I’m officially done with Part 1 of the new novel — 50,000 words, about 40% of the book.
As I explained in Entry No. 2, I polish off each part as I go, so this first part is as clean as I can get it before my editor has a look. At this point, I’ve locked in the pace for the novel, as well as the main characters, twists and turns, in what is amounting to a big, epic thriller. (Jun spent a week diagramming all the plot threads so far and it looks like Mulder and Skully tracking a serial killer.)
I’d say it’s the best thing I’ve ever written, which I truly believe, but no one cares about a great takeoff if you can’t stick the landing, so we’ve got a long way to go in this flight.
I’m lazying for a couple days at the farm to clear my head, then onto Part 2 this week.
But let’s dive into something deeper…
In my little notebook of ideas that I keep by my bed, there’s one phrase that caught my attention: “Good at life.”
I don’t remember writing it. I’m not sure where it came from. But it stayed with me this week, popping up occasionally, like a shiny coin waiting to be spent.
What does it mean to be Good at Life?
We can all name someone we know who fits this description — who never seem affected by the chaos of moods, who succeed in everything they do, who sail through the ups and downs without accumulating baggage or residue, who consistently seem at the nexus of good luck and opportunity. (My ex-trainer Dave was one of these — moved to New York, found a gorgeous and brilliant girlfriend, raised a dog, got married, had a kid, all right on schedule, as if Manhattan was Mayberry Falls. When everyone was scrambling to secure COVID vaccine appointments, he gave up and shrugged: “It’ll happen.” A day later, someone at the gym was a nurse who happened to have an extra dose in her purse: “Do you want it?” she asked him.)
We all know these people. The Human Golden Retrievers who always land on their feet, who walk around with a perma-smile and sleep without dreaming.
They were the first kind of boys I fell in love with — the happy, confident, smooth-walking inverse to my shy, anxious, stumbling young self. (Usually, it was an athlete whose inner dialogue could be reduced to: “See ball. Kick ball.”) My first weighty crush was a boy named Noah, who acted as if high school was the greatest place in the world. Always smiling, always happy, no sign that puberty had made a wreckage of him like the rest of us. He wore muscle shirts even though he didn’t really have muscles. He had such swagger that he had his own posse of good-looking sidekicks. So many girls trailed after him that he had his own cheering section at basketball games, even if he wasn’t the star player. I used to skip Calculus to hang out with him at lunch — me, who never skipped class in my life, let alone an AP one. Did I really like him? Or did I just want to be him?
All week, I’ve tried to figure out what made him special at that point in my life. What made all the Noahs of the world different at some cellular level, in the way they were made. Like there’s some deep secret to being Good at Life, where every day is a fresh, clean start, no shadows lurking behind.
I wanted to put it into words.
This was the best I could do.
Good at life: living without any fear of physical or emotional suffering
That’s it, isn’t it? The idea that there’s nothing that can take you down, no kind of pain that’s too much for you, in body, mind, or spirit, so you just live life with your guard down and your heart open and assume that you can handle anything that comes.
This is not me.
The fear of pain, the resistance to it, is often at the center of my existence, which is why writing is my safe space and my paradise and the place I will always be free and ecstatic, because it is here, facing the blank page, where I have no fear. I am a fearless writer because I am not a fearless human. Since I was a kid, I had sweaty palms and hiked shoulders and a dodgy SI joint and ground my teeth so badly that I had to wear mouth guards at night. Tension, a visceral stiffness of fear, dominated every second of my existence. (That ex-trainer Dave, Mr. Golden Retriever, said my body seemed to be stuck in the position of a “startled cat.”)
Time has helped me grow past most of this fear. Along with a relentless dedication to athletics and the gym, 20 years late, pushing my limits and resilience so that fear has become a familiar and unthreatening foe. I’m more myself now. Not quite a Golden Retriever… but more like a French bulldog that’s made peace with his bad breeding.
But if I’m secretly craving to be Good at Life, that made me wonder — why don’t we value characters like this? Why does every great hero have to have some woeful hamartia, as the Greeks called it: a tragic flaw at the center of their being, a wound that needs to be healed? Because if I think back to characters I love most… it’s often ones that don’t have this inner life at all!
As a child, I was obsessed with Amelia Bedelia, the disastrously incompetent maid in the books by Peggy Parish, who is certainly not good at anything, other than living life with relentless optimism and joy. Despite all her mistakes as a housekeeper, misinterpreting instructions literally again and again — she sketches drapes when told to “draw” them; tucks eggs into sheets of batter when told to “fold” them — Amelia never learns. She never changes. She never grows. But she is always herself, always pleased to be alive, always within reach of a happy ending. Quintessentially Good at Life.
Auntie Mame, in the books by Patrick Dennis, was like a surrogate parent. (The School for Good and Evil is chock-full of Mame references). Like Amelia Bedelia, Mame is a well-meaning but utterly incorrigible mess of good-intentions, who bumbles through life, wreaking havoc on everyone’s equanimity but her own. She also never changes or grows and remains thoroughly herself. Life and the world bend to her will and never the reverse.
Jack Reacher and James Bond might be the male equivalents, who seem immune to fear and as a result, feel superhuman to us lowly, fear-driven lemmings.
As the world grows more uncertain and anxiously digital, I wonder if characters like this grow more and more appealing. Sports-based romance novels are hot again, where the boys are horny puppies, with the depth and transparency of saran wrap, and kicking a ball is treated with the reverence of rocket science. Edward Cullen is out, with his brooding intensity; Travis Kelce is in, who can’t spell squirrel and tweets about what he ate at Olive Garden.
But in our national emotional meltdown, which started in COVID and shows no sign of ending, maybe it’s teenagers most who need a hero that’s Good at Life.
It’s one of my goals in my new book — to create a hero that you love and trust because he lives life able to surmount fear rather than to surrender to it. But how to make that compelling? And realistic?
Solution: write in immersive, first-person, present tense, which is the closest POV to replicating the pace and tenor of every-day life. Then, up the pace, so it’s breathless, aggressive, And it’s in that breathless, aggressive pace, give the character ALL that he can handle. A gauntlet course of obstacles that a Bond or Reacher might face. The ultimate pressure-cooker of time and stakes. Only in this case, the kid isn’t a pumped-up machine, like Bond or Reacher. He’s adolescent Soman, the closest I’ve ever written to myself if I could do my teenager years all over again. Only in this alternative Soman universe, there’s no time to live in perpetual self-doubt and tension like the first time around. The world is on fire. Lives are at stake. Things have to be done.
In other words: See Ball. Kick Ball.
Let’s goooooooo!
Do you consider yourself Good at Life? Does every character need to have some defining flaw?
Oh, and if Noah is reading this – the muscle shirts looked good! I swear.
Until next week…
Awesome topic!! I personally think NOBODY is good at life. I think some people may try to act like they are and act like everything is all rainbows and unicorns, but truly... none of us are "good at life". We're all just humans trying to figure out how to survive in this crazy world. And while practice does help you grow, it never makes you perfect.
On behalf of teenagers, we are quite possibly the last people that need a 'good at life' main character. I think in our hyper-glamorized social media world, books are one of the best places to find a relatable, flawed character. For me, the inherent humanity in literature is what allows us to connect to characters from times and universes vastly different from ours (though hearing a teenage boy call Oedipus "so relatable" was a low point in my education). I imagine most golden retrievers have anxieties and insecurities of their own, and first-person narration of the thoughts behind the mask really humanizes those characters. The incredible job you did with that for SGE is what pulled me into that series so long ago. I'm so excited for the new book, and so confident it will be amazing!