[Essay] Finishing my first 100,000-character novel.

Recently

Recently, I have started posting short stories on note quite often.

Until now, my focus was mainly on essays, with the occasional short story.

But now, the balance is completely reversed; I just start writing wherever my creative urge takes me, and if I keep up 1,500 characters a day for three or four days, a short story is finished.

I dedicate my mornings to writing every day, but 1,500 characters is hardly a pace to be proud of.

I wake up around 6:00 AM, sit at my desk, and write until about 11:00 AM.

Even though I spend five hours writing, it is a truly strange story.

Even though I call them short stories, I am not writing anything particularly formal, so they are mostly just a sub-species of my previous essays, but my desire to create something I can call a work of art has become very strong.

And the cause, or perhaps the source, or the catalyst for that, was clear.

It was that I had finished a long novel of over 100,000 characters for the first time in my life.

Until now

There is a prize I apply for almost every year.

It is called the Jump Horror Novel Grand Prize.

It is a prestigious public competition from Shueisha, where the national author Otsuichi made his debut.

Even before I registered for note, I would spend a year writing a long novel for this prize, and then, without hearing anything back, I would start working on the plot for the next one—a creative process that, looking back now, felt like ascetic training.

All I got was the sense of liberation from having finished it. Nothing more.

Because I write with a desperate longing to win an award, my days of creation feel like being slowly strangled with silk, whether I am planning the structure or writing the sentences.

Even when I feel like I have managed to create something good, it doesn't even make it past the first round of judging, so I receive zero feedback. (Or rather, the selection process itself is a complete mystery to me.)

I didn't do much analysis, and the only reference I used was Otsuichi's 'Summer, Fireworks, and My Corpse'.

Because that was how I operated, writing a novel was nothing more than something I had to struggle to squeeze out.

This time

As usual, I was writing a long-form novel for that public submission again this year.

However, this year's work feels different somehow.

It's not that I have any conviction that it's well-made, that it was incredibly fun to write, or that it will definitely win an award.

When I placed the period at the end of the final sentence, all I thought was, 'Ah, I've written it.'

As for the finished product, it turned out to be, to put it kindly, unique, or to put it unkindly, chaotic.

The plot I initially set up was almost entirely ignored, and it ended up looking like a child's room left in a mess.

However.

I felt that it was the most 'natural' novel I had ever written.

When I finished writing, the character count was about to reach 100,000 characters.

Surrender

For example, there is an episode in this work where a girl from the protagonist group plays a game of Concentration one-on-one with a supernatural entity, and if she loses, she and her best friend will be eaten, but I have no idea why such a scene was even born.

But that was the case even while I was writing it; I kept moving my hands while thinking, 'No, this is strange, what is this flow? Wait, are we doing a memory game now? Seriously?'

I wasn't the one driving the work; the work was moving on its own, and I was just trying to keep up with it.

That was the image I had of the process.

Whenever I tried to think and move it with my head, the movement of the work would invariably slow down, and consequently, my hands on the keys would slow down too, leaving me with a growing sense of frustration, like having gone shopping and spent a lot of money, only to completely miss out on buying what I really wanted.

This happened many times with this work.

'Entrusting it to the power of the work itself'

After a long period, that became a kind of guiding principle for me.

And before I knew it, I started thinking about it first thing in the morning when I woke up.

'I wonder what will happen today.'

A sense of progress

And so, six months passed where I wrote 1,000 to 1,500 characters a day, about 7,000 characters a week, and 30,000 characters a month.

During that time, I was also writing a separate entry for the Creative Awards, writing essays, and doting on my niece.

Despite that, I reached a point where I could write 100,000 characters in half a year, whereas before, it would take me a whole year just to manage 60,000 or 70,000 characters.

Before and after writing it, there was a clear difference in my awareness regarding what a '10,000-character piece of writing' is.

Of course, numbers aren't everything.

From someone else's perspective, it might just be long and the content the same as before.

But it's just that now, for the first time, I feel like I've gotten a sense of progress.

It's about the feeling that as long as I have that sense of progress, I feel like I'll be able to write a lot more from now on.

The feeling that 'I am writing a novel now.'

It was, perhaps, a little too late.

▼Why not leave it to us?

▼I want to do this, too.