On Writing V

Right after posting my last entry, I began to hesitate.  I’ve been planning on turning my diary entries from my first year of college into a book ever since I finished that awful experience.  That was approximately two years ago.  It wouldn’t be too terribly hard.  It’s not like I’d be writing the book from scratch, relying on my failing memory for material.  I wrote it all down as it happened.  If anything, all the entries need is a little editing and then some extra writing to tie everything together.  Doesn’t seem like that big of a deal.  I guess I’ve been too lazy and too scared to actually make it happen.  A part of the hesitation lies in how I want to approach the book.  Do I want it to be strictly journal style or do I want to make it have a novel feel?  I suppose it doesn’t matter which way I go about it because there is still a ton of things to consider, like character development and pacing and conflict. Where’s the rising action?  Where’s the engaging dialogue?  I didn’t record very much so I’ll have to rely on memory for that.  And lastly, where is the resolution?  I don’t really have much of one.  If anything, I learned that everything sucks.  I’m just worried the book will fall flat.  It will contain no redeeming value, just some jilted kid complaining for three hundred pages.  No one wants to read that.  And that’s where my fear comes in.  I fear no one will care, no one will want to read it, and most terrifyingly, no one will think it’s good. 

When I think about it, it’s not like my college experience was exactly interesting.  Nothing crazy actually happened, at least externally.  Most of the drama came from my head, which means the book would very much be a slow burn, a psychological portrait of one young man’s descent into disappointment and eventual emotional death.  Who wants to read that?  No one.  No, people nowadays are more interested in high-class cocaine scandals and bisexual orgies.  People want to read “Gossip Girl” material, something Perez Hilton would post on his website on any given day.  I’ve kept tabs on what titillates the audience and mostly it’s anything that’s shallow and juicy, situations like insignificant struggles, like who’s the richest out of a group of friends, a Prada bag battle and surface concepts of love that last a week at the most are what make ears ring.  Pretty people with problems.  Well, I had a lot of problems but they sure weren’t pretty.  And neither was I.

And then the question of who I want to write the book for comes up in my head.  I always struggle with walking that fine line of creating things mainly for myself while making it appealing to others.  Everyone wants to be able to make a living doing what they love.  I love to write and would very much love to be a full time writer.  But you can’t just write for yourself.  You have to make it relatable.  You have to invite the audience in instead of shutting them out and I feel if I wrote the book exactly how I want to, no one would want to read it.  I feel I’ll have to punch it up a bit to make it more interesting.  Now, that doesn’t mean to lie but to just provide more facts that I wouldn’t exactly share in my vision of the book.  I would very much like this book to be a success, despite the fact that I’m self-publishing it and I don’t have a lot of contacts or connections to spread the word that my material is even out there.  And because I would like this to work out, I’m feeling extra pressure to make sure it’s nearly impeccable.  And there’s just so much to consider.  I don’t want it to just me whining all the time.  No one cares about whiners.  I started reading the reference materials and in the first few pages, I nose-dived into a depression and the rest of the writing is just me sinking further and further into sadness.  How can I reconcile that?  By having some grand moral at the end of the book?  To let the audience know that I came out of that experience stronger?  No.  I can’t do that because that’s not how I feel.  In fact, I feel worse than ever.

In the beginning of Judith Moore’s book Fat Girl, she states that there is no moral at the end of her book and that she did not intend for the reader to glean any lesson from her story.  At the same time, she’s writing about something incredibly relatable.  I read the book and all the while I was nodding my head and saying, “Yes, yes, I feel the same way.”  So even though she never had a clear epiphany planned in her story, she was still able to capture my interest and my sympathy and I really enjoyed the book.  And I think people can relate to my book.  I don’t know anyone who had an amazing college experience all the way through.  Everyone has had some rough patches, and if they haven’t, then they were incredibly lucky.  So, even though my book may be relatable, it doesn’t mean it will be good or interesting.  Because so many people do have bad experiences in college, what is going to make my experience stand out?  What’s going to make it shine and be something that people will want to read and understand?  I don’t think there’s anything outstanding about it.  In fact, the whole book is terribly negative and depressing and it’s not my intention to depress anyone so it makes me question writing it at all.  I’m just trying to show people where I’m coming from, trying to find some kind of validation and appreciation for what I had to endure.  It felt like Judith Moore was venting in her book.  I got the sense that the book was cathartic for her and that’s what I want for me.  I keep thinking about the series finale of Roseanne and her final monologue.  It perfectly articulates why I want to write this book and why I write in general:

I made a commitment to finish my story even if I had to write in the basement in the middle of the night while everyone else was asleep. But the more I wrote, the more I understood myself and why I had made the choices I made and that was the real jackpot. I learned that dreams don’t work without action. I learned that no one could stop me but me. I learned that love is stronger than hate. And most important, I learned that God does exist. He and/or She is right inside you, underneath the pain, the sorrow, and the shame. I think I’ll be a lot better now that this book is done.

Ever since I started taking writing seriously, I’ve felt it was healing.  In fact, I feel all the writing I’ve done over the past couple of years have slowed my decline into insanity.  And the Roseanne quote is so accurate.  When you write about your life, you really are forced to examine the choices you’ve made and why you did what you did.  If I can get this book written, it’ll force me to face my decisions and maybeI’ll finally get why I did the things I did so that maybe I won’t hate myself for making the wrong choices.  Hopefully the process of writing through my dilemmas and sharing my story with the world will help me heal.  Plus, having my own published book will just be awesome, even though it is self-published, which presents my other problem: I still question my talent.  It’s not like some publisher contacted me and threw money at me to get this thing written.  It’s not like it’ll ever be on the shelves.  The best I can hope for is Amazon.com but even that sounds pretty neat to me.  I guess I’m just worried that I’m not qualified enough to write something as challenging as a book.  Sure, I can squirt out the occasion good essay and I get lucky with a decent poem now and then but a book?  I feel like I might be writing off more than I can chew.  I’d hate for someone to read it thinking, “This person has no business writing a book.”  Then again, successful authors such as Stephen King, J.K. Rowling, Anne Frank and William Faulkner, just to name a few, were all rejected several times before someone finally said they were good enough.  I guess that gives me a bit of hope when I inevitably get my own rejections and negative reactions to the book.  I understand that not everyone is going to love me but as fragile as I am, I can have one hundred praises and one complaint and I’ll fall to pieces.  Where does the acknowledgement of talent lie?  Within a ton of readers, book sales, lists, awards, money, or within ones own self? 

I guess all I can do is keep writing, keep working on the book and be proud of it no matter how it turns out.  It is my first, after all, and I will no doubt make mistakes, mistakes that I can learn from when I work on the next book.  Maybe as I write, things will unfold naturally and I’ll find a pace that will be appropriate and when it comes to some kind of grand revelation at the end, there might not be one just yet because my story isn’t quite over.  At the very least, I think it will provide some much needed closure.  I think I’ll be a lot better once this book is done.

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