Of copycats and lemmings

A while ago a lot of my single friends started getting married. Being the copycat that I was, before long I was married too. So I suppose it’s no surprise that when my friends started abandoning the short fling or rather the short story for the novel, I decided to do the same. Maybe that wasn’t the best reason for starting a novel, but it seemed like a good enough one at the time.

I used an unfinished short story about my childhood as my first chapter. It contained thinly disguised versions of myself and my two cousins. We were at the beach. One cousin was a mean red-head. The other was a lovely hippie. We frolicked in the cold waves. My neurotic mother made a cameo appearance. I had no idea what would happen next, but I brought it to class and Eliza said, “Keep going”. She was a firm believer that the chief obstacle to a novel’s success, above all others, was the failure to complete it. I took her advice to heart.

Every week I forced myself through another chapter. Even though I had no idea where I was going, I kept going. I thought it would be good for the plot to have a death. so I threw in a mystery over a drowned child. I knew my book would never be made into a movie if there wasn’t some sex in it, so I threw in a dark young man who took lots of LSD and swept me, I mean my main character, off her feet. There was a horseback riding incident. I had recently gone myself so I through threw that in too.

I kept throwing things in, hoping for the miraculous insight that would save me from the tangled mess I was creating, but it didn’t happen. And every time I brought a chapter in, Eliza would say, “Keep going.” I added a frantic drive across the country (not exactly a car-chase but close enough), and more LSD. The drowned child morphed into a drowned teenage girl. The ‘me’ character was still in love with the dark- drug-taking young man, but he was in love with the lovely hippie. There seemed no way to resolve it so I kept going.

After about two years I completed my 300 page novel mostly because (and I hate admit this) a lot of other people in class were finishing their novels. It ended with the dark-drug-taking young man, who had also turned out to be the killer, going right over the edge of a cliff. The ‘me’ character almost followed him over the edge but was saved at the last minute by the mean red-haired cousin; an apt metaphor for the whole experience.

Somehow I didn’t feel the satisfaction I expected, but the next step was revision so I dragged out that first chapter, polished it up a bit (even though it seemed nearly perfect) and brought it to class. I was expecting some gentle criticism, but Eliza didn’t waste any time. I can't remember exactly what she said, but the spirit of it is indelibly etched in my mind. It was something along the lines of, “What’s wrong with the mother? Is that hippie girl a moron? Why is other the cousin so mean? Why are you even writing this?” It was as if she’d never read or praised my novel before, but I didn’t say anything because I realized that all this time, I’d been waiting for permission not to keep going and now finally she was giving it to me.

And I'm not bitter. I don’t think “Keep going,” is bad advice. What I learned from all this is that it's very good advice for most but not for me, because I have a very bad sense of direction. A better directive for me would be, make sure you’re headed in the right direction and then keep going. Even better advice would be, it’s fine to be copycat if that’s what gets you going, but don’t turn into a lemming and blindly follow the whole damn thing right over the cliff, unless of course you have a mean red-haired cousin standing next to you.