Despertar

rhetoric

I'm writing a novel. It's rough for me, even without a bunch of technical training weighing on me, so I can only imagine how stressed Aaron must be.

Because it's so difficult, and feels so important, I am very sensitive about it. I've offered to show it to about four people, all of them trusted beta readers, and reneged every time. There's something about confronting the limits of my potential that just, like, spooks me. That possibility of finally completing a project that I really believe reflects the effort I put into it, only to have someone else tear it apart, or, worse, not give it its due. I've worked harder on this than I have at any aspect of law school; I think I'd give up at both if some outsider were to undermine it.

Anyway, Wal-Mart. I don't really have a Wal-Mart right now. Which isn't to say I never waste entire afternoons wandering around indulging in cheap retail, because I do. I live in D.C.'s Chinatown, a place where everything is available in every color and at every price point, and even just walking home from the Metro, it's impossible not to get caught up in all the stimuli. I can catch a twenty-dollar bus to Manhattan in the middle of a Thursday or buy a two-dollar bootleg copy of a movie that hasn't hit local theaters yet. My neighborhood is full of Chinese immigrants and their families, white yuppies in the process of gentrifying Capitol Hill, brown people who drive cabs and work in convenience stores, black kids whose pants ride below the cusps of their asses and a tiny handful of people (all colors) who remind me of myself at all.

So, the problem: I'm still too selfish--as selfish as I was at sixteen, really--or maybe immature, or whatever it is, to want to write outside my own perfectly imperfect little box. And what perfectly imperfect means is this: I'm fine with imperfections, with the flaws inherent to everything and everyone, as long as they appear somewhere in my existing catalog of preapproved flaws. I can't write a white racist sympathetically, but I can write a black woman who vaguely distrusts white society, and I can write her with great detail and tenderness, because my mom is one. I can't write a junkie, but I can write a pathological liar, because I spend every day grappling with the boundaries and usefulness of truth. I can write a girl whose love for a boy has reduced her to a single pathetic dimension, a narcissistic womanizer without emotions, a bitter automaton addicted to a career and a family woman motivated predominantly by obligation and guilt. I can write an alcoholic. But I patently cannot write a smoker, a compulsive overeater, a politician. I can write a pedophile, but not a character who dislikes children.

The point being, sometimes I can accept my surroundings, and allow them to become fodder for future stories, and other times I can't. And I'm finding myself, right now, in a place where everything around me seems to fall into the latter category. I like my neighborhood, but I don't really like my neighbors. They step on my feet a lot, and the men spit everywhere. When I walk through my neighborhood lately, my head feels fogged up to the point where I can't think about anything, much less rearrange raw thought into a cogent idea.

I got the idea for the current novel on a day when I was driving out of the city to see my parents, taking the scenic route and listening to "Strawberry Fields Forever" in the car. As soon as the concrete turned into trees, as soon as the cellos came in, my till-then zygote of an idea blossomed and crystallized, and I had to pull out a notepad at a stoplight. Now, I mainly write on the train, but only underground.

When I was in high school, and even college, I used to meet people who just felt like ready-made characters. Whom I couldn't wait to dissect, reconstruct and immortalize in fiction. A few weeks ago, I was walking through Chinatown with my fifteen-year-old cousin, who was visiting for the weekend. One of my illustrious neighbors, a drunk teenager with an entourage around him, jumped in front of us, blocking our path. He tried to hit on me, and then, when I brushed him off, yelled belligerent obscenities till we'd walked out of range. "I want to stick my dick in your butt," was the last thing we heard him say before we rounded the corner onto Fourth Street.

Where's the art in that?