To Hold the Mirror up to Nature

Today, a friend from my writing community asked this question in our Discord: “Do you think about what you want to write?” Which began a conversation about some of those stereotypical things writers are told (“write the book you want to read” or “write something only you can write” or “write what you know”) and why some (I’d say most) are a bit absurd. Generalized writing advice tends to be… less than helpful, I’ve found, and telling any one person what they “should” be writing is nonsensical (as the aforementioned friend said, “we all come to this medium from different places and no reason is less valid than any other”). But what this friend was ultimately interested in was “whether people think about what they like to write, and if so what that special thing is, be it genre or trope, medium or method.”

As I dive deeper into making writing an active part of my career, I find myself thinking more and more about the kinds of stories my pre-teen self needed to read, or the ones I wish I had had access to earlier in my life. Stories of queer love that don't end in tragedy, but also about queer people just existing. About fat people in fantasy worlds who are not shamed or doubted or relegated to two-dimensional stereotypes or villains or jokes. About loving yourself, but also about letting yourself be loved. About found family, finding your people, and knowing that being alone isn’t always the worst thing that could happen to you. About being strong, and being strange, and being brave, and being vulnerable. Letting your heart be broken and making mistakes and knowing that your faults do not make you irredeemable. Stories about finding connection in a world that wants to eradicate you. Stories about people whose brains look like yours, about people who talk like you, and look like you, because you deserve to exist in every world, including this one.

On the other hand, I think about writing stories to explore the “what ifs” of life, and to build the world I want to live in. Stories that shatter toxic masculinity and hold accountable those who have done harm; that don’t settle for death-as-punishment, but actually ask for reparation and explore the possibility of redemption. Stories that ask us to have the courage to do hard things. Stories that remind us that we are stronger together and that just because something has been one way for a long time does not mean it has to be that way forever. That we can change. Stories that reassure us that “there is some good in this world, Mr. Frodo, and it’s worth fighting for.”

One of my favorite things about speculative fiction is its ability to talk about real life without talking about real life. We can explore issues and questions from our current world by taking a step back and transposing those conflicts onto different planets and different people in different times. I think it is incredibly important to be able to discuss complex emotions and situations at a “story distance” (that sweet spot between experiencing something in your own head and watching something happen on the horizon) because it often allows us to see from someone else's perspective without triggering our built in defense mechanisms. Because a story can bypass the sentries and infiltrate the fortress of our adult concept of “us” and “them” and “self” and find that inner child, sitting in the dark, terrified of all the loud noises outside; a story can hold that child’s hand while it opens a window to let in a little fresh air.

But I also think it can be hard to walk the line between a good story and a didactic sermon. I don’t think we, as writers, have any right to tell our readers how to experience something we wrote. I think, if we’ve done our job well, our readers will have the emotional experience we’ve hoped for, but we can’t tell them what it means to them. There’s a piece of acting advice that I’ve received in the past that I think is relevant here: be specific. This may sound counter intuitive, but the more specific you are (whether it’s in your choices as an actor or a writer) the more people will resonate with what you have to say. I think this is why folks love memoir so much, and why a book like Eat, Pray, Love was such a huge hit: Liz Gilbert was incredibly vulnerable, and incredibly specific, and she never told anyone else what it was supposed to mean, she just told us how it was. To put it another way, have you ever read a self-help book that used a personal anecdote to illustrate a point, and then proceeded to offer some generalized advice on that life thing, or explained to you what you should think about their story? Yeah, that shit doesn’t work. I think we (writers) are at our best when we can invite readers into a shared world without being prescriptive. I think the best stories have opinions, but don’t claim they are the only right opinions.

But holy cow do I digress. What are some of my special writing interests? I’m glad you asked… I think one of the big things that draws me to writing (and also to acting) is the opportunity to explore experiences outside my own. This may sound a little self-serving, but one of my favorite things about acting is getting to poke my emotional core with circumstances I may never experience in real life just to see what happens. Will I ever experience the emotional turmoil of having my mother marry my uncle after my father died in suspicious circumstances and then being visited by the ghost of said father, demanding revenge? No! I absolutely will not! But Hamlet will, and I can step into his shoes long enough to experience that with him. I can also do this in my writing (and my D&D campaign but… that’s another post entirely). I can take one facet of myself, one quirk of my emotional experience, and give it to someone else. Then I can present that someone else, that character, with circumstances specifically designed to press against that facet… and watch what happens. Maybe this sounds cruel, but in a way I’m testing myself, right? I’m taking a cutting of the succulent that is my life experience and I’m planting it in new earth. Now we just have to see if it survives. (Don’t worry, I’ll water it and make sure it gets plenty of sunlight.)

Ultimately, I think the reason I keep coming back to writing (and acting and TTRPGs) is because of my constant need to understand what it means to be human. And I want to write stories about other people trying to figure that out too. Especially if those people aren’t human themselves. And the genres of sci fi and fantasy (and horror) can take us to the extremes of that question: If we take away everything recognizable about our world and the people who live in it, are we still human? How? Why? And if we can figure out what makes us human, maybe we can learn to see it in each other, even as the world tries to deny us our humanity.

So yeah, I think a lot about what I want to write. I think about that little person that I was, and I think about the possibility of reaching out to other people who feel lost and alone and unloved, and I want my stories to remind them that they are not alone, and that they belong in this world as much as anybody else does.