My baby is nearly two, all of my parent friends now have two-ish year olds, and the conversation has turned from nap schedules to next babies. The main question on the table seems to be: “if we don’t have a second child, will being an only child be ok for my first kid?”
Due to all this will they/won’t they sibling chatter, I’ve been thinking about growing up mostly by myself. I remember feeling lonely a lot of the time. My sister and brother are significantly older than me, sixteen and eighteen years respectively. When they came home to visit, it was a fantastical reprieve filled with fun and games and something called Madalyn Baseball1. When they returned to their young adult lives in the great elsewhere, a cloud of solitude descended onto my days.
One time after my siblings left I went through a particularly bad bout of only child depression. Then we rented That Thing You Do. I loved that movie so freaking much. It pulled me out of my loneliness. I watched it over and over and over. Imagined that Tom Hanks told me what sunglasses to wear. That’s the first time I really remember escaping into a movie. And it was just a gateway film. Next came Freaks and Geeks, Pirates of the Caribbean, October Sky. Oh god, October Sky. I wanted that movie to be real so bad I started learning physics. I went to space camp. Twice. My mom came into my bedroom once and saw me making a collage of black and white stills from October Sky and I remember even then, understanding that her reaction to that was like, “Oh WOW. That’s uh…wow. That’s very artistic. Are you ok?”
Then the movie would end, the tv would turn off, I’d re-read a book so many times I couldn’t fully escape into it anymore. And I was left in the harsh reality of my own perfectly nice but lonely house once again. No matter how often I imagined it, I couldn’t actually eat a feast of acorns in Redwall, couldn’t actually join the Weasley family in Harry Potter, couldn’t actually kiss Edward in Twilight…my life was not lived in glorious plot arcs. It would physically hurt sometimes, crashing back to the understanding that my biggest problems were getting the right pants at The Gap and not saying anything too stupid in front of Andrew C (a crush that went fully unrequited from 4th-12th grade).
Stories are so good; I often found real life disappointing.
I think I wanted to become a television writer because I liked escaping into these stories so much. Maybe if I could write the story, then I could escape that feeling where my own life was a grayer version of what I saw on the screen.
It kind of worked! Not in the way I thought, though. By uncovering how a story is made, I see plainly why stories are exciting and life usually isn’t. Personally, I would not want to be facing high-stakes obstacles every five pages or so. And also, I grew up. Made a real life that I love, and have filled it with interesting characters, ahem, people.
But now my ‘ole “life isn’t as good as the movies” issue is coming back to haunt me. Same problem, new place. I’ve transferred my feeling of life inadequacy to story-choice inadequacy.
When you have an idea for a creative project- movie, novel, tv pilot, anything- there’s the idea of it before you get started. And then you start writing, and because you’re actually fleshing it out, making it real, it doesn’t quite add up to the idea that you had in your head.
I have my novel idea, most of it anyways. I’ve written a decent amount of a first draft! But it’s just…it’s not really what I think it is when I imagine it. It seems so much more magical and sprawling in my head. But the mechanics of the actual story bring me back down to Earth every time I work on it.
I’m vacillating- should I scrap it all together and write something totally different?
It’s a really tough call. You really need to love the novel you’re working on. On the other hand, every project goes through this phase. Because guess what? Just like real life, nothing that’s real is as good as an idea. Even, ironically, the tv shows and movies that I escaped into the idea of as a kid. They all had writers who I’m sure felt this way about their movies at some point in the process.
That’s really the gist of it, the thing I would tell my childhood-self who was lonely, what I would tell my now-writer-self who can’t settle on her project, and to the first time parents imagining having or not having that second baby and what their first kid’s life will look like as a result— nothing real is as good as an idea in theory.
But you can’t kiss an idea. You can’t bury your nose in an idea’s sweet little neck and have it giggle back at you. You can’t publish a book that isn’t written. You’re going to have to make a choice, to write a story with boring bits and sections of exposition that yes, you will bury as best you can but will have to be there, because that is what stories require to exist.
Raising children has boring bits. Raising a story has boring bits. Even those stories I loved escaping into as a kid- I bet I could go back now and pick apart all their boringest bits.
I still love escaping into a really good book or movie. It’s one of my favorite things to do. But I vastly prefer my own real life now. People, it turns out, are very interesting. If I go about my day with the idea that people are very interesting, especially the ones I love who love me back, it’s easy to escape into my own life.
As far as I’m concerned, Madalyn Baseball is regular baseball except third base is a human who can run away when you try to tag them. My family claims that Madalyn Baseball is “baseball but where Madalyn constantly changes the rules so that she wins.”
Hi Madalyn! I love this: "But you can’t kiss an idea. You can’t bury your nose in an idea’s sweet little neck and have it giggle back at you. You can’t publish a book that isn’t written." I occasionally had similar debates about whether to have more children. I ended up with one amazing child and 5 books (so far). :)