Writer's Block

Oh-my-friggin'-god...I'm going to call myself an artist.

Because that's what I am. I'm an artist. I have a Bachelor of Fine Arts. Not just Arts - Fine Arts. I'm a fine artist. Except, I've abandoned my art because I've become a little yellow scaredy pussy cat. "Are you sure this was written at the graduate level?" she asked. "It feels like undergraduate writing to me." And my first (and current) inclination was to say, "Where do you draw that line?" Because I knew a good deal of undergraduate writers whose art blew the socks off of some graduate writing. Off of most graduate writing, really.

It wasn't about my writing, though. It was about putting me in a class of writers because I enjoyed playing with that red-headed step-sister we all know as "genre writing."

Fucking literati.

It's a problem with the writing programs in general. They are brainwashing writers into using the same dull, safe techniques in order to be considered "literature" as opposed to "mainstream" or the dreaded "formulaic." Um, I really hate (love) to tell them this, but when I've cracked open the past few years' worth of the Best American Short Stories I can't help but feel all of the stories are so...FORMULAIC. I feel like I can open any page and read it, then skip ahead to a totally different, random story and it's as though I never stopped reading the first story. They all want to talk about the psychology of their mundane lives, or the pain of trauma A, or the details of trauma B...blah blah blah!

I love trauma. My characters are always cliched-ly abused or perverted in some way. I know I fall into this habit, as well. But isn't there an interesting way to weave it into a captivating story anymore? Are we past the point where we want adventure, or entertainment, or fantasy when we read? Are we past the point where those things can mean intelligence instead of immaturity? In the world of graduate writing programs, the answer is "yes." The lady from the second paragraph, the one who had to make a distinction between graduate and undergraduate writing, said that Harry Potter isn't deep or complex. Pardon? This, of course, led to my infamous retort to her that made all of my classmates go "OHHHHHH." I don't even remember what I said because I was so angry. After this conversation, she took every advantage to make me feel like I didn't deserve to be there anymore. Which, for a long time, I began to believe.

You wanna know the formula for current literature?

Small town + trauma + feelings = literature.

Slice-of-life. Ugh. Double Ugh. I'm fully aware this may be my preference for epics coming through, but I know I've read exciting slice-of-life fiction and this current crop of writing ain't exciting. Earlier in one of my posts I talked about the Virgin Suicides, which follows the formula and is still riveting.

Small Ohio town + multiple suicides + narrator's feelings = fuckin' awesome.

I think here it is the absolute obsession of the narrator with what went wrong, and the fact that we are removed from the actual feelings of the sisters, that make this story so engaging. We won't ever really know why the girls committed suicide, we can only speculate, we are only given clues. The story isn't told from the "I" point of view. The boys in town are telling their obsessive "we" point of view.

I feel like every current short story is "I." Because that's the narrator who can tell his own feelings best.

Maybe I can't just talk about feelings. Maybe I have to be cryptic. Maybe I feel all icky and maybe I feel like it's telling instead of showing and maybe I feel like that goes against the grain of good storytelling and maybe I feel like people can't understand someone else's feelings unless they're shown where those feelings came from in the greatest detail possible. Current short stories...all they do is give the least amount of detail possible to set a scene so it can showcase all the FEELINGS the characters are experiencing.

And so, for a long time, I tried to write about feelings. I tried to mimic those stories in the Best American Short Stories, because a book called about editing told me I should do this. Well, what it tells writers is that a writer should follow all of the advice these two editors (who wrote the editing book) give in the book if you ever want to be published, and then they go on to give examples of writers who did what they were told and got published, and writers who did not do what they were told and got nothing. And then...AND THEN...they take excerpts from The Great Gatsby and re-write them using their advised techniques to show how the book could have been better.

To show how The Great Gatsby could have been better. With their help.

And you know what? After they laid their hands on those books and stories and the Great Gatsby each piece of writing lost all of its character.

But I thought, what if this is what I have to do to get published? What if this is what I have to do to be called "serious?" What if I have to abandon my own voice in order to have any voice at all? I was scared.

No fucking more.

I will do as I please.

Watership Down reminded me of what I love to read and why I love to read it. I tease my best friend about her romance novels, but in the end I understand what they give her. What did a book about rabbits give me? Adventure and suspense and characters I gave a damn about. They, in effect, ceased to be rabbits and by that point the story is all that mattered and it was a BRILLIANT story. So is Harry Potter. So is The Dark Tower series. The rabbits are a metaphor for survival, war, and brotherly love. Harry Potter is a symbol of the abilities of everyday human beings who aren't really all that "special" but are clever and heroic. Roland is an obsessive, abused, smart man who feels he must save the world and feels he must personally lose everything to do so. How are those things less artistic than: Watership Down vs. Animal Farm; Harry Potter vs. The Old Man and the Sea;
The Dark Tower vs. The Grapes of Wrath?

But all of the second entries in each comparison are considered "literature." NO FUCKING MORE. I think there is some kind of unspoken rule that if you enjoy the book, grotesquely enjoy it, it is not allowed to be literature. I have decided not to care. I have decided that if I enjoy reading about an 800,000-year-old cybernetic bear who is taken down by a gunslinger and his white, heroin-addicted sidekick and in turn his black amputee lover, I will enjoy writing said sort of story and, therefore, others will enjoy reading my story. Will these stories win me a Pulitzer Prize? Nope, not in a million years. Is that what I'm giving up to save the world? I believe so. I believe art cannot be homogenized anymore. Something must be done. It looks like I'm going to be the one who does it.

Longest. Post. Ever. (not really)