My NaNoWriMo Pseudo-Update

In which I write a blog with literary flair so I don't feel bad about not writing my novel.

Imagine the horror. After four and a half years of being in college, a writer is quite confident that he is ready to write his own version of that great entry into the world of “literature” – the college novel. He’s got only a short period of time, though – he knows if the months become years and the years become decades, well, he’s going to forget what college was actually like. And indeed the months do become years and he is somewhat worried to find that when he is (rarely) moved to write, it’s not the college novel he intended. He may have already outgrown it. And then a well-established writer of a certain literary and populist pedigree comes along and publishes a novel with great national attention (if not acclaim) and, yes dammit, it’s a college novel. The young writer is discouraged (if 70 year-olds are writing college novels, does that mean the college novel is over?) and later encouraged when he reads it (the book gets it so disastrously wrong that he thinks a “true” college novel may still work). He’s also just annoyed. How many people will read this book and actually start to think college is like this?

So he starts writing and it turns out (not that he was even intending this necessarily) that he is writing his college novel, finally. It just snuck on him, but he’s 20,000 words in and suddenly it’s clear – that’s what it is. But here we come to the horror. The horror. The writer looks back at what he has written, looks forward to what he think he will write yet in the story and – the horror – everything that was wrong with that Charlotte Simmons book is present in the one he is writing. It’s a college book that barely even addresses what college is actually like. Really, it’s just – the horror! – a sort of dirty book all about sex.

Yes, there’s a lot of revision this story is going to need, should I get to the end and finish it. It’s not unusual, I don’t think, to start a book thinking it’s about one thing or that it’s going to go a certain direction – and then find out you were entirely wrong: It’s actually about this, and going in this direction. One reason so many books and movies are bad is that, as a writer, it can be hard to let go of where you thought you were going. Maybe you had this great scene all planned out. Maybe you still kind of want to stick it in there (ahem!), even if it doesn’t necessarily fit (fit the narrative, I mean. Of course.)

So far, I hate to admit it, the story I have been writing is essentially the tale of Christina’s sexual exploits during one year of her undergraduate schooling. What a dirty bastard I am sometimes. But, let’s be fair for just a moment – lots of people have written lots of books about sex. Mine isn’t even really explicit, or particularly scandalous. I’m beginning to even think the ending might be redemptive, which would be something almost wholly new in my fiction. And moreover there’s this: Sex really, really truly is a part of college life. Sometimes it’s a pretty big part of college. But here’s the thing: Sex isn’t what you’ll remember about college. It isn’t what you’ll miss. And – no matter how much it might be on your mind – it isn’t how you spend most of your day.

The way I remember it, most people were too busy for sex to actually be a big part of their lives. Hell, I was too busy and I was a freaking creative writing major. If I didn’t have time for girls, then how in God’s name did people with jobs and real majors find the time?

So far there’s only a hint of that in what I’ve written – in the form of a little conversation between Christina and her nearing-30-year-old-friend Jess, who misses college. Or misses what she thinks college might have been, if she hadn’t been in a serious relationship. The point, ultimately, is that Jess is wrong – college isn’t really Girls Gone Wild, it isn’t really Charlotte Simmons. Maybe sometimes it is. But most people who are up until 3a on Wednesday nights are studying – and I don’t mean anatomy.

That’s mostly going to have to come in revision, though, I think. Still, it gives the story a focus beyond the sort of weak plot I’ve been working with, and that’s reassuring. There’s virtually no chance I can get this thing to 50,000 words by the end of the month, but it’s worth it having discovered in the midst of this silly little story I wanted to get out of my system, an actual book. That college novel. Finally.