Rich Kid Books

You know the ones I'm talking about.
Clique. Private. The A-List.
We're all familiar with them, or at least their trope.
A bunch of rich, beautiful people go to an esteemed private school. This private school is esteemed, destined to lead its attendees to the Ivy League and into a glamorous life. The main character is estranged, having arrived at this school out of sheer coincidence or scholarship, and finds herself enchanted and horrified by her peers, particularly THE Group.
There all always variations of this group, but their members always embody these characteristics: Wealthy, gorgeous, ambitious, and smart. The alpha (There is always one) is the epitome of these traits to her peers; to them, she is unstoppable and superior. Nobody can top her. The main character inevitably finds herself wanting to be a part of this group. She wants to prove to them that however badly they might regard or treat her, she is not inferior. Eventually, with persistence and manuevering, they get in, as the plot goes.
I hate these books.
But I still read them.
I have a long history with reading these kinds of books. (The Clique series comes to mind easily) but for a long time, I'd abandoned these almost-political books in high school. That was when I started reading about real people with real lives, and if not, then those about urban fantasies. That changed this year, mostly by accident.
I had owned a copy of The A-List for some time now, but I hadn't actually read it until I was perusing through my bookshelf in winterbreak, bored and wanting something completely new to read. I noticed it, and with a chuckle, I started reading it. I found myself sucked in, not in admiration, but out of sheer disgust at what these people are.
They are wealthy and self-assured in their wealth and beauty through expensive cosmetics and lucky birth. They are arrogant because their wealth and status has assured them that they are important. They are ambitious and ruthless to keep it that way. These people have no qualms about doing whatever it takes to maintain the status quo.
It's easy for people born into these high-society bubbles to forget about the world around them. After all, it's undeniably hard to notice and act on the flaws of a society when its serving you well. At least for these people, the only thing standing in the way of their ambition and desires is their peers, not the faults in their stars. A Roman noble can easily say "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves, that we are underlings," because the stars of his birth have not faulted him the way they fault so many others through disease and death and poverty.
There will always be an avid audience for these books because there will always be people who want to be like these people, however wrong and shaded they may be. Or rather, there will always be people who want what these people, despite their many faults, can hold on to.
Pride, and an ability to maintain it.
***This is my shaded way of highly highly recommending The Disreputable History of Frankie-Laudau Bank as a great book to read that intelligently subverts this trope with a highly-intelligent, ambitious girl turned renegade that ends up fighting against these ideals through clever pranks.

Writing a novel

Writing a novel is annoyingly hard, not because its hard to write, but its hard to write what you want to write.
Cliche, stupid things bore me. Most first drafts are made up of stupid, cliche things. Therefore, my first draft is filled with cliche, stupid things, and maybe that's why I'm bored with it.
(This is implying that I have a real first draft, that somewhere on my computer there is a 50,000 word sucky narrative. That's not the case. What is the case is that I have 50,000 words of scenes that I wanted to write and did even though in retrospect, they all suck. Plot-wise, 99% of it is useless, and rightly so.)
I still want to write a novel. I still want to write about those characters (albeit the very few) that have survived these tumultuous last few months and are actually complex and interesting. I still have those vivid ideas that pushed me to the keyboard in the first place, the ones brimming with possibility even now.
But I don't have a story. I realize this now as I sit down on Blogger and try to figure it out. Maybe I haven't done enough universe building, and that costs me. I hate outlines, but I suck at coming up with things as I go that are also funny and intelligent. (Another reason I can't do improv) I have to universe-build. I know I'm not going to have time to write in the next year or two though  (and probably weeks as soon as break is over) because of finals and school and ACT and doing-well-enough-to-go-to-a-good-college. I might have a legit excuse not to write fiction if I get in Honors Seminar in Non-Fiction Writing.
But I like fiction. I like making up a world that makes sense to me even in its wrongness and writing about things that are meaningful to me and the reader. I like making up and writing about characters that are complex but cool, crafting something out of the weird mess that is my life. I like making sense of my life through fiction. I'm just very bad at it.