Three Novels That Prove Your Writing Life Could Be Worse (At Least You're Not Mallory Catfishing on Grindr)

The best feeling in the world is starting a book. You sit down with a feeling - a scene, a voice, a question you can't shake - and the pages come. You're not thinking about readers or markets or whether it's any good. You're thinking about the next sentence, and the one after that, and the way the words are landing on the page in the right order for the first time in your life. It's the closest thing to flying that a person sitting at a desk can experience.

And then you start, and the problems begin. The blank page. The half-finished draft. The nagging suspicion that someone else has said it better, or that you're saying something you have no right to say, or that the 90,000 words you've produced are 90,000 words of nothing.

There are hundreds of books about writing. Most of them are instructional. They tell you to sit at a desk, to write every day, to kill your darlings. They're useful in the way that a manual is useful. But they don't capture the experience - the particular dread and absurdity of trying to make something out of nothing and then asking people to pay for it. For that, you need novels. Novels about writers, written by writers who have lived through the mess and come out the other side with something to say about it.

Three novels, three nightmares. Each one captures a different version of what it feels like to be a writer who can't write, won't write, or can't stop writing.

The nightmare of having nothing to say

Fruit Fly by Josh Silver. Mallory is a novelist who can't write. She's blocked, her career is stalling, and she needs material. So she creates a fake Grindr account and descends into London's queer nightlife, looking for a story she can use. She finds Leo, a young man on the edge of homelessness, and she makes him her project - her muse, her research subject, her pet. She poses as a therapist. She shapes her novel around his life. Leo knows he's being used. He can't work out why.

This is the book that understands what writer's block does to a person. It doesn't make you serene. It makes you feral. Mallory's desperation is the desperation of someone who has built their identity on being a writer and is watching that identity slip. She needs a story the way a person needs oxygen, and the less she has, the worse her judgement gets. The novel asks the question every writer avoids: where does material come from, and what are you willing to take from another person's life to get it?

Silver doesn't let Mallory off the hook, and that's what makes the book more than a satire. It would be easy to write her as a villain - the middle-class writer exploiting a vulnerable young man for content. She is that. But she's also lost, and frightened, and doing the thing that writers do, which is looking at the world and thinking, "Could I use that?" The novel holds both truths at once: that the instinct to turn life into art is what makes a writer, and that the same instinct, unchecked, is monstrous.

The nightmare of wanting what isn't yours

Yellowface by R.F. Kuang. June Hayward is a writer - not a successful one. Her novel tanked. Her friend Athena Liu is the one with the career, the accolades, the voice everyone wants to hear. And then Athena dies, and June is in the room, and Athena's unpublished manuscript is on the desk, and June takes it. She publishes it under her own name. She becomes the thing she wanted to be.

Kuang's novel is about theft, but the real horror isn't the act of stealing. It's the rationalisation. June doesn't see herself as a thief. She sees herself as someone who recognised quality, who gave a dead author's work a chance it wouldn't have had otherwise. The publishing industry - hungry for diverse voices, for authenticity, for the next big thing - doesn't ask too many questions. And June, who has spent her career being told she's not interesting enough, not diverse enough, not marketable enough, discovers that the right story can fix all of that. The book she stole is brilliant, and for a while, so is she.

What makes Yellowface uncomfortable is that June is not a monster. She's envious, and she's human, and the distance between those two things is smaller than any writer would like to admit. The novel understands that the publishing world doesn't reward virtue. It rewards narrative. And if you can't generate the narrative yourself, the temptation to borrow one - or take one - is not as far-fetched as it sounds. Every writer who has read a debut novel and thought, "Why them and not me?" will recognise June. The recognition is not flattering.

The nightmare of not being able to stop

Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon. Grady Tripp published a novel that made his name. That was seven years ago. Since then, he's been working on the follow-up, and the follow-up has grown to two thousand six hundred pages, and he can't finish it, and he can't stop, and he can't let go. The manuscript is in a brown paper bag. He carries it with him. He adds to it. It's eating him alive.

Where Fruit Fly is about a writer who can't start and Yellowface is about a writer who steals what she can't make, Wonder Boys is about the writer's most private fear: that the work has outgrown you and you've lost the ability to shape it. Grady isn't blocked. He writes every day. The problem is that he can't end. He can't find the sentence that says, this is done. And so the novel grows, and grows, and the gap between what it is and what it's supposed to be widens, and Grady fills the gap with more pages, which make the gap bigger, which demands more pages.

Chabon knows this territory because he lived it. Before Wonder Boys, he spent five years on a novel called Fountain City that his publisher hated. He put the manuscript in a drawer and wrote Wonder Boys in seven months. The novel is the answer to the drawer - it's what happens when you stop trying to write the masterpiece and write something honest instead. Grady's problem isn't talent. It's that he's fallen in love with the idea of the book and lost track of the book itself. The two thousand six hundred pages aren't a novel. They're a monument to his inability to let go.

What the three books share

Read together, these novels form a kind of map of the writing life's worst corners. The blocked writer who exploits others for material. The failed writer who steals. The successful writer who can't finish. Three different failures, three different kinds of damage - and all three rooted in the same thing: the conviction that being a writer is who you are, not what you do. When the writing goes wrong, the identity goes with it. Mallory, June, and Grady aren't people who write. They're writers who have stopped being able to, and the difference is catastrophic.

The lesson isn't that writing is miserable, though these books won't convince you otherwise. The lesson is that the hardest part of writing a book isn't the writing. It's the relationship you have with the work - the way you treat it, the way you let it define you, the way you hold on when you should let go. Mallory can't let go of her need for a story. June can't let go of her envy. Grady can't let go of his pages. Every writer who has sat at a desk at midnight, staring at a draft that won't cooperate, will recognise the feeling. The work asks too much. You give it anyway. And then it asks for more.

This is what we talk about on our writing retreats. Not the mechanics of plot and character, though we cover that. The harder stuff: what happens when you lose the thread, when the book resists you, when you can't tell if you're writing or just typing. 

Mallory destroys her relationships. June destroys her reputation. Grady - and this is why Wonder Boys is the warm book of the three, the one that ends with hope - Grady lets the manuscript go. He throws it in the river. He starts again. And the thing he writes next is shorter, and truer, and finished.

Writing a book will break your heart at least once. The question isn't whether it happens. It's what you do on the other side.