[writing] What makes it go
Nov. 21st, 2004 09:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
maradyddThe comments thread on a recent post from an LJ acquaintance brought up the time-honored idea that pain can be a valuable catalyst for art. Like most conventional wisdom, there's certainly some truth in it; case in point, right now I'm sitting on the couch of ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
czarina69, a jewelry designer who started producing some of her best work in the aftermath of a really bitter divorce. A lot of the short fiction I still find the most compelling -- in theme, at least, if not necessarily execution -- came out in response to pain of my own.
On the other hand, I have my doubts as to how effective a catalyst pain is for craft. About two years ago, I finished (for values of "finished" that don't include subsequent edits) a short story called "Alexander Finally Gathered the Courage to Break Out of His Shell". It was about a year and a half, off and on, in the writing, and I still think it's one of the most thematically complex pieces I've ever written; it blends fragments of T.S. Eliot with the topos of Houston in a magical-realist story about loss and isolation, all borne out of my own grief and frustration from the breakup with John back in 2001. I'm very proud of it. But I can't sell the thing, and very few people who've read it actually get what's going on. The art might be there, or it might not; it's not for me to say which is the case. What is clear is that the craft isn't, and I'm not sure what to do about that. I don't even know if it's fixable; perhaps I'm not at a point in my craft where I can recognise how to fix it. Or perhaps I'm just not in a good position to be objective about it; the story was inspired by strong emotions on my part, and as such, does a pretty damn good job of reviving those emotions in me. It shouldn't have been surprising to discover that it didn't necessarily inspire the same kinds of emotions in other people, but it was at the time. Most of what it inspired, as it turned out, was just confusion.
I was reminded of this earlier today, talking withczarina69 and sclerotic_rings about a creative writing class I was in years ago, where a lot of the students decided that the way to create an effective story was to pick some Important Issue that would Necessarily Evoke Strong Reactions in the Reader. By and large, they picked child molestation, and week in, week out, we'd have to crit a piece in which some sweet innocent thing was horribly raped by an evil relative and nothing else happened. Needless to say, it wasn't enough; again, I won't comment as to how much art might have been there, but the craft was certainly absent. A few years later, I managed to really piss off someone in an online writing group who wrote a similar story, not having known that she was basically writing for catharsis; I criticised it as uncompelling, and she went completely unhinged. Obviously it was compelling to her, but that didn't make it "work" for the rest of us.
Funny, then, that I'd catch myself in the same situation years after that. Physician, heal thyself.
What's especially difficult about this sort of thing is that sometimes, in those bursts of creative energy that sometimes accompany either the blackest depths of or the surge out of a depressive episode, one does end up producing a few isolated gems. I imagine it's pretty frustrating to show the results to other people and not understand why they Don't Get It, but it's even more frustrating to recognise independently that yeah, there are some diamonds here, but they're securely embedded in a few square meters of coprolite. Doubly so when you check your toolbox and realise all you have is a toothbrush.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not knocking the value of writing as a cathartic mechanism, nor am I trying to suggest that there's some sort of incompatible difference between people who write for therapy and people who write for craft. But I do think of myself as someone who writes for craft, or tries to, and it's always difficult to find a shortcoming in one's abilities and not know how to address it.
czarina69, a jewelry designer who started producing some of her best work in the aftermath of a really bitter divorce. A lot of the short fiction I still find the most compelling -- in theme, at least, if not necessarily execution -- came out in response to pain of my own.On the other hand, I have my doubts as to how effective a catalyst pain is for craft. About two years ago, I finished (for values of "finished" that don't include subsequent edits) a short story called "Alexander Finally Gathered the Courage to Break Out of His Shell". It was about a year and a half, off and on, in the writing, and I still think it's one of the most thematically complex pieces I've ever written; it blends fragments of T.S. Eliot with the topos of Houston in a magical-realist story about loss and isolation, all borne out of my own grief and frustration from the breakup with John back in 2001. I'm very proud of it. But I can't sell the thing, and very few people who've read it actually get what's going on. The art might be there, or it might not; it's not for me to say which is the case. What is clear is that the craft isn't, and I'm not sure what to do about that. I don't even know if it's fixable; perhaps I'm not at a point in my craft where I can recognise how to fix it. Or perhaps I'm just not in a good position to be objective about it; the story was inspired by strong emotions on my part, and as such, does a pretty damn good job of reviving those emotions in me. It shouldn't have been surprising to discover that it didn't necessarily inspire the same kinds of emotions in other people, but it was at the time. Most of what it inspired, as it turned out, was just confusion.
I was reminded of this earlier today, talking with
czarina69 and sclerotic_rings about a creative writing class I was in years ago, where a lot of the students decided that the way to create an effective story was to pick some Important Issue that would Necessarily Evoke Strong Reactions in the Reader. By and large, they picked child molestation, and week in, week out, we'd have to crit a piece in which some sweet innocent thing was horribly raped by an evil relative and nothing else happened. Needless to say, it wasn't enough; again, I won't comment as to how much art might have been there, but the craft was certainly absent. A few years later, I managed to really piss off someone in an online writing group who wrote a similar story, not having known that she was basically writing for catharsis; I criticised it as uncompelling, and she went completely unhinged. Obviously it was compelling to her, but that didn't make it "work" for the rest of us.Funny, then, that I'd catch myself in the same situation years after that. Physician, heal thyself.
What's especially difficult about this sort of thing is that sometimes, in those bursts of creative energy that sometimes accompany either the blackest depths of or the surge out of a depressive episode, one does end up producing a few isolated gems. I imagine it's pretty frustrating to show the results to other people and not understand why they Don't Get It, but it's even more frustrating to recognise independently that yeah, there are some diamonds here, but they're securely embedded in a few square meters of coprolite. Doubly so when you check your toolbox and realise all you have is a toothbrush.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not knocking the value of writing as a cathartic mechanism, nor am I trying to suggest that there's some sort of incompatible difference between people who write for therapy and people who write for craft. But I do think of myself as someone who writes for craft, or tries to, and it's always difficult to find a shortcoming in one's abilities and not know how to address it.