A Thousand Falsehoods (Part 2)

I stood there alone in the bright lights and saw how impossible it was to see anyone beyond the front row, though I could just make out the shape of K on the upper bleachers.

Tell us about yourself, said J. Your story. Why you’re here.

My name is Elemeno P, I began. I fell in love with novels when I was a teenager. In my twenties, I spent years writing short stories and posting them as unrelated comments on Reddit threads. Sometimes I’d get thousands of upvotes and dozens of replies. But my first love has always been the novel, and so I spent the last two and a half years turning myself into a novelist. It wasn’t easy. A novelist I once studied with said she only had a good idea once every five years. At first I was horrified but then I remembered a theoretical physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study who’d said something similar. It wasn’t that they didn’t have ideas, or even good ideas, it was that their bar for a truly good idea was extremely high. It reminded me of a concept in professional chess called the universal player. To be universal is to excel at playing across every style and every part of the game. I think the same is true of a great novelist. It’s not that they need to be great at everything but they need to be good at everything, and great at a few things. So I had the idea to pick a structure for a novel that allowed me to use what I was good at, but also required a skill level just beyond my ability. And as I wrote within that structure, I improved. When you write, or better, when you rewrite, all you focus on is what is wrong with the piece. Sometimes it seems unfixable, but often enough there is a way through to that sought-after clarity and coherence. I spent two and a half years accepting that my rewriting would change the novel’s structure beyond my original intent. You have to let the ideas bend, I realized. The novel, if it’s imbued with sufficient meaning, can’t really be conceived of until it’s partially written. Only then can you see what you’re actually dealing with. I learned also that I’d have to write far more than what would ultimately appear in the final draft. That even though much of that writing could be defined as falsehoods, blind alleys, wrong paths, it was essential to the creation of the novel. As if the falsehoods better constrained the true shape of the novel. And after years of hard work, of suffering and delay, of progress and exaltation, I’d have, if I was lucky, a novel containing some truth of what it meant to be human in this world.

I’m here because I want to imagine more deeply, and perhaps falsely, in the hopes of arriving at another good novel. But my answer has gone on far too long, and my two minutes are certainly up, and I have two years ahead of me of imagining falsehoods. I am only at 573 falsehoods imagined, and am progressing at a rate of 13 useful falsehoods a day.