I don't want to write a book

It's the ultimate dream, isn't it...to write a book, become incredibly successful and have the world gasp at your insights, thoughts and aspirations. It's going to be the great life-changing novel...the addictive fantasy series...the brilliant suspense...the epiphany-loaded philosophical tract...the much needed text book...or the earnest self-help book full of personal life lessons.

And of course that dream was mine...isn't it everyone's?

All my life I held the thought of My Book in my heart, knowing that one day it would be released from within, that one day my great communion with the world could commence. In the meantime I nostalgically re-evoked primary school teacher praise for my early efforts, admired deep-hidden poems from my angst-ridden twenties, and embarked on some serious explorations of writing in my thirties. I devoured the Right to Write, critiqued the books I read, sucked up classic literature and made decent efforts to work at developing style and skills in a journal. The plans were coming together, winding down work hours and setting up a space in the house, getting a timetable, getting disciplined, and off I would go. But then the thunderbolt.

I was browsing through Readings, a fistful of birthday vouchers at hand. I wandered through the new novels, the new non-fiction, amazing books, less-than-amazing books, books written to make money, books written to make a point, books written to share the inner dream of others. This shop was full of book, all new, all waiting to be purchased, maybe read, maybe not, but there for the buying. As I suppose a bookshop should be. But instead of feeling like a kid in a candy store, I felt...lost. I found myself frozen in between Jonathan Littel and Christos Tsiolkas. The motivation behind all these books may have been genuine, but all I could think of was the commodification of all those motives, pure and impure, into $29.95. What were we all doing in there?! Why did we have to acquire, own, sell, covet, these objects?

My epiphany - in a nutshell - was the realisation that the dream to write a book is archetypical - it's so not the unique personal quest that I had it pegged as - and it's flawed. You can give years of your life to a book which never sees the light of day. Even if you actually get published, which is highly unlikely, your soul-stripped-bare masterpiece can still be outstripped by a piece of commercial drivel. Conversely, you can write a piece of commercial drivel and make a heap of money but know deep inside that it's a piece of bollocks. And what is left in the end? Piles and piles of once-were-trees sitting in a bookshop, on a bookshelf, or in landfill. What type of positive creative act is that?

So I don't want to write a book after all. If I write, it will be in a form that takes up as much space as itself, in a format that one or many can read at no extra cost to the environment, that can build at my own pace, stagnate as long as I do, and which can be as grand or as intense or as frivolous as I need it to be. A book is a fine dream...but one that it's time to let go.

I walked out of Readings and bought fresh pasta for dinner instead.