One of my LiveJournal friends is that rara avis, the Published Fictioneer. Since I knew she was intrigued by role-playing but a little put off by improvisational acting, I invited her to lurk over on Passions, and let her into the mailing-list archive so she could read over the first few months. Improvisational narrative, as I expected it would, agreed with her a bit better. (As, truth be told, it does me, though I do enjoy both.)
I like your writing, she wrote me back. Not deathless prose, but solid.
And being the peasant I am, I stuck my tongue out at her. :P And when she was kind enough to reiterate her praise, I did it again.
I think she felt a little rebuffed. (Gee, imagine that.) I feel I should explain.
It boils down to just plain not wanting to enter that arena. I’ve been stubborn about this all my life, aside from the occasional lapse—and the last lapse was in high school, many and many a year ago, and I think I used a pseudonym, so I wasn’t completely gone. My mom once exclaimed apropos of absolutely nothing “I hope you write a book someday!” while she was driving me somewhere, half my lifetime or thereabouts ago. Once I got past the scalding incredulity I thought to myself with teenage self-righteousness that she wouldn’t like the book I wrote. I’m probably right about that; the thing is, I wouldn’t like the book I wrote either.
Could I toss a hat into the ring, if I wanted to? Yeah, probably. I mean, I can’t imagine what gets into fantasy editors’ slushpiles, if shoddy garbage like James Clemens’s Wit’ch series gets out of them. (I had to work on far too many books from that series once. Books that bad are like strong acid—just touching them burns. I have never converted a bunch of books so fast in my life, I so desperately wanted them out of my sight forever. If there were a hard-drive decontamination ritual I could have performed once the conversions were done, I would have.)
There are days it’s tempting, sure, entirely too tempting. Just as music and theatre were when I was in high school. I delight in good writing, as I do in good music and good theatre. And I like to do, not just watch. The doing is rather more than half the fun, and what’s more fun is that the doing informs the watching—I wouldn’t understand even so well as I do what good writing and good music and good theatre are if I hadn’t tried to write and play and sing and act.
But. Writing for publication is a little different from live performance, in my estimation. The chief difference is ephemerality. I can sit through a mediocre live performance and enjoy it—and if I don’t enjoy it, it’s only a little lost time, no harm done. Mediocre writing lasts; that is the genius and the horror of the written word. I have a horror of immortality anyway, but I’ve a worse horror of crystallized mediocrity.
There’s also a question of resources. Before my hands broke too badly to play, I gave impromptu recorder concerts sitting in a park or in my back yard, once at a local herb and plant sale—I like aleatoric audiences. What I remember best about the MythCon I went to a few years back was sitting in on the performers’ circle, and singing old Ladino ballads just for the hell of it. (Yes. Me. Singing solo. In public. What did I just say, rara avis.) This cost nobody anything (other than a wince or two when my voice went flat, which it is prone to do). The human and material resources that go into a published book are frightening; I’m a text artisan, I have reason to know. The book better damned well be worth it.
And mediocre published writing gets under my skin far worse than mediocre live performance, largely because—again, in my estimation—live performers have so many fewer delusions about the quality of their work, and yet have so much more fun performing it. I can watch mediocre performers having a glorious time. I can’t read mediocre writers who clearly think they’re $DEITY’s gift, or worse, mediocre writers who will never be anything but mediocre, and yet siphon publishing resources and readers from their betters. I certainly can’t face the thought of becoming one of those mediocrities, and I’m pretty solidly sure that were I to try, I’d not rise above that level.
So I’d rather people go read somebody good. It’s not like there’s any dearth of good writing around.
Fantasy writing, in particular—my personal theory is that good fantasy writers must bring some knowledge external to fantasy to the writing. History, sociology, linguistics, folklore, myth, literature, philosophy, religion—plenty of possibilities. But something. The worst fantasists obviously don’t know a damn thing but other people’s fantasy. What do I know that I could bring? Nothing that hundreds of other people don’t know more thoroughly and care about more deeply. Nothing.
Therefore I very badly need not to set my sights on becoming a Published Fictioneer. Get thee behind me, O Publisher!
Now, I like praise, when I do something well. I do. There’s just praise I cannot, must not, let myself listen to, because I will get above myself on the strength of it, and in the long run it would all lead to fury and frustration. Praise of my writing is like that. Like lots of people, I’m given to overvaluing my own writing. I have to watch myself.
There are venues for the kind of writing I do, the modest expectations and aspirations I have for what I write. There’s this marvelous thing called blogging, for instance. Though even so, I shake my head sometimes, when people pay more attention to how I write than what I’m saying. I agree with Baldur that there’s a craft to writing, and I’ll even admit that when I put my mind to it, I can put a good sentence together. That’s a far cry from being a good writer, even a potentially good writer.
But every single time somebody hands CavLec meta-praise—every time I’m accused of having “voice” or “tak[ing] care with [my] forms”—I make a new commitment to the bald, slang-ridden, speech-infested, low-register style that most of CavLec falls into. It’s not that I can’t write better than that; a few entries here even prove as much. It’s not that I’m earnestly fond of the style; sometimes I read my archives and cringe at how very unnecessarily ugly the writing is. It’s that I don’t even want to seem to write for the sake of the charge that praise of one’s writing brings, or the desire to be a Published Fictioneer.
Blogging is pluralistic, side-by-side, ephemeral, in a way books aren’t. Room for all. People who get tired of my blog are more than welcome to go elsewhere; there’s even a handy-dandy list of places they can go in the sidebar. Nobody expects the prose to be deathless; if by some freak of chance it is, that’s a bonus. I haven’t glommed up anybody else’s publishing resources with CavLec; I pay for my own webspace and I paid for Movable Type and installed it my own small self. Playing recorder in the park, that’s all it is. Even less intrusive, since recorder-haters can’t block out my playing nearly as easily as CavLec-haters can CavLec.
Play-by-email lets me walk around outside my world, as CavLec can’t. I get to play with diction, register, world-building, plot, character; and I even get help doing it, which is not at all to be despised. Most of the time the results suck. Occasionally they don’t. I generally know the difference, and I do try to approximate non-suckage. (I’m not happy with Tamasi’s diction at the moment, for example. Her register wavers without apparent reason, and her vocabulary is too erudite given that she’s not speaking her native language. Working on it. I think the more formal diction I started with was better if I can tone down the Latinisms some, but I keep wandering toward figuring out a rationale for her register shifts. Maybe she’s trying to tell me something about herself.) Even by revision, sometimes. Some of Juskinah’s stories have been polished far beyond what they merit, because I liked the words enough to want to make them better, to enjoy the stories more when I reread them.
But it’s just play. Playing with writing is all I need to do to be happy, and the suckage or non- of the results isn’t the bloody point. If everything I wrote sucked (and it’s close, though not quite), I’d still be having fun. If everything I wrote sucked and I had great expectations for it nonetheless—well, “not fun” doesn’t begin to cover it.
Scratching on the sand with a stick, for the plain bloody fun of it. That’s all I do. It’s enough for me, and if I am wise it always will be. So do me a favor, okay? The next time you’re thinking of praising my writing—don’t. It’s nice, and I appreciate the intent, but it’s not good for me.
