How To Be A Failing Novelist, Part 2

Read Part 1

Live in a large gated community with guards and trucks. Some of the communities within the gated community have more gates. You rarely see anyone who doesn’t look like you. Analyze model homes with the same customizable options that are available to your neighbors. Analyze amenities. Get a house with an upstairs bonus room.

Live on the poorer side of the gated community, close to the bad entrance where there are no guards. All your friends and some people that aren’t your friends live in this gated community, but if they are a 20-minute walk away then they are too far.

Visit churches with your family and go to one with a pretty girl. You ask your parents if you can go to this church. They choose the church without the pretty girl.

Only think about yourself. You have a sister, but you wouldn’t know it by the way your life is going. Don’t ever write.

Walk across campus and ask a Christian kid with long bangs if he’ll go to a concert with you at a church. He says no because he’s going to see MxPx.

Listen to MxPx after your friend sees them. Stop listening to music that isn’t punk rock. I mean, pop punk. But Christian pop punk, like Slick Shoes, Value Pac, Ghoti Hook and Five Iron Frenzy.

Go see your neighbor Evan who sometimes plays basketball with you at the park. Go to his villa apartment and listen to the Beatles and Nirvana and Soundgarden and Limp Bizkit and Blink 182 and New Found Glory.

Think about girls and cars and ping-pong and punk rock and driving and play basketball video games on your computer.

Invest heavily in CDs. Listen to your CDs in a five disc changer. Buy new albums every weekend.

Lift up one side of your ping-pong table in the bonus room and practice against yourself while listening to new albums. Remove the liner notes from the album and try to find new bands.

Make whirring AOL sounds on your computer and join a chat room and write notes in the chat room and receive a picture from a girl in England and hang this picture on your bulletin board. Don’t ever write her back.

Go on a weekend trip with your church youth group and another church youth group that the pretty girl is in. Talk to people and realize she also goes to your school. Put on a nice polo shirt and see her outside her cabin. Say “would you like to do something sometime” and register her response as “no.” Walk away and try not to wear polo shirts again for a very long time.

Go to school and join honors English. Listen to a teacher with a 4-foot long beard who weighs a lot and moonlights as a medieval LARPer.

He brings a chainmail vest into class that he made himself. He tells you an inspirational story about how someone with an outside opinion may be able to help people who are too close to the situation.

Wonder if he could help you be a better ping-pong player?

Read Ivanhoe because the chainmail teacher makes you, not because it’s on any state-approved syllabus.

Listen to the chainmail teacher explain an elaborate notetaking system with multiple highlighter colors.

Never use highlighters again for the rest of your life.

Decide to get a job with your friend Warren who works at Burger King. Drive out of the gate of your neighborhood and go to the local shopping center, the one with a Kmart. Go to the Burger King located in the Kmart parking lot and fill out an application.

Read The Great Gatsby after Ivanhoe. The Great Gatsby instantly becomes your favorite book primarily because it’s not Ivanhoe.

Learn about Seinfeld from the girl sitting next to you. Start watching Seinfeld because of this girl and her friends. Gradually understand Newman jokes from the girl and her friends.

Return to Burger King for your interview. Dress in a tie, because your mom tells you to. Listen to everyone at school make fun of you for wearing a tie to your Burger King interview.

Start a journal. Write about how you watch Seinfeld. Write about how you try out for the tennis team, even though you’re better at ping-pong. Write about how you wish your school had a ping-pong team.

Beat your friend Warren in tennis tryouts. Quit tennis tryouts soon after.

Do a group project with the Christian kid with long bangs and a few of his friends. You have to build a catapult to launch a pumpkin across a football field. Create an 8-foot tall catapult and strap six garage door springs onto it in a friend’s garage in the nicer part of the gated community.

Read more Fitzgerald. Read This Side of Paradise. Read the book during class after finishing your work. Jot down every author mentioned to look up later. Become enamored with lines like: “Amory did not entirely agree with Tom’s sweeping damnation of American novelists and poets. He enjoyed both Vachel Lindsay and Booth Tarkington, and admired the conscientious, if slender, artistry of Edgar Lee Masters.”

Work with Warren at Burger King. Wear a black polo shirt that you bought at Kmart. Put fries in the fryer. Put frozen hamburgers on the rotating grill thing. Feel a slight pang of guilt when your manager catches you stealing chicken nuggets from the warming area.

Write stories that are bad imitations of Fitzgerald. Throw them away or claim you threw them away while writing an essay about how you failed as a novelist.

Haul the catapult to the school football field. Crank it back and shoot a pumpkin 60 yards, while your catapult disintegrates into shreds. Win the catapult contest. It only takes one shot.

Ask your Christian friend with bangs if he wants to go see MxPx. He says he doesn’t like MxPx anymore.

Help Warren clean the grease traps at Burger King. For some reason, you have to climb up to the roof. Sit down on the flat roof and gaze over the suburban skyline. See the Kmart and the parking lot and your gated community. And the stars. Pay attention to the stars.