The ‘Lady Bird’ Solution To The Changing Context of My Novel


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

The more I think about it, the more I realize the movie Lady Bird provides a solution to the conundrum I find myself in — how do I write a novel I can sell after the era that conceived it is over?

On the face of it, it’s a serious, existential problem.

The energy to get this far with the novel came directly from my white hot rage against the Trump Administration. And what’s wild is now that Trump is out of power, the Trumplandia era now seems surreal, but very much the past. I am acutely aware that novels, in general, need to be “timeless” so they have more shelf life.

But this novel I’ve been working on for about three years now was always meant to be very “of the moment” and of the zeitgeist. Now, of course, I’m going to try to sell it during the Biden Era and not Trumplandia. Yet the movie Lady Bird is set in a very specific moment — the early 90s — and it manages to pull that off in a timeless fashion.

As such, that’s how I’m going to fix this problem.

I’m going full speed ahead — unless something fucks those plans up — and just write the damn thing. But write in such a way that I lean into character development and entertainment — in short, write a great story — to such an extent that people will forgive me if I wallow in things that now seem completely moot.

And, let me be clear, when I saw “wallow,” all I mean is had Trumplandia at the forefront of my mind as I mapped out the structure of the novel. Hopefully, it will, unto itself, just be a great story and you can read it as that without realize being all that aware of how enraged I was by Trumplandia as I developing and writing it.

Really, the point now is to write something, anything. I hopefully can read a lot and write a lot starting in the next few days. But I have to admit that I might have to break down and do some character studies of my major characters so I have a “legend” to reference as I write.

We’ll see.

Author: Shelton Bumgarner

I am the Editor & Publisher of The Trumplandia Report

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