What is a novelist?

A novelist is someone who imagines that it will be exciting and fulfilling to write a novel. He takes up pen (quill, laptop) and begins to write. If he is lucky, he soon realizes that the task is impossible and gives up. In that case, he is not a novelist, bless his soul. If he is unlucky, however— or rather, if he is proud and possessed of a strong capacity for self-delusion— he has a good run, he writes several chapters that he thinks are beautiful, or at least promising. Eventually, he gets stuck, of course, but he does not wish to abandon his promising beginning, so he keeps at it. He breaks through, has another run, then gets stuck again. Again he breaks through and again get stuck. This third time is worse. He sees now that he never really got unstuck the first time around: the problems then are the same ones that plague him now; he never really solved any of them, only slipped past them and fooled himself into thinking they were solved. He goes back, he deletes, he rewrites, he deletes again. His work changes, he cuts out the pretty nonsense that charmed him at first, smooths and focuses the story, ferrets out the linguistic tics that clutter his writing. He is amazed to find how bad his writing was, but now it is better, sharper, stronger. He is in love with his characters and the scenes he has caught them in. He sets out again, he goes further than ever before. Yet again, he gets stuck. And this time it is calamitous. He sees now that the whole projected is flawed in its very conception. He begins to suspect, in fact, that the Age of the Novel is over, that it is no longer possible to write a genuine novel. He dreams of turning back, of abandoning the whole thing, but he knows that by now it is too late. He has gone too far, written too much, devoted too much of himself to this doomed adventure. He is trapped and must see the thing through, even though, very likely, it has no end, and he will grow old and die with nothing accomplished, leaving behind thousands of pages of notes and fragments.