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[orthent]

If your everyday life seems poor, don't blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches; because for the creator there is no poverty and no indifferent place.

--Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young PoetDear You

Comments

[orthent]

I should be clearer about what kind of a place I live in, since I still think of my hometown as a small(ish) town, although it's actually a modest-sized city (about 50,000 people). And yes, it has night life (though nothing to compare with even the state capital) and culture--though it's possible that after years of living here, what I think of as culture would make a city-dweller laugh. I'm guessing a place like our county seat (6000 people), or like the nearby towns of Roland and Slater (under 1500), is closer to most folks' idea of a small town. Probably I have no right to underplay the drawbacks of living in such a place.

And there's some irony in Rilke's saying "there is no poverty and no indifferent place," since he had travelled quite widely when he wrote that-- he was born in Prague, but had visited Italy and Russia, and had lived in Munich and Paris. Certainly if someone is bored in these places, it's nobody's fault but his own.

But to be an author--and the person I've posted about wants to be one--you don't necessarily need to see widely; what you need is to see acutely. There is this offensive argument I admit to having ranted about before: that you can't be a good writer if you live in a small town in a remote area, because a writer needs lots of experience, the more varied the better, that you can't get in a small town. WTF? Flannery O'Connor wouldn't have been a better writer if she'd lived in New York instead of on a farm in Georgia, and it wasn't Harvard that made Theodore Roethke a great poet, it was Saginaw. You can be rich in insight and experience living in a tiny town in Iowa if you have learned to pay attention; you can be poor in experience living in New York or London, if you're too full of yourself to let understanding into your head.

And Mr. Wangsty is definitely that. He likes to pontificate like a cracker-barrel lawyer--he likes the sound of his own voice too damn much to listen to anyone else--and he doesn't realize that this is why he doesn't have the life and friends and experience that he wants.

(And there's a good chance that the reason he pisses me off so much is that I see in him the things I like least about myself--because I do my fair share of pontificating too--but that's the way of all flesh.)

[indongcho]

There is this offensive argument I admit to having ranted about before: that you can't be a good writer if you live in a small town in a remote area, because a writer needs lots of experience, the more varied the better, that you can't get in a small town.

I've never understood arguments like that. Frankly, if all writers stuck to topics that they had personally experienced, fiction would be by far the poorer for it. There are simply too many things to experience, so many things that one person is never going to go through. And I wonder, how would one of those people react if I responded to their argument with, "So you think I should watch a village being massacred before writing about a character who has experienced that? Okay, I'll go look for a massacre!"

Hmph. And I won't even get started on the arguments concerning experience and writing romance and sex...I could be babbling for paragraphs on end ^^;

[orthent]

Ahaha, we've both ranted on this--in fact, I remember using some of the same arguments in your journal that I did in this post. (Sorry 'bout the copypasta!)

And I wonder, how would one of those people react if I responded to their argument with, "So you think I should watch a village being massacred before writing about a character who has experienced that? Okay, I'll go look for a massacre!"

Well now, some people would probably argue that if you haven't experienced such things, or grown up hearing the oral histories of those who have experienced them, you're at high risk of writing them badly--of glossing them over, or using them to up your story's wangst quotient without regard to how people who actually have experienced these events process the trauma and the memories, or without regard to the real-life, permanent damage the events have caused. Thus we get people who watch a 45-minute video about the Holocaust in social studies class, and think it's a good idea to write an AU fanfic set in a concentration camp for their favorite anime, with one half of their OTP as a Jewish teenager and the other half being in the SS, and there is healing buttsex and a happy ending.

I think it can be done, but you have to be prepared to do a lot of research, and to scrap plot ideas that you thought were brilliant when you discover that they fly in the face of history, and to remember that you're playing around with events that may still be reverberating through people's lives. No matter what, these things are not just plot fodder, they're not ingredients that you can just grab off the shelf and chuck in willy-nilly. And you have to listen without defensiveness or excuses when someone who really does know what they're talking about tells you that you're getting it wrong.

I was actually looking at this problem from a different perspective when I got to ranting, though: from the perspective that experience of a small town is real-world experience, and it too has riches that reveal themselves with some attention and reflection. It doesn't deserve to be sleepwalked through because you think it's too boring and mundane to be worth anyone's notice. The comment from Mr. Wangsty that got me going was actually one of those throwaway things--like "of course all the people around here are always up in everyone else's business, because they're all bored out of their minds, living in this stupid one-horse burg." It grated on me--how sure he was that nobody could think differently than he did, and that everybody was just as bored as he.

When people complain a lot of how dull and mundane and banal everything around them is, and how they're surrounded by boring bores who bore them, I tend to suspect them of being bores themselves. (Edward Cullen of Midnight Sun, I'm looking at YOU.) I think they see themselves as the farmboy Stu Limyaael used to rant about, stuck in a poor, drab, narrow place, surrounded by dull-witted, petty-minded conformists, misprized because they're too smart and nonconformist to belong. Of course, if you can't see the place you're in as anything but a foil to your fascinating self, you'll always be bored and miserable there, and you'll be a trial to everyone around you.