Writing ramble: I have a minor problem…

Yes, the weather’s going wonky, so I’m dealing once again with mood swings. And let me tell you, this time they’re a real doozy. I go from depressed to enraged in 2.2 seconds, and then shift to guilty and melancholy in another two.

I suppose it’s good luck that I finished my last writing project when I did, because now I don’t have to worry about negative emotions leading to a writing block. But it’s also kind of a bad thing because my usual post-book brain drain problems are compounded by the wonky weather mood swings. So not only do I hate all of you, but I also hate myself too. And no, I don’t really hate y’all. I don’t even know you. But once the mood swing hits, logic and reason both get up and leave. And then…oh yeah, fuck the lot of you.

One of the things driving me nuts in these mood-swinging times is these sudden desperate urges to do something to change my fortunes. Maybe if I released a new book today, y’all would show up and buy a few copies, and I could feel like I accomplished something. Maybe if I wrote a better book, today, I’d start making enough sales to handle my medical needs. Maybe I could write “something more meaningful,” and that would be popular even if the rest of my stuff got ignored by the mainstream.

But there’s no point in selling a story today, because no matter what I put up from my queue of unpublished works, none of them are likely to sell. I’ve got four sequel to books that didn’t sell well, and one standalone story that I’m already feeling doubtful over on the grounds that it’s “too gay” to be popular. (Well, it is a gay romance, so you’d think it’d be okay in this instance.)

I don’t need to write better to sell a lot either. I need to write “right.” Any bestseller I read tells me it’s not the quality of the writing that moves units. It’s the choices of which characters to put on display, the right choices of plots and themes that will appeal to the reader quickly if summed up in a blurb. There’s formulas that offer a higher chance of success, and my inability to embrace those formulas are what keep me from capturing more mainstream interest in my writing.

Almost everyone wants to be a spy, so if I wrote a spy novel, that might have a chance of selling well. But I don’t like spy novels, and if I tried to write one just to cash in, it would read like shit. So it wouldn’t sell well, and so there’s no point in me pushing to write a story that I wouldn’t want to read myself.

And then there’s the “more meaningful” urges, which make no sense. I’ve written a lot of books, and all of them have a lot of meaningful things to say, both on the surface and between the lines. I can’t get any more meaningful without making a book of lectures, and then I’m not telling a story so much as browbeating the reader with my personal beliefs. I drop books where the writer gives me that impression of only lecturing me, and I think most readers do. So I think this inner voice asking for more meaning is a red herring. Or perhaps it’s a MacGuffin. Either way, it’s not important, and it isn’t a real problem with my previous stories. The only time when it is an issue is when I’m in these mood swings, so I can ignore that inner voice pretty easily.

But there is one thing coming out of all of this depression that I feel like holding onto. As regular readers of my blog know, the muse really wants to do another story with kids. It would be a huge departure from my usual efforts. This story would not have any fantasy elements to it, and my aim would be portraying the characters with as much accuracy and reality as I could manage in fiction. It would not have a happy ending, and with what the muse is proposing, a non-ending would be more likely.

Obviously, some rules of writing still need to be respected to make this story work. Real life never has to makes sense. Lots of bad things happen, and there’s no logical explanation for it. Real life isn’t required to explain the how and why of events. But in fiction, there has to be that sense of logic, even if doing this consistently isn’t very realistic. This isn’t a rule that writers like, and they deal with it as a necessary evil. It’s a rule enforced by readers, who feel that if a fictional event happens for “no good reason,” then it doesn’t make sense and ruins the story.

Reading is something of a compromise, a trade of your time for mine. If you are willing to sit down and crack open my next 200 page book to invest a few hours in my fictional rambling, I have to be willing to make some concessions to you to make this reading time feel worth your while. I have to make concessions to you to keep you reading all the way through instead of tossing the book early on, probably while declaring, “This writer is an idiot!”

Which puts me in a pickle, because what I want out of this next story will be damned hard to keep readers going past the first moment of intimacy. So how can I keep people reading to understand that the story isn’t about those scenes, but about the way the characters develop in reaction to these moments of too early intimacy?

The first thing I feel I need to do to compromise with readers is to have a lot of short scenes that don’t advance the central conflict, but which show the characters being happy, seemingly healthy kids. I want the vast majority of the book to be about these interactions, and I want those few awkward scenes to exist for a reason other than to titillate or offend. They have to make the reader understand something about the characters, or it’s not worth showing.

See, it’s like this; when I tell people about me and my childhood, there’s only one of two ways I can do this. I can tell you about the abuse and neglect, and that will make you think I had a rotten childhood and there was never anything good in it. This is inaccurate at best, because while my childhood was extremely messed up, it wasn’t all bad, all the time. I could tell you about trips to Six Flags or to Lake Texoma for the family campouts. I could tell you about my endless quests for candy, or what cartoons and comics I loved. I could tell you about a number of happy holidays and birthday parties, and then you get this idea that I have an almost normal life. This is also inaccurate, and it erases a great deal of the experiences that defined me as a teen, and later as a confused adult trying to imitate “maleness.”

But the truth about my life story is more complex than either of these methods allows me to convey to readers, and it’s not easy to depict that in a fiction story either.

Put another way, someone had long ago commented how it was unreal how I could talk about sex between us kids like it was something we’d do after watching Smurfs. But that’s just it. We didn’t have sex all day, and nothing else happened to us. We did watch Smurfs, and Jem, and Go-Bots, all kinds of other cartoons. We played with toys and video games, and we went to visit friends, other kids we knew that we talked about normal stuff, and they had no idea about our private affairs at home. We were long-time lovers, and yet paradoxically, we were still little kids in a lot of healthy, wholesome ways. We went to school, hated homework and cafeteria lunches, attended dances, went trick-or-treating, and did all the same mundane things the other kids did.

But what happens is, when mention of sex enters any child’s story, everything else that went on in their lives before or after is erased in the minds of most outside viewers. It’s not important, and it’s no longer a part of the “real” story. All that matters to other people is the sex. It overshadows everything else in the child’s life, and not because they fixate on it, but because society does. It’s that social fixation on sex as an act of evil that shames abuse victims and eventually turns some of them into abusers.

In my current state of depression, I wonder how I can handle this mammoth task, how I can juggle scenes more fitting for a middle grade book with scenes of intimacy between minors. No matter how delicately I write those scenes, people are going to say it’s unrealistic. Not because it can’t happen in real life, but because they don’t want to acknowledge that it does happen all the time. “Unrealistic” is not an accurate charge so much as a reality filter that allows people to dismiss reality and pretend that kids are innocent angels until adults fuck them up. That’s just not true. Yes, adults do A LOT to help mess up kids, but that doesn’t change the fact that lots of kids aren’t angels even if they have great parents and fantastic teachers. Some kids are just bullies no matter what their folks are like, and some kids are sexual abusers without any outside help from a molesting adult. Even with parents buttering them up and telling them what special angels they are, some kids can’t feel right with themselves without cutting someone else down. That’s reality.

Some will say that the story should be about something else. Or they will wonder why there’s a point to showing the kids going to school, talking to friends about mundane things. If the central conflict is about the sex, then why tack on all this “boring stuff”?

Other people will say that the point of the story isn’t to shed light on the problem, but to condition others to think “this is not so strange.” This charge now gets slapped on almost all YA fiction that adults don’t like. The characters aren’t demonstrating bad behavior for entertainment purposes, but to train kids in how to be evil. And it isn’t true in any of these cases, but people love to say this to dismiss books that might have something intelligent to say about making mistakes.

The point with a story like this is to say, “This kind of intimacy between kids is always happening, and we need to find better ways to deal with it than what we’re doing now.” No one can look at the current rising popularity of rape culture and tell me that this isn’t a conversation we all need to be having. Abuse in all forms is on the rise because so many people refuse to discuss it in any way. So obviously, this is not going to go away if you choose to ignore it. Continuing the same plan after years of continual failure is not a sign of peoples’ commitment to “goodness.” It’s just a denial of the biggest problems in our society, and there’s nothing healthy about living in denial. (Trust me, I’m a huge expert on this.)

Broaching the topic is going to piss off people. But hell, I pissed off a few billion people just by being transsexual and bisexual. A few million people indirectly wish for me to burn in hell simply for the crime of being born. So if I can deal with that much invisible hate coming my way already, surely I can handle more heat for continually bringing up the topics of sex abuse and kids.

What I’m aiming for is a story that embraces the real complexities of growing up as a troubled child. No, it’s not all bad, but it’s not a great life. But it is a common story in real life that’s all but erased in our storied worlds. The worst part about this kind of widespread social erasure is, people don’t care about hearing the rest of a person’s history after being exposed to the worst abusive elements of their private lives. If a person is deemed “bad” by the public, fictional or real, nothing in their life story is worth sharing with others.

Fiction characters like this are shunned and erased to make room for an escapist delusion that almost all modern fiction strives for. Modern fiction seeks to placate the reader and validate their world views. I think some works should shake readers up and make them question the reality they think they know. This is all easier said than done, and no matter how timidly I depict the intimacy in this story, it’s going to be a slap in the face of anyone expecting cute kids who can do no wrong.

There’s another problem here, and that’s establishing the initial relationship between the characters in a realistic way. When I was a kid having secret affairs, these relationships were pushed on me. They weren’t something I sought out and desired. It was only much later that I began to seek moments of physical connection, which is what led to me taking on a predatory mindset.

This is one thing that separates me from the main character, in that he does want to find someone else to replace his abusers after they leave. He’s transitioning and taking on the role of abuser as the story opens, so he finds his target in the arrival of a new neighbor, and…then something happens to bring the two together. What? I don’t know. I know I want it to make sense, and not just to me, but to readers too. They don’t have to like how the relationship starts, or where it leads because it would be depicting acts of abuse, after all. But readers should find the characters’ choices realistic enough to keep reading instead of throwing the book away and dismissing it as a bunch of sick fantasies.

That’s why I feel like the book needs a lot of material showing the “boring” side of life for the characters. I want to make the sex a small, small fraction of what happens in the book, and even if that abusive intimacy is the central conflict of the story, I want readers to come away feeling like the characters were tragically real and not one-dimensional props serving a role as fantasy fodder.

I’m sure I’ll be working on a lot of other books before I come back around to this idea. I probably shouldn’t bother blogging about this so early because I know how the topics of kids and sexuality never fail to upset people. But my main goal in writing has always been to give voice to the abuse victims who slip through the cracks, and this is one more facet of the larger theme I’m exploring.

Maybe I’ll write it and later feel like it’s a failure for the same reason my other books are, that it fails to “tell the story right.” Maybe I’ll publish it and get ignored, and it will all be another waste of time. But to me, these stories have far more to say about our real life problems than the vast majority of escapist fiction does.

No, I don’t think reality-based writing will ever beat escapism for popularity. But I know these stories are worth telling, even if the number of people willing to read them and try to understand is small. I think a bigger mistake would be for me to write fluffy escapist fantasy and deny everything that I know in favor of a profitable lie. What I’m doing is not unique, but it is rare. So even if it doesn’t earn me a lot, I do feel it’s worth my time.