Twenty years ago was when I first started brainstorming “The Story,” in some very rough sketches of writing and thinking. Over those twenty years, I’ve been able to refine my writing, as shown in “Novel 01,” and brainstorming, as shown in the videos that I record along with these essays. What if it will take me another twenty years, at this pace, to write “Novel 02?” That is the only way that I want to go forth.

Major spoilers after the jump.

Writing “The Story” is more of the life’s mission I have.

I’ve learned over the years to stop and smell the roses, of course, because I spent too much time burning out over these first twenty years of brainstorming and practicing to write “The Story.” What I’d like to accomplish with these maybe twenty more years is to thoroughly understand the world of “The Story” so comprehensively that writing will be second nature for me. I don’t have the ability to take time off work to write. I can maybe take a day off, like I did my-today before a doctor’s appointment to write this essay and record this video, but I can’t dedicate much more time than that because I have to pay rent.

I feel like the writers that disinterest me the most are the bourgeois writers.

They’re the ones that are spoiled through a lifetime of not having to experience near poverty outside of leaving their fancy hotel rooms that were paid for by their employer. I had a week-long hotel room paid for by one of my employers, and so I know that experience along with the experience I just completed of having to work a contract immediately after getting my healthcare sorted out because I was just about to go into debt. I’m no longer at risk for this financial ruin, however, I know this mentality so thoroughly that I understand the plight of the proletariat and how difficult it is to make rent merely because I’ve experienced it. So when I read some of “the classics,” where these writers write which such a prejudice against other humans, all I can think is, “this is very poorly written in myriad ways.” For one, the writing descriptions are hollow. You can tell that the rooms are half-described, because as I experienced when I wrote “Novel 01,” I could only muster the time to half-imagine these rooms. There was no room for anything other than letting the reader imagine the rest because I was too busy to complete the damn thing.

So what if it takes twenty years or more for me to do it properly?

I’d rather do it right, now that I know how I did it wrong by giving myself two weeks to write a novel in four weeks, than do it wrong just so that way I get a half-baked product onto shelves to sell to pay for my rent in ways that frankly feel more self-exploitative than if I just worked a dirty day job through the duration of my writing brainstorming. Maybe I can take a week off in a year or two to dedicate to doing more thorough brainstorming, or maybe drafting up a skeleton for “Novel 02?” But I don’t have the ability to rest on my laurels with the sort of luxury of writing, complaining about not having the inspiration to write through a writer’s block, when, I have a new job I need to start on my-Monday.

If that new job goes well, though, I could write “Novel 02” in less than twenty years…