On Writing a Novel

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This summer I managed to complete my first novel 'Digital'. Its completion, after almost 2-and-a-half years of biding my time in thoughts and around 7 months of reeling it in, leaves me with a chorus of disparate views about what this achievement means in any real terms, and what potential it has going forth from the jetty of my creative imagination into the turbulent sea of the publishing world.

Set at an undisclosed point in the near future, 'Digital' depicts a nightmarish dystopian society in which cyberspace and internet technologies have assumed an autocratic predominance. It is the story of one man’s initial acceptance of and coalition with this world, before circumstances provoke a sense of creeping discontent and a pivotal moral dilemma, the repercussions of which eventually lead to him spiralling into madness.

It is a novel that pre-empts the means by which humans have subverted their natural tendencies – for privacy, intimacy, social interaction – to exist in this virtualised hyper-reality. It examines how, in the face of limitless information and simulacra, conventional morality has been sublimated and basic humanity eroded.

Admittedly, it is a bleak and pessimistic prophecy of the near future, but the further into the work I progressed, the more external events seemed to lend it an odd credence. Initially, I had judged my notion of a neuroprosthetic lens being affixed over everyone's eye, allowing cognitive processing of online data over reality, to be too fanciful and far-fetched. Midway through writing, Google Glass was unveiled and I felt a real sense of vindication, that this was indeed a major step along the road to inevitable implantation of cyber technologies.

The pervading sense of foreboding regarding the abstract faceless online conglomerates and web providers was leant further legitimacy by the NSA/Edward Snowden revelations, that demonstrate the heavy losses to the concept of the Internet as a truly universal democracy, free from overt corporate infringement, however benevolent the facade.

Many of the changes in human behaviour that future in the book are capable of being seen today. The extent to which people are subservient to digital technologies, and exhibit almost compulsive obsessive tendencies in their engagement with them. Before long, any time that is not spent online in some guise or other will be deemed wasted time. The proliferation of explicit and uncensored material; the fact that anyone can view hardcore pornography within a few seconds of entering a search request, all of this will, and can be seen already, to be altering human perceptions. My claim that child pornography will have become passé is not altogether too elaborate when you consider recent reports of under-16s creating sexual imagery using their own easily-accessible and abundant technology.

The fact is, as I consistently claim when talking about these issues, the Internet, social media and other digital technologies have only been widely present since the mid-90s, their dominance has sky-rocketed since then and shows no signs whatsoever of abating or altering trajectory. This has to, in some marked way, effect human behaviour and individual psychologies in terms of how to relate to each other as well as ourselves. There is no precedent for this change, but it is happening.

Some may argue against my view of humans becoming less sociable in the wake of these developments. I would say that humans will only become less social in a physical sense. It is human nature to be social towards one another, I am not arguing against that; instead I believe that the forms and platforms on which we socialise may very well evolve irrevocably. Surely, it is far more sociable to be communicating with innumerable people from disparate geographic locations all at once, rather than be limited to the arcane tradition of face-to-face physical interaction with one or a small group of people? To test this notion, ask yourself how many times you have been in a social situation where the other person hasn't been able to resist checking a digital gadget of one kind or another?

When attempting to write any kind of dystopian fiction or present a vision of some alternate society, the writer is inevitably strait-jacketed by the legacy of Orwell and ‘1984’; in fact so dominant is his imprint on the sub-genre that it almost embodies the character of Big Brother looming over the writer’s shoulder and keeping a stringent eye on the page. Having finished the novel though, a friend of mine commented that it seemed to him more redolent of the other parent novel of dystopia, Aldous Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’. Having just re-read Huxley’s book again for the first time since the age of 17, this is a view with which I would have to concur.

As opposed to ‘1984’, Huxley’s vision of a utopian society in which sex and state-prescribed drugs (or soma) are encouraged instead of repressed, and the idea of privacy and secrecy has been mired in taboo and ostracism. Citizens are kept docile by the synthetic and artificial nature of their environment and control systems; in a way that much more accurately foretells the wish fulfilment and limitless distracting quotients of my ‘cyber nightmare’ society.

In terms of other dystopian literary influences on ‘Digital’, it is Yevgeny Zemyatin’s ‘We’ that is perhaps more of a direct ancestor, or E.M. Forster’s novella ‘The Machine Stops’, a remarkably prescient work that in 1928 depicted a ‘book of the machine’ containing unlimited knowledge, instructions against every possible contingency, and leaves everyone isolated from another in private cells.

Technically, this isn’t the first novel I’ve written. I wrote my first ‘Doves Will Rust’ during a year spent in Manchester from 2009 to 2010, which was, to all intents and purposes, an immature and inferior blueprint for ‘Digital’. Nonetheless, it was a critically important exercise in endurance and perspicacity; the disciplining of oneself to see such a project through to completion. Naturally, my 20-year-old self thought it was the defining book of our time; and just as naturally, given its demonstrably amateurish prose, the publisher’s rejection slips came in as reliably as utility bills.

All of this reflection brings me to ponder the actual achievement of writing a novel and what merit is warrants in the early 21st century. Since finishing ‘Digital’, I have noticed a palpable lack of some sentient form from my consciousness, of course attributable to not having to subconsciously ruminate about it for the first time in 2 or 3 years. Naturally, I’m now starting to cultivate the field of imagination ready for my next novel, although god knows when I will again start up the heavy machinery of application and routine.

On a more general level, is the written novel even a viable or worthwhile art form any longer in the 21st century? If the developments that I describe are realised – the diminishing of attentive faculties and interest in an imaginative narrative or story; the repackaging and rebranding of pre-existing works of literature, music, film, etc. – then that would tend to indicate that it is not. And yet, I don’t think all hope is quite lost. Despite experiential evidence to the contrary, reports suggest that reading is still a popular pastime; book sales (physical as well as electronic) are still strong. But the publishing industry is currently entering, very slowly and cautiously, the rough waters of piracy and threat to business model stability, that drowned the music industry so quickly and irreversibly. It remains to be seen whether it will similarly flounder or instead remain buoyant in a new and perhaps stronger model for the future of literature.

Cultural societies have always looked to writers as the commentators on the zeitgeist, as social provocateurs and documentarians of the prevailing mood of the times; and despite 21st century society leaning at increasingly drastic angles towards the world of celebrity to pacify this need, I see no reason why writers shouldn’t in some way still uphold their responsibility to this end going forwards.

To conclude on a personal level; the notion of having completed a novel, a piece of art in a sense, is a profoundly satisfying one. The novel is something that has endured for centuries, the practice of storytelling has done since the dawn of man; and though it may be only a singular grain on the shore of man’s creative endeavour and achievement, it is my contribution nonetheless.