On the same morning, two people shared the Jeremy story with me. And the link, I noticed, had been running riot on the internet for a few days. “We all have our one Jeremy,” some proclaimed dramatically. Or “Who is your Jeremy?” queried others. ‘Jeremy’, according to Jordana Narin’s ‘No Labels, No Drama, Right?’ for The New York Times is an archetype, a trope, an all-purpose noun used by her friends to talk about “that guy”, the one who remains in some netherworld between friend and boyfriend, often for years. The focus of her essay is on how contemporary relationships spiral into inconsequence springing from a fear of labels — what we don’t name (‘boyfriend’, ‘girlfriend’, ‘partner’) becomes something indefinable, intangible, something that removes the possibility of ends and closures. My interest though lies elsewhere, in why these ‘Jeremys’ persist in existing, and why we are so often captured by the things that never happened, or steeped in pasts that didn’t present themselves. It’s simple really. If something hasn’t taken place, it has the possibility and potential to be perfect. At least in our minds. And in a writer’s life, that means every single book that he or she doesn’t write but thinks about often.

A writer’s ‘Jeremy’ is the manuscript we never really pen down and never really get over. The one that lies, at best, unfinished.

At a literary festival last December, a writer of non-fiction, keen to begin his first novel, asked for advice on writing fiction. Impatient as I am with questions like these (as with articles titled, for example, ‘Seven Gazillion Tips for Young Writers’), I tried to be helpful.

“It’ll always be a failure.”

He blinked.

“Whatever idea you start out with, you’ll always end up with so much less.”

Evidently, it wasn’t quite what he was expecting. I told him what author Ann Patchett mentions in her essay on writing in ‘This is the Story of a Happy Marriage.’ That it’s similar to taking a beautiful butterfly, plastering it on a page and bludgeoning it with something heavy. Okay, I might have exaggerated a little. She says it much more eloquently: “Only a few of us are going to be willing to break our own hearts by trading in the living beauty of imagination for the stark disappointment of words.”

What I tried to prepare him for was loss, even diminishment, in the transference between intangible thought to pen and paper. This is why we keep manuscripts in our heads. Where figments of ideas — unconfined by font, ink, and margin — remain forever exquisite. In our heads, dialogue runs smooth and witty and utterly convincing, descriptions are moving, the plot riveting. It’s a literary project of cosmic proportions, an inspired coupling of aesthete and craft.

Megan McArdle is crisply candid about it in ‘Why Writers Are the Worst Procrastinators’ for The Atlantic — “As long as you have not written that article, that speech, that novel, it could still be good. Before you take to the keys, you are Proust and Oscar Wilde and George Orwell all rolled up into one delicious package.” The fear is that by the time you’re finished, you’ve realised you’re not. (Or worse, she says, that you’re “one of those 1940’s pulp hacks”.) The grief of constantly having to face down our own inadequacies is what keeps people from writing.

A non-existent book can be always flawless and, more importantly, brimming with infinite possibilities. It hasn’t been written and hence can be written in a multitude of ways. As Hanif Kureishi said at the Jaipur Literature Festival earlier this year, writing is preservation, an exercise in setting down occurrences and emotions so they won’t be forgotten, but it’s also an act of loss, because suddenly what was as wide as life itself becomes confined to a set of words, lines, paragraphs. It becomes the only way that the experience exists. Everything else is discarded. What remains is a single telling, a single reading.

How then do we proceed? To pluck those ‘Jeremy’ manuscripts out of our heads. How is it possible, I often think, to write at all? Again, Ann Patchett has the answer. Forgiveness.

She calls forgiveness the key to making art. (As well as very possibly the key to finding any semblance of happiness in life.) “Every time,” she says, “I set out to translate the book (or story, or hopelessly long essay) that exists in such brilliant detail on the big screen of my limbic system onto a piece of paper (which, let’s face it, was once a towering tree crowned with leaves and a home to birds), I grieve for my own lack of talent and intelligence.” We berate ourselves relentlessly. Were we smarter, more gifted, we could pin down a closer facsimile of the wonders we see in our imaginations. Forgiveness, therefore, is key. “I can’t write the book I want to write,” she continues, “but I can and will write the book I am capable of writing. Again and again throughout the course of my life I will forgive myself.” Say it. I will forgive myself. Repeat.

Janice Pariat is the author of Seahorse

Follow Janice on Twitter @janicepariat

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