I adore Kurt Vonnegut.
(As if you couldn't guess)
I wish he was my grandfather, or something of that nature. I really do believe that everything you need to know about life you could probably find in a Kurt Vonnegut novel, including the fact that it's always self-referential, and every character has a story, even if you haven't read it yet or never do.
Bearing this in mind, if I were to write a novel, I really haven't a clue what I'd write about. I think I would probably lose interest in my own plot a few months into the writing process, and I would spend all my time obsessively writing and re-writing what I had already done. Perhaps, a-la Kurt Vonnegut's 6th Rule-For-Writing-A-Short-Story ( Be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.) I'm a sadist. I always pluck my characters into difficult situations, leave them that way and end the story. The end. I always end up writing short stories.
There's one story I wrote, that was meant to be (and still could be) the first chapter of a novel. The main character is a young journalist who has recently experienced crippling heart break, with no idea why the love of his life, his girlfriend of two years, has left him. At the end of the eleven-page story, after probably being fired, plenty of wishful thinking, clumsily inspired false hope, a fruitless effort to look cool and one very loud fight cut off by an unsympathetic librarian, he finds out it's because the girl he loves has finally accepted that she wants to become a man, and that there is no way he's getting her back. But she's sitting there sobbing (this being the first time she has admitted it to anyone) and he's the only one that can be there for her, though he realizes that every cherished memory of their relationship was essentially a cover-up.
And that's it. The end.
I feel like there's no way I could live up to that level of twisted emotion in the rest of a novel.
-Ellana
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