On the Fourth Novel: Where It Stands

The fourth novel has been, until recently, a secret I was keeping from myself. I knew I was writing it — the notebook was full, the document was open — but I had not yet admitted that what I was doing counted as a beginning. Beginnings feel too much like promises.

The first attempt started with a woman on a train. I wrote sixty pages before realising I did not know where she was going, and that this was not the productive kind of not-knowing — the kind that opens outward — but the kind that simply means you have not yet understood your own book. I put it aside in November. December passed. I read other people's novels and felt the usual mixture of admiration and quiet, unreasonable panic.

The second attempt kept the woman but removed the train. I gave her a house, a mother, a recurring dream about a flooded street. This felt more promising for about three weeks. Then I wrote the same scene four times and understood that I was circling something I was not yet ready to look at directly. The book was asking me a question I had not yet answered.

What survives from both attempts is a single chapter. It is the third chapter, which will probably become the second by the time anyone reads it. In it, a woman stands in a kitchen watching rain collect in a blocked drain outside. Nothing happens. Everything is implied. I think it may be the best thing I have written, which is either a good sign for the book or a warning about the book. I have not decided which.

For now the novel is in the place where novels need to be before they can be finished: known well enough to work on, unknown enough to still be discovered. I am trying not to rush the discovery.