ALDEN JONES: HOW NOT TO WRITE A NOVEL

What does the artist do when her project refuses her? Drawing from my thesis, How Not to Write a Novel, I ask what a writer learns when the book she intends to write denies the writer’s efforts and asserts its own form. In the spirit of Halberstam’s Art of Queer Failure, I present the project that was able to come into existence because the novel could not. How Not to Write a Novel is a text at the same time as it is a site of inquiry, investigating craft, ego dissolution, exoticism, authorship, and genre.