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Getting Started (5 of 5): First Novel
A year long fixation started while I read this book, on an airplane, flying home. I read all these single women’s stories, and they got me thinking about how hard it would be for Robin to have a girlfriend.
Then, I thought, what if some kid read a bunch of Robin comics and decided to try to be some sort of superhero in a little town like the one I grew up in? Then, I thought, what if that kid had a girlfriend? And what if she kept a diary about trying to get him to be safe?
I wrote the concept out on the inside back cover of my copy of The Improvised Woman. Then, I thought, “I don’t know anything about having a girlfriend!” So I changed it to a story about two very close friends.
As the year went on, I kept this gigantic journal with me all the time, and most of what I wrote in that journal related to this story, this evolving first novel. It was exciting, because I had ideas all the time. I’d think about it while I walked across campus, sat in class, worked in the library and as I brushed my hair in the morning. Every idea that came to me I had to, at least, get written down. I hated it when I forgot anything.
Somewhere, I had read that the beauty of the novel as a form was that it could contain everything you wanted. So, over that year, I took every crazy idea I had and tried to figure out some way I could work it into the story. The year in question happened to be my Senior year of college, the year in which you study all the most esoteric and random crap college can throw out you.
I had a lot of random ass ideas that year.
Somehow, my story about a kid trying to be a superhero in Southeast Kansas turned into some sort of bizarre interplay between the two propagandistic Greek Gods (Pan and Cupid, if you’re curious), each of which symbolized the essential tension between text and sub-text.
What does that even mean? I have no clue. After I graduated, I started writing it.
You wouldn’t be any clearer on the concept if you had read each of the first four drafts of that novel. It only made sense five years later when I rewrote the book from beginning to end, took the the gods out and all the text versus sub-text went with them. The story made sense, that is. The text/sub-text schema never had any logic to straighten out.
I miss the days when a story concept could stay on my mind, all the time, like that one did. When I finished that book, I remember pouring myself a glass of Cognac and sipping it in a quiet and anti-climactic celebration of completion. It felt good to know I had the discipline to finish a story of 330+ pages.
My mind had not escaped Musings mode though. The only difference between this book and that one was that I had strung my unrelated pretensions together with a Vertigo comic-book‘esque plotline. It would feel much worse, years later, when I finally had found some true discipline, enough to tell myself that about 200 pages worth of my ideas never should have escaped my private notebook.
Up to then, I had a lifetime or so now of very productive notebooking. The Winter I spent turning my first novel into a novella marked the next step: honing that brainstorming into writing. Long begun, if not so well begun; at least I had got going.