Reflection 4: Imagining The Metanovel

I imagined a metanovel and now the metanovel exists—or at least it is beginning to exist, getting realer by the day. Imagination is leading to existence. Decision, imagination and practice, practice, practice, help me create, create, create what I really want to create.

Imagination itself takes practice, and knowing what I want to imagine takes practice, too. The more I practice imagining and then practice creating what I imagine the more what I imagine approaches what I imagine I actually want.

Once I found I was writing a metanovel and not just a novel, I imagined what I wanted to create, and I created what I had imagined. But it wasn’t a metanovel. I’d only imagined that I had imagined one. I’d really imagined a metanovel draft. And that’s what I’d created.

I was happy with my metanovel draft, but I wanted something more than that. So I imagined that I could improve it. And I improved it by editing it. And I was happy with the improvement. But what I’d imagined was still not a metanovel. It was an improved metanovel draft, but still not a metanovel. I didn’t have enough practice imagining a metanovel to actually imagine one.

So I practiced some more. Imagining a metanovel takes more work than imagining a metanovel draft or an improved metanovel draft. And creating a metanovel takes more work than creating a metanovel draft. That was clear now.

A metanovel requires a metanovel draft to start with, followed by a great deal of repeated imagining, deciding, practicing, and working to make it better. Each time that I imagined that I had imagined a metanovel, I imagined something that was more like the metanovel I wanted—yet still not that metanovel. My current metanovel draft, the one I am writing right now, isn’t quite what I want, but it’s on its way. And the one you’re reading isn’t quite there either. But it’s close enough. It’s really very close. And it’s evolving.

Evolving!