Writing a book has always been one of those things I dreamt of doing.
Not because I wanted to become a famous author, appear at literary festivals or sit behind a small table signing copies for a queue of admirers. I simply wanted to find out whether I could take an idea and follow it far enough to turn it into something.
So I tried.
I did not finish the book, but that is not really the point of this story. The point is that I finally had a go at something I had thought about for years. I followed the idea through more than forty thousand words, ten chapters and sixteen versions, and eventually discovered that the journey was taking me somewhere other than where I had expected. In a way the goal to finish became symbolic of something other than the book itself.
That does not make the attempt meaningless. Sometimes the value is in beginning, seeing where something leads and knowing when it is time to let it go.
The book I thought I wanted to write
The idea came at a particular stage of my life when the last thing I probably should have been trying to do was write a book.
I had returned to Australia after spending many years living and working overseas. Australia was supposed to be home, but it did not feel like home anymore.
My children had grown up. Friends had moved on. The country had changed, and so had I. I had a house to return to, but having a house and feeling at home are not the same thing.
I became interested in belonging.
We live in a world where we can contact almost anyone, almost anywhere, yet many people feel increasingly disconnected. We have apps that measure our sleep, heart rate, steps, breathing and stress, but nothing that tells us whether we matter to anyone.
I thought there was a book in that.
Perhaps there still is. It just may not be mine to write.
The subject became enormous. I found myself writing about loneliness, technology, social media, individualism, artificial intelligence, outrage, relationships, retirement and the strange ways we try to optimise ourselves.
I was attempting to explain what had gone wrong with modern civilisation.
A modest first book.
When persistence becomes rearranging furniture
I kept going because that is what we are told successful people do.
Do not give up. Push through the resistance. Finish what you started. Successful authors apparently sit down every morning and write, whether they feel inspired or not.
So I sat down and wrote.
Then I rewrote.
I moved one chapter into another. I changed the beginning and then changed it back. I rewrote the ending. I renamed sections. I removed things and later returned them because I could no longer remember why I had removed them.
Eventually, Version 16 appeared.
I began to suspect that Version 17 would not contain the magical arrangement of words that transformed me into an author.
The problem was not that I had run out of things to say. The problem was that my heart was no longer in what I was saying.
Maybe it never had been.
That is difficult to admit after investing so much time in something. It is much easier to keep polishing a project than to acknowledge that it may be the wrong project.
Persistence can be admirable. It can also become a way of avoiding the truth.
Did I really want to write this book?
I began asking myself an uncomfortable question.
Did I want to write this book, or did I simply want to have written a book? Or did I want to prove that I could stick at something?
There is a difference.
I liked the idea of completing one. I liked imagining it sitting on a shelf. I liked the thought that I had finally achieved something I had talked about doing for years.
But wanting the finished object is not the same as loving the work required to create it.
I enjoy writing observations and stories. I enjoy describing strange encounters and following an idea to see where it leads. I enjoy writing songs that few people hear and taking photographs of ordinary moments that most people walk past.
The book began to feel different. It became an obligation I had invented for myself.
Nobody had commissioned it. No publisher was waiting. There was no deadline except the one quietly ticking inside my ageing head.
Still, I felt guilty about stopping.
Calling it what it is
We can be very good at disguising the fact that something has not worked.
We call it a learning experience, a strategic change, a creative redirection or part of the journey. These things may be true, but sometimes something simply does not become what we hoped it would become.
I set out to write a book. I produced forty thousand words, but those words never became the book I had imagined.
A collection of bricks does not automatically become a house. At some point, the pieces have to form something complete.
Mine did not.
I could spend another year trying to force it into shape. I could pay an editor to help. I could reduce it, expand it, restructure it or feed it through another round of artificial intelligence and ask a machine what the human writer should do next.
But I do not want to.
I have decided to stop.
What happens to all those words?
They do not have to disappear.
There are ideas in the manuscript that may become blog posts. There are personal stories I may return to. There are observations about belonging, ageing, travel and technology that still matter to me.
The time was not wasted, but I am not going to pretend that recycling a few paragraphs transforms the whole exercise into a hidden success.
Sometimes you try something difficult and discover that you cannot do it, do not want to do it, or have simply chosen the wrong subject.
It is much the same when I write songs. Some days I pick up the guitar, strum a few chords and a melody appears almost immediately. I know it has the foundations of something worth finishing.
Other times, I pick up the guitar, strangle it for a while and try to squeeze out a few words. Nothing flows. Like a bad relationship, it is simply not working.
You have to know when to end it.
That is what happened here.
The value of an unfinished thing
Creative people leave things unfinished.
Songs that never find a chorus. Photographs that looked better through the viewfinder. Stories that begin confidently and wander into a swamp. Paintings turned towards the wall.
We usually see only the finished work. We do not see the abandoned drafts, terrible ideas and months spent creating something that never becomes anything.
Perhaps that distorted view is why stopping can feel so shameful.
But there is value in attempting something without knowing where it will lead. Having a go opens doors that thinking about having a go never will.
The manuscript took me through ideas I might never otherwise have explored. It helped me understand something about belonging and something about myself. It also reminded me that creativity does not always move in a straight line towards a finished product.
Sometimes it wanders around, becomes lost and eventually leads you somewhere else.
I would rather have tried to write a book and left it unfinished than spend the rest of my life talking about the book I might write one day.