incoming: bummer post about the inevitable inferiority complex of the fantasy writer. I read The Sentence by Louise Erdrich and Obit by Victoria Chang in quick succession and I’ve been accosted by the fact that I’m a genre hack for the entire two weeks since.
Thesis statement: Reading important things terrifies me.
I’ve never grown up, stylistically. There’s an assumption that, as a writer, if you want to say anything true and important and beautiful, you say it in a confusing, startling, sideways way. It’s most obvious in poetry; I’m reading a book of poems that frustrates and bores me, and every once in a while I check out the reviews which rave over its use of language, its deep emotionality, the intensity of its grief (it’s a book of mourning poems), and I wonder what I’m not getting. It’s won two or three awards. It’s art; it’s important, partially because it’s not easy. All the artistic world consists of anymore, after all, is Marvel blockbusters. Anything more complex than that is important for holding the line.
I’m trying not to sound bitter. I know what my more self-important, reactive response is going to be: that art and storytelling and poetry aren’t nearly so cut and dry, that, like so many other things, they exist on a spectrum, or, even better, a color wheel. Writing – or storytelling in general – is a beautiful, constantly shifting, world-sized mass of shades, with one particular shade for every individual who’s ever lived, their one perfect story that one imperfect writer has written for them without ever knowing it. As a storyteller, I’m not beholden to buck or follow trends that anyone presents to me, Hollywood or anti-Hollywood. I can choose a secret, third way, which always exists as an option.
But there were three separate times, in the paragraph above, where I fought over whether to contract a verb or not. Whether the words sounded lovelier, more true, more beautiful as “are not” or if they were more real and honest written out as “aren’t.” There’s a binary there, as much as I don’t want to admit to binaries. Real or beautiful. Honest or better-than-honest. Are not or aren’t. One or the other changes everything.
What does it say about me that I think a contraction is realer or more honest? In this choice, I can be read as much as the words can be, I’m as open to interpretation as the contraction or lack thereof. Do I read as cheap and unartistic, unwilling to expend the effort of being difficult and beautiful? Am I lazy or spare? Am I trying hard enough? Am I abandoning art to the cheap and the easy? Can I say without shame that I like plain straightforwardness, that I’m more moved by it, or does that betray something flawed and ugly in me?
It doesn’t matter. Nothing else matters more.
I’m spiraling over a single paragraph of prose poetry: I think it’s emotional and raw but at the expense of anything that makes poetry readable to me. What kind of reader does that make me? I can’t stop asking questions, backing myself into a corner, interrogating myself under a hot lamp until I’ve ripped every shred of ego out of me that might let me defend myself. I need to break myself down until I admit that I’m a hack and an artless shill. If I know that about me, no one can surprise me with it. There is, at least, a little dignity in knowing that I’m at the bottom of the barrel.
Art shouldn’t be comfortable. Art shouldn’t be easy. Art should be tangled and thick, art should hurt you, like running straight through a hedge maze because taking the path is intellectual death. I can’t stop reading these essays and blog posts that say what art should be, telling me that because my stories don’t exist in their one particular paradigm of Art That Matters, my stories are not art for readers but the written equivalent of nutritionally empty candy for a numbed and dumbed audience of consumers. Is it really such an intellectual, artistic failing in me that I like taking the path sometimes, or am I not taking the walk as seriously as it deserves? Why shouldn’t I build a path if I like paths? Sometimes I like struggling through underbrush in a forest, because that’s where the struggle belongs, but if I’m in a maze, it seems at least forgivable, if incorrect, that I want the path.
It’s not forgivable. I have to forgive myself anyway or I’ll never stop spiraling.
Once I wrote a poem, and, at the risk of self-aggrandizing, the first stanza ended with a line that an angel must have delivered to me on a platter that was something more creative and incisive and specific than silver: “This is the only tightrope worth falling from.” I’ve never written a line that more felt like it came from the untangleable heap of spaghetti that comprises my soul. I meant the line to refer to something that was worth the agony of keeping myself suspended directly in the middle of control over it, but, of course, when I reread my own poem, it meant the opposite. It defined the one thing for which it’s acceptable, even necessary, to forego moderation. I thought I’d told myself never dare the fall, but what I really wanted was the opposite.
I do: I do want to let myself fall, but I’m terrified of the crowd on the other side. They would never be able to catch me, anyway, but I’m still scared of them. I’m afraid they’re the only crowd there is.
The love I have for the stories I tell is unfathomable, the love I have for storytelling itself is bigger than the Mississippi, you could see it from Mars if you wanted to, but what are you supposed to do when there are so many ways to do what you love wrong? There are so many ways to be unmeaningful, to take a lazy way, to clear a smooth path. I don’t know what it means that I like the smooth path, that simple words and concrete images and straightforward plots are what I’m drawn to and where I find the most meaning. Poets and writers can string twelve disparate images in a row, startling and odd and novel and beautiful, and I’m cold to whatever it is they’re not saying outright. I don’t want to be. I want to be an artist with cigarette pants and thrift store glasses; I don’t want to be broad and obvious, ugly and uncreative.
I am, though. “Now say something beautiful and true,” the Tweet meme goes, and I know I can do half. I can be honest (though whether ‘honest’ is an exact match for ‘true’ in this Tweet is unknown to me, so maybe I can manage 1/3 of the assignment). I’m terrified that it won’t be enough. But if it’s a tightrope for me, when it’s two cakes to so many other better and more important writers, I know which side I’ll be falling off of, for better or for worse.
I’m going to finish the book of poetry that I am not moved by, because reading things I don’t enjoy will have as much impact on how I write as reading things I love. No read word is wasted. The struggle will be in deciding what to do with the shame and guilt that I don’t appreciate the poems the way I wish I could.
There’s no concluding paragraph to this essay because I haven’t figured it out yet. Failing grade. Retake the class. Come back with better reading comprehension. Stop taking a sick, defensive pride in your secret third way, which, how’s that working out for you, by the bye? Pretty good when you turn your brain off and get three thousand words into your NaNo WIP but a lot worse when you come up for air? Shocking. No wonder you couldn’t finish Ulysses.
It’s not like this was the first time I’ve had these thoughts. I’ve had them ever since I realized that some novels were Important and some were Not, and that my favorites and my least favorites didn’t always align neatly with those two options. I’ve read plenty of things about the value of fantasy and I’ve gotten advice on the subject. My shelf of very-favorite books don’t include books widely considered to be of great import: it’s Every Heart a Doorway and The Penderwicks, it’s Annihilation and the Tarot Sequence and the Queen’s Thief. It’s Fruits Basket and Happenstance Found and Howl’s Moving Castle (All right, HMC and TQT has their own cult followings, Fruits Basket is massively popular, and Annihilation got a movie, those aren’t good examples. You get what I mean.)
I don’t need advice or comfort. The idea of getting told It’s okay that you write fantasy, mindless escapism has its place, too! makes my heart, soul, mind, and body cringe themselves inside out. That’s exactly what I’m afraid of! I don’t want to be mindless escapism. I like mindless escapism from time to time, I rewatch Thor: Ragnarok biweekly probably, but that’s not what I want. I want that secret third way, the way I want my writing itself to be plain, straightforward, suited to the story and the character, never difficult for difficulty’s sake, while also wanting it to be beautiful, memorable, technically excellent, an example of thoughtful, mindful craft. I want to write about worlds and characters not based on any one real-life parallel, big, weird, unfamiliar worlds that don’t serve as the setting for a parable or metaphor, and I still want people to be moved by the characters in those worlds, to feel encouraged and challenged and entertained by something they can take into their real lives.
I want to have my two cakes and eat them both. I don’t want to have to choose. But sometimes I just get afraid that I’ll have to choose anyway, and that everyone will see and know when I choose wrong. Maybe I won’t get read if I fall off the Ulysses side of the tightrope, but no one will say that I’m contributing to the death of art as we know it, the way they will if I fall off the Thor side.
But I want to fall. I’m tired of feeling so afraid of where I might land and who may or may not be there when I hit the ground.
Random Pattern Generator 