Look in a book...
I've been on a search for the ultimate novel for pretty much my entire life. I would scour the library thinking that today would be the day that I would find it. A novel with the perfect characters, amazing plot line, life lesson and I guess the holy grail of knowledge that I could carry with me forever, that would make me understand the world in a different way. I guess for some people this book is the Bible, and though it has many great parables I don't know if that's what I'm looking for. I've read many great novels thus far, I have yet to truly find a book to fulfill all my needs.So, I want to write a novel. Then again, who doesn't? A lot of the journalists I've come across are all just wannabe novelists. If you could pay me to sit at home and write all day then hell, that's my dream job. And yet the older I get the less I know what to write about, the more I fear that I don't have the creativity, the imagination, or the skills. Like if I had started writing and publishing books when I was about five and at my most bizarre and creative then I would be a hell of a lot farther ahead in life than I am now. I feel like journalism has really reinforced this hamburger model of writing, so much so that it has sucked the joy out of my writing so much so that I almost hated it when I was done my program. As my master's progressed I eventually specialized in radio to avoid having to plug my words into the carefully crafted boxes of the model that inevitably included: entertaining human-interest opening, boring story background, some fun facts, and then never ever a real conclusion. (We are supposed to be story tellers, oh the irony.) Writers like Stephanie Nole and Jane Armstrong manage to tell real stories, not hamburger ones but I'm clearly not there yet. And I am so long-winded I need more space to write than a column of a news article.
But also, I don't know what to write about.
I have a million ideas but they all stem so much from my own life that I don't know how to separate them. I don't know how to make it not about things I've felt. I feel like I've lost some of my imagination that would have allowed me to create the story of something completely different. Because as much as I want to use my experience to fuel my characters, my dilemmas, my climax and plot, I fear that I am too over-involved, too confused still to separate them enough so that they would be unrecognizable, so that I don't offend those closest to me with my portrayals of pieces of their lives.
I want to imagine myself another life I could not and may not ever lead. I want to create people that I could love, that because they are my creation can be who I want them to be, to be able to envision places and events that may never happen but that could fulfill my insatiable wanderlust. Like connecting the R.E.M. of my dreams and pouring it onto paper. I need the confidence to write from my heart, to take the ideas that my 10-year-old self poured into notebooks and make them a reality with my ever-expanding vocabulary. I'm just not sure how, or if I want the guidance of a class, or a structure at all. Because maybe some of the best writing is practically poetry, breaking rules, ignoring grammar, creating a piece of art out of letters. And I feel like you can't teach that.
A while back, on a whim I read the book Chasing Harry Winston and it really got me thinking. (No, not the book itself, but more what it was lacking.) It was a book one could read entirely in the bathroom. Hypothetically speaking of course. I'd describe it best as one of those easy-to-read but mind-numbing Us Weekly types. And though the book was entertaining, it had almost zero longevity. In about a month no one will catch half of the references to The Hills or designers or swanky New York hot spots. So while the author will make some good money on a fun piece of entertainment it's not the notoriety I want. It was candy floss for the brain. It sickens you a bit but you keep going because it is fluffy and endearing somehow. But I want to write something that can be read generations from now and will still be relevant, will still make sense like The Alchemist or all the hilarious novels by my beloved childhood favourite Roald Dahl.
I feel like if I keep reading the ability to be a good writer will just happen, will be absorbed through a waterless osmosis, like if I slept with MJ Vassanji or Paulo Coehlo under my pillow that I would just wake up and know where to begin. But I'm just not sure. And will perhaps just keep finding excuses and dead ends and not know where to start.
So I'm going to try to just keep writing and see what comes out.
posted by Kate @ 10:00 AM
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