I did something very stupid the other day: I told my friends I was writing a novel.
We were talking about books we'd been reading, books we'd wanted to read, books we'd been gifted and were avoiding reading, and then, there it was. I'm writing a novel. Oh, you're working on a big case at work? I'm Writing A Novel.
It just slipped out. Whoops! Silly me!
That's not quite true. It didn't slip out from nowhere like the little cockroach of a thought that it was. After hearing one of my friends gush about a 29-year-old author whose novel was blowing her mind, pure, mean competitiveness jolted it out of me. I flung it out - a monkey turd reaction. Twenty-nine? Twenty-nine? Very soon, I'll be twenty-nine. If I don't publish my novel before then, this girl can go around feeling superior to me, with her books and her publishing and her obvious focus. I couldn't have that, so instead, I said "I'm writing a novel." I fibbed. Hard. And I wasn't even drinking (although I was rapidly becoming more hungover as we sat there, and thus feeling very much like a gutter-crawling, surly artist of Romantical olden times).
I've written three pages in three years.
T.S. Eliot wrote "Prufrock" when he was twenty-two. F. Scott Fitzgerald pounded out Gatsby when he was around my age. Even cranky, lupus-ridden Flannery O'Connor scratched out her first novel when she was twenty-five. I can barely cook myself dinner on a semi-nightly basis.
Of course, because I'm me and this is America, this makes me feel like I'm losing some sort of competition. No matter that I work all day at a job that is not writing, and Ezra Pound is not my mentor, and I cannot afford to travel about to various European townships for "inspiration" -- they have done it, and I have not. They are Known, and I am a Nothing. There are only so many defeats a girl can take, even if they do result in Great Achievements for Mankind. Rather than accept defeat (in the loosest of terms -- can you lose a game when you're more like a mascot than a player?), I keep telling people that I am writing a novel.
I do want to write a novel. I even have two whole ideas sloshing around in my brain. They've been sloshing around up there for years! By this point, actually, they're probably just the withered, rat-eaten skeletons of ideas - shipwrecked tourists who held on to hope until the mangos ran out. Or they've gone native, have started mating with other weirdness in my brain. I'm going to sit down to type my novel (really! I will!), and horrible, toothy monsters will spill out, all muscular verbs and sharp dialogue, but no poetry.
At my job that is not writing, I cajole and/or coax young people into being better writers. I make them believe that I know all the secrets to being a good writer. I occasionally (but never to their faces) mock them for being such bad writers, and I tell them, "The only way to get better at writing is to do it." I may be bad at accomplishing the act of writing, but the act of teaching I have pretty well sewn up, so I have to take my own advice.
This is where lying to my friends comes in. Somehow, I -- I! -- have managed to attract kind, supportive people as friends. It's impossible, or at least exhausting, to keep telling novel-based falsehoods to kind, supportive friend-people because they - poor saints! - remember facts about my life, and they ask me how it's going. Really! They've heard me speak in real life, and they still manage to drum up interest in how I would write down words for general consumption. They don't do this for their sakes; they know that I may end up writing something horrible or offensive or boring. They do this because they would like to see their friend succeed.
If my friends were normal people, I could, while slogging through the hellfires of prolonged, focused writing, comfort myself with the idea that, once my work was completed, I would happily pass on the mantel of friendship-lying, patiently waiting for them to fib about having read my completed opus. Knowing my friends, though, they will come back to me within a week, trailing folders of copious, constructive notes and snappy hashtags to build internet buzz for my book. I am probably not the Next Great American Writer, but I do have good friends. Fitzgerald had Hemingway, and O'Connor had her peacocks, but I think I'm winning this one.
