That’s its name. The bane of my writerly existence. Well, at least, of my writerly existence thus far.
I went over it with Meno this afternoon. I sat in a rolly chair in his office, knowing that it was the last Fiction conference of my life at Columbia College, and I STILL royally suck at bracketing.
But for now, that’s neither here nor there. My main concern is this novel in progress that I can’t seem to do away with. I have sat for over a year, watching the evolution of this story, as if I were watching a child grow up. Antoinette literally grew up before my eyes, first in that unexpected yet charming story of a father, pushing his toddler daughter around in her exer-saucer, listening to Smoke On the Water. Man, I had no idea what that story meant—or what it would eventually be.
Now she is eighteen, and fighting for all hell to be taken seriously. She’s trying to find perhaps just one person that will treat her as a rational human being. Besides her father, a former greaser in his glory days, and her best friend, Dani, who winds up pregnant, battling between their feminist fundamentals, and a fleeting, yet powerful feeling that she’d be willing to sacrifice her own for her child’s. There’s a rally, a rebellion, a boy in Michael Jackson leather.
Damn it all, every synopsis I attempt sounds like some tv guide description for a Lifetime movie, but I swear it isn’t. It’s about equality, human rights, and the human right to fuck up every now and again—which Antoinette and Dani seem capable of doing over and over and over. It’s a coming of age story. What’s worse is that its a “comical” one. Countless times I have wanted to put it on the shelf with a shrug, not quite able to be rid of that ever pressing feeling as though I have somehow outgrown it. I have other ideas, far better ones. Ones that question reality, ones that question the purpose of human existence. They are surreal and philosophical, but I can’t manage to get beyond this seemingly simplistic question that two punks in the year of 1985 are asking themselves over high school porcelain sinks: what do we do now?
I’ve written eighty pages in third person. Then I changed my mind, and wrote eighty pages in first person. Now I realize that I should have kept with third person, but the story has evolved so much that my original draft is like a skeleton. Sacha, and Andrea, and Scott. Names with nuances, and fingerprints, and feelings, people that have sprung from the imaginative soil, like fucking Gerber daisies. And I’m here, knotting up my fingers in my hair, wondering if it will ever be finished. If it will ever be anything worthy of the thought, of the intention, behind it. If this story is just a bunny hill, on a trail full of mountains.
Haha…ahh, it’s like that movie Inception. It’s amazing what an idea can do, if you let it. I am a writer. When I was seven, I would make fake news articles on notebook paper, stapling the pieces and handing them out to my family. When I was ten I began drawing comics, tales of skateboarding and blink 182. At twelve I began my first novel—science fiction, hand written in a spiral bound that I still have in my closet, crinkled and yellowed with age. Through girl scouts, and soccer, and drum set lessons, through middle school, and high school, and college, everything else I have given up, lost interest in. Some, it’s true, I would love to take back, but writing was something I never considered sacrificing, because it was the only thing that could still capture my interest.
I am twenty-one, now, and on my fourth and final year of earning a degree in creative writing. And yet, and YET…one idea, one character, one mud fight, one meager plot that I myself have conjured, makes me question every minute, every dollar given over to this. It’s maddening, this process! No fucking wonder so many great writers took to drinking, because this solitary, exclusively imaginary mindfuck that we manifest rules our lives. Between two shitty drafts, between the baby then, and the woman now, between the spaces of punctuation marks, I question the purpose of my life. I question this gruesome, introverted path I have chosen for myself, and will always wonder if I simply am just not good enough. If I was simply just meant to do something else with my life.
But after all of that, I will keep writing.
Because I can’t come up with a better idea.
