Thinking about writing, episode 2
Jun. 20th, 2009 07:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ceriInsofar as health has let me be a professional anything the last fifteen years or so, I've been a professional writer, and I look forward to being one again as I get my life's act together again. I'm in the midst of a sea change about what I want to write, and having some tough times putting it into practice. So I'm going to ramble. This is what someone halfway through her second million words and changing course sounds like.
Most of what I've written professionally is horror. I like horror. I think that when it's done well, it can be a humanizing thing: it takes interior experiences we share and makes them tangible for the characters. I've never been a vampire, for instance, but I've felt isolated, cut out of time and watching an increasingly incomprehensible world pass me by, and stuck dependent on something I loathe. Monsters, and other subjects of horror, affirm our interior lives: they say "These things you feel, they're so powerful and true that they can fill the universe." Naturalistic fiction says "These things you feel, no matter how intense they seem, are still just packed inside one little head." Both are true, really, but when you're suffering through isolation and alienation, that non-naturalistic honoring of what's inside us can be weirdly comforting and even encouraging. Good stories cross the gap between lives to point at things we share, no matter how different we are in other ways.
It's not true, by the way, that you can diagnose someone's mental health or even just general mental state from what they write. It's notoriously true how many great comedians are personally miserable, and there are a lot of very fine horror authors who are well-balanced people good to and for those they love and their surrounding communities.
It's just that right now I find myself hungering for stories of joy, of completion and reconciliation, of peace made, of good things happening. And sometimes it's awfully hard to find these kinds of things in stories that take the complexities and dark sides of life seriously. So I'm thinking that maybe I should be writing some of them myself.
Naturally, I have trans experiences on my mind a lot at the moment, and I'd like to write stories that draw on them. But I also have a respect for the limits of my knowledge and clues, or at least I try to, and in any event, there are happy endings of other sorts that I'm also interested in. In every case, it's remarkable to me just how really hard it is to work out satisfying good conclusions to interesting challenges in the lives of interesting people.
(It's occurred to me as I write this post that this subject is one to discuss with my counselor, and I've added it to the list of things to bring up in future sessions.)
I just find myself with a very strong feeling that this is a challenge I want to take up: to see what I can do to imagine some better worlds, and some redemption and progress within ones that aren't necessarily better, and to convey them well to readers.
Most of what I've written professionally is horror. I like horror. I think that when it's done well, it can be a humanizing thing: it takes interior experiences we share and makes them tangible for the characters. I've never been a vampire, for instance, but I've felt isolated, cut out of time and watching an increasingly incomprehensible world pass me by, and stuck dependent on something I loathe. Monsters, and other subjects of horror, affirm our interior lives: they say "These things you feel, they're so powerful and true that they can fill the universe." Naturalistic fiction says "These things you feel, no matter how intense they seem, are still just packed inside one little head." Both are true, really, but when you're suffering through isolation and alienation, that non-naturalistic honoring of what's inside us can be weirdly comforting and even encouraging. Good stories cross the gap between lives to point at things we share, no matter how different we are in other ways.
It's not true, by the way, that you can diagnose someone's mental health or even just general mental state from what they write. It's notoriously true how many great comedians are personally miserable, and there are a lot of very fine horror authors who are well-balanced people good to and for those they love and their surrounding communities.
It's just that right now I find myself hungering for stories of joy, of completion and reconciliation, of peace made, of good things happening. And sometimes it's awfully hard to find these kinds of things in stories that take the complexities and dark sides of life seriously. So I'm thinking that maybe I should be writing some of them myself.
Naturally, I have trans experiences on my mind a lot at the moment, and I'd like to write stories that draw on them. But I also have a respect for the limits of my knowledge and clues, or at least I try to, and in any event, there are happy endings of other sorts that I'm also interested in. In every case, it's remarkable to me just how really hard it is to work out satisfying good conclusions to interesting challenges in the lives of interesting people.
(It's occurred to me as I write this post that this subject is one to discuss with my counselor, and I've added it to the list of things to bring up in future sessions.)
I just find myself with a very strong feeling that this is a challenge I want to take up: to see what I can do to imagine some better worlds, and some redemption and progress within ones that aren't necessarily better, and to convey them well to readers.
no subject
Date: 2009-06-20 10:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-06-20 11:01 pm (UTC)Seriously, though, the reinforcement so prompt-like is helpful.