First Failure
I met novelists Kim Yunja and Yoon Suryeon at a café, shared a brief conversation about literature, then talked a little more over a meal.
I brought up In the Line of Fire and received some advice.
That you sometimes have to put on a thick skin when broaching something too dangerous.
After a moderate dose of girl talk, I came home and finished In the Line of Fire.
But novels never really have a true ending. The next day I discovered places that needed fixing and fixed them.
I fell into a deep sleep.
In a world where the masses flow naturally into becoming working adults, at twenty-seven I achieved economic freedom, the dream of every working adult.
Happiness, the dream of the masses, is still pending.
I woke up completely soaked in sweat.
I stared blankly at the ceiling for a while, then pushed myself up and looked around the room.
Nothing had changed.
Since the dramatic upheaval of last November, my life had become truly, thoroughly boring.
I found myself wondering what on earth I was even doing right now.
I looked at my lengthened hair.
My bangs had grown long enough to stab me in the eyes.
I should push them to the side or something….
The best thing about weekends is being able to spend the morning at a leisurely pace.
Even on weekdays I often took my mornings slowly, but weekends felt distinctly different.
On weekends I could truly laze about.
The sweat-soaked body and clinging hair were unpleasant, yet the comfort of the bed outweighed them.
I lay there, dawdling and dawdling….
“I really shouldn’t be doing this….”
Half of me insisted I had to get up and write this instant; the other half wanted to savor the sticky discomfort and quiet happiness of staying in bed. Both thoughts battled for control of my head.
My body chose the easy path.
This body, as a body, with its body, was….
“I should get up.”
Somehow, after writing In the Line of Fire lately, it felt like my head had gone completely haywire.
Thinking itself had become a chore.
I had burned the last few days white-hot.
Writing the novel slowly, endlessly polishing sentences, meeting other novelists for advice.
I still hadn’t sent the manuscript to editor Kim Jinhee.
How to put it—In the Line of Fire felt like homework.
I wanted to show it to her only in its perfectly completed form.
Well, even then it might not seem perfect to editor Kim Jinhee.
I planned to take the novel to the Manin’s Creation office on Monday.
Because of exams, school finished early, so I could head over the moment classes ended.
That made this weekend my last chance to revise before the homework inspection.
Drag myself to the café, write.
Come home and sleep, then the next day go back to the café again….
I found myself pondering why I was so willful.
Until a few days ago I had cherished ordinary life and taken it as the natural order of things, yet the moment this weekend arrived I was doing nothing but write.
Cornered by the deadline I myself had set—delivering the manuscript to Manin’s Creation on Monday.
What good did any of that do?
Anyway, this kind of whining could wait until after I finished the novel.
I wasn’t happy with my mental state at all.
Even after telling myself through literary conversation that “this belongs to the realm of literature,” thinking about death still tormented me.
It was agonizing and horrific.
Imagining people dying, transferring those images into words, filling the pages until they began to eat away at me.
And the worst part was that it didn’t feel bad.
That was exactly why it was agonizing and horrific.
I was being swallowed by the novel.
That damn thing.
“Novels aren’t everything.”
I am a human full of contradictions.
Writing novels in the first place is hardly a sane act, and if you examine the idea that money isn’t everything, I was definitely a mental patient.
I punched myself in the head with my fist.
Not hard—just hard enough to make a little thump.
There was a reason for this self-reproach and despair.
I had bombed the exams.
And I had heard a great many things from editor Kim Jinhee.
“If you want the novel to be used for political purposes… then just publish the version before the revisions.”
“I believe in you, novelist Seo Yuja. This isn’t everything; you can write better than this.”
“So let go of this novel boldly.”
“You have to know how to let go, too.”
I had been rejected.
I had been given the boot.
Alone in the workroom I hit my head again.
A soft thump, not enough to hurt.
Originally, novelists were supposed to need hardship and trials.
But this wasn’t hardship or trial; it was simply a novel being rejected.
Even back when I was a man I had experienced this sort of thing.
No—many times.
Still, the fact that I couldn’t manage my expression…
the fact that I kept wearing this gloomy face…
was probably because this was my first failure.
Whenever I wrote a novel I received awards, people read it, and that was that.
Those were the days I had lived as Seo Yuja.
Yet for the first time I had been rejected.
Too sensitive a subject, and I hadn’t handled it well enough.
Being rejected was only natural, I supposed.
“Would you like some banana milk?”
“Ah… thank you.”
“Something sweet will make you feel a little better.”
Editor Kim Jinhee opened the door, came in, and held out a carton of banana milk.
Then she sat down naturally beside me.
I fixed my expression.
I wasn’t such a baby that I would keep looking miserable in front of other people.
I stuck a straw into the banana milk.
Come to think of it, this seemed like a gesture of comfort, yet banana milk was always stocked in the pantry.
Meaning she hadn’t gone out and bought it.
The realization made me smile a little, and my mood improved a notch.
Editor Kim Jinhee carefully opened her mouth.
“It was… two weeks ago that we talked about In the Line of Fire, right?”
“Yes… about that long.”
“There’s no novelist anywhere who can bring a novel like this in after only two weeks.”
Suddenly I was being praised.
Looking back, she had praised me at our very first meeting too.
The memory surfaced unbidden.
I could feel editor Kim Jinhee carefully selecting her words inside her mouth.
Every thought showed clearly on her face.
“In the Line of Fire… isn’t a wrong novel. If you’re willing to ignore the backlash, it’s a novel that can be published.”
“Then why….”
“Because it’s a bad novel.”
In that instant my heart dropped with a heavy thud.
A bad novel—that was the worst thing a novelist could ever hear.
It was a phrase people avoided even when relationships were strained, and even in that Boimitsu Girl news article that had torn into my award-winning work…
they hadn’t gone so far as to call my novel a bad novel.
My heart felt as if it were being squeezed tight.
“Is that… so….”
“Yes.”
Right. I had forgotten the true duty of a novel.
I should have written a good novel, yet I had simply written because I wanted to write.
About lives.
Because I had written about Sally’s life, because I wanted to write about the weight of a life, I had written it that way.
“So we won’t be publishing it.”
“….”
“You still have many novels ahead of you. When I think about the evaluation you’d receive from releasing just this one In the Line of Fire….”
“I know.”
A novelist’s image is important.
Publish even one mediocre novel and people stop reading the next one.
That is the cold, hard world of literature.
I knew full well that editor Kim Jinhee had done this to protect me.
“I’ll be heading out for today. Always… thank you.”
“…Take care on your way.”
I packed my bag and left the Manin’s Creation office.
I decided then and there to bury In the Line of Fire.
Maybe later, when I had written about six novels and put out a short-story collection, I might include it then.
A story for the distant future.
…But I worked so hard on it….
Feeling the regret, I set off toward home.
And after agonizing for a while over whether to send this or not, I finally decided that nothing much would come of sending it anyway, so I sent it.
Anyway, I had experienced my first failure.
When I arrived home my mood wasn’t actually that bad; rather, I felt strangely relieved.
Relieved.
As expected, a novel that weighed human lives against one another was something I simply shouldn’t write.
My heart felt light.
Still, it was my first failure, and a first failure is something you can only experience once in a lifetime.
So I despaired to my heart’s content.
I buried my face in the pillow and cried, wailed, then, thinking it was too loud, bit down on the blanket and kept crying.
Later I discovered drool all over the blanket.
Utterly high-school-girl of me.
Anyone who saw me would have thought I was crying because I had bombed a test.
I had bombed the tests, true….
But there were tests tomorrow and the day after as well.
Despair over exams could wait three days; no, I would never need to waste despair on them for the rest of my life.
The despair I was feeling right now was far too large to spend on mere tests.
At four in the afternoon, after I had poured out every last tear and shaken off a fair amount of frustration and despair,
I went out to the living room and called for Mom.
Mommy~ comfort me~.
“Mom, shall we go on a picnic?”
“Huh? Uh, uh… sure. When do you want to go?”
“Let’s go now.”
Whether Mom had heard me crying in my room or simply saw how swollen my eyes were,
she didn’t say a word of protest. She packed a mat and we headed to the park near the house.
We spread the mat on the grass, ate the two chocolate milks and sandwiches we’d bought at the convenience store, and thoroughly enjoyed the summer.
Good thing I had put on sunscreen. Otherwise I would have baked black.
Mom and I chatted cozily about this and that, waiting for Dad to get off work.
Dad arrived at the park around six-thirty, finished the remaining sandwich, and the three of us chatted cozily about this and that all over again.
I even heard “Glad we had a daughter” sort of remarks.
I was happy.
That was how I let go of Yoo Hanjin.
I let go of the pig platoon’s story as well, and decided that the weighing of lives ended here.
And then it didn’t end.