Originality

My girlfriend, Mica, and I have a game where we try to lay out the influences of stories that we like, or stories that we’ve written, as a sort of ingredient list. Take Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, for example: it centers on the kinds of questions about what makes someone a human that you get from science fiction, but instead of getting there through spaceships and robots, the first half seems more like an uptight English bildungsroman from the Victorian era. That’s one of the great things about dating another writer: we get free reign to talk about all these esoteric questions with limited appeal to anyone else. Because I don’t think I’ve seen another writer who doesn’t obsess over what inspired them.

Often, that obsession is self-affirming. There’s the same thrill of sorting yourself into a genre or claiming your writing tradition from some master of the craft as there is in getting your Myers-Briggs Type Indicator score. It affirms your authenticity in the craft, your uniqueness, but without leaving you entirely out on your own. It turns your writing from something you do in private, scribbling bits that might not ever be read again, into something part of a larger tradition, something with weight behind it. I’ve been saying “you” a lot here, but mostly I’m just listing my own experience, gaining confidence as a writer by imitating who I knew were respected and admired. In general, I don’t think there should be any shame in this sort of imitation. Walk through any art museum on a busy day and you’ll see students on benches with sketchbooks on their laps, copying the greats. Why shouldn’t writers do the same?

Sometimes, though, I get scared that this imitation is all that there is. I’ve gotten hooked on the website TV Tropes over the past month, which defines common elements (character archetypes, plots, settings, etc.) and lists works that use them. It’s mostly fun to look around at different stories I recognize and see how they all sprout from the same structure, like pulling back the curtain to reveal the mechanisms of my favorite stories. But pulling back the curtain can be disappointing too, especially when so many stories seem the same. Spend too long in that way of thinking, and it begins to feel like nothing can really be unique. If a character seems new, it isn’t something entirely original, but rather a subversion of a trope, or two tropes melded together. From the TV Tropes perspective, writing begins to look like building with Legos: maybe what you make is original, but it’s never really true art because the pieces were made by someone else. My first day at the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio my class read the short story “Bullet in the Brain” by Tobias Wolff. At first it confused me: a hodgepodge of clichés, none of which mixed quite right. But, as we discussed it, I realized that this was the point, that Wolff was arguing that nothing was original anymore, but you can still find beauty by combining what no one else has thought to combine yet. I was proud of myself at first, but as soon as I shared my theory and got an approving nod from the teacher, I felt suddenly disappointed. The secret to being a great writer, it seemed, was to quit trying and settle for being a plagiarizer with a unique talent for hiding who you stole from.

I don’t think it’s that extreme anymore, but the problem is still with me. Over fall break I’ve tried to come up with a plan to revise a novel I’ve been working on since Junior year of high school. All my past drafts were disappointing, so I tried to cut without mercy and replace it with new parts that I thought were sure to work. But that turned out disappointing too, because I ended up cutting what was most original in the story, and everything that I replaced it with, I’d stolen from somewhere else.

I think that knowing how much writers borrow from their colleagues is pretty important, especially for new writers. For one thing, it underlines the importance of reading widely, and it cuts through blanket respect of mythic writers too. But it only goes so far. Because we have other sources to draw from, sources that are never as simple as tropes. There’s non-fiction history for one, and your own life for another. That was Mica’s big innovation in our game: when talking about her own stories, she listed memories with her family as ingredients alongside her favorite books and films. And this injection of the personal, I think, is what keeps fiction from becoming repetitive. Take high fantasy, for instance, maybe the genre that borrows the most from others because it’s completely separate from our own world. At it’s worst it’s nothing but mimicry: the dungeons and elves and orcs and taverns that Tolkien codified and imitators and Dungeons & Dragons and video games reinforced over and over and over again. But in any decent game of D&D you’ll see characters drawn from personal experience and flourishing webs of inside jokes that could only have come from real life. Oddly, some Dungeon Masters try to keep their game-worlds pure by banning anything that doesn’t jive with the pre-established gameworld. But, in my view, the personal and new cutting through the caked-on layers of tradition is what fiction is really about.

Lesson Plan

I’ve got no time and less energy right now, it being the day before fall break, so instead of writing a post, enjoy this lesson plan I wrote for Americorps this summer!

• Start the lesson by telling the kids, “raise your hand if you have a good memory.” (Probably a lot of them will jump up, raising their hands and rattling off things they remember. Let this go on for a little bit, but then quiet them down.) Then tell them, “Okay, it’s good that so many of you have good memories, because something very important is about to happen, and I need all of you to remember it exactly.”
• Someone walks into the room with a pink flowerpot on their head. They have socks on their hands and a blue shirt on backwards. They walk to the floor, do a push-up and a jumping jack, and walk around the room counter-clockwise while saying, “I don’t want to eat plant food! My mom says I have to, even though it makes me sick and gassy and I’m pretty sure the little white bits are poisonous. But I don’t want to! I’d rather eat spaghetti, which I used to call noodles until my English teacher in fourteenth grade told me that it’s always best to use the least silly word for everything, so that everyone knows you’re a dull and pretentious person.” I’ll provide all the props, and hopefully we’ll have a printout of the script so whoever does it doesn’t have to memorize it. The actual details aren’t that important, so long as it’s all extremely specific and random.
• Ask the kids to describe what they just saw, and write what they say on the board. After establishing the broad details, ask for specifics. Ask what he said he didn’t want to eat, or what exercise he did when he walked in, or what color the pot on his head was.
• After we have a comprehensive list, have the person who did the random walking rant come in and go over what exactly the kids got right or wrong. Probably, they’ll have the broad strokes right but the specifics wrong.
• Explain to the kids that no one can remember everything. And if they had so much trouble remembering so soon after something so memorable had happened, imagine how much they would forget for things that happened days or weeks or years ago. That’s why it’s important to keep a journal: because, inevitably, you forget what you thought or how you felt. But a journal, which is a book you write in every day about your feelings, is sort of like a better memory, a memory that can’t forget or misremember. Tell them, “Of course, it’s not so important if you don’t remember what costume [SLICK member] was wearing today. But what if you forgot something really important, or found out something about yourself that you can only find by looking back? To show this, we’ve come up with a couple scenarios for you.”
• For each scenario:

1. Read the scenario out loud.
2. Ask what the person might be forgetting.
3. Ask what they would learn by reading their older journal entries.
4. Ask what the person in the scenario should do.

(Also, clarify that it’s okay to feel angry or sad sometimes, a journal isn’t supposed to fix your emotions. Rather, it’s supposed to help you look at the big picture and learn more about yourself).

Scenario 1

Curt keeps a journal. One day, he writes down, “Wow, I can’t believe I saw Minecraft: The Movie on its midnight premiere! They managed to capture the fun of spending all day and night mining, and made it into a movie that was only five hours long! I sure will be tired when I get to school tomorrow, but it sure was worth it!” The next day, he writes, “Ugh. I totally failed my math test today. I could barely keep my eyes open, and the numbers didn’t make any sense. Mom said she’d unplug the computer and throw it into the gorge if I brought back one more bad grade, so I guess that Minecraft I saw last night will be the last I’ll see of it for a while.” One year later, he writes, “I can’t wait to see Minecraft: The Movie II: Quest for More Wood tomorrow! I’ve missed Minecraft so much ever since mom threw my computer into the gorge! Of course, I have a history test tomorrow, but I’ll be fine. I don’t need much sleep, and I’m really great at winging tests.”

Scenario 2

Angelina keeps a journal. One day, she writes, “I’m so sad! Julie’s dad got a new job spying on the Amish, and now her dad has to move all the way to Ohio! I won’t see her at school or on soccer team anymore, and I can’t even text or call or email her, because if they catch her using modern technology, her dad’s cover will be blown and she might get shunned! Julie is my best friend, what will I do?” A month later, she writes, “Writing letters with Julie is great! It’s so fun keeping her up to date on the drama at school, and she’s been telling me all about the barn raisings she’s gone to! In some ways, it’s almost better than having her around, because it feels so special every time I get a letter from her.” Two years later, she writes, “Today has been the worst day of my life! This morning, mom said that we have to move to Florida, and I only have a week to say goodbye to all of my friends here at school! What will I do? I won’t know anyone there, and I’ll never get to see any of my old friends ever again!”

Scenario 3

Amanda keeps a journal. One day, she writes, “I’m really lucky to have a family as good as mine. Dad always lets me play with his scuba gear, Mom has the best stories from her detective agency, and my brother Garrett makes the best fajitas in the world! Yesterday, the kids at the lunch table were talking about how they hoped they were long-lost princes and princesses who had real royal families looking for them. I told them all that I wouldn’t choose any other family in the world but my own.” A week later, she writes, “I just found out that I’m adopted! And my fake mom and dad weren’t even planning on telling me until I turned eighteen! They only told me because there’s a viral video of my real mom getting way too emotional when hugging a mascot at Disneyland going around, and if I saw it I might realize that I look just like her. Garrett knew, of course. They tell him everything, because he’s their real son. How can they even love me, if I’m not their real daughter? That’s a trick question, because they don’t.”

Scenario 4 

(Skip if time is short, it’s even more jokey than the rest)

Thomas keeps a journal. One day, he writes, “Looking through old boxes of Christmas ornaments in the attic, I found an ancient prophecy scroll about me. Apparently, on my tenth birthday a demon will appear in the form of an enormous bull-headed serpent and tempt me to open a magical door that appears in my wall. If I do, apparently I’ll be transported to a land of nightmares where I’ll suffer in eternal agony. Pretty cool what you find in the attic sometimes.” On his tenth birthday, he writes, “This has been the best birthday ever! All my friends and I went to Adventureland, then I came home and opened my presents. I got a ton of great Lego sets! And then, when I thought the day couldn’t get any better, a giant snake with the head of a bull appeared in my bedroom and told me that I’d live forever in bliss and happiness if I opened a new door in my wall. This is so great! I’m just taking a moment to write this before I turn the handle.”

• After the scenarios, make little journals by stapling together half-sheets of paper (I’ll bring them). If there’s time, color the front covers with their happiest memory.

Archiving

I just spent twenty minutes turning my collected notes from the middle school English classroom observation into a really terrible scrapbook. It’s a mess of scraps and staples and tape. The handwritten bits are nearly indecipherable and the printed pages are ordered 1-3-2-4. I could’ve done a cleaner job of it, and if I were doing this for a grade I’m sure I would. But compiling all these notes into one journal is just something I did for fun, and I decided against taking an extra five minutes to make it look halfway decent because I want it to look like something the middle schoolers I’m observing will scoff at. Ancient and important texts rarely come in neatly stacked 12-point-font pages with one-inch-margins and page numbers, after all. They’ve got texture, stains, damage, missing parts. And, even though I know that it’s arrogant, that it distracts me from getting my words themselves to be the best that they can be, I always want my writing to have that wonderful feeling of decay.

My classes have accidentally hit on a bit of an archival motif, all at the same time, that has gotten me thinking about this more than usual lately. In Humanities we’re reading most of Sappho’s work, which isn’t hard because only 650 of the 10,000 lines she wrote survived. Much of our discussion is guesswork, imagining what might have filled the missing lines, which gives her writing a half-cloaked majesty that Homer never had. 

Meanwhile, in my fiction seminar, we’re reading Valeria Luiselli’s novel Lost Children Archive. A little ways past the halfway point, I’m not sure what I think about the book yet. It’s about a woman and her family who drive to Arizona to document the lives of migrant children held in detention centers, focusing on an important issue, but in a removed and philosophical way that seems as distanced from the horror as any newspaper article. Still, in that emphasis on archiving there’s a bit that appeals to me. The story is regularly interrupted to catalogue the various boxes of the archivist family. Maybe it’s just me, but there’s a thrill in the simple action of turning a page to open a box, the same sort of thrill as unwrapping a present. I guess that’s what I want my writing to be to some reader: mysterious, somehow, like lost documents or buried treasure, something to be uncovered and explored. That’s why so many of my drafts are marked-up print-outs and lined pages in my terrible handwriting taped together, even though it means I have to go through the long and dubiously helpful process of typing it all up: because opening a box of messy pages is a lot more fun than opening a computer file.

A couple weeks ago I posted about a student film that I’d officially abandoned. Once I was finished, I printed that post out, put it in with the marked-up script drafts, notes, and revision flowcharts. Then I put it in a shoebox, taped the whole thing up, and decided to bury it under mounds of other forgotten crap in the basement when I go home for fall break, hoping it will someday be excavated, that it will have meaning to someone later that it doesn’t to anyone now.

There’s a problem with writing for future historians, though. A lot of problems, but one specific to our time: there’s just so much information. The preciousness of a few tattered pages depends on most other pages being lost or decomposed by the time anyone bothers to look. But, barring some apocalyptic world-wide hard drive wipe, future generations are liable to know way too much about us. It feels like everyone is writing more and more, and there are more and more people to begin with, so what are the odds that anything I make will stick around and be remembered?

I’m starting to sound like some fringe academic sect my dad told me about once, people who thought public education had gone too far and a perfect world would go back to having literacy be a rare commodity. I dismissed them back then a little more easily than I can dismiss them now, because that sort of arrogance is more compelling now that I know how hard it is to have your writing read. But I need to realize that more things being saved also gives everyone better odds of being remembered. So I’ll fantasize about being archived like I always do, hoping it’ll someday come true. And I’ll keep up my ridiculous education scrapbook, because it’s fun and mostly harmless.

Autumnal Madness

It’s October. I’m consistently exhausted by cross country practices, but the end of the season is close enough in sight to hold in. I’m coming down with something, not anything to keep me out of class, but a little runny nose or cough or sore throat, accompanied by the stuffy head and slight disorientation and vivid dreams that tend to accompany these little illnesses. It’s getting colder without ever getting cold, lots of rainy or windy or foggy days. I’m watching something nostalgic, maybe that Ghibli movie that I saw at a birthday party in fourth grade and loved so much without ever quite knowing what was going on. And I have a powerful urge to write fantasy. It’s like this every year.

I’m not sure if that makes sense to anyone but me. Reading drafts for a literary magazine, I know well that there’s a real danger in assuming what is meaningful for you is meaningful for everyone. So maybe I should unpack that a little bit. October always feels a little haunted for me, and not just because of Halloween. (I’d actually bet that the feeling of October makes Halloween feel haunted, not the other way around). I’m always in these altered states: a little delirious from a subtle illness, exhausted from running, confused by how fast I’ve settled into a school routine and how the summer I thought had just arrived slipped out from under me. It’s an in-between time, not fully grim or lively. In that moment of disorientation between seasons I feel like I can see into some other world, and it’s a world that I really want to write about. 

And, like I said, this feeling comes every year. And it goes, usually before Thanksgiving. Which is a shame, because I feel like I could do a lot with this half-conscious creative energy. It’s odd describing fall as a manic period when most people are settling in for winter, but that’s usually what it is for me: my imagination soars and I spend my long runs crafting fantastical stories that I don’t think I’d have the courage to try any other time of the year. I’m prone to bouts of obsession on certain ideas any time of the year, but fall seems especially bad, maybe because it only properly feels like fall for such a short time. 

I spent all the time to lay out this vague dilemma because I have a very specific one facing me right now. There’s a novel, the one I posted about finishing last summer, that I’m just now returning to. It’s bad, worse than I expected, rambling and aimless and full of tangled subplots that don’t last two scenes and never add up to much of anything. Refining it into something that matches my original vision for it would take long, careful work, the sort that builds character in a writer but doesn’t seem like much fun. Or I could take the story in a bizarre new direction, one that seems brilliant, but might end up just as rambling and aimless and tangled as what came before, only now less inhibited. I think it’s a good idea now, but I’ve been caught up in swells of inspiration often enough to know that the route to the end goal is never as straight or clear as it appears.

So what will I do? I’m not entirely sure yet, but I think I’ll go with the new idea. Because I have the rest of my life for the slow, careful work of a writer, but spur-of-the-moment kicks like this only come around in this liminal season. I won’t say that it’s good advice for anyone, but I think I’ve laid out plenty of reasons in this post why I’m not the best advisor anyway: I’m exhausted and sick and drunk on some kind of fall-season madness that I don’t think anyone else actually gets. But it won’t last long, so why not take it for all it’s worth.