The New Writer’s Block
Craig Ryan
There’s another kind of movement that I’ve been thinking of writing about (not just for this project, but in general) because it’s very much what I’m reacting against, here at (my university), a school that champions experimental literature so much. This movement hasn’t happened yet, but it is in the works, by me and my colleagues, and it is one that I hope very soon to start changing the way we read stories here in America.
America has, by and large, fallen off the wagon so to speak in terms of the kind of stories we tell and the kind of stories we teach in writing. A large part of this has to do with the fact that we live in a society that has become very sensitive, and very politically correct—a word I’d like to examine a little—and very much positive attitude and, in the millennial sense, very much an “Everybody gets a trophy because we all tried hard” kind of place.
Stories have never given a damn about being politically correct or sensitive. Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment” was about a young man who’d become a double murderer, axeing to death two helpless women within the first quarter of the book, then struggling with his conscience for the rest. Lolita was about a man who’d fallen in love with a twelve year old girl, who’d come under his patronage. As the stories progress, the captivation comes from the hearts and minds of these characters, depraved though they may be, by use of the author’s understanding of them and sympathizing with them. It also comes alive by use of the author’s imagination and the vividness of the “dream” of the piece, the use of constant forward action, scenes, voice, the richness of the supporting cast, the constant conflict, and the climax, wherein a character changes—another thing experimental fiction likes to challenge most, the idea of change.
While it’s certainly true that not every piece of classic literature has to deal with characters this far gone off the radar of humanity, it is true (in my humble opinion) that every piece of literature that wants to call itself good has some key characteristics of classic fiction and storytelling, namely: setting, character-specific action, dialogue, and thought and emotion. It’s also true that every piece of good literature has characters in conflict with one another, has rising action, a climax, and a resolution. But deeper than that, everything that’s good has characters who need something from one another, who have motives and compelling reasons for why they do the things they do.
Where the “art” comes in should be the characters, the plot, the way that setting is described, the way that time moves throughout the piece, and how the characters change. There’s no easy five steps that make for a good piece of writing, the art is far too complex for that. In fact, part of the artistry, I think, is in getting these rules so engrained in the way that you live, as to become second nature, thereby freeing the author up to simply have the dream and make it as vivid on the paper as he or she possibly can. It should not come from forgoing certain key elements of fiction. Like character, like setting, like plot. Removing these things doesn’t make the piece experimental, it makes the piece fall flat. It makes the dream suddenly become unable to imagine in the mind of a reader, and thus become words on a page.
But, more than that, the way that we tell stories doesn’t change in that sense anyways. So what’s the point of doing it on the page? Some deeper meaning is supposed to be gleamed because you’ve removed all traces of setting from the piece? All you’ve done is made the piece float in space. Sure, there are good examples of this working in some author’s work (one recalls Richard Bausch’s “The Voices in the Other Room” where all that we’re given is dialogue) but this is more an example of luck and the masterful skill of the author than it is a handicap that a writer can’t fully grasp, and therefore leaves out in the name of “artistry.” It does not define a trend.
The truth is that good writing stems from an imagination so powerful it can capture the most complicated things in the world: namely people and the secrets of their lives. I’ve never heard of anybody reading Rae Armtrout and crying, of being genuinely moved by her work, the way I’ve heard of people being moved by Sharon Olds. Take for example, her work “Advent”:
In front of the craft shop,
a small nativity,
mother, baby, sheep
made of white
and blue balloons.
*
Sky
god
girl.
Pick out the one
that doesn’t belong.
*
Some thing
close to nothing
flat
from which,
fatherless,
everything has come.
What is supposed to be gleamed here of the complexity that it is to be human in this day and age? With whom (if anyone) am I supposed to understand better? You might say that that’s not the point of the piece, that the point of the piece is simply to examine language. Okay, but my point then becomes, so what? Why is listening to the pretty sounds words make worth my time when there’s so much great literature out there for me to be reading?
The need to be entranced in a story doesn’t go away simply because we’ve stopped doing it (to a large degree) in fiction and poetry, by the way. We’ve just turned to other mediums. Breaking Bad, Walking Dead, and Game of Thrones are all examples of the new trend in television, whereby characters go through deep changes, over long periods of time, through scenes, which are visually captured so beautifully as to become million dollar television shows. They’ve become steeples in our culture, the way good literature used to be, because they follow the classic elements of storytelling more so than our literature does. Isn’t that strange? Television is telling better stories than our books. It’s no wonder so few Americans read! But who can blame them? Walter White is like a Dostoevskian character, struggling with his conscience as he murders more and more people, all the while trying to keep his family unit together and lead his double life. How is this not literature at this point? Look at how much he changes during the course of those five seasons. Look at how much he loses, at how far he’s willing to go, at the consequences that he has to face.
The movement needs to happen soon. They say that these things come in stages. As with music of say, somebody like The Beatles, who were influenced by Little Richard (and the whole of the British invasion, which was influenced by American Blues, which America had largely ignored because of the race of the original performers) perhaps we, too, will, whether we like it or not, remember what good literature is supposed to be by examining not the writing of today, but the television.
Earlier, I said that one of the reasons for this trend in literature was the environment of political correctness and over sensitivity to author’s feelings, especially in workshops. I feel like I escaped this problem from coming from a really vicious kind of writing group, where we took active delight from cutting each other down. I can remember a certain workshop, wherein I’d turned in a story about a group of kids who hung out behind the bleachers, divorced from humanity, watching some of the jocks have sex with their girlfriends, and examining the tale tail signs of coitus by way of the panties which were hung from the rafters. Trust me, the way I’ve described it just now does not do justice to how badly the story was written, how insipid the characters, and how hard it was to identify with the narrator and the antagonist because I was writing about characters I didn’t know, doing things I’d never done. My old instructor identified this, but not without his usual kick-to-the-groin way of identifying what the problem was with me, the writer.
“Craig doesn’t feel comfortable writing about people he loves, doing things we’d ever in a million years have compassion for, so he falls back on his usual shtick of being a complete and utter prick and letting his characters do the same.”
This was pale by comparison of some of our other comments, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t just as bad. Hell, I might have been worse. But the truth is that this kind of brutality led me to forge an ambition to write correctly, passionately, and with purpose. It made me unafraid of even the most blatant kind of criticism. Much like a drunk guy at a bar, I am immune to any but the most soul-searching kinds of critiques. Tell me that my story offended you and I’ll smile. That means that it got inside of you and changed you. Tell me that it’s poorly written, without strong, different characters trying to get at their own hearts and souls and doing strange things to do so, and I’ll go out and rewrite it, or toss it. Which is the way things should be.
Most people would be wrong about the way this movement would start. Unlike social activism, writing is nearly a completely solitary thing, done only for the simple joy of telling a good story. But, hopefully, it would become self-perpetuating, in the sense that once people realize that a good story can still be told on paper, they’ll try to start doing it again. Perhaps it is vain to think I alone can change the world, but then, that’s not my goal for now. My goal is simply to tell a story. My story.