Fellow writers! Today I want to talk to you, briefly (editor peebs note: not THAT briefly,) on a topic that has been on my mind. Today I will be speaking to you about the Dunlin, a bird of limited importance, that all the same taught me an important lesson about writing and quality.
Following me so far? No? Yeah I kind of expected that. The dunlin is protagonist of a Norwegian folk tale, the Dunlin and the Hunter, a very Scandinavian type of tragedy. In the tale, the dunlin mother approaches the hunter and begs that he doesn't kill her children. The dunlin seeming a fairly unremarkable bird as far as fowl to feast on, and doesn't otherwise inconvenience the Hunter he goes "Sure. What do they look like so I know not to shoot 'em?" The dunlin goes on to speak of the virtues of her children, how they are the most radiantly beautiful birds of the swamps in the area. The hunter agrees without, one assumes, thinking too much about how he's bargaining with a bird, and with the matter thus settled, the two go their separate ways. The hunt isn't great, and while the hunter doesn't get much, he does manage to catch and kill some fowl that perhaps would do for a only mostly regrettable soup before heading home. As he heads out of the swampland, however, he is beset by a mortified and furious dunlin. How could you, she admonishes the hunter, kill my only children when I asked you to spare them. The hunter hasn't quite picked up the moral and claims he's not to blame, as he specifically went for the ugliest failbird-looking hatchlings he could find. Don't you know, the dunlin delivers the moral of the story through the deepest of sorrow, That every mother considers her children the most beautiful.
So there's the fable, a rare fairy tale from Norway in that it neither includes God's Favorite Little Guy, Askeladden, nor some fuckass fox who fills much the same role (seriously, those two guys are fucking EVERYWHERE.) It's a story about bad communication leading to tragedy, sure, but it also is about the love a mother holds for her children, and, if we chose to expand the scope a little bit, about the love a creator holds for their work.
Now, I hope, pieces are starting to fall into place RE: that whole "Peebs what the fuck are you on about" thing. See, I believe that many of the neuroses and much of the angst we writers hold as it pertains to our writing is rooted in what might be described as a mismatch between the love we have in our heart for our stories and the perceived quality, or possibly also recognition that our writing gets us.
Writing, I think we can all agree, is hard. Putting the words on the page seems a lot easier in theory, as one can imagine some level of directly transcribing ideas from ones brain, than it usually is in practice. It is through the exercise this inevitably becomes that most writers, I imagine, become aware of the fact that even though they conceptualize their thoughts as ongoing use of language, putting it on the page like regular language encounters some truly staggering barriers. The reason for this, I maintain is that though one may perceive ones thoughts to be mostly visual in pictures or "video," or even mostly language, spoken or written, putting actual words to them can be, if you pardon the nomenclature, a fuck of a thing. I tend to conceptualize this as the story, characters and dialog often appearing in the mind to be made of "amorphous thought stuff" until I've thought about them enough that writing their shenanigans down becomes a necessity.
A lot of the "beginner" level tricks to writing is, as far as I'm concerned, about how one navigates the gap between how the story feels in its malleable thought form version and how it reads on the page. "Start writing that bad first draft" is a piece of advice I see frequently, as well as "you can make it good later," and while I agree that this is a valid approach, and definitely what I did with my first novel, I can also see how it may not help everyone. See, I kind of don't like the good-bad dichotomy, it feels like we're the dunlin and the hunter again, talking about subjective sizes such as "beautiful" and "some stank-ass looking birds" like they're benchmarks that helps anyone determine anything.
In part, I fear that this future goal of the Good Book is in part unreachable, due to the inherent gap between what is possible in thought space versus, you know, actual words. You see it, for example, in aging authors and filmmakers, muttering sourly at the shortcomings of their most famous works, movies and books that by all accounts are considered stone cold classics and prefect or near-perfect examples of the craft. So what's up with these geezers? Are they merely curmudgeonly? No, I think that it's more that they're holding themselves to the same impossible standard that many amateur writers do. There exists, in their mind, a More Perfect version of their work, and the actual work in the actual physical world fails to live up to that. There can be any number of reasons for this. Budget constraints, editors, agents and producers of multiple kinds, but one that just about always will get in the way for this immanetization (that is to say "trying to make it manifest/real) is the problem of incompatible formats.
Now this comes the part of this little essay where I get a little bit naughty with it and say something that probably is true in the philosophical sense, but proving or disproving it is a bit of a doozy for reasons that should become obvious shortly. I'm of the opinion that the Thing In Your Head can not be translated perfectly to the world Outside your Head. There is an unbridgeable gap there. The Thoughts that make up the Thing In Your Head may seem linear and like they'd translate into the linear format that is language with no problem, but if that were true, we'd probably see way way more books like The Naked Lunch out there, to name one thing.
What I instead posit as how this "really works" is that I believe that writing is more a question of translating thoughts into language than it is transcribing them. Sure, you won't get much of anywhere without some thoughts to translate, but the thoughts themselves and five-ish dollars will get you a halfway decent cup of coffee, as the by now thoroughly demolished-by-inflation saying goes.
Now, this isn't to speak badly about Having Thoughts about your writing projects. On the contrary, I believe it is vital to consistently create and renew this material to fuel ongoing work in writing your book. It's one of the reasons why I haven't stopped tagging my creations in tag your oc memes and respond to WBW and STS asks with such vigor. It keeps the Ideas Basin churning. Some times it translates cleanly, like one such basin stirring producing a piece of worldbuilding, but often the gain is a bit more indirect. By now, it feels like I "know" the world of Thereafter, in that most questions I can think to ask of the setting has an answer that will appear to me after not too much pondering. This isn't to say I'm immune to the kind of chaotic and unpredictably captivated attention of, say, a party of D&D players of course, but it's going to take some doing to Boblin The Goblin me, if you pardon my dip into TTRPG lingo.
Alright, so this pursuit of the "Good Book" may be misguided as it has you reaching for something that, much like Nirvana can only be strived for. What do I then suggest one does instead? Well, I kind of want to provide an alternate measure of success. As I've grown more comfortable with this whole Writer business, I find that I care less and less about whether the thing I've written down is as good as the thing that is very similar but in my head and thus made out of Thought Stuff. The writing process is translation of those thoughts, yes, but with a good enough translator not only can a work become accessible to new readers while not losing what made it good in it's "original language," there's also the wonders a good and inventive translation can provide.
Lately, especially, I've been learning to appreciate the way some things just "pop up" in my writing. Good turns of phrase. Interesting ideas. Connections to the worldbuilding or themes that I didn't actively consider before then. These things, I am pretty sure, aren't indications of my rare genius (nor would I ever claim such a superlative for myself,) but rather a consequence of working as tightly with the material as I do. There is something transformative to trying to nail such a well-developed universe (here I WILL toot my horn a little,) to the page, and if you're willing to trust where your instincts take you, you could end up with some gold.
You could, of course, also end up with some bullshit in the eyes of a reader or god forbid some profit-motivated publisher or agent. This isn't an essay about how to please those guys though. If I knew how to do that exactly, I probably would be making a decent if not particularly dignified living writing whatever trend is right now in the increasingly fickle publishing market these days. No, what I want to help people do is write the best version of their book that they can. In my perfect world there is no Perfect Book, the unassailable smash megahit, only thousands upon thousand of perfect books, the most well-realized versions of themselves written by people who love them as dearly, maybe even more dearly, than the theoretical author of this theoretical Perfect Book ever could love their creation.
Also in closing, I want to share something funny about this essay. When I sat down to write it, this thing was entirely different in my mind. I was planning to use the "every creation can be perfect in the eyes of its creator (as long as the creator are aware of the inherent limitations of their medium)" thought as a jumping off point to defend "bad" art. Now I wouldn't call Thereafter bad, in fact I think it quite frequently works, but there is a bit of old timey sci fi publishing ethos behind it. Releasing three chapters a month means writing it is a more ongoing process, and while this is probably better for my mental health (more on this at a later date I suspect) it does mean I limit myself as to what level of Quality Control I can apply to the thing. Editing, for example, is a more chapter-to-chapter thing, and not being able to go back much does feel a bit claustrophobic I will admit. That said, I am aiming for something akin to comic book or pre-syndication speculative fiction pacing with the whole thing. Get the thing out there. If people love it they'll love it, if they don't they'll forget. No harm either way.
The above, granted, does limit Thereafter's potential as a traditional Comercial Product, but one of my favorite things about it is just that. This is my Young (ish) Hungry Artist piece(s). This is the thing I create for the sheer love of creating it. It's unrepentantly queer, proudly anarchist, as anti-imperialist as I think I'm capable of making it, and while it isn't the same thing as the thought form version of the same, it's comparable in quality, at least if one takes into consideration 1: the fun things I've "discovered" while writing it, and 2: that it unmistakably exists. Here I am, Thereafter says, I exist. I would say if that doesn't give it right to life, what possibly could?
