Control: Reflections on an Attempt At Literature

I, Dalton Lewis, finished a novella called Miserable Existence. It’s 100 pages of the most wonderful characters I could conceive. That’s one of the two elements I worked on for this story: trying to create unforgettable people you could get behind and root for. Everett needed to fight back at all the unfairness in middle school. He needed to be someone to question religious beliefs and sexual preferences and figure out what he believed in.

One character isn’t enough, though. Adding in Natalie seemed perfect and a solid high-round draft choice. Natalie needed to become an icon of goodness and innocence, and then she needed to fall and lose everything and see what she was made of after that.

Axel, the bully, needed a heart of gold. He needed to sometimes be wonderful and sometimes terrible — one can’t have a basic story in which the bully is bad and has no personality except to terrorize the protagonist. No, that character won’t do: Axel cares about Everett and Natalie and everyone — he just struggles to show it correctly. I knew a guy in middle school who was more popular than me. He didn’t treat me poorly. I wanted to tap into that. One weekend he drank a beer and immediately fell asleep.

Now that I have these wonderful characters what do I do? I need to get the word out about my novella. I’ll be honest — I don’t know how to do that. It seems that the market stay saturated with countless novels and one needs to fight very hard to stand out and be noticed.

I sit here, enraged, a forty-two year-old writer who can’t write a bestseller. Why? What gives other writers the right? Why do I fail and they succeed? I understand, it’s hard. It’s supposed to be hard. Nothing is supposed to come easily in life. I just want to get noticed for all of my hard work.

I understand: not everyone can get onto the bestseller list. That’s true. Hard work should pay off, though: my hard work should pay off. I worked like crazy on this novella for nine months. I sat there, drinking zero sugar soda, typing away in my bedroom, day after day, trying to inject literature into my writing.

How? That involved a lot of work. Trying to show what’s wrong with religion involves showing a God-like figure turning out to be Satanic and a Satanic figure turning out to be God-like. It also meant to include coronavirus because that’s the problem facing society right now. Finally the characters had to reflect real social tensions and difficulties to make the piece mean something.

Did anyone notice that hard work? It’s unclear, and that’s frustrating. Should i continue to write novels? I don’t know. They don’t seem to be noticed by anyone, and yet I continue to write them. I’m going to plan out the next novel much more carefully and rewrite it more — until it cannot possibly be rewritten any longer. I will try to do everything perfectly. It’s all I can do to persist despite all the failures. I will persist.

Thanks, and take care, friends.