Hooked For Life

There are many reasons why people write, and why they might quit.

My parents are dead, for instance.  I'm evidently not writing to prove anything to them.

I discovered writing out of a love of stories, and a realization one day that hey, omg, I can write them too!  holy shit!

I was 7.  It was in summer, between first & second grade, at 402 W. Triumph Street, Ebensburg, PA, at the bottom of the hills the town was built on, down by the railroad tracks. I sat on the green couch by the east window in the living room in a striped tee shirt, jeans, and black Keds. My hair was pretty well buzz cut.

I wrote a story, The Big Fish, in a Tom Brown's Notebook, in pencil, using my knees as a clipboard. The story was about an imaginary adventure I and three friends had. Along with Scott Coons, my best friend, there was Marvin Hudson, who did a hilarious spazz creature at the Lyons Pool in Cresson, where I learned to swim when the teenaged bullies threw us in and told us we'd drown if we didn't learn fast, and Craig Weaver, who tried to act grown up all the time, much to our puzzlement. Craig had walked up to me first day of first grade, when I was terrified, and had punched me in the stomach. Then he said, "Now you punch me and we'll be friends." He was as good as his word, despite the bizarre logarithms by which he operated.

My story was about us going fishing together, of course, and about how we caught a fish too big to get into the boat. Our line breaks and the fish gets away. We are disappointed but also think it was cool how close we came, until Craig starts practicing the story he intends to tell about it. He plans to lie and say it was bigger than the boat. Scott and Marvin and I don't like this. So we tell him to shut up.

It was a great story, to me. Seemed both realistic and compelling, with elements of fantasy, even myth. It even included profanity; Craig had said, "Shit," at one point, something he really would have done.

I was so thrilled at the freedom, and the realization that I could make those pictures in my head come to life, that I ran to show my mother. I read it to her, "shit" and all, and she liked it. "But what can I do with it now?" I wondered. Even then, just writing it didn't seem enough somehow.

And she said, "Well, maybe you can get it published sometime." And I realized, with naive amazement, that the stories in all those books I loved so much had been written by people like me, and that is how they got into the books.

I was hooked for life.

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Order and Chaos In Genre

Genre fiction relies on order and chaos in many ways to define itself.

All mystery is about restoring order after chaos. Any variation of that moves away from the form to the point of failing the audience.

Horror often moves from order toward or into chaos. Schlock and camp horror even celebrates the chaos.

SF is about lecturing each other in detail how imaginary order works.

Fantasy is about escaping strict order to imaginary realms where emotional and mental elbow room can be found. Taken to extremes, fantasy has so much mental room that it becomes inadvertently chaotic.

A hero ventures forth from order to fight threats to that order, usually monsters. To do this the hero will die, be reborn, vanquish the threat, and thus redeem or save the order he can never then return to. He becomes an outsider as a sacrifice to the order he defends. A hero does all this selflessly and often reluctantly.

A villain threatens order, or undermines it for his own ends.

Genre fiction succeeds or fails to the extent a given story varies from established pattern. Fulfilling a pattern in a clever way earns accolades, thwarting a pattern, even in a clever way, risks audience rejection. Maintaining a pattern's order helps a story succeed in genre terms.

Order and chaos also apply to tone. The more orderly narrative, the more a genre audience likes it. Add any level of chaos and genre readers will either be confused by it and put it down as amateurish, or see it as literary and reject it bitterly.

Too much narrative chaos strikes genre audience as abstraction, which makes a genre reader feel as if something is being put past them, and this riles anger and resentment.

However, if you can make order look chaotic on the surface, and manage not to lose the order required to fulfill a given genre, it is possible, rarely, to prevail as "brilliant" or "a genius". Examples of this are Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man and the Zen influenced mysteries of Janwillem van der Wetering.

Strict attention to order and chaos defines genre and helps a story fulfill expectations and thus succeed in the market.

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Drama, Melodrama, and Soaps

Good drama is based on interconnections, which is another word for relationships.

Soap Operas draw them with big fat crayons and oversized Sharpies in neon colors.  This is the reason we can all get hooked into them but also feel at least a mild contempt for them, if not outright allergic detestation; they're blatantly manipulative of our vulnerability to relationship shifts.

It borders on cheating; in the worst of them it IS cheating.  It parallels taking a sledgehammer to a kitten or feeding a puppy into a meat grinder.  It is guaranteed to make us react, and everyone knows it's a cheap shot.  

This is melodrama, the cartoon of the dramatic world. Actual drama is more refined in many ways.

More refined drama addresses both more serious relationship subtleties and deeper emotional scars. It also factors in ethical considerations and other real world expansions of personal problems.

The best drama enhances real life. It shows recognized individuals, not types, engaged in situations we can relate to, doing things to cope we have all done in one way or another, and it also reveals the complexities and subtle shadings involved in the process of living life with others.

Next time you write a story, figure out if it's melodrama or drama and adjust accordingly. It will strengthen your fiction no end to be aware of these things.

To Congressman Lee Terry Regarding DADT

Dear Mr. Lee Terry,

As one of your constituents from Bellevue, I'm writing this to let you know how let down I am about you standing against repealing Don't Ask, Don't Tell.

How can you oppose treating all human beings the same? How can you set aside categories for less-than-equal treatment? You are a privileged rich white man in a control position, so you're not affected by such unfairness, but huge numbers of people are, every day. Why perpetuate unfairness, prejudice, and bigotry?

What do you fear about GLBT folks? Do NOT try to tell anyone they fight or die differently for their country, nor that they adversely affect morale. Such nonsense has been disproven from the Spartans' stand at Thermopylae on down to now.

Do you, as a privileged rich white male, have to hide any parts of yourself in order legally to do your job? Are there aspects of Lee Terry that others' would shame you with, were they to find out? Or do you live free, unafraid, and dignified by personal liberty in an open society?

Why can't everyone? Why can't ALL American citizens? How can you possibly justify a Separate, Unequal set of rules for certain categories of American Citizens?

Please use the brains that must exist behind your charisma and glibness to re-think this important, pivotal matter and support complete equality under a Rule of Law for the GLBT among us. You have a chance with the Employment Non-Discrimination Act and other bills.

Instead of towing an out-dated, fearful line of prejudice, think your way clear to supporting ALL your constituents and ALL American citizens.

Thank you for your attention.

Oh, and a thought: Please spare us both a franked letter merely expressing the party line. I've seen it so many times it haunts my bathroom hours. Use the franking privileges to support Freedom, Liberty, and Equality for ALL.

Sincerely,

Gene Stewart
1710 Dianne Avenue
Bellevue, NE 68005

Writing Late At Night, Questions Arise

Is writing communication,
the marking of territory,
or merely jabber to stave off loneliness
in this closed cranial cavern?

When words leap the gap we call time,
voices of people long dead speak again.
Is what they say more than
a waving hello between islands,
so we know we are sharing
experiences common to us all?

When we read, do other members
of our lonely species link through us
to each other, across a spectrum of
writers, writing, words, and voices?

Does writing bind the literate
into a greater experience of an
unknowable, isolated, yet somehow
elevated status of being?

Are each of us, those who
call themselves writers
because we write words
into sentences, stories, and songs,
seeking communion with
others like us from all times,
past, present, and future?

Write it once and it is always.
Read it once and it is yours.

Cogent Points On Christianity by Christopher Hitchens

Let’s say the consensus is that our species, we, being the higher primates, homo sapiens, has been on the planet for at least 100,000 years, maybe more. Richard Dawkins thinks perhaps a quarter of a million, but I’ll take a hundred thousand.

In order to be Christian, you have to believe that, for 98,000 years our species suffered and died, most of its children dying in childbirth, most other people having a life expectancy of about 25, dying of bad teeth, famine, struggle, vicious war, suffering, misery... all of that for 98,000 years, heaven watching with complete indifference and then 2000 years ago thinks, “That’s enough of that, it’s time to intervene. The best way to do this would be to condemning someone to a human sacrifice somewhere in the less literate part of the Middle East. Let’s not appear to the Chinese, for example, where people can read and study evidence and have a civilization; let’s go to the desert and have another revelation...”

This is nonsense. It can’t be believed by a thinking person.

Why am I glad this is the case, to get to the point of the wrongness in the other sense of Christianity?

It’s because I think the teachings of Christianity are immoral.

The central one is the most immoral of all, that is the one of vicarious redemption. You can throw your sins onto somebody else, vulgarly known as scapegoating -- in fact, originating as scapegoating in the same area, the same desert.

I can pay your debt, if I love you. I can serve your term in prison, if I love you very much. I can volunteer to do that. I can’t take your sins away, because I can’t abolish your responsibility, and I shouldn’t offer to do so. Your responsibility has to stay with you. There’s no vicarious redemption.

There very probably, in fact, is no redemption at all. It’s just a part of wish thinking, and I don’t think wish thinking is good for people, either.

It even manages to pollute the central question, the word I just employed, the most important word of all, the word love, by making love compulsory, by saying you must love. You must love your neighbor as yourself, something you can’t actually do, but you’ll always fall short, so you can always be found guilty.

By saying you must love someone who you also must fear, that is to say, a supreme being, an eternal father, someone of whom you must be afraid, but you must love him, too; if you fail in this duty, you’re again a wretched sinner -- this is not mentally or morally or intellectually healthy.

And that brings me to the final objection, which is that this is a totalitarian system. If there was a god who could do all these things and demand these things of us, and who is eternal and unchanging, we would be living under a dictatorship from which there is no appeal, and one that could never change, and one that knows our thoughts and can convict us of thought crime and condemn us to eternal punishment for actions that are condemned in advance to be taking.

I could say more, but it’s an excellent thing that there’s absolutely no reason for any of it to be true.

--Christopher Hitchens, speaking off the cuff

True Violent Crime R Us

Violent crime, all the time.

Do we as a species have something wrong, or is it that violence should be accepted as natural? Maybe, like childhood, our aversion to violence is an artifact of our society. We make it worse by repressing a natural urge.

Oh, but then war becomes therapy, or at least a necessary venting, an outlet for roiling urges we can’t contain.

That would suck.

Might also be true; it rings true. There is surely an urge to kill and destroy in us. It is surely irresistible. As a species, we end up self-destructive every time we try to do anything.

We generally consider it allowable or at least constructive to sublimate our dark urges into art. It might even be the one thing keeping us from complete suicide. Species suicide is strange to contemplate but so many species have boiled off into extinction that, for all we know, it’s a common event. One almost thinks this could be a blessing if it would stop all the suffering we cause each other and the world, all the destruction.

Then we reconsider, or forget, and in forgetting neglect to take any positive steps to eliminate or even mitigate our own ferocity.

Humanity is a true crime.


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