Want Makes a Novel

On narrative desire and internal cosmology. Also, Milan Kundera.

This essay originally appeared in Catapult’s Don’t Write Alone series as “What Does Your Novel Want?” in 2022. This is the “Taylor’s version” of that essay.

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When asked But what does your main character want? I feel backed into a corner. It feels as though something inside of me is missing, as a novelist, because it seems like the most basic ability, to know desire and to bring it forth. A hero’s journey, from a to b to c. With a nice arc and a clear villain. There are fully customizable beat sheets out there designed to help your plot move along like a Pixar vehicle, with corresponding word count estimates to help you see where things should be happening, lest you bore your reader prematurely with esoteric digressions and they deposit your book into a little free library and move on to the next bit of media gnawing on their pant leg, per the mandates of the attention economy. 

Here I feel the need to mention Aleksandar Hemon: “I don’t want to write a page turner. I want the reader to spend as much time with my pages as possible.”

My tendency is to get caught up in the details. Show me a forest and I’ll see nothing but trees. I already know it’s a forest, so it’s time to get into specifics. Clearings and branches and shadows and pine cones and tree stumps and needles and leaves on black earth. We enter, turn the page, and the atmosphere takes hold. The forest consumes. It’s a separate world the moment you step in. Rarely is there a direct path, taken before. Art should be like this, my intuition tells me—immersive, consuming, fundamentally of itself. Somehow this feels out of step with the current literary landscape. More and more it seems the desired manuscript is clear to the point of pain. An owner’s manual, in primary colors, stripped down.

It took me five years to write my second novel, revisions and all. There were four revisions total, and each time, the most difficult thing to nail down was want. Every note I got on my manuscript was some variation of: I’m having trouble deciphering the main character’s desires. What does she want most? I don’t know. You’re the reader, you tell me what you found there. My husband did his best to help, bringing his most foolproof newly-minted-MFA advice to my novel. Make your character want something, he insisted, quoting Vonnegut. Even if it’s only a glass of water. A simple enough imperative, but to me, disorienting and disingenuous. My characters want lots of things that evaporate and leave imprints. One desire carries to the next one, to the next one, until the logical end. The understanding of the self is the journey: the arrival within the approach.

Milan Kundera in The Art of the Novel: “The whole raison d'être of a novel is to discover what only the novel can discover. A novel that does not discover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel’s only morality.”

There are plenty of novels out there without want. Or with ambiguous want. Mutable want. David Markson comes to mind. Bjørn Rasmussen. Kathy Acker. Hard even to find one absolute desire in Moby-Dick. It is a damp, drizzly November in the soul, so off he goes to sea. Of course. To me, novels with a clear-cut, singular desire line often run concurrent with a flatness in character. The speedy narrative engine is there to appease the short attention span, to compensate for lack of depth. In literature classes, we’re taught to get underneath novels: to study the myriad meanings of a recurring color, a word choice, an image pattern. We are taught to pull up the roots of a text. To widen the incision into the world the author has made and step through it until we can see that world clearly, and ourselves more so. Not so much to read a book as to interact with it, one to one.

The modern writing imperative feels like it’s at odds with this type of text/reader relationship. More than at odds—actively hostile. We demand a clear thesis from art created to help us know ourselves. How will this not disappoint?

In my novel, I did every possible thing to the plot to avoid nailing down a concrete, singular goal for the protagonist. Why? I set out to write a true work, in both ways: true to itself, and true to life. Most of the time, people don’t know what they want. Or they start out knowing, and then it changes. We are always, in some way, a mystery to ourselves. Only in hindsight can we link seemingly isolated events into a narrative, decipher the consummate picture out of a smattering of stars. What feels true for me is ambiguity and shifting desires, moving plates of land mass altering the face of the earth, always hot at the core. A deeper understanding of their internal cosmologies is what my protagonists are, at the core, seeking, and there isn’t much of a resolution there. Where the reader is concerned, that non-resolution brings about a change in perspective nonetheless.

Marlon James: “That’s the thing about a book. You don’t know what effect it’s going to have until it’s too late.”

I’ve never asked any book to deliver a change in its protagonist—I only asked that it deliver a change in the reader, in me.

Writing is solitary, but publishing is collective. The fact that someone—many someones—will have to value and like what I do enough to put hours, effort, money, paper, and faith behind it is terrifying, not because I feel undeserving, but because I will have to admit that I want that approval. Publishing, sharing—anything more than printing—rests on some form of approval. How to get approval without approval-seeking? Resonance. Trust that your words are words with space to dig underneath, that the incision you’ve made can be widened.

Milan again: “The world of theories is not my world. These are simply the reflections of a practitioner. Every novelist’s work contains an explicit vision of the history of the novel, and idea of what the novel is. It is the idea of the novel inherent in my novels that I give voice to here.”

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