The Two Types of Stories...
There are two types of stories facing those of us who write: stories that we ourselves want to read, and stories that we feel a need to write because of something deep and primeval inside us. The former are usually more entertaining and have the wider popular appeal for the reader, and are often the ones for which the writer is known and remembered. The latter kind -- often painful, sometimes awkward and deeply unpleasant even -- are the stories that may make the greatest impact and are the most "important" ones in the sense of a contribution to the human body of literature. (They are the ones that get taught in schools to reluctant students who wince at the reading, yet possibly find personal value many years later in having been exposed to that dentist-drill of a read.)
It is often said that we writers ought not to be silly, stop assuming that anything we produce will be read even five years hence, much less a hundred, or become a classic. However, we all secretly hope that our work will not die in obscurity, will linger, even if only in the shape of a faintly glowing coal, for a soul or two to discover in the distant future. It is this secret hope that drives us -- from the greenest beginner, to the drudging mid-lister, to the aging literary master. Sometimes it is but a faux rhinestone mockery of an urge, because we might have very little talent coupled with very little ability to improve out writing, and worse, we might be just not driven enough to persist against genuinely horrible industry odds.
And yet, many of us persist, at least for a while. And here is where those two types of stories I mentioned above enter the picture. I think those of us who are in the early stages of writing ability (or obsession), tend to fall for the easy kind of story, the former, the kind that we believe will be fun to tell, might be popular at the moment, and the kind that we find personally entertaining, satisfying, comforting, and we want to read in other people's books.
But those of us who bear the indomitable absolute drive are usually possessed by the latter kind of story -- the ugly, dark, unpleasant and uncomfortable kind that rears its head suddenly smack in the middle of our lives and must be told -- and we continue to find peculiar harrowing beauty in it, for ourselves alone, and we somehow produce this story and give it birth, and hope against even worse odds, for it to reach the tiny niche of readers that might find this rather ugly uncouth thing to be exactly what they have been looking for all their lives.
So where am I going with this? Simply that I hope that if you too have the dark uncomfortable story monster that you think no one else wants to see, that you appreciate the fact, and that you will find your true readers.
Happy Thanksgiving.
It is often said that we writers ought not to be silly, stop assuming that anything we produce will be read even five years hence, much less a hundred, or become a classic. However, we all secretly hope that our work will not die in obscurity, will linger, even if only in the shape of a faintly glowing coal, for a soul or two to discover in the distant future. It is this secret hope that drives us -- from the greenest beginner, to the drudging mid-lister, to the aging literary master. Sometimes it is but a faux rhinestone mockery of an urge, because we might have very little talent coupled with very little ability to improve out writing, and worse, we might be just not driven enough to persist against genuinely horrible industry odds.
And yet, many of us persist, at least for a while. And here is where those two types of stories I mentioned above enter the picture. I think those of us who are in the early stages of writing ability (or obsession), tend to fall for the easy kind of story, the former, the kind that we believe will be fun to tell, might be popular at the moment, and the kind that we find personally entertaining, satisfying, comforting, and we want to read in other people's books.
But those of us who bear the indomitable absolute drive are usually possessed by the latter kind of story -- the ugly, dark, unpleasant and uncomfortable kind that rears its head suddenly smack in the middle of our lives and must be told -- and we continue to find peculiar harrowing beauty in it, for ourselves alone, and we somehow produce this story and give it birth, and hope against even worse odds, for it to reach the tiny niche of readers that might find this rather ugly uncouth thing to be exactly what they have been looking for all their lives.
So where am I going with this? Simply that I hope that if you too have the dark uncomfortable story monster that you think no one else wants to see, that you appreciate the fact, and that you will find your true readers.
Happy Thanksgiving.