The Grasshopper #89, A New Year
No, I don’t do predictions, but this year will be a doozy
Are tumultuous times good for writers? I hope so because the coming year, especially for political observers, promises to verge on the insane. We all know what’s coming, or do we?
During and after the Covid lockdowns we saw a wave of dystopian fiction in both print and streaming. Understandable, given the end of the world vibe you got when you walked outdoors. Empty streets, a virulent pandemic, incredible uncertainty.
Anyone who reads The Grasshopper probably knows I hate dystopian fiction, mainly because it is so hard to be original and it’s so easy to cook up a nightmare scenario. Now it’s actually become a genre, albeit a limited one.
If you write about actual dystopia, which unfortunately is what a lot of my political writing is tinged with, making up one seems a bit silly. But a lot of genre fiction ends up being silly or just plain bad because it’s rare for great writers to tackle genres.
They have their own notion of the world and it rarely fits into neat categories. But today there are a ridiculous number of categories and subcategories, labels the business finds convenient from a marketing point of view.
If you read my newsletter The Witness Chronicles, you know my non-fiction genres and you may know I’m doubling down for the coming year by spinning it out into its own pub with its own subscriber list. It’s a little risky and Substack doesn’t allow Sections to have their own subscriber list.
A Section in Substack is when you add a subsidiary newsletter under the umbrella of an existing one. It can be confusing but The Witness Chronicles is a Section under The Grasshopper. In hindsight I should have done it as a stand-alone but Substack is frankly not great at clarifying a lot of their new features and I got it wrong.
I love the platform but there are aspects of it I would change. Like everything else.
So, back to the future, the year ahead. It’s going to be challenging to keep my projects from spilling over into each other but frankly I don’t care. A writer can compartmentalize but that’s not my nature if I see relevant connections between topics.
So if I’m writing about my state of mind in my recovery letter, The Remarkable, and I’m feeling up or down about politics, for example, politics might creep in over there. Which brings me to the subject of rules, specifically rules for writing.
There are no rules for writing other than those you impose on yourself. There are things like genres and style which writers conform to for readability, marketing, or just to keep things manageable. But that’s voluntary.
If you want to write something radically different, go for it but realize it may not get read. A few writers can do this and succeed, Cormac McCarthy comes to mind or Don DeLillo though I must confess I find both unreadable and sometimes sophomoric in their extreme experimentation. It often seems done for its own sake, not because it makes a story stronger.
But what do I know? They’re both considered literary lions by many. Like I said, the only rules you follow as a writer are those you impose on yourself.
One of mine is that words are not precious, not my words anyway. Our unfinished paintings do not risk being seen unless we publish them and delete is a function unique to our art form in many ways. Most of us have had the experience of losing our work to a simple mistake or a crashed computer back in the day.
The world didn’t end, at least mine didn’t. But I do write in Google Docs because I know my words exist somewhere in multiple Google data centers in places I’ll never know. That’s my free insurance policy against losing my work.
We have some wildcards ahead in 2024. AI comes to mind, along with the future of democracy in the US, and the climate thing. Eight people got injured by a rogue wave in Ventura, CA this week and surfers are flocking to Mavericks south of SF to ride seventy footers.
That’s different. Who needs dystopia when you’ve got giant waves and rogue AIs?
Do you have a topic you think you could write about but are hesitant, because getting it wrong could be a real problem? 2023 saw me writing about a few things that fit this description.
One has been my dealing with drinking and recovery. But the other is the subject I still feel is a balancing act because it is so polarizing, the Israeli/Hamas conflict. I won’t go into my feelings about it as I already have in my writing in The Witness Chronicles.
The challenge for me was to take a complex issue and find a balanced way to write about it. Though I said there are no rules earlier, for both these issues I set myself some rules. For example, in writing about recovery I have to be brutally honest with myself and my readers.
In an issue like the Middle East, I felt I should try and see both sides of a conflict that has been festering for hundreds of years, with many mistakes made on both sides, deadly and heartbreaking mistakes. When I first published my perspective I was a little worried about what I might hear in comments.
I’m not out to generate hatred or spread fear, ever. But I learned not to underestimate my readers who were generous in recognizing the balancing act I was attempting. The feedback has been thoughtful and supportive.
I’m sending this out on the first day of the new year rather than yesterday, its normal publishing date. This is a day for looking forward and there is a lot to look forward to. I can set goals and make plans but the future always has an element of the unknown and I intend to embrace it in 2024.
Did you write today?
Martin
1010 words
~ I write The Grasshopper, a letter for creatives, The Witness Chronicles, a weekly digest of three of my articles on politics and climate, and The Remarkable, a recovery letter, about my addiction and reentry experience. All are weekly and free with a paid option to share your support. Please check them out.
If you want to show support but don’t want to commit to a subscription, you can always buy me a coffee!
Believe me, it makes my day. M