuck. If you want to take it from the top, start here.
November 17, 2022
I’m in the kitchen de-veining prawns and lamely complaining to myself about my own writing. Why can’t I do history like Mantel? Why can’t I do worldbuilding like Tolkien and Martin? And battle scenes like Abercrombie? And magic like Morgenstern/Bardugo/Clarke/etc.? Etc.
The trouble with writing is that there are no excuses. There is no actual reason to be bad. Everybody has the exact same tools. Other writers don’t have secret extra words and letters that I don’t have. It’s not even hard to see what they’re doing—they’re not doing it in secret, they’re doing it right in front of me! It’s right there on the page! It’s hard to explain to myself why I can’t do it too. Except for the obvious.1
November 18, 2022
The Bright Sword is too long. Way too long. It’s 225,000 words, which is longer than any book by J.R.R. Tolkien. (Though still shorter than any of the Song of Ice and Fire books!) It’s as long as four Great Gatsbies. I’m cutting reams. Reams and reams. Pages of free-indirect-discourse, spiritual revelations, painstaking research and so on are falling on the floor like hair in a barbershop. King Arthur is shedding epiphanies left and right.
It sucks but somehow they don’t thrive in close proximity to each other. They steal oxygen from each other. Only when I prune back all the others does the one big one actually start singing.
And nobody will miss the other ones. Except me.
November 22, 2022
There’s a funny but not hugely distinguished movie called This is 40, which I never finished watching, but I do remember a bit early on where Paul Rudd and his buddy are complaining about how much their wives hate them, and then they segue into fantasizing about how great their second wives are going to be, after their first wives leave them. Their sexy loving rebound wives.
I find myself having similar fantasies about my next novel. How quickly I’m going to write it, how easily and naturally it’s going to flow from my fingers. The deep wells of emotion I’m going to tap. How elegantly it will mirror the mood of the world as it is now.
But first I have to get through this one. I wonder how the Paul Rudd character actually got on with his second wife? Or did he ever actually get divorced from his first one? I have a feeling they secretly still loved each other. I may never know for sure, unless I finish the movie. Which seems unlikely at this point.
On reflection there are many excuses, including not having enough money, or time, or if you have health problems. This diary entry has not aged particularly well. They can’t all be winners, I guess.
One day I hope. I'll have to reread them and think about whether they should see the light of day. There's an extended set piece where the knights are chasing a parrot ... it's fun but a bit of a digression!
Ohhhhh I think you’re pretty good at building worlds. Fillory. Brakebills. Nice try but I’m not falling for that one.