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I cannot write fiction.
I wish I could, but I can’t.
I’ve come to this conclusion as my wife embarks on her
latest annual fiction-writing challenge. She loves making up stories. She’s a
self-published author of lots of engaging book series. There’s some mystery stuff,
some paranormal stuff, even some sci-fi stuff, but the one thread that runs
through all of them is romance. Now, romance isn’t exactly my genre of choice, but
she writes such rich and multilayered characters and engaging plot lines that I
find myself waiting to discover what comes next at the end of each chapter.
That’s the definition of writing a page-turner, I suppose. It’s a special gift
that she possesses, and in a lot of ways I’m envious of it.
And I’m envious of it because I wish I possessed the ability
to put together an engaging story with engaging characters. She makes it seem
effortless. And every year she urges me to take part in her writing challenges
with her.
This year, I decided I was finally going to get my book on
spirituality out of my system. It wouldn’t be a work of fiction, but I decided
maybe that was OK, because I can write good nonfiction. At least I think I can.
I have a decent vocabulary and can build a persuasive argument. Heck, I work
with words for a living. I was trained in practical writing. That’s what I’m
good at. And that’s why I started my career as a reporter for a couple of Midwestern
newspapers that you’ve probably never heard of. I was good at getting the facts
out up top and explaining things clearly. There wasn’t really room for me to
color the articles with my own artistic flourishes, which was OK because newspaper
articles weren’t the place for that and, well, I just wasn’t very good at it
anyway.
That’s not to say I haven’t tried writing fiction. I have. I’ve
put a couple of bad examples up on this blog. And that’s why I decided that if
I was going to take part in the writing challenge, the best thing for me to do
was to stick to nonfiction.
So I bounced a lot of ideas around in my head, which is
actually something I enjoy doing. I’m an innately curious person and almost always
have thoughts of some sort rattling around in my cranium. And because I prefer
to thoughtfully chew on ideas and figure out how to piece those ideas together
in a logically coherent and consistent way, fitting disparate thoughts together
like the pieces of a puzzle, I like to think that I often have a unique point
of view to share with the world. Maybe that’s just conceit talking, but I fancy
the idea that the reason I don’t fit into most people’s categories out in the
real world is that digging in and examining the things that other people take
for granted means that, almost by default, I end up never following the crowd. Anyway,
I’d feel like a phony if I did.
I say that because my problem with writing fiction isn’t
that my head is empty of any ideas. Far from it. My brain truly never stops churning
through thoughts and ideas. To the world, I’m a quiet man of few words, but in
my skull it’s Grand Central Station, 24/7.
But that doesn’t mean it’s easy to take the thoughts and
make them say what I want them to say. I fuss over getting everything right,
even with my blog posts, and sometimes it leads to paralysis. I’ll publish a post,
reread it, and think of 16 different things that I feel compelled to add. And I
hit republish over and over until I’m finally satisfied. I can’t imagine what I’d
be like writing a book. So after numerous failed false starts with this idea, I
got impatient with myself and decided to put the project aside.
It’s not that I can’t organize the thoughts I want to get
out. That part is easy for me. Again, it’s just making sure I say absolutely everything
I want to say, in exactly the way I want to say it, and getting agitated when I
think of something I missed. I don’t know that I’d ever be satisfied with a finished product.
There’s also the practical matter of the research I’d have to
put in to cite my sources. That felt daunting, to the point of being overwhelming.
I know a lot of time and effort goes into good storytelling, and the same is
true for good nonfiction. And I found myself wanting to touch on so many points
in my book-to-be that I think I’d find myself buried under source material
trying to find references for my book’s footnotes. I don’t have the time to do
that. I have a job to do, a house to help keep up as my wife recovers from her
cancer treatments, a kid and pets that need attention, and a body that’s not
doing so hot these days. It’s just hard to focus on something that doesn’t feel
vital to the needs and demands of everyday life, I guess. It’s a luxury that I
suppose I’m not allowing myself to have right now, or at least to prioritize
enough to give it the time it needs to actually be good and not feel slapdash
and undercooked.
Plus, I think I’m at a place in my life where I no longer
feel the need to be heard. I used to take my time crafting and polishing 10,000-word
posts on this blog because, as I said, I felt I had a unique point of view and
I wanted to share it. I wanted to try to reach someone, anyone, and make
some kind of a difference in the world. Now? Well, I think I’ve just gotten
used to the fact that no one listens to me and probably never will, and there’s
little I can do or say to have an impact on the world in any event. And I’m
actually OK with that, where I think I used to be a lot more neurotic about
wanting, even needing, to bend the world to my will. But that’s what everyone
else does, and what does it really do but lead to needless conflict? There’s
very little that any of us has any real control over in this life. You can come
to terms with that, or you can burn yourself out with anxiety over things that
you can’t do anything about.
As for my spiritual point of view, I still think it would be
fun to share, and I would hope that it would cast a fresh perspective on things
for people who struggle to feel a connection to established religious
traditions. If I could reach even one person, I’d feel that I’d accomplished
something and that the time spent putting the book together would have been
worth it. So maybe someday I’ll still write that book. Maybe it will be in
retirement. Who knows.
So with that idea set aside, I turned my attention to
trying, one more time, to pull together enough ideas to write a story. I didn’t
force myself to come up with an idea: As serendipity would have it, I just
happened to have an idea rolling around in my head. Had I forced myself to come
up with an idea from scratch, nothing would have ever happened. But I did have
some rough ideas to work with, and I thought about how I’d craft them into a
story that somebody would want to read. And I just got nowhere. I even monkeyed
around with an AI engine — not to have it write for me, but just to try to
generate some basic ideas that I could then expand on. Still, nothing.
I think the root of my problem is that I just don’t know how
to characterize. Everything I write sounds like a book report or a Wikipedia
article. I’m like the Joe Friday of writing: I gather and present just the
facts. And there’s a place for that. But fiction is not necessarily that place.
What I mean is this: How do you make fictional characters
sound human? How do you make them sound not wooden and mechanical, going through the motions, like a puppet that
you’re moving from Point A to Point B with your words? And then, how much
description do you need? And what is good description versus bad description? I
have no idea, but for other writers it seems effortless to figure this out. People
laugh at writers who turn out bad prose. But how do I know if mine is good or
bad? What standard do you use? How do you find an engaging way to say your
character walked to the kitchen for a light breakfast before walking out in the
courtyard to plant flowers? I’m supposed to tell you how the sun illuminated the
beautiful colors in the garden, and how the warm air felt good against our
protagonist’s skin, and how the smells of spring intoxicated her, and what all this
meant for her in that moment. But I can’t do that without just saying the literal
thing that she walked to the kitchen, had breakfast, went outside, and
planted flowers. A, B, C, D. Just the facts. I don’t know how to take those
things and transform them into engaging prose that sings, that sticks with you
because of how vivid and memorable the descriptions were. That’s my problem.
There seems to be an unwritten (heh) understanding among
writers of what actually constitutes good writing. But it’s a very
subjective thing, which stands to reason since art is inherently subjective. And
it’s something that I guess you either get or you don’t. In that sense, maybe
it’s more that good story writing is ultimately an intuitive thing. You
can put paints and a blank canvas in front of a thousand people, but only one
or two, if you’re lucky, are going to create anything that exceeds a Kindergarten level of aptitude. You either see the beauty
in your head and can use your hands as a conduit to put those ideas out into
the world for others to see, or you don’t. Creativity is just something you can’t
force, and I’m not even sure you can successfully teach it to any great degree.
I’m like this with music as well. I understand music theory.
I know what time and key signatures are. I know what notes go where on the staff. I
know how to place my hands to make chords on guitars and keyboards. I even understand
the logic of the circle of fifths. But I can’t actually do anything creative
with that knowledge. For me it’s just all head knowledge. I can’t translate it
into something expressive and beautiful. And I think that to expect that anyone
can do it with just a little bit of practice and determination is to ask for
something that ends up making a lot of people feel like a failure, as if they’re
just not smart enough to figure it out.
Likewise, I know the ins and outs of English grammar and mechanics.
I was that weird kid who enjoyed diagramming sentences and figuring out the relationships
between words in a sentence. I make my living as a copy editor because I
understand how language works. But in the same way that I can’t sit down at a piano
and write an original song full of depth and beauty, I can’t sit down at my laptop
and craft you a story. For whatever reason, I just can’t.
But it’s OK. There’s no point getting mad or frustrated
about it. If the artistic skill isn’t there, it simply isn’t there. That’s just
the way it is.
And so I’ll leave it to my wife to write the fun books with
the interesting characters. Head over to dreamwriter.earth if you want a sample
of her good works. For me, for better or worse, I’m afraid you’re stuck reading
dreary blog posts.
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