Dear Jason Schwartzman,
I have this novel in my head. I started out writing it five years ago when I was thinking a lot about Salinger and the family dynamic. I created these characters and this plot just sort of emerged but I can’t seem to get it out onto the page. I’ve got these really great moments. These places where if I say so myself its pure brilliance. But as someone I once knew said, I’m tired of living life in these same old short stories.
Its nothing really. I mean its just life. And more and more as I write it I realize that its my life.
I recently decided to change it all to first person. Is the Catcher in the Rye first person or was Salinger just so good at third person that it seemed that way? I can’t recall, anyway the point is I’m no Salinger and apparently I live life so much better in my head than I do in the real world or on the written page.
The working title is Welcome to Fiction. A play on the fact that the main protagonist is using the English degree he earned from his state university to work in the fiction section of the local library. Like, virtually nothing happens. I think that’s the problem, except, that is not entirely true because this whole year goes by in his life and lots of things happen. I just mean that there are no big explosions or fireworks or car chases. There is not even a good love scene or this great romance, and the thing is, I think that, strangely, this is all as it should be.
I don’t want it to be about just anything. I want it to be about the nothings of everyday life and about everything. About how our generation doesn’t have this driving force like the depression WW2 era did, or like the hippie Veitnam era did. I mean we have the war on terror and the recession but somehow still most of us as 20 and 30 somethings are so far removed from all of that. Not that we mean to be, not that we don’t care, just, what does that really look like to care? I mean we recycle, we voted for Obama, but on a day to day basis what has our fancy private school education and our degree done for us that drives us to a more fulfilling existance?
Generation X or whatever you wanna call it. Its this big joke and yet no one that I know is really laughing. Most people I know, if you asked them, and they were really honest, would say that they are kind of depressed. That they have become insomniacs because they can’t seem to turn the tv off, put down the controller, or stop checking face book on their I phone. Scared that the silence might cause them to start to really think and that thinking might open up a whole world that they have so neatly tucked away. They have become loners because becoming the socialite has become what Paris Hilton and Lauren Conrad are and if we learned anything from our days as twothirtyeight, jimmy eat world junkies its that life is better lived in the mind. We have become dreamers but only to the extent that it gets us through the day to day because life long goals seem too far off and everything we dreamed as fifteen year olds somehow failed along the way. Maybe that’s the problem. Maybe everything has slowed down. Or sped up. Which ever way we can’t seem to get on or off the train, or whatever, cause where is anybody really going?
Anyway, thats the way my protagonist feels.
I’m really not cynical. I’m actually a fairly pleasant person, most days. I think that its just hard for me to think about what the great american novel looks like for our generation because I don’t know how our generation is going to achieve the great american dream. I think that we will achieve it, one day. It just may take us a little longer.It just might not look like the same dream our parents and grandparents achieved. It might not even look like the same dream we once thought we would achieve. But, for better or for worse, maybe we will reach it. eventually.
And maybe that’s why its taking so long for me to get my book finished. Maybe that’s why I keep putting it down, picking it back up and starting it over again.
Maybe I need to stop listening to death cab radio on Pandora as I write. Maybe the melodic tunes that I claim as inspiration are lulling me to be stagnant.
Maybe if I could get it out of my head that what I was writing was a Wes Anderson screenplay, if I could stop thinking of the protagonist as Luke Wilson then I could just really concentrate on seeing him as himself. As me.
Maybe if my own chapters would close a little more triumphantly.
Maybe.
Anyway, I write to you, because I think you might understand. Because I think you might know how it feels to have this river inside of you the size of the Mississippi, but unlike me, you seem to have somehow learned how to release it…
--jayna lea
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