Auf Wiedersehen, Romancier
When chocolate doesn't taste like chocolate anymore...
That’s bad German for “Goodbye, Novelist” and I wasn’t talking to you, but to myself - or a past me, that I had hoped to resurrect earlier this year. In an August blog post, I made the ambitious declaration that I would commit to a return to creative writing full-time. Now that two months have passed, I’ve learned that while commitments are important and ambitious declarations are fun to make, this one was faulty. Hindsight is 20/20 and I can see clearly now that my failure was committing to a journey without even taking a few steps in my intended direction first.
Over the past two months I made some forays into fiction and found the experience more repulsive than I ever imagined. This is what I needed and should have done before making my prior declaration. But I learned two things from the experience I think are worth sharing: a) while writing for entertainment is a good pursuit, it’s not for me and b) the enchantment of fiction writing can be rather unproductive.
To my first point, I have previously written about how un-fun some creative works can be to read and even suggested it is on the writer to please their audience. Give the people what they want, as the saying goes and I don’t think the people want An Inconvenient Truth, they want to be entertained. My own venture into novel writing, Electric Love, was very much the preachy downer (albeit with a (sorta) happy ending) I now find problematic. It’s certainly not what publishers want to invest their marketing dollars in.
So my new writing direction was to create beautiful things for the world, entertaining and positive. But, dismayingly, what came out when I put pen to paper was pure darkness, absolute contempt for the current state of affairs. Perhaps it was therapeutic, but by no means resulted in something worth sharing. The experience revealed a previously unknown (to me) truth about myself: What drove me to write my novel is what still drives me today: the pursuit of truth, democracy, justice and community. So when I sit down to write something more tailored toward entertainment, my inner resistance is futile. The solution, I think, is to stick with my core values and find a more productive pursuit than writing depressing and judgmental fiction.
Which leads to my second point: What would be a more productive way to live my values and take action in the world? I had a rather naive theory when I set out to write my first novel in 2015: If I spell out society’s insanity, everyone will read it and change for the better. To be fair, it’s derivative of literary theories that are offered on many college campuses. I remember taking a course on cultural work and social change that I found quite enlightening during my undergrad. To avoid going on too much of a tangent I’ll simply say that I do believe cultural work, including fiction, can play a role in social change, but it is a small part of a much larger (and longer) symphony.
If I haven’t gone in enough circles already, this leads back to my venture into community service that has been a major theme of my life this year. I guess I don’t need to know my truths to live them, sometimes it just happens. The work I have done with housing issues and serving immigrants this year has been far more impactful than the novel I wrote in 2015. And while I don’t see myself doing this specific work for the long-term, I now have the improved self-understanding of my core values and the importance of living by them.
I hope that other writers who go into writing for the reasons I did can see the danger of it, not that whiny poetry isn’t always worth writing, but that there may be avenues for greater impact towards change - whereas writing alone can create a deafening echo chamber of despair for the writer. We have to accept the realities of the publishing industry for starters: they want to make money, they publish what sells which tends to lean towards what readers want to read written by writers with recognizable names and platforms. I think the fact there is so much writing going on outside of this scope is wonderful and ought to continue (for reasons I discuss elsewhere), but it may not be fruitful for those fantasizing about writing the bestseller resulting in significant social change.
What comes next for me? Another bold declaration? Next stop Mars? No, nothing to declare I’m afraid. Just taking life a day at a time for now, very happy to be continuing my work with immigrants and learning French (and German) while exploring some new opportunities that are not yet developed enough to share. I know my values and every day I do my best to find things I can do to live them out. Oh, and I’m still writing (this blog).