23. Why Nat isn't writing enough

This entry isn't about France. It's about me. 

One of my friends here asked me what I was doing with my writing. Was I just writing my blog, or tapping out a deep, serious novel at the same time? I told him that for the most part I was just working on my blog. I have intentions to write stories, and from time to time I'll whip out a sonnet because I find the form easy to work with and inspiration for one comes along with some frequency. But the fiction writing hasn't materialized as much as I would want.

I'm going to point out several things that can act as reasons that I haven't banged out a three-hundred-page novel in the time we've been here, me with no job and few responsibilities beyond doing laundry and buying croissants in the morning. But I know that the real reason is that I haven't been writing enough. In a book I once read about wizards and dragons and suchlike, one of the characters remembers the words of her teacher: The secret to magic is magic. To be a mage you must be a mage. That transfers, I think, perfectly to writing, and it also echoes what my fiction writing professors said back in college.

So I'm not going to admit that the real reason I haven't been as prolific as Stephen King is because I don't write as much as him. Well, I guess I just did. BUT! What I would like to talk about are, I suppose, what you might call impediments to my process, or maybe just some thoughts on my process, and how that process might sometimes get in my way.

The most I've ever written on one single topic was the novel I started as my final project while I was getting my bachelor's degree. It was a humorous fantasy tale about a would-be adventurer who wanted the fame without the danger, yet got caught up in a plot wherein some magically-enlarged gecko ninjas had stolen the Map By Which the World Knows How to Look. It was a rollicking good time, with fun characters and allusions to Star Trek and role-playing games and I got to introduce a dragon the way I think dragons ought to be...and then about a hundred and fifty pages into it I realized that in order for this thing to be good and hang together as a well-thought-out narrative, I needed to go back and start over.

Because I didn't think the thing out. I had the barest bones of an idea when I started: Bort wanted to be an Adventurer (with a capital A), but was really a wimp. Not at all autobiographical at all. So he didn't know what was going to happen when he set out, he just started walking. So for the most part I merely went along with him, finding out what he ran into as he did. Tap tap tap on my keyboard. As things began to develop, I started making notes on Post-its and sticking them on my monitor. I wrote things like “Don't forget Edmund [Bort's magical sword] gets sleepy after using his powers” and “All Clawed Terrors look different to represent how their Tapestry snarl is different” and “Grymnelestrix's eyelids are like ironclad battleship hulls.” As I incorporated those notes I would take them down; nevertheless the rate at which I was sticking them far exceeded the rate at which I removed them.

And at some point I realized I needed to find out where this story was going, start planning for a climax so I could start moving the players around in a way so that when everything came together it would look natural and not like the Machina of some Deus. And that's when I realized that, for things to work, I needed to start over. I couldn't just shoe horn in a little exposition in Chapter One. No, King Berililinastis needed some drastic character rewriting, and the very nature of my Macguffin, the ancient magical map of the world that changed the world whenever you changed the map, needed some tweaking. And said tweaking would change the way the geckoes went about stealing it, which meant...well, you get the idea.

There may have been allusory, homage-ey, sort of things to some turtles
 that had figured prominently in my youth. Maybe.

That prospect daunted me, and so I put it off, and here we are years later and it sits in a file folder, untouched. Plus I'd graduated and the exterior force exerting its will upon me to continue producing had stopped. A similar thing happened to a play I wrote about characters that rebel against the Author and start telling other characters they aren't real. I got all the way to the climax with that one, and then just had no idea how to end it.

The lesson I should take away from that is that before I start writing I should know how it ends, or pretty dang close. Outlines. Character sketches. Flow charts of events and choices. I do that/did that when writing papers for classes, why shouldn't I do it when writing fiction?

I mean, how hard is this?

Well, the thing that kept me writing about Bort and his adventures was that I wanted to find out what was going to happen. Half, if not most of the fun was discovering how the story was unfolding, watching it spring from my fingers (and, I suppose, my brain) like a movie. If I'd already story-boarded it out, there'd be no surprise. I would sit down to write, and instead of, “Okay, how are Bort and Sini going to get away from the goblins?” it would be, “Let's see, now we're at the part where I connect Plot Point 4A (Bort/Sini on the slopes of the Tumbledown Mountains) to 4B (Introduction of Dwarven Underhighway), and incorporate a battle scene, discussion of looting corpses as pathway to fortune, and bathing to shed gore. Sigh...” The fun to work ratio would tilt dangerously towards work.

And now I just sound lazy and whiny. Aw, work? No, I want everything to be playgrounds and candy drops! I guess that's what I'm being. Aw, work. Remember: I do not talk about these things to excuse my lack of productivity or make it sound like it's not my fault.

I graduated college with a bachelor's degree in Creative Writing. Which, as I read and learn more about the authors whose writing I like the most, was probably the worst thing I could have done to become a writer. Well, maybe not; I learned useful things about writing, and being in a class where my assignment was to write a bunch kept me writing, practicing, honing. But my favorite contemporary authors- Gibson, Stephenson, Jordan- didn't get degrees in writing. They have pieces of paper from universities declaring them adepts in math and sciences. Hells, one of them got his physics degree from the Citadel, of all places. I didn't need to get a degree in writing to become a writer. I should have gotten a degree relating to things I wanted to write about.

In related news, getting that degree harmed me in other ways. Creative Writing is a subset of a Literature degree, and so in addition to those writing courses I also had a lot of Lit classes. Now, when I say harm I don't mean to imply that it was bad that I read those classics of (mostly) dead white men. I probably never would have sought out Notes from Underground or The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I would have gotten to Frankenstein on my own (written by a girl! Take that, Canon!)- in fact, I'd already read it in high school- but I totally would have missed out on Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, and that would have been a tragedy.

Why do people keep calling me Frankenstein? That's the other guy.
 I prefer Kevin.

The harm I speak of came from being being surrounded by professors and students that took this stuff really seriously, and from them I learned of the contempt in which my preferred reading material was held. I like the fantasy and the science fiction. Give me wizards and spaceships and dragons and aliens over ennui and intellectual navel-gazing any day.

There are, of course, works of “literature” that I enjoy, many a book whose cover says something like, The Delicate Afternoon, and then below that it says, A Novel. But I feel like if a book has a picture of a space marine or some lady in a chainmail bikini on the cover, or gods-forbid has a colon in the title or is one of a series, then any chance of its being respected for the quality of its prose, the depth of its characters, or how it examines the effects of power upon one's beliefs goes out the window of the literary community. They have judged that book by its cover and found it wanting.


This is not to say that there isn't a lot of bad fantasy, bad science fiction out there. But there is also a lot of bad mystery fiction, a lot of bad romance fiction, and a lot of bad "genreless" fiction out there. There's bad writing everywhere, but I felt as though what I was being told was that there were a few grudgingly accepted works that fell under the genre-moniker of what I enjoyed reading (and writing), but that they were the vast, vast minority.

This, of course, is not an image that strengthens my argument.

I absorbed some of this contempt during my journey through the lower, undergraduate levels of the Ivory Tower, but most of what I got there, as regards my choice of reading-for-pleasure, was guilt. I felt like I needed to hide my dog-eared copy of Barbara Hambly's Dragonsbane, like discussion of cultural relativity in Orson Scott Card's Speaker for the Dead was laughable. So I didn't try.

Once, while working at my gas station job, one of my Lit professors came in to top off his water bottle during his jog. I'd recently seen Starship Troopers, the film adaptation of Robert Heinlein's (in scifi circles) classic that has been lauded and criticized for its treatment of militarism. As we did our brief chat I started telling him about the satiric nature with which the movie treated military propaganda. He just got a good-natured sneer on his face (if that's possible) and said, “C'mon, Nat, you're reaching.” I have no doubt that not only had he not seen the movie, but he hadn't read the book, either. But because it had spaceships and a war against giant insects, it was irredeemable crap.

Nope. This is not a satire of wartime propaganda at all. What was I thinking?

And that irredeemable crap is what I want to write about. I know that a good work of fiction is not just about battles and spells. It's about people and somehow tells us something about reality or ourselves. But why can't it do that while faster-than-light vehicles zoom through the interstellar void or a wizard struggles to master the arts arcane? The answer is that of course it can, and it has in hundreds of works that would hang out in the scifi/fantasy section in Barnes&Noble. But I have internalized this belief that what I write won't be “good” if it has a sentient species other than humans, or if spaceships roam the starlanes or ogres prowl the forests.

And so it's hard for me to write. Before I can get over that hump where I really do need to just start that novel over, before I can make myself just outline this or that story so that it works instead of just being fun, I need to convince myself that it can be good. I need to get over this. I need to sit down and write some stuff.