The Novel

Chapter Five

Jack proposed to me this crazy idea: "Why not write a novel about a writer struggling to write a novel? Then call your book The Novel."

I laughed at the idea. It was absurd. "What the fuck are you smoking, man!?" I said, as I hit my own blunt. I sat there on the floor, leaning my back against the wall as I chatted with him. He was sitting just next to me and we were taking turns in smoking our weed.

"No, seriously," he said, "just think about it, man. Put some weird shit in it!"

"What kind of weird shit are we talking about?"

"Time travel shit, murders, and make it seem really absurd and crazy that readers will just want to scratch their heads." Jack said, he looked serious while I kept laughing, still insisting how ridiculous he was. I didn't think of employing those themes in my work until I became a professor in the university when I began teaching a course analyzing William Burroughs' Naked Lunch, Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, and Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels. Those books were surreal, and at times dark, much like Kafka's works, but they taught me things in writing more than any college teacher did. They taught me that you can always be unique.

Write nonsense! A good reader will always find ways to interpret it. So jump back to a few years later when I managed to land a teaching job in the university, while at the same time earning my master's degree. I was sitting in my office, thinking. I just had finished checking my students' papers when I recalled Jack's proposal. It was a ridiculous proposal. It was crazy, as a matter of fact, but I had to try somehow. I've been a good writer all my life. My stories, my poems, my novels, all of them handwritten in my old college notes. Waste of paper, I thought, if they weren't going to get published anyway. What's the use, then? For me, entertainment. Writing had been my passion and I didn't care if I get famous for it or not.

Just like Kafka. Kafka's life almost resembled mine, come to think of it. We both have the same personality, we both love writing, we both love surrealism, and we both hate the bureaucratic system. And we're both ethnically Jewish. Anyway, where was I? Oh right. I had my cup of coffee, having recently purchased it from Deus Cafe, and I was off to write. Whenever I took a sip, my mind just went on a creative rampage, being able to come up with great plots and twists. However, once you get writer's block, even a coffee won't save your despair. You'd be drawing a blank. But this was then. This was when I wrote The Novel for the first time. Though, to be honest, I've been working on it since college. I just didn't think of really putting it altogether as a whole masterpiece.

To hell with it, I thought. It doesn't matter if it gets published or declined, what matters is at least I tried. Heck, Kafka wasn't known widely when he was alive. Today he's one of the most recognized fiction authors that even his Metamorphosis is studied in various colleges and universities nationwide. For all I know, I could influence a wide range of philosophers, writers, artists, who'd think of me as a highly influential writer like Karl Marx or George Orwell. Bit of a stretch when I mentioned Marx, but still... You just have to be optimistic.

I sipped on my coffee and picked up my pen. Then I began writing on a blank piece of paper. My mind went rapid. My hand just started moving on its own with extreme cautiousness and precision. I haven't thought of a title yet but I did manage to come up with characters, story arcs, twists and turns. I felt unstoppable, invulnerable, I felt very, very powerful. The overwhelming feeling of being able to dominate my own mind with such flawless creativity, it was better than most drugs I had taken. I took another sip on my coffee. One sip helped me form three paragraphs of surrealism.

The first chapter concluded in me murdering someone in a graveyard after he witnessed me dig one's grave. Wait a fucking minute. Holy shit. That did happen, didn't it? As I went on, I was beginning to realize that the plot of my first novel was starting to haunt my whole life.