The Grasshopper #94: Hibernation?

Where did winter go?

Feb 14, 2024

focused photo of a snow flake — Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

I took a little time off from this and my other Substack, The Remarkable, this week. Politics in the US is off the rails right now and my writing bandwidth has been focused on trying to decipher it day by day. But I am also thinking about what I do as a writer after that storm is over, if it is ever over.

I do not consider myself an artist these days. I’m ok with that right now because to me art is representing the magic of the world, both good and bad, but I cannot see any magic in the antics of politicians. And politics is the tag that leads most of my writing at the moment. Am I happy about that? Not always.

When I started The Grasshopper nearly two years ago I had a pragmatic idea of what a writing newsletter should be. Advice based on experience, but the experience of writing is wildly different than what I grew up expecting. Not in a good or bad way, just different.

I had the strange realization that I’ve lived in two centuries and watched history unfold. I’ve always been interested in history, not as a historian but as patterns that emerge and repeat. Stories, or myths as Joe Campbell would tell us.

But this year things feel different. It seems a kind of collective insanity has captured a significant number of humans across the planet. Maybe it has always been there but today it seems to be much more on the surface, that is to say, acceptable. Anger, fear, hatred, bias, all that negative stuff. And it makes for good copy, which has twisted some of the media in their quest for survival.

A part of me wants to retreat, to sleep a little more until the spring sun and birds don’t allow it anymore, but I can’t. I don’t feel that hatred and bias but I do feel the requirement to be a witness, to say what I see and what I think. And I think any writer or professional communicator cannot ignore the world.

Writing is so multifaceted that it defies description or categorization. If Taylor Swift writes songs that move millions or a filmmaker tells a story with few words but many deep levels of life, are they writers? Is a painter a writer? I’d argue yes.

So, you sit here reading this, something by a man you will never meet, who sits in an apartment writing. You may read because you are a writer or aspire to call yourself one. Have you ever considered the power of these few marks on a screen? The ability for me to share my thoughts one on one with a thousand others across a planet, in seconds?

It’s mind boggling. By the way, boggling is an incredibly odd word. It boggles the mind to think about that. Or this.

Recently I read a piece about a new literary genre called romantasy, a made up word combining romance and fantasy; sexy love stuff but with swords and dragons. Not my thing but apparently the hot selling flavor of the month. And I understand why. A lot of us need to escape, which probably explains the massive popularity of Star Wars and the Marvel Multiverse, whatever that is.

These genres offer paths for writers to enter a pre-made universe and build stories off of it. There is a thing called fan fiction, which has been around for ages, and it takes existing characters, settings, and conflicts and reworks them. But it is not considered ‘real’ writing and I tend to agree with that.

Those things I mentioned, characters, etc., are often what makes great writing stand out, but if you simply take someone’s else’s original work and riff on it, you’re probably shortchanging yourself as a writer. Why? Because when you create a world from scratch, you get to enter unknown territory and have an adventure of your own. And maybe others will come with you.

The problem I have with derivative genre fiction is it does not force you into growing as a creator. The limits are predefined so the writer is not forced into that unknown territory and that is the place where the really interesting things happen.

When George Lucas conceived the original Star Wars film, A New Hope, he was riffing on 1950s sci-fi and comic book themes of good vs evil. But he built something far more and it has evolved far past Buck Rogers spaceships, ray guns, and swashbuckling heroes, though he put all those things into that first film.

It could easily have been a major flop, in fact the studio executives figured it would be. But they underestimated the times and the need in the seventies, a tough decade, for escape and stories of young people overcoming adversity in pursuit of justice.

The innovation he introduced was not a clear happy ending with all the storylines neatly wrapped up. That is never the way life is and though he leaned towards those goofy endings, there was always the dark side lurking in the background. That created complex layers of conflict which have now become a universe many live in.

Writing a successful serial is not easy. Frank Herbert, the brilliant author of Dune, attempted it with his follow up novels but they never had the density and impact of the original. The stories petered out into arcane mythology that his son, a lesser writer, tried to keep going. But to me, as an enthusiastic fan, the later books just seemed like a way to keep the royalties flowing.

Sometimes we don’t need more, which is why so many sequels don’t cut it. We have seen that with the way the studio has milked the Marvel stories until all they had left was relentless and pointless action.

To circle back, the interesting thing about this emerging romantasy genre is that like its precursor, romance novels, there are rules about how things should unfold. These rules are so specific that the Romance Writers of America once published guidelines outlining the dos and don’ts. And publishers like Harlequin would not take stories that deviated from the norm too much.

Of course the Star Wars universe has its own set of rules and massive base of fans prepared to debate every innovation and plot twist ad infinitum.

Yeah, being a writer is different these days. Fun though.

The Witness Chronicles, politics decoded

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