What Kind of Writer Do I Want to Be?

This is a question I'm sure most writers don't give a lot of thought to. Most of us just sit down and write what interests us, what we're passionate about, and after enough time and practice a pattern begins to emerge. For most of us, we leave the packaging to someone else and try our best to make writing as organic and nebulous as possible. That is, after all, what gives us the best results.

To be honest, I'm not sure that's going to work out for me. When I read a blog or story I particularly like, my first response is something like "I want to do something like that." And thanks to a wide variety of friends, I'm exposed to all *kinds* of writing. Obviously, I'm not versatile enough to write in every style I want to, so I think it makes sense for me to sit down and think about exactly what I want to be doing with my writing. What do I want to sound like? What's my ultimate goal with this kind of thing?

It's not an easy question to answer, even though I feel like it's something I should be asking of myself. What interests me? Why do I want to talk about these interests with a wide audience? What am I hoping to show people?

I think when it comes right down to it, I'm fascinated by the act of storytelling and what we get out of it -- as a society and as individuals. I think the symbols we use and how they relate to the aspects of ourselves we admire is very, very telling. Most of the time, we don't even realize what we're doing, what we're saying by who we choose to obsess over, tell stories about and connect with. It's that cultural subconscious that's really intriguing to me. I think there's always an undercurrent running through a community that will tell you what it's about if you're able to crack the code. I think, ultimately, what I want to do is talk about that in my stories.

Storytelling, to me, is a worthwhile pursuit because it's such a powerful tool of self-reflection. Our storytellers show us who we are in ways that we would otherwise find incredibly painful. They hypnotize us into seeing the parts of ourselves and our society that we would rather not see. Our stories, at their best, force us to be honest but also enable us to handle that honesty with grace and compassion. If you're able to do it just right, you can take the blinders off of someone's experience with a well-constructed story. You help people to see things exactly as they are -- or exactly as you see them, at least.

Right now I've been focusing on the idea of stories as entertainment, because I think that's what a story needs to do at the very least. No one's going to let your story affect them if they're not entertained by it; so you need to figure out how to package your presentation in a way that's gripping and fun. There's no shame in wanting to write a story just to entertain; in fact, a lot of our 'serious' writers could really stand to remember that lesson. Entertainment, ideally, shouldn't be the only reason for a story's existence, but it's got to be a big reason. If you're going to sermonize or lecture, there are other avenues for that. Ayn Rand may have had an interesting political idea to espouse, but she absolutely sucks at story-telling.

Ultimately I'd love to be the kind of writer who had something to say about the role mythology plays in our lives, in all of its forms. I would love to playfully tweak our fascination with pop culture while at the same time illuminating its purpose and elevating it beyond its admittedly shallow nature and reputation. I would love to explore the alchemical process of mixing truth in with a stew of symbolism, metaphor and misdirection so it can be made palatable. And I would love to entertain while doing it.

So there we go. Now that I've outright said it, I guess I have a direction to point myself in. That direction might completely change once I get some actual practice under my belt. We'll see. I just think this is a talking-out-loud conversation with myself that needed to happen.

The Reading List (May 2011)

I'm coming up on the end of my self-imposed month-long hiatus from all things poetry, so now I'm going to have to start digging through the poetry I wrote for National Poetry Month 2010. In a way I'm kind of dreading it; you know there's a lot of pain in discovering how awful you were even just a year ago. There are a lot of poems that I've written where I just sit back and wonder, "What the hell was I thinking?"

It'll help, of course, to remind myself to be gentle with my work. There's always an idea struggling to get out and even if it was born misshapen and ugly, there's the chance that it could turn out better with the proper shaping.

In the meantime, I've been reading more than I have before. This is intentional, of course. In order to be a better writer, I'm going to have to be a better reader; the two practices go hand in hand. If I don't search out writing that's exciting and engaging to me, how in the world am I going to figure out how to steal...er, imitate it?

Ryan also got me a Kindle for Christmas last year, and I really want to be better about using it. It's meant to make reading easier, and by God it does! I just have to get into the habit of wielding it.

So far I've picked up Storm Front by Jim Brooks, On Writing by Stephen King and Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky. There's quite a few others on my list, but I'm trying to work down my list before I start filling the damned thing up with stuff I'll never get to. Hopefully by keeping the book list small I'll have more incentive to read what's there. Right?

Anyway, the Kindle is a really great device. It's ultra-portable, carries quite a lot of books (you can even subscribe to blogs, newspapers and magazines that will automatically update in the background whenever wi-fi is turned on) and best of all is quite easy to read. There's no glare on the screen, the words are crisp and clear, and it's really easy to navigate. If you download the Kindle app across multiple platforms (I have it for PC, iPhone and iPad), then it'll automatically fetch your most recent page and pick up where you left off. Awesome!

Now that the plug is out of the way (I'm waiting for my free book downloads, Amazon), I'll talk a bit about the last book I finished. Storm Front is a pretty neat concept -- a pulp detective novel crossed with modern fantasy. I've been a fan of that cross ever since reading Gun, With Occasional Music several years ago, and Brooks manages the blend a bit more seamlessly than Lethem did.

The plot is fairly basic when you get right down to it. Harry Dresden is hired to investigate the disappearance of a family man who's been dabbling in magic. At the same time, a particularly gruesome magical crime has been committed, and the police call Dresden in to investigate. The governing body of wizards in this world, the White Council, believe that he's up to no good and are just waiting to catch him in the act. It all comes together for a pretty explosive climax, just as you'd expect it to. The big mystery, the thing that drives you along in the novel, is figuring out how.

It's a bit difficult to explain how the novel works from a storyteller's perspective. I'm not used to looking at books from that angle, and I have even less experience talking about them that way. Functionally, it all fits, but there's something about the style of it, the artistry that makes it just a bit lacking. You can tell that Brooks is still getting his feet under him with this stuff, and he's being pretty careful about the positioning of the pieces. The characters all have personality, but you can't help but see the mechanism underneath the artifice, driving them to be in the right (or wrong) places at the right time.

That isn't to say that Storm Front is unenjoyable. It's fun, and the world that Brooks introduces us to is pretty intriguing. A lot of the writing, though, feels intentionally "grabby," with beats and turns of phrase that are only meant to grab our attention. It's like sitting next to someone who's rehearsed the same story hundreds of times so that he's got everything down but figuring out how to make it all sound natural.

In other words, it's pretty good, but you can also tell that it's a first novel. The style is unpolished but competent enough to stay out of the way of the narrative most of the time. I'd expect that everything gels pretty well in future novels, actually, and it's cool to see something that's polished enough to be of publishable quality but still rough enough that you can see how the story was shaped.

So yeah, after this next little bout of reading, I'll be downloading the second in the Dresden series for my Kindle. First though, Stephen King and another rough draft of a novel written by a friend.

At some point, I *really* have to catch up on my comic books...