In Which I Do Some Pretentious Rambling

When I was eight I began writing what I referred to as a novel. I had a red folder filled with notebook paper I carried around with me everywhere I went, just in case a chance to write a few paragraphs arose. I even, deluded and ambitious child that I was, tried create illustrations and cover art for what I was sure would eventually be a work of brilliance. I never finished it, though. I never even reached the halfway mark. At some point I realized it probably wasn’t very good, and with my best friend Fear of Failure’s encouragement, I just stopped working on it one day. The folder got thrown away during a move about two years later, and I haven’t really thought about it since except to cringe at the absurdity of my half-baked creation.

I remember perfectly what it was about, but all I’m willing to say is that it had a first-person narrator. I really enjoyed first-person narration as a child, and reading things like The Catcher in the Rye and The Bell Jar made me love it even more. I have a lot more issues with Holden Caulfield now than I did when I was 12, but one of the few things I still like about that book is Holden’s voice. Yeah, he’s whiny, homophobic, lazy, and etc, but he is wholly himself, instantly recognizable. It sounds cliché even to me, but creating a character like that isn’t easy. Believe me when I say I’ve read a lot of fucking books, and there aren’t that many characters I can immediately recognize just based on one or two random sentences.

Of course, now that I’ve said that my head is full of characters I could name based on just a few random sentences.

Anyway, it didn’t take very long for me to realize I can’t write first-person fiction. (Whether or not I can write third-person fiction is debatable. I’m generally inclined to say I can’t do that either, but I keep trying anyway.) I’ve tried creating first person narrators, and the results were atrocious. Michelle Tea heroines look like interesting, complex characters next to mine, and since aside from Trish in Rose of No Man’s Land, she basically just writes the same thinly disguised version of herself getting into the same shenanigans ad nauseum, that’s saying something.  All my heroines end up sounding exactly like me rather than like themselves, which had a lot of do with why I abandoned most of my projects before finishing them. I always knew the handful of pages I’d written weren’t good enough, and the thought of forcing a short story born of self-indulgence onto other people was more than I could handle. In hindsight, however, I realize I didn’t have that many people to force those hypothetical stories on, and like Daria, I would probably have ended up trying to avoid ever doing anything with them.

I gave up trying to write fiction in first person and settled for trying to write in third person. I daren’t venture a guess as to whether or not those attempts have been successful, though I can say with some certainty my early work was awful. Rereading it doesn’t induce violent cringing fits, but rather, I see now where I could improve things and what parts are simply beyond salvaging. I think that’s probably a sign of growth.

Aside from these few posts and papers for class, only perhaps three of which I took any interest in at all, I haven’t written anything in months. I either haven’t wanted to or only managed to write a few lines before deciding it would be a waste of time to go any further. With my trusty Fear of Failure entwining itself ever more into my hair, my creativity didn't need a pocketful of stones to sink. It just went, and nothing I did could bring it back. 

But maybe that's changing. I hope it is because walking around feeling as though your brain was mush all along and you were just fooling yourself with those ideas about being intelligent or even marginally articulate is, to put it mildly, a rather horrible feeling.