The Theory

I spent about six years working on a novel before I decided it wasn't much good. The six years weren't a dead loss - I did things like get married, have a child, go to grad school, etc. Besides, every novelist has a few lost manuscripts, right? And even Faulkner wrote some terrible books. I've given this novel almost no thought for several years. Recently, though, it has come back to my mind - I suspect because, for the first time since working seriously on this novel, I'm spending most of my time writing software, albeit this time on the web. I might have more to say about that later.

Since I've stopped working on it, I've spent some time and energy teaching students to write academic and semi-academic work for the web, in the form of a blog. I'm not very satisfied with the art which is out there on the web, but I have some interest in its potential.

One thing that people hated about my novel was that it was episodic: it was about characters, not events, and there wasn't much narrative force. Whatever strengths it had were in moments, encounters, bits of prose and dialogue.

Three things occured to me today, roughly in sequence.

1. A number of great works of literature have been created by cutting bad works of literature to the bone.
2. While this work is unlikely to be called great, its central problem is that its virtues are overwhelmed by its length - its virtues are in fragments.
3. The web - and blogs in particular - is about nothing if not about fragments.

I thought it would be interesting to cut this shipwrecked novel down into a series of memorable sequential fragments, complete with occasional html. It's my experiment, but I thought it might interest a few others - so here it is. Subsequent posts (until I'm done, at least), will form a radically and rapidly slashed version of a ponderous novel, for your amusement. If anyone reads it, I might use the blog for other things thereafter.