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When I was sixteen
Last night I went to Eric's to have my book dissected. Frankly, I expected Eric to be both the most negative and most penetrating of the people who have read it and commented on it.
To my surprise, although he didn't like the book, I would not call his comments negative. And though he added few new things I hadn't already heard from other readers, he enabled me to put all the pieces together. At last. In a way no one else has done.
So now I have good news and bad news: The good news is that I now know the best way to rewrite the novel, which way to steer, and how to turn it into something which could well be a fascinating and entertaining book.
The bad news is that I will have to rewrite the book almost completely to do it.
This is the news I've been resisting, one of the many things that a part of my brain knew already.
And now that the weight of What To Do With The Book is off my shoulders - now that I have sighed a massive sigh of relief - there is another question left in the dust. One I'm not sure I want to contemplate, which is why I have to.
In order to understand the question, though, I have to explain all the other things my brain knew already but was refusing to admit.
My behavior about this book has been strange, to say the least. Usually when I write something I offer it to anyone who'll stand still long enough to read it.
I have been oddly reluctant to show it to people, offering it mostly only to people who asked me for it, people who were already disposed to like it. And I'm happy that some people did like it - but I didn't do this because my ego needed the boost. It took me until last night to realize why I was being so weird.
It's because I knew it was a Bad Book. And I knew that Eric would know it was a Bad Book and call my bluff. Which is why he's perhaps the only person I actually asked to read it.
This is the story of my life - finding a behavior in my own head that doesn't fit, being unable to confront it myself, so getting someone else to point it out to me and therefore forcing myself to deal with it. My internal consistency detector is excellent, but my will is weak.
Eric called me out on any number of stupid things - telling the reader about things over and over instead of showing them; putting big gooey lumps of exposition in the narrative; deliberately setting up hurdles for the reader that shouldn't have been there. In many ways this book was an endurance test for the reader: Let's see how hard I can make it for them to keep going.
Oh, there's interesting stuff in the book. But there are many places it could have been more entertaining. And those have all been deliberately omitted. Almost every time Eric asked me about one of them, I said, "Oh, yes. That's the way I would have written it normally, but I didn't do that here."
You see, I know how to write better books. The Novel on The Floor is a better book, for all that its subject matter is unsalable. It has forward motion. It has plot. It has a lot of dialogue and very little plain exposition. It has humor. It has interesting details. All of these things are missing from Aedie's novel. And I left them out on purpose.
I not only wrote a Bad Book, I did it willfully.
This book was straightjacketed by arbitrary rules I created for myself. I won't explain them all here, but suffice to say that if I remained consistent within my rules and my universe, it would be impossible to make this book much more entertaining than it is now.
It's all mostly moot. I have realized that some of these stupid rules must change if the book is to be salvaged, and I know which ones will be. I wrote the book I wanted to write for myself, rigid and cold. Now I will take the basic framework, the framework I wrote over seven years ago, which is the only part of the book that still fascinates despite my efforts to submerge it ... and I will dig out the entertaining book that was always under there, and write it. For everyone else.
And yet ... and yet ... how can I say that the current draft is "the book I wanted to write for myself," when frankly I'm not sure even I would want to read it if I found it on the shelf in the bookstore? If even I cannot find love in my heart for Aedie the way he is now, and I made him, how can I expect anyone else to? And, more importantly, why was it so vitally important to me to write this particular book this particular way?
Because, I say again, this was all planned. I surgically removed all the joy from this book, and I knew how I was going to do it - I now realize - long before I started it.
I just don't know why I did it. Here I sit, with a manuscript in my hands which betrays me, makes the world think I can't write when I know I can do much better work, and I haven't the foggiest idea why I wrote this Judas book.
I have only a guess.
I tried to disguise the autobiographical aspects of this book. I did this because I am tired of my friends teasing me about how I always write autobiography (something Eric has convinced me is a bad reason, since most readers will neither know that nor care). But it's true. This novel is me at sixteen. The other novel is me in my early twenties. And one reason the other novel is more readable as it stands now is that by the time I was in my twenties, I was finally beginning to turn into a human being.
I never did convince Eric of this fully, and I'm not sure I ever will, because all he can see is the way I am now, with strong emotions and wild ideas, loudly expressed, and my eyes always flashing over one thing or another.
But when I was sixteen, I had muted every single thing about myself. I didn't speak to other people. I didn't have passion for much of anything. I never dared express any kind of emotion. I didn't interact. I was almost sociopathic. I was not a friendly or entertaining person. I was, in a word, Aedie.
The book was supposed to be about Aedie breaking out of this character, of Aedie learning to be more human ... but I didn't do it right. I got too caught up in watching him enjoy the pleasure of the pariah, relishing the way he stood in his corner thinking about how horrible the world was and how miserable he was. There's a joy in this kind of misery - I remember it well - but it's not a healthy joy. When I find myself doing it these days, I slap myself out of it immediately.
When I was sixteen, I wrote about suicide a lot. I have never been suicidal in my life, but I was in love with the idea, the idea of just finally being pushed so far to the edge by a world that didn't want me: This'll show them.
Aedie isn't suicidal. Maybe he should be.
He learns too little, too late, for the reader to be engaged. He gets better, but only after most readers have already withdrawn their sympathy. Just like I lost ten irreplaceable years of my life relishing that "the world hates me" feeling. Ten years on my little island of hate. Ten years in which I could have been making friends, friends I will never have.
I believe that this book was catharsis.
And now that I'm done with it, I believe it has served its purpose and should metamorphose into something altogether better.
But don't worry. I am keeping at least one copy of the first draft. I don't normally believe in destroying work. I've only destroyed work from one period in my life.
When I was sixteen.
© Columbine
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