Title is appropriate

February 7, 2010 Title is appropriate

A lot of people don’t know this, but I’ve never wanted to be a n0velist.  Ask my mentor, who for years said, “You should write a short story! You should write a novel.”  No, I wanted to write movies.  Or films, if you want to sound smarter!  I was a film minor, I know movies!

This was in…2005-2006.. I was in the midst of the 6th year of my two year college.  Oh yes!  I read all the books.  Story. Syd Field. William Goldman, who claimed “Nobody in Hollywood knows anything.”  Neither did I!  So it must’ve been a perfect marriage.  I started a script I called Celebrity Drama. It was about…celebrities.  It still lingers, maybe 20 pages away from being finished.  I’ll finish it one day.

Once again, I was told, “You need to write fiction!”   My dad stepped in to help with that, with “You read so many children’s books..write one!”

I refused, no, I wanted to be a screenwriter.  I wanted to write sitcom.  If you’re ever at a dinner party in the middle of an awkward conversation, just drop that bon mot in.  It’ll save you in no time. You’ll get some funny looks. They’ll look at the ground, and then slowly say, “But..you aren’t funny.”  Or if you happen to be funny, “Why?”

Here’s the irony.

I said, “I can’t tell a story in only a few pages, so I can’t write short stories!” A screenplay is 120 pages or so.

I took a creative writing class and eeked out a short story about pickles and vampires. They were somewhat related, I assure you. Then I channeled my inner Sylvia Plath and wrote a story about a suicidal mermaid.  Didn’t give writing  anything beyond films a second thought.   Then I wrote some awful poetry.

I went to university.  I read Lorrie Moore, who wrote the amazingly brilliant and funny “How to be a Writer.”  I read Mary Gaitskill and Joyce Carol Oates and a lot of YA fiction. I started my blog, met some wonderful authors and other people in the business online.

And then I still didn’t write. Except papers, because I was an English major.  But there was always that attempt having fun even with those, with long titles such as “Take These Broken Wings and Learn to the Fly Again:  Song and Flight in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon.”   We were required to keep a blog on various computer topics for our Computer Literacy class, and I wrote about the invention of the internet, dinosaurs, Jem and the Holograms.

Then Nanowrimo came around, and my mentor again said, “You should write.”

Write? Me?  What about my magical world of celebrities waiting on my harddrive? What about that vague film idea I had about a girl running away called Highway Girl? Wasn’t my Oscar waiting in the wings?

No.

I said, “Okay, I’ll write the book I want to see on the shelves.”   A girl with a dream. To be somebody, to be on top of the world! (I apologize to White Heat here*).  A girl who wanted to not get the boy or go to the prom, but had a dream that was a little more out there, not supported fully by her family, but it had to get her out of her small town.

And what do you know? I like doing it.

So Funny Girl is maybe 2 chapters long now, because I finished my Bachelors degree, than my Masters degree, and now I finally have time to write.

But the problem when you’re writing humor..about a girl who wants to be a comedian…is you have to be funny.

Damn.

I’ll address that next post.

* Told you. Film minor.

Advertisement

• 1 comment
• Posted under Uncategorized