Or, I could think of it this way

Becoming a successful writer - and by this I define ‘successful’ as someone who writes publishable fiction, and by this I mean fiction that is skilled and artful enough to create a powerful emotional experience for a reader who is not the writer’s spouse, friend or family member, who doesn’t know or care about the writer at all but would be willing to do something so drastic as to pay money for the privilege of reading her work - is all about writing your way through a succession of big and little failures. There is the failure to sell your work, and the failure to get an agent, but these are capstones: the major reason why a writer fails at either is, ironically, because they haven’t yet failed enough. They haven’t pursued the craft long enough, haven’t written or revised enough, haven’t taken enough chances or gotten enough constructive feedback. They haven’t learned enough.

In short, they haven’t completed enough practice novels. And what is a practice novel but a novel that fails to be good enough to be looked on as anything else?

I've written before about the difference between the goal of writing and the goal of getting published. The latter, it seems to me, is a recipe for compromise and crushing depression. But there's a certain attitude required to make the former work, that I haven't quite managed to adopt yet: I have to be willing to invest a lot of time and effort in a project for its own sake, independent of its eventual fate as a published work or a drawer dweller. The purpose of such a project, then, is what Justine says it is: practice.

While I've managed to avoid publication as the principle motivation for writing a novel-length work, that's a negative definition. I know what's not motivating me, but I haven't really established what is motivating me. Given my glacial progress, it's become clear that the answer, in truth, is "not much." Right now I'm able to look at a shorter work as a learning experience, probably because the irregularity of my output and my nebulous focus makes completing a 1,200 to 13,000 word piece somewhat more realistic and much less threatening.

In the end, this might turn out to be a "you have to crawl before you can walk, and walk before you run" kind of thing. If I get another half-dozen short pieces published over the course of the next eighteen months and I'm still quaking in my boots at the thought of a 100,000 word marathon, then maybe I'll have a problem.

Until then: breathe. Write. Practice.