Lately, as National Novel-Writing Month inches ever closer, and I find myself further entrenched in the English major, I’ve discovered a few things. First, if you ever hear someone talking about how much they love Chuck Palahniuk, run the other way. Second, everybody has their pet project. And third, everybody will be dying to tell you about that pet project -- in great detail, at great length. Multiply this by every English major in your college and that means there are upwards of 500 magnum opuses floating around campus at any given time. They can be anything from thousand-page treatises on Jane Austen to the latest dystopian amoeba someone’s happiness-starved brain has puked out. So this is an open letter from one English major to all the others: For the love of God, stop talking about your novel.
English majors aren’t immune to this, by the way. There’s a significant portion of the population who seems to think that writing a novel is easy, that some day when they’re 50 years old, they’ll sit down at the computer and pound out the next bestseller. Let’s start by disabusing all those armchair novelists of that notion. Writing a novel is hard. Writing a good one is harder. It’s not something you sit down and do “just ‘cause." Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s move on.
Telling everyone in your immediate vicinity about your novel takes a special sort of hubris because it assumes that a) you’re the only one there writing a novel, and b) that yours is somehow better than theirs. I’ve been in workshop classes where an aspiring novelist has ripped someone else’s ideas to shreds for being contrived and unoriginal, only to produce a cheap "Hunger Games" knockoff when it’s their turn to share. My advice would be to check all such assumptions at the door. First of all, everyone’s ideas come from somewhere, so nobody’s story will ever be 100% original. Secondly, unless you’ve been at it awhile, there’s a good chance your novel is irredeemably bad. Let those, who are without typos and plot holes, cast the first critiques and all that.
I’m going to go back to point A of the list for a second because it’s the most important. I distinctly remember a conversation I had with a group of accomplished writers and actors, in which one person monopolized the conversation by talking at length about the piece he’s working on. And his plans for said piece. And all the salient plot points. And the production values for when it inevitably becomes famous. Meanwhile, the other talented artists sat quietly, forced to listen as this blowhard went on and on, unable to understand that other people might be capable of having good ideas, too. The kicker? This ad nauseam exposition of his work occurred right after I told the group, not entirely jokingly, that I hate it when people tell me about their novel unprompted.
So, to all my fellow English majors: Enough. Get yourself a group of critique partners and talk about each other’s novels in addition to your own. Sneakily bring a section of your novel to workshop and restrain yourself from telling literally everyone about how amazing it is. But for the love of God, don’t go around preaching your plot like it’s the word of Jesus Christ himself. After the quarter we’re having, I don’t think the rest of us can take it.
