I had a writing afternoon on Friday, which means that I stole a few hours from my day-job as Mother and went to the coffee shop to write.
I had an iced coffee and my iPod, and was listening over and over again to the song that helps me focus, hopeful that I could produce something. I’m working on the last chapter of a book, you see, a book that Intends to be really really great but in all likelihood will Fall Short. It is Falling Short right now, let me tell you. Falling Fast, falling Hard, and falling Short in ways that I find Discouraging and Intimidating and Sad.
And while I’m sitting there, who should come in but our friend Ben. Yes, there he was, quite suddenly, innocently ordering something delicious, planning to get some work done.
Now let me tell you that I love to write. Love it. There is Very Little Else that I would rather do than write and, very often, when I am doing other things, I am thinking about writing anyway. Not that it does me any good, but there you are. I love to write. And yet, without fail, when I am sitting down to write, actually in the act of writing, there is nothing else I try to avoid like writing. Honest. I will pick at my toes or check my hair for split ends or study with great interest the pattern of wood on the table top. I avoid it like I avoided the mean girl in seventh grade.
And then on Friday– voila!– there was Ben. And so we chatted. Yes we did. There he was to rescue me from my idiocy, my muselessness, the dull and shallow crescent of my brain.
But he didn’t want to interrupt me. Blast it all, he wanted to get some work done. He was trying to be my friend and he succeeded. I think I managed to write four paragraphs, maybe five, and that’s not bad considering I haven’t visited my book for several weeks now. That’s not at all bad considering I’m at the very difficult end of the story, where one must tread oh so lightly. So very very lightly. And they are very bad paragraphs, but what can you do?
Somehow, in the midst of his not speaking to me, Ben managed to confess that he is reading The Time Traveller’s Wife.
“Oh,” I shuddered.
“What?” says Ben with a grin, “Don’t you like Claire?” (Claire, of course, being the time-traveller’s wife).
Well, I don’t think Ben can realize how grateful he should be that I couldn’t remember the details, but I told him in no uncertain terms that I really didn’t like that book. Don’t like it. Hate it, in fact. It is tripe. Drivel. Overly sentimentalized mushy nonsense. Unbelievable, in the truest sense of the word.
I’m not talking about time-travel here. Heck, I would love to be able to time-travel. I have tremendous respect for the author of that book in terms of the risk she was taking: her premise is Most Brave. A guy is born with the tragic defect of being able to travel through time. But she doesn’t pull a Jules Vernian “I-can-control-this-with-just-a-flick-of-these-few-levers” deal. No, his time-travelling happens to him; he is victimized by it. Time travel, in this book, is a real bummer, a chronic and sudden annoyance, to say the least.
No, that’s not the problem with this book. She carries that out fairly well. The problem — and I am closing in on it here just now, having shut it out of my consciousness for a Long Time — is that she is trying, too, to tell a love story, and her love story Just Doesn’t Cut It For Me.
And I love a good love story.
But when you are telling a love story, Don’t make it be about sex. Just don’t. Because although sex is a wonderful thing, and created by God, and fascinating and varied and Very Very Alive, it has also become the way — the Only Way– that Hollywood and television writers and, sadly, writers who should know better demonstrate that two people love each other. And sex, sadly, doesn’t mean you love someone. It should, but it doesn’t. You only have to watch one of these Hollywood gems or a little t.v. to find that out for yourself.
Oh, I can hear it now: But Rebecca, their love story (and by this I mean the love story of Claire and her time-traveller) wasn’t only about sex. My answer: Fine. I’m sure you’re right. But the rest of the story wasn’t strong enough to support that sagging burden. It was weak, it was trite, it was rushed to the end. It wanted to be clever but it lost the scent. It wanted to be brilliant, but it wanted more than that to move me, to make me cry. And crying, although it really really feels good, is Inadequate.
I didn’t cry. Not because I was unwilling, but because the writer had asked me too many times before the crying part to be an idiot. I’ll be an idiot on my own terms, thank you very much.
So Ben said I should blog about the books I think people should read, and that was where this post was supposed to go. But look! My, I write a lot. I’ll have to save Ben’s idea for another time.
Meanwhile, I feel better having vented about a book I scarcely remember. And I’m guessing that the writer of The Time-Traveller’s Wife didn’t have a friend like Ben who knew how to hold his tongue in the coffee shop so that she could eek out a few marginally decent paragraphs. No. She probably got distracted a lot, and talked too much, and didn’t attend to her work.
I hope that’s all the difference.
