I suppose that every aspiring writer must have a literary goal and that, therefore, I must have one too. But what do I hope to achieve by spending hours at a computer, researching and writing; and many more hours between those hours just thinking about what I might write about and how I might I translate those thoughts into words that a stranger might read and even have the remotest idea of what I felt when I composed them and how I expected, or even just hoped, that same reader would feel upon reading them.
So I came up with a definition:
“My literary goal is to write a book that, if it had been written by someone else, I’d read it and wish that I had written it.”
There. Simple. Concise. Capturing as best I can what the pinnacle of my writing achievement would be if I ever attained it. Not Stephen King-like celebrity. Nor JK Rowling-like riches. Just the satisfaction of having written something I felt unequivocally proud of. But the problem with such a goal is that it can never be attained, because I can never be that person who reads my own work for the first time. I can never experience my own writing like anyone else can. Having lived through the gestation of the novel, having experienced all the momentary highs of unexpected creativity and the deep, dark lows of creative frustration and drought, the novel, in its completion, is no longer novel to me. There are no surprises waiting for me on the next page. There are no more linguistic delights twinkling brightly on the page like the lights on a Christmas tree. After reading thirty drafts, inching painfully towards the carrot of imagined perfection but, like one of Zeno’s paradoxes, never achieving it, all the lustre of my opus has been rubbed off leaving a litany of doubts and disappointments. And all I have left is the achievement of its “completion” to spur me to begin again, like Sisyphus, and again, and again and again.
A Pocketful of Mumbles 