The starting is the hardest part
If this blog is proof of anything, it’s that the hardest part of any pleasure project is getting started. The same is probably true of self-improvement projects like diets, but since I’ve never actually tried to make myself a better person, I’m just guessing on that one.
Why does starting suck so hard?
Don't worry. I'm gonna tell you.
- Because the opportunity to fail spectacularly (and possibly publicly) is very high. And public embarrassment isn’t part of anyone’s New Year’s Resolutions.
- Because to do a thing you have to make choices. And making choices is harder than fantasizing in a green field.
Just this morning I was thinking about my own journey in starting a novel. Over the course of the last decade, I’ve started and stopped a number of pieces, writing tens of thousands of words. Kristina has slogged through the reading of many a bad plot, to which I’m as thankful as I am mortified. I enjoyed this time, but I struggled with the process and never managed to produce anything that I was happy with. Part of this is because I didn’t know what I was doing. I still don’t. But also, I’m pretty sure now that I probably hadn’t read enough.
Yes, you read that correctly. Yes, I was an English major. Yes, I consider myself to be fairly well read. Particularly so in the western canons, but I’m reasonably familiar with the key works in others as well. I’m passable as far as blog writing and memoirs go, but do I think that a decade ago I could have been a good genre writer? No.
And that’s the thing about starting. While I was writing all of those pages I knew I had more pre-work to do. Valuable discovery needed to take place. Expeditions needed to be arranged into all sorts of non-standard English major territory. (And here I’m avoiding the obvious allusion to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness because a) I don’t also want to suggest that forging new territory in my reading life is akin to descending into madness and because b) I hate that book and want it to die.)
What do you want to do to today, Spot? Fight an octopus or perpetuate stereotypes of idealized femininity? I thought so... <sigh>
But seriously, I’m not a dead white guy. (Am I?) And I don’t intend to write under the pretense of being a dead white guy. So it’s not surprising that my vast experience reading, parsing, and appreciating the work of dead white guys (and the occasional woman writing under dead white guy pseudonyms) has ill-prepared me to fully develop the weird and wacky fragments that come to me in lucid dreams into fully realized and compelling stories.
Dead white guys don’t daydream of girls who fence villains in burned out factories. They wrote didactic bullshit about the evils of expressing your opinion and making bold eye contact. They openly judged (in novels like Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded) women who fell prey to evil fuckery at the hands of manipulative, boorish men. Even Jane Austen, who I love, openly mocked young ladies in Northanger Abbey for reading early analogs to the kind of novels I want to write.
Said every fat, bloated cousin who forced himself on a 18th century heroine
If you think virtue signaling is a new thing, try reading some 18th century British literature, yo.
My Goodreads account is a testament to the dedication I've shown to putting aside all reading that my I would have previously categorized as “having value.” Meaning, stuff that was on my guilt list or any book NPR mentioned in 2017. I haven’t read All the Light You Cannot See. I was too busy filling my brain hole with steampunk adventures featuring adult themes and shameless boatloads of distopian YA. I did get suckered into The Nightingale and A Man Called Ove, but I swear that was by accident. And while I would be the first to admit that most of my reading material this past five years could only be fairly classified as totally engrossing, entertaining, fun, drivel, I think old me would have been too hard on new me. While it might not use 18 point words and be full of allegorical allusions to the bible, these pages are not all without conversation value.
Deanna Raybourn has given us all a gift with her brash and socially progressive Victorian lepidopterist-meets-detective, Veronica Speedwell, and Gail Carriger was the first to show me that a novel of manners could be adapted to include hilarious paranormal elements and fierce battles involving ugly parasols.
Not the Veronica Speedwell I was searching for, but I do appreciate a good botany pun.
Five years ago I hadn’t read enough fun books to realize that I don’t want to write the next great American novel, but now, I think that maybe I have. There’s a seed here that I have to water. Two seeds. One that might grow into spunky, smart, culture-clashing heroine that any young girl would be proud to imitate, and the other is a man who might not know what the hell to do with the first, but will figure it out. I can’t wait to get to know them.
And perhaps I can start, even if I don’t have the perfect opening line…
