“Once the writer in every individual comes to life (and that time is not far off), we are in for an age of universal deafness and lack of understanding.”
The above quote from Kundera can be read as an extremely negative observation, but anyone grazing through the landfill of online writing, hoping to find a gem amongst the garbage, might find themselves in agreement.
One of the downsides of unlimited and unsupervised publishing is the reader learning how much bad writing is out there. It is a little discouraging, but I have a notion how you can look at your own work and avoid getting lumped in with the poor, derivative stuff.
Simply put, virtually every piece of effective writing documents a transformation, whether an Elon Musk disintegrating in public, or a young writer finding their voice. If you can find the transformation(s) in your stories, you may be on your own path.
Even if you are documenting a transformation as narrated by someone else, you can find insight an that it offers you, based on your personal experience. I will go so far as to say that, in fiction particularly, if there is no transformation at the center of your story, you have no story.
In the days when crossing the ocean meant spending a week on an ocean liner, it was believed that if someone had experienced trauma, sending them on that journey could be a healing experience, a sea change in their attitude.
I have always wanted to experience this, getting on a boat and crossing an unimaginable expanse of ocean, only to arrive in a different world. It couldn’t help but reorient your perspective. I think this notion of a sea change as a healing experience is a good model for building a story.
It has the elements of a hero’s journey into the unknown to conquer something, whether it is grief, immobility, or a lost love. You enter an unfamiliar vessel and embark on an extended meditation of wind and water. You may encounter storms or dead calms that must be endured.
And then, in the end, which is an arrival, you have the opportunity to reinvent yourself in a new world. The metaphor is complete.
I think you could see the pandemic lockdown or the road to an election as such a process. In my recent history it was a long train trip that proved much more challenging than anticipated. Which brings me to the final element to that transformation, the return as a changed person.
I determined after that trip in late fall of 2019 that it was time to shake off the last vestiges of ‘normal’ work life and dive into a new writing life, entirely self-directed. Then the world shoved us into lockdown to avoid a deadly illness, which, coincidentally, was a perfect environment for writing.
By the way, I do not think there was anything coincidental about it.
There has been a theme emerging in the past few issues of The Grasshopper, related to writing as a form of therapy, for both the writer and the reader. This has not been intentional on my part but it wants to come out here, so I’m going with it.
I can’t see writing as anything else but transformative if you are at all serious about it. Even in my daily political writing I see an arc of transformation, not always positive. The rise and fall of division driven by a narcissist that was accompanied by a positive change for most of the country as the midterm elections showed positive concern for the country, is an example that is ongoing.
In that example we see a spiraling downward transformation of an ex-president, but a corresponding upward movement as the country shakes off an experiment gone disastrously wrong (my opinion of course). It’s a good example because it illustrates another characteristic of change: its negative and positive effects.
I know that for a beginner writer this may seem dauntingly complex; to take your story through that arc, or even to find it. But it is a challenge necessary to face if you are going to grow your own voice, another theme here.
So, if you can’t seem to get life into your writing, look for that sea change. If you don’t find it, try again because it is there somewhere waiting for you.
As a Buddhist, the nature of change is central to my worldview. Everything is in a state of constant change and always has been. As a writer I try to capture moments when that constant change reorients the world for a character or a reader.
Enjoy the rest of your week. Next week the Solstice dawns, heralding the eventual end of winter, though here we have the worst of it ahead of us. So it goes…
M
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