How I became an amateur

[randy_byers]

Sorry if that last post was a bit raw. Feeling clearly is hard work, and I didn't put in the work on that one.

So let me try to take this deeper. This is actually something I was thinking of writing a year or two ago but decided was just too much navel-gazing. Maybe it can be therapy instead. Or therapeutic navel-gazing, or something.

Comments

[gerisullivan]

I read this. I read your Joanna Russ/Memory Lane post. There's something really chewy here, probably even more than one thing. It's resonating with what I know of you, but off at the edges. I think I need to come back to it later, that my head just isn't here right now, much as I'd like it to be.

In typical Geri-fashion, I say that, then go on to dive in, at least just a bit:

Does anyone understand their innermost desires very well? I still can't forget judith_dascoyne putting her finger right on it when I told her about 10 years ago that I wanted to be married and growing older together with someone and she immediately shot back with something along the lines of, "Well, you think that's what you want." She was so right; my behavior certainly didn't reflect my claim and it hadn't for as long as she'd known me. So why did I think I want it? Why do I still?

[randy_byers]

It's true, these innermost desires just aren't rational! It's one of those things that the English language codes very well in the dual meaning of "want" as both "desire" and "lack". I don't have much insight into why we want things that our behavior says we don't actually want. I wish I understood the human heart better. I can only conclude that we are all perverse.

[mcjulie]

Well, either you really want it after all, or you want whatever it symbolizes to you.

If it's the first one, you'll only find that out by giving it another go. Maybe you just weren't ready to write fiction before and you are now. Maybe you should give NaNoWriMo a try and see how it feels to write every day for a month. NaNoWriMo can be a good experience for people, because the pressures are exactly the opposite of what they usually are for a writer who isn't already an under-deadline professional. You don't have to worry about it being good, making sense, or being salable at the end. You don't have to worry if anybody is going to like it. You just have to worry about the act of writing.

If it's the latter, I probably have no advice.

[randy_byers]

For me it isn't so much that I really still want to write fiction but the realization that I still feel ashamed that I wasn't able to succeed at it when I did want to. I wanted it so badly when I was younger, and probably the fact that somewhere deep inside I still feel ashamed about the failure is an indicator of how intensely I once wanted to be great. So my advice to myself is to acknowledge that old intensity and to acknowledge that it's okay I didn't achieve my ambition.

[kalimac]

That's all really interesting, and reflects my own experience - I too write a) what comes (relatively) easily and b) what readers say they enjoy. Was an embryonic concert reviewer for years before I got a chance to do it seriously.

But, though I wrote a few SF stories in high school, I never had much of an urge for fiction. I wonder why. Partly is that I never went through a Burroughs-Howard stage. I was a Tolkien man from day one, and he's not to be cheaply imitated, say I. (Many disagree, of course, starting with P. Jackson.) And I detested mandatory literary symbolism so much that I flunked out of high school English lit rather than bow to the teacher's indomitable will on the matter.

[randy_byers]

Hey, I remember The Sword of Shanana, and I remember how disappointed I was that it wasn't even close to as good as LOTR. I could do better than that! Oops, not really.

And although it was probably painful to flunk out of that English lit course, you did yourself a world of good by rejecting literary symbolism. I wasted a lot of time thinking about that crap. Although to be honest, if I hadn't been thinking about that crap I would've been thinking about something else equally useless. Growing up is hard!

[kalimac]

But I didn't want to write something that was merely better than The Sword of Shannara. It'd have to be a lot better than that - or than ERB or REH - before I'd want to read it.

Dropping out of that class felt like escaping from the insane asylum. Most of the fellow students I respected intellectually the most were in that class, and they all swallowed this insane lunacy whole.

But soon afterwards I discovered the school's SF club, where I found a whole different, and much more enjoyable, way of being smart than the students in the English class (some of whom are now elitist academics themselves) ever showed.

[randy_byers]

Well, I always loved English literature classes, and that was my major in college, so I kept a foot in both camps.

[kate_schaefer]

I'd like to read fiction you'd write now, but not if it were a quest story with dragons and volcanoes. That is, not if it were just a quest story with dragons and volcanoes. You've spent a lot of time closely observing and thinking about movies about what people do after their hearts are broken. The noir genre is about other things besides the broken hearts of the lead characters, of course; it's also about redemption, sometimes, and new losses, always, and smoke and light, almost all the time

[randy_byers]

Thanks, Kate. There's another version of this piece that includes a meditation on all the different ways that friends of mine have been writers. What constitutes success or failure as a writer is a complicated subject!

My abandonment of fiction felt like a liberation to me. I actually don't think I have "narrative mind". For a while in college and beyond I tried to turn that lack into a postmodernist or metafictional anti-narrative approach, but it turns out that you have to have a feel for narrative to do *that*, too. I really do think that amateur journalism is a good fit for me, and thanks so much for your kind comments about my film writing. That means a lot to me.