Youth

I was thinking the other day about youth and inexperience. Mainly this was in regards to my novel about twenty-somethings. I was trying to figure out how to compose an engaging query letter that will snag an agent's attention, but it just seems like an impossible task. Is this because my book is simply not that good? I don't think so. Although I imagine it's not the greatest book ever or the best thing I'll ever write, I still feel pretty pleased with it. I've gotten good feedback from trusted readers. Even when it was at an earlier stage a few drafts ago, I got good responses. A couple people had the same major issue with it in their critique, which was simply that they wanted more of it, to spend more time with the characters. Hurray, right? But how do I distill what is decent about it into an engaging hook? There doesn't really seem to be a hook. Every time I tried to figure out what the conflict is at the heart of the book, what the major struggles are for the characters I was left feeling like it doesn't sound all that interesting. It's partly the high concept issue I discussed last time, but there's something else there, too. And that, I think, is the problem of youth.

I've written a book about twenty-something characters struggling with twenty-something problems. My hope is that those issues translate to other readers, that older folks could read the book and remember back to when they were younger. But maybe they wouldn't care much. They're past that stage of life and would rather move forward. Or another way of thinking about it is that for young characters there's an inherent lack of high stakes. Although the conflicts and struggles are very real and important to those characters experiencing them, they might not matter to an older reader. I'm not so many years removed from my characters, and already I'm starting to think that. I'm sure another ten or twenty years down the line and I'll have even less interest in young people. I remember a girl at the bookstore where I work was telling me why I should read the Twilight series of books. She said they aren't simply about vampires, but they're more about teen angst and young love. And I thought that was the perfect reason for me to not read those books. I might have some interest in reading about vampires, but teen angst and young love rank pretty low on my list of things that engage me.

So is my book then doomed? What interested me about that story when I started it a few years ago seems less significant to me now. But there's a good chance that my newer ideas will stay interesting to me for a while. Really, the kicker came when I was trying to come up with a hook opening line for a query, and I was thinking about what it is that my main character really wants and what the challenge is for him. He's a young writer who hasn't experienced enough life yet to have much worth writing about. But if that's the case, and the book is a metafictional work that he is writing, then doesn't it follow that there's not much worth reading there? Not entirely. By the time the character starts writing the story, more has happened to him. Yet, I can't quite crack how to explain that in a snappy few sentences. I just kept getting into the mind of an agent and reading a query letter that describes a novel by a young novelist about a young novelist with little life experience struggling to write a novel. How could that be anything but an automatic rejection? Even if it's good (which I think my book is), it seems so clichéd and self-referential. The chances of that kind of book being very decent and having much appeal to a wide audience seem pretty remote. If I can't imagine me requesting the manuscript as an agent, how could I expect an actual agent to want to look at it? But that's not to suggest writing it wasn't valuable even if nobody else ever reads it.

So when it got me thinking about youth, I started reflecting on young I still really am. I dreaded my last birthday when I hit 30. That seemed so old to me. It was depressing to reach that point and have so little to show for my life, to not even have a full time job. But when I think much about it, thirty is awfully young for a writer. How many writers do much that's any good by that age? Sure, there are the handful of Hemingways and Shelleys out there, but most don't get going until much later. Even Philip Roth, who made a splashy debut in his twenties, didn't hit hit his stride for about another decade, and then he arguably didn't climax for another three or four decades. It takes so much practice to get good at writing that the chances of getting in enough practice by age thirty are pretty slim. So for now I'll keep practicing and living, and eventually I'll have plenty to write about and the skills with which to write effectively.