Arwen Spicer's Blog: Diary of a Readerly Writer (and Writerly Reader) - Posts Tagged "rl"

There’s a cashier at my local Safeway who is not the model cashier. While the other cashiers smile nicely and ask how my day is going and if I found everything I needed, this fellow is more likely to grumble, “Darn yogurt won’t scan. C’mon! Stupid machine.”

This put me off at first and, in the back of my head, I wondered how he managed to hold on to his job. But gradually I warmed to him, his genuineness, his inexhaustible ability to kvetch about leaves to rake, annoying neighbors, headstrong pets, and anything else a patron wanted to get off their chest.

Today, as he handed me my coupons, he said, “Here’s your propaganda.”

I laughed and said, “That’s very true” and walked out comforted by the little corner of uncensored humanity this man represents in a society in which we too often buy groceries self-check-out machines or people told to behave like them.

I am breaking a rule. Everybody knows that it is a terrible idea for a writer to write fiction based on the venting personal pain. There's no authorial distance; the lack of perspective is obvious; the characters and situations will be out of balance. It will sound like angry, juvenile, Mary-Sue-ish ranting. Heck, I learned a long time ago not even to write academic papers about books I especially love because they lack critical distance.

Yet here I am, writing furiously on a book (titled Mercy) that is largely spurred by venting my personal grief about my friend ditching me this past fall.

Here's my justification. Two justifications: 1) it's therapy. That's fair. And I think, as such, it's helping, but this isn't an artistic justification. Therapy may be great for me, but there's no guarantee it will make good art and a good chance that it won't. Which brings us number 2, the artistic justification: there is a power in writing hot.

By this I mean, writing out of emotion: throwing onto the page whatever the heart most needs to say. Angry name-calling, apologia, self-justification, random philosophizing, fear, angst, crazy sarcasm, rabbit holes galore. I want a record of it. Partly just for myself (I seem to be full of fragments today). I want to be able to look back in a year or five and see what my grieving process was/is.

But there's a use for this in literature too. My main character is also in a grieving process. This book—a revision of an old project—has become a story about grieving. I can best express her process by feeling the process in my bones. When I want to shout imprecations about betrayal, she wants to, and the force of the feeling comes out real, much realer than if I tried retroactively to work myself into a state five or ten years later when I'm somewhere else.

So here's what I imagine will happen if I ever work this book into good science fiction literature:

Right now, the book is a weird amalgam: one part old sci-fi romantic road story I started creating at seventeen (over twenty years ago); part revision of 2011 to a create a more philosophical, reflective story of finding love unexpectedly; part grief-and-guilt-ridden rant about lost friendship and betrayal coming unapologetically almost word for word out of my own life right now. It's a weird mess.

Eventually, I suspect that 80% of the lost-friendship rant text will be revised out (though probably preserved in my archives for my own therapeutic purposes). What will be left will be the gems that concisely express the grieving process in a proper narrative form. Meanwhile, that process will become increasingly thematically integrated into the actual fictional story of these characters being mysteriously stuck on a planet, investigating how this came about. Hopefully, the end result will be a thoughtful work of sociological/literary science fiction that principally argues that human grief and interpersonal pain is a main driver in human society, whether in a particular friendship or in events as cosmic as interstellar war. And hopefully, it will come out as a readable story.

If it doesn't, it's still helpful as therapy. And it will certainly show a raw truth that a more systematic control of the written word could never capture. I may not be writing a good book right now, but I know I am writing some good prose. Writing, like grieving, is a process, and sometimes we need to start hot.