What’s It All About Then?
Thoughts on writing a first novel

Jason Erik Lundberg, 16 July 2020

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You spend a year doing nothing but world-building, creating a new fictional country from scratch, with strong inspiration from Singapore, a nation you’ve only visited twice by that point, and you do this while studying for a Master’s degree in North Carolina. You spend the next two years with multiple false starts, trying to find your way into the story, anxious and insecure about committing to a book-length text. When people ask what you’re working on, you tell them a new novel, and they immediately ask, “What’s it all about then?” You mumble in generalities, and resent the question while at the same time appreciating the interest.
 

You write 30,000 words and move to Singapore, before your new job as a full-time teacher in one of the country’s top independent secondary schools gobbles up all your mental energy. Your child is born and occupies all your free time with the wonders of early development. Your subconscious, which has been gnawing away at a narrative problem, finally speaks up and reveals how to solve what felt like an intractable snarl, causing you to rewrite those original 30,000 words and then progress onward. You quit your teaching job after four years because it has become the major source of stress in your life, and devote the next eight months to writing full-time, during which you finish this massive endeavour and finally type THE END, along with the title: A Fickle and Restless Weapon, a reference to the Dhammapada. When people hear you’ve finished the book, they ask, “What’s it all about then?” and you find yourself unable to distil over 130,000 words of messy narrative into a pithy elevator pitch.

But it’s not over, not even close. You put the manuscript aside for a month before you re-approach it with a more critical eye for self-editing, as well as to take a break from it. You get hired by an up-and-coming commercial publisher with the potential to revolutionise the local literary scene, and you mark up the manuscript while the office manager is setting up the work computer on your first day. You send your creation to a group of trusted beta readers, your heart in your throat at the notion that other people will now be able to judge it, and are relieved that nearly all the feedback is positive, while also paying close attention to any criticism. You revise twice more, and start to zero in on what you’re really trying to say through your art.

You query a literary agent back in the US that a writer friend says has been keeping an eye on you; based on the strength of your novel, he agrees to represent you and provides more input that leads to another revision. The two of you craft a query letter than will hopefully attract interest, along with a one-line brief: “A Calvino-esque psychological novel about transnational characters using varied art forms to struggle against a Southeast Asian surveillance state, with explosions.” You wait as your agent submits the manuscript to major publishers in New York City, and when the responses trickle in, you are disheartened to discover that these editors don’t know what to do with your sexy, strange, explosive story. After a handful of no’s, your agent gets quiet and you spend months, and then years, trying to get a reply out of him.

You craft a novella that takes place in the same fictional universe as your novel, and start divorce proceedings in the middle of writing it. Your agent is still quiet, so eventually you decide to part ways and sell the novella yourself, along with a “greatest hits” fiction collection, in a two-book deal. Once the novella is published, you pitch the novel to the same publisher, and after several months of consideration, finally sell that too. 

Your editor is exceedingly thorough during the structural editing and line editing passes, and your eighth draft of this novel that you began over 15 years earlier becomes the final one sent to the in-house designer for typesetting and layout. Your book is sent to the printers during a global pandemic, but the stock date is delayed by only a few weeks. Once copies arrive at the publisher’s office, you collect a boxful and beam as you hold this culmination of a decade and a half’s worth of work in your hands. It is beautiful and it is real.

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Image by Jason Erik Lundberg.

Now comes the selling. Several months before publication, the publisher held its biannual sales conference to hype releases for the next half-year. In attendance are publishing professionals, bookshop buyers, distributors and the press. When it comes your turn to “big up” your novel, you feel awkward and fumble-mouthed all over again, embarrassed to explain why your own book is so great when you have no problem doing so about the books that you edit. As a former bookseller, you’re used to enthusiastically pushing the books that you love onto other people, but when it comes to your own work, you shrink into yourself, questioning who the hell you are to be telling other people what to buy and read. You think the novel is actually pretty awesome, the best thing you’ve written in a career that now spans nearly two decades, but have immense trouble conveying this feeling to others without shame overcoming you.

And then comes that infernal question once more, from an otherwise very well-meaning marketing manager: “What’s it all about then?” At this, you freeze up during the sales conference, even though you knew this question was coming, and had previously prepared for it with your former agent. You internally rail at this cold simplification of your creative work, but this is the business of publishing, to reduce down your interrogations and reflections and observations into something easily digestible, and you long ago resigned yourself to this unavoidable capitalistic necessity, that commercialism is what gets books into the hands of readers. And in the moment, you blurt out: “I would hope that people read this and become more aware of the prevalence of surveillance in their daily lives.” But it is such an insufficient answer that even months later, upon the book’s release, you castigate yourself for your idiocy.

So, what’s it all about then? Your novel is indeed about ubiquitous surveillance, but it is also so much more. It is about friendship and love and grief and heartbreaking loss. It is about both inward and outward resistance against the tide of overwhelming control. It is about bravery and openness and hope. It is about the need to see ourselves as part of a community, something bigger than the solitary self. It is about 450 pages long.

Whether this answer is satisfactory and apposite is up to the book-reading public, but you understand how much of that is out of your hands. You take solace in the fact that you accomplished what you set out to do with this novel, and now place your artistic creation in the readers’ hands, hoping for connection.

Jason Erik Lundberg is a fictionist, anthologist and book editor. Born in New York and raised in North Carolina, he has lived in Singapore for the past 13 years.

His first novel (and 25th book), A Fickle and Restless Weapon, is now available in paperback and ebook from Epigram Books.