The Things You Want
I was talking to my partner about how Nanowrimo is popular because many people -- perhaps even most readers -- dream of writing a book. And Nanowrimo’s roots are in “stop saying you will write that book ‘someday’ and do it. Do it right now.”
Many people who start Nanowrimo do not write 50,000 words in November, and many of them never finish their draft. If they do finish the draft, they don’t revise it. If they do revise it, they don’t publish it. It’s a path with a lot of failure points.
One of those failure points is realizing that this is a lot of work and maybe you like the dream of writing a book a lot better than actually writing a book. Maybe you give up on that image of yourself as an author. Maybe you decide: this is not something I want, after all.
That last one made me reflect on my own path. I did eventually turn into the sort of person who writes, edits, and publishes books. Pretty often, by most standards. But I did give up some big parts of my self-image along the way.
I loved reading from an early age. I came from a family of avid readers, and I loved science fiction, fantasy, and romance when I was growing up. I got a bachelor's and then a master’s degree in English Literature.
Throughout my education, I had an image of myself as a person who enjoyed books of all kinds. Maybe I liked fantasy/science fiction/romance best, but I liked classics, too. When I was in middle school, I read the Iliad and the Odyssey for fun. (My mother reminded me of this recently, because it boggled her at the time. From my perspective, they were fantasy. Why wouldn’t I read them?)
As a teen, I wrote a fair bit of fiction. After I started college, my fiction writing trailed off. I wrote a few short stories for college assignments, and did some work on a novel or two, but for 13-14 years, I wrote little fiction on my own time, apart from text-based roleplay.
In 2001, I decided to make a serious effort at writing a book again. I had two ideas from my twenties, one science fiction and one fantasy, and I decided to write one of those two. While neither concept was literary fiction, they were heavily influenced by what my education said was Serious Literature. They were pretentious, dramatic stories exploring big ideas, with a lot of tragedy and suffering, and protagonists who died at the end.
At the time, I thought “I only have these two ideas that are worthy of becoming a book.”
I finished the draft and revision of one of those books, a fantasy epic with a working title of Prophecy. I never did a second revision of Prophecy based on reader feedback (I can’t remember now if I ever got any critical feedback on Prophecy, for that matter, although Greywolf read it as I wrote it and did a lot of cheerleading for me.) I never attempted to publish it.
I hated writing Prophecy. While there were parts of the book that I enjoyed reading, I’ve never read Prophecy for pleasure. I’m not sure I’ve even opened its files since I finished the second draft.
Over the next several years, I wrote other stories in fits and starts. I started A Rational Arrangement on a whim, and finished the draft in less than a year -- more than twice as fast as either of my previous drafts.
And over time, I realized that I do not like Serious Literature. I don’t like grim stories, I’m lukewarm about big ideas, and I am almost never in the mood for tragedy.
I do have a genuine and unstrained love of some classics. I love watching Shakespeare’s comedies, and reading Jane Austen’s books. I love Jane Eyre. But one thing these and almost everything I enjoy in a story have in common is that they’re not serious.
I am an extremely fussy reader. It’s hard for me to read a book by someone else and enjoy it. I pick books apart, questioning the choices the author made on plot or pacing or climax. But despite my weirdly exacting standards, I don’t actually like the things that most people look for in Great Books. My culture says that Great Literature is most often serious, dramatic, and tragic. Even awards that are exclusively for stories considered unserious by the mainstream -- sf&f and romance -- privilege grim and serious over light-hearted romps. “Award-winning” is a predictor that I won’t enjoy a story, not that I will.
It took me most of my life to realize that there really aren’t awards for the kind of stuff I love best. That when light-hearted, upbeat books win awards, it’s in spite of being light-hearted and upbeat, not because of it. To finally stop telling myself “this is supposed to be great so I have to like it.”
No, I don’t. I don’t mind that other people love grim and serious and dramatic, but I have come to terms with myself. When I enjoy a book like that, it’s despite being grim and serious and dramatic, not because of it.
I love fluffy and upbeat. I don’t want to spend months immersed in crafting a story full of sorrow and heartache.
Young Me wanted to write Great Literature, and didn’t think anything else was worth the effort. Old Me just wants to write cheerful stories with happy endings. They’re not Great Literature, and that’s fine. They're exactly what I want.
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