Despertar

let's get real

I have a great idea for a novel, and it is killing me that I'm not good enough to write it yet. Done well, it could be, maybe not a commercial success or even publishable, but definitely an incredible personal triumph, my Charlottian magnum opus. Done poorly, it could haunt me forever and maybe be the last thing I ever wrote.

It is, literally, the best, most clearly defined idea I have ever had for a novel. The right number of characters, the right amount of story, a pretty much unbotchable structure, little wisps of narrative already assembling themselves in my mind. It is an incredible exercise in voice--four main characters, each one an extended fragment of some frustrated piece of me. A la One Hundred Years of Solitude, it opens on a family tree to which readers would excitedly refer at the start and end of every section. I'm kind of in love with the brother character and madly in hate with the sister--throughout the day, riding in elevators, I catch myself contemplating her, snarling, thinking Fuck you, Angelica. In the car, when I get tired of the radio, I experiment with different ways of phrasing the opening paragraph.

I'm ready to lock myself in a room with some Debussy and a bottle of Malibu and start really fucking the shit out of this thing, but I cannot, and it is killing me. Killing me. I wish I could take a year off school and spend the rest of 2009 doing nothing but writing and rewriting, whittling away at the inevitable superfluity, punching up the stronger sections till they shine so brightly I can hear the sunlight singing off them. I wish I could devote entire days, weeks, to exploring each character in turn, handing each one a pen and letting the nibs fly, so that at some point I know each one so intimately I worry they can hear my thoughts. I wish I could draw diagrams and house blueprints, scribble diary entries, carve a timeline into the wall so I have no excuse to flub continuity.

Here's why I can't: I still write terrible dialogue. I don't commit the sin most amateur writers do, I don't write really stilted ridiculousness that is really just exposition in disguise and would never be spoken extemporaneously by any native English speaker--I do the exact opposite. I mark it exactly as I hear it in my head, exactly as it would be spoken in life, and it winds up as awkward as a chopped salad, all contradictory interjections ("Yeah, no") and breathy commas. I have no sense of pacing. I can't bear to write boring scenes I'd skip over myself, were I reading them. Even now, with my teenage years behind me, I remain terribly, immaturely self-indulgent in the way I design characters. I can't find the godly benevolence to write a character with flaws worse than mine, then see her all the way through to the denouement. My portfolio is full of imaginary angels who would never survive in the real world.

I'm obsessed with my characters' looks. I want you to see exactly what I see, no way I'm going to let you insert your own experiences into the shells of my creation. Even after Oscar Wao I can't bear the thought of a loser for a protagonist, can't figure out how I'd get a reader to empathize with a fat, grouchy or stupid narrator. I frustrate myself deeply trying to sketch my imaginings exactly without overdrawing the description. Ditto setting, sex scenes. I cannot stand to trust you with a world in which I've invested every color and tone I've collected in twenty-four years.

I don't want to anchor my story in a historic time and place. No good novel tells a story that could have happened anywhere. Award-winning authors dream their plots and characters, then attach them to revolutions, to genocides, to the Trujillo regime or a Vietnamese rice paddy, Prague or the bark of a Congolese poisonwood tree. (Macondo is a fluke and literally the only novel I've ever read where the author actually got away with imagining an entire universe that no historical happening could penetrate, and even that I'm not so sure of, I didn't read the whole thing.) I do not want to offhandedly mention that, in the middle of the firestorm that was Collin Bright's untimely funeral, one of the ungracious daughters ducked away to check her cell phone for the 2008 primary results.

On top of all that, one out of every three sentences I construct still contains some babyish grammatical mistake, or else it's so overblown and pretentious it might as well have been written by a high schooler trying to impress her AP English teacher.

And I don't know enough about anything to inhabit the headspace of an old man, a white heiress, a young mother or a boy. I can't be anyone but Angelica right now, and Angelica can't carry a story on her own.

And I refuse to blow my wad on this prematurely, and lose interest, when in five or ten years I might actually have a shot at turning it into something approaching my delicious vision for it.

So I'm shelving it.

God damn it.