The world is so big, so complicated, so replete with marvels and surprises that it takes years for most people to begin to notice that it is, also, irretrievably broken. We call this period of research “childhood.”

There follows a program of renewed inquiry, often involuntary, into the nature and effects of mortality, entropy, heartbreak, violence, failure, cowardice, duplicity, cruelty, and grief; the researcher learns their histories, and their bitter lessons, by heart. Along the way, he or she discovers that the world has been broken for as long as anyone can remember, and struggles to reconcile this fact with the ache of cosmic nostalgia that arises, from time to time, in the researcher’s heart: an intimation of vanished glory, of lost wholeness, a memory of the world unbroken. We call the moment at which this ache first arises “adolescence.” The feeling haunts people all their lives.

If you lack confidence in setting one word after another and sense that you are stuck in a place from which you will never be set free, if you feel sure that you will never make it and were not cut out to do this, if your prose seems stillborn and you completely lack confidence, you must be a writer. If you say you see things differently and describe your efforts positively, if you tell people that you “just love to write,” you may be delusional.

Works with completely irrefutable power to convince. Works that cause the reader to be visited, dimly, briefly, by revelations such as cannot be produced by rational thinking. Works in which you can see not yourself but, for one second, the inaccessible. Ah, but to have glimpsed the inaccessible is, however imperfectly, to have gained access to it. That is what your writers can give you, if you want it, and let them know that you want it. The decision rests with you.

IT GENERALLY TAKES awhile to write a novel. Although there are authors who can write a quality book every year, they’re the exceptions; it’s more typical to spend three, five, or even seven years to complete a draft. If you’ve never attempted to write anything of a novel’s length, imagine having a friend or relative visit you for roughly that length of time, for three or five or seven years. Imagine a person, a person with whom you are not enjoying anything like traditional sexual congress, leaving their little hairs and toenail clippings in your sink, sprinkling their droplets of pee on your toilet seat, cluttering your surfaces with their weird pocket stuff, sticking things in the wrong cabinets, being underfoot and distracting you constantly for three or five or seven years. Let’s be honest: even if it was your favorite cousin, and even though you sort of invited him, after a year or so, you would owe it to yourself to give, at minimum, tacit consideration to murdering this person. This is the unique affliction of writing books: the endeavor is such that you can never entirely stop thinking about it. Picture the houseguest that is your novel, day after day, chewing cereal with his mouth open, his butt cratering the seat of your favorite armchair, and you will begin to understand.