Heavy on my mind
Why do I write? Out of ego, out of yearning, out of purpose. Yes. Because I don't know how not to write. Yes. At the risk of sounding ridiculous, ideally I also write to bring more light into the world, more love. How, then, do I account for my sometimes (often?) dark and more disturbing stories.
I've experienced trauma and violence. They're a part of my psyche, of my scars. Such themes and tropes are going to come out in my stories, along with all my other anxieties, obsessions and preoccupations. How much responsibility do I have, though, to filter and police my stories, to not share and publish those that are most dark and disturbing? Is it okay to potentially disturb readers? More and more, I read contemporary stories that are so violent, so strange and disturbing, they repel me. I don't know what to DO with them? How I'm supposed to process them? Such worries and concerns weigh on me.
My two most recent stories are strange and creepy and violent and terrible. One of the two, "Beast and the Bear" is forthcoming in Bluestem Magazine. A line from the story, the story's seed, came to me again and again over the course of weeks: "Because I loved Bear, the townspeople said I couldn't be human, said I was a beast." I finally sat down to write that insistent line and the story flowed, darker and darker. Dark, but dare I say riveting. I found the characters and story compelling and felt deeply moved by the telling. Damn, it's dark, though.
I hate how so many mediums, TV and film especially, normalize violence, murder and abasement. How life is depicted as worthless and disposable. I just saw the latest Harry Potter movie with my eleven-year-old daughter and felt blasted by its gory grotesqueness. She felt traumatized. This is how we entertain our children. I don't want to play any part in the normalization of violence, in the numbing of our society. I think, I hope, the latter is key. I felt moved by "Beast and the Bear." I cared. I hope readers will care, too.
Months back, a literary magazine tweeted "There's an awful lot of sex in contemporary literature." I replied "There's an awful lot of sex in contemporary life." I think our stories should mirror ourselves, our society and culture, and allow us to see anew, to hopefully care anew. There's an awful lot of violence in contemporary literature. There's an awful lot of violence in contemporary life. I give voice to my stories and tell them to the best of my ability. I don't write sex and violence to be "popular" or shocking or gratuitous. Is that enough, though?
In "The Art of Fiction," which I read over ten years ago, John Gardner wrote in depth about writer's responsibility. I have never forgotten the gist of it. Here's a direct quote:
"To write with taste, in the highest sense, is to write with the assumption that one out of a hundred people who read one's work may be dying, or have some loved one dying; to write so that no one commits suicide, no one despairs; to write, as Shakespeare wrote, so that people understand, sympathize, see the universality of pain, and feel strengthened, if not directly encouraged to live on … every writer should be aware that he might be read by the desperate, by people who might be persuaded toward life or death.
It does not mean, either, that writers should write moralistically, like preachers. And above all it does not mean that writers should lie. It means only that they should think, always, of what harm they might inadvertently do and not do it. If there is good to be said, the writer should remember to say it. If there is bad to be said, he should say it in a way that reflects the truth that, though we see the evil, we choose to continue among the living.
The true artist is never so lost in his imaginary world that he forgets the real world, where teenagers have a chemical propensity toward anguish, people between their thirties and forties have a tendency to get divorced, and people in their seventies have a tendency toward loneliness, poverty, self-pity, and sometimes anger. The true artist chooses never to be a bad physician. He gets his sense of worth and honor from his conviction that art is powerful–even bad art."
Heavy on my mind.
