pre meditations on writing, part 1

It's come to my attention that I don't really write like most people with literary aspirations. One part of that may be that I tend to have inconsistencies that I haven't worked my way through yet. And that's just because I need to get my head screwed on straight.

But the second part is that I feel like there's a, well, let's call it "fashionable aesthetic" of realistic fiction. The way most people seem to understand fiction is that it is a creation of characters that could be real, and whose fates clarify some point of human existence. Within this realm there are all sorts of tones, styles, and characters, but one of the popular approaches is to take a disaffected/unengaged tone and talk about a character whose life is decadent and morally questionable. Kind of a "jaded observer" pose. A lot of college kids seem to like this pose because it allows them to appear "racy." Oh look, I can write about these things like they're normal, the message seems to be. That's why I'm cool.

The opposite end of the spectrum would be a "compassionate observer" pose, where the characters are somewhat bumblers, but the narrator forgives them because their faults are somehow loveable as human traits. Lorrie Moore seems to do this a lot, especially when she did a reading for us at Yale. It's hard to explain, but this is approach also strikes me a bit cold. I guess the "compassion" can easily become sappy if the reader doesn't agree. It's like how Dostoyevsky makes all these ethical comments all the time, and it sometimes seems extraneous. Except in the current trends, it's more an attitude thing than actual paragraphs of morality.

What do I find wrong with all this? Nothing, except that when I sit down to write, I don't feel these things coming to me. And I wonder why everyone seems to think this way. First of all, to me, a story only stays interesting if it is slightly strange. (People who know me will probably start nodding at this point!) Not only slightly strange, but it has to somehow give off an aura of being real and not real at the same time. It has to be that I'm telling you a story, and it also has to be that you believe me, at least a little bit. The story also cannot be just about people who live pointless lives. Pointlessness is not a point. Stories have to have magic--and I mean that figuratively.

Secondly, I don't like how everyone tries to be detached all the time. There's something to be said for being an observer, but there's something cold about it, too. People just don't seem to think writing emotionally charged sentences is a virtue. It's too sentimental, or something. Of course, it doesn't do to be sappy or moralistic, as I mentioned before. But whenever I start writing in a more passionate vein, I feel unwillingly funneled towards some sort of "asian american" or "women's" literature that I don't feel like I necessary belong to. Like I'm not going to be taken seriously, because I don't want to write in a detached, witty tone. This IS serious, dammit. Living in this world, seeing it for real, is a serious thing. Authentic emotions are just as important as big ideas.

The AA/women writers/Amy Tan complex brings me to another thing: geography. I can never decide whether or not to give my characters a time and a place. Because if I had my pick, my characters might live in any of the countries I've ever been in, and then they would be "exotic" when I just want them to be generally human. And it just might get political, depending on which countries they live in...why is it that only literature that takes place in America seem to have that aura of "American literature"? And everything else has a different label? To someone living in Indiana, a story taking place in New York City might be set in almost as foreign a place as Tokyo (two cities that give me the impression of having similar feel). It's like how in movies the "white people" are simply normal, whereas anyone of a different race is "ethnic" simply by virtue of the fact that they don't show up very often.

This has turned into a rough expose on what I think about writing at this moment...which is funny because instead of writing something, I decided to write ABOUT it in a xanga entry. But I've been thinking lately about why I want to write. Probably these ideas need to stew for a while longer before I can boil them down to what I really think. If I can ever do that, it'll help me screw my head on straight(er).