Where's the Good?

I tried watching Hereditary the other night, and among the few movies that have made me cry, it is the only one that I didn’t finish, and I never intend to. Usually when a movie affects me deeply enough to trigger that sort of physiological reaction, I need to stick through to the end, hoping for some kind of hope, or at least resolution. But with Hereditary, I knew from nearly the very beginning that there wouldn’t be any. Every member of the family it followed was dismal and disconnected; if there was any love there, I didn’t see it (and love in movies, or any story, shouldn’t be the sort of thing you need to watch closely to discover). When tragedy struck, the gore and guilt forced a response from me, but I could already tell that the filmmaker wouldn’t give these people any satisfying conclusion. He was putting them through hell so he could make some esoteric point about society and construct a beautiful shots of severed heads crawling through ants, not because he wanted to tell a real story about these people. 

In retrospect, it was a bad idea to watch a horror movie as a palette cleanser from another horror movie, but the next night I watched Us, and it convinced me that at least some filmmakers can do it right. The family in this film is hardly perfect, but they clearly love each other enough that, when their lives are threatened, it actually means something. I read a few reviews that described the characters as superficial walking clichés that compliment the film’s condemnation of American materialism, but that misses the point entirely. We see mundane but charming scenes of family life that prove that these people aren’t hollow, that it matters when their lives are at risk. The true horror isn’t the superficiality of capitalism, but its human cost, and how arbitrarily it chooses who succeeds or fails. And I think it’s a real problem that so many critics would assume we shouldn’t care about the characters when we really should, in this movie especially but also in any well-told story.

Of course, the problem with being a writer is that any critique you have on a story could just as easily be thrown back against one of your own. And actually, I don’t think I would have noticed this trend towards ignoring characters’ humanity if it weren’t for a similar trend in my own writing. The past week I’ve been looking through short stories, searching for something fit for publication, and I’ve noticed that almost all of them are stories of disillusionment, of characters learning that their family or social group or faith isn’t as pure as they once thought. The problem, though, is that these characters never really trusted these things in the first place; they were always drifting, sarcastic creatures, keeping an arm’s distance from anything optimistic. And if my characters don’t have anything to hope for, then no one has a reason to care when they lose what they hope for. 

So I went back into these stories and tried to inject something worth caring about into them, but I abandoned every attempt because the results seemed too sappy, melodramatic, or self-serious. And that illustrates the problem that Hereditary and my stories and so many others try and fail to face: love, beauty, and hope are hard to write. The writerly part of our brains scream that they’re too simple, too over-done, not serious enough. Readers don’t take much convincing that a character or setting is corrupted, but suggest anything worth caring about and they go on high alert for unrealistic sentimentality. So a careful writer will edge away from anything authentically happy into stories like Hereditary, where everything is well-paced and thoughtful and aesthetically perfect and there’s no good to be found anywhere.

Looking back further in the archives of my stories, though, I found that I hadn’t always been like this. In high school I wrote stories where characters aimed for true happiness, and sometimes even found it in the end. On most levels they were much worse than what I’m writing now, but there’s something that I lost, something worth recovering. 

Not to blame Grinnell too hard, I got an excellent education there, but I think it’s clear where I lost it. In class discussions a professor would prod and doubt any new idea a student proposed, but let critique pass unexamined. We were taught to doubt everything, break every assumption or hope down to its component elements. And while critical thinking is essential, it would’ve been nice if the professors had said a little more about what to do with a system once you’ve deconstructed it.

I’m not advocating for stories where nothing bad ever happens, or even complaining about dark and disturbing stories. But the dark and disturbing stories that work are ones in which a character has something worth wanting or protecting. Once you have that, losing it actually matters. As nervous as I am to propose any new writing rules, knowing how many of those have failed me, I would tentatively suggest that any writer would do well to locate the hope in their story before going too far with it. A story without that might be exciting and funny and pleasing to the eye, like a painting, but I doubt it will ever really be satisfying.

I Regret to Inform You That I've Finished a Novel

I figured I've done enough posts accompanied by pictures of stacks of notebooks or me writing, so enjoy this juvenile drawing of marine life.

There’s really not a right thing to do when you finish the rough draft of a novel. The thrill of writing the final words on a story you’ve toiled over for at least a month (NaNoWriMo’s ultra-compressed time frame seems to be about the record) feels like it deserves some kind of celebration, so it’s only natural to tell your friends or post about it on Facebook. And while you’ll probably get a ton of likes and praise, inevitably someone will want to know what it’s about. Maybe some writers are better at this than me, but every time I try to describe my writing, I start in the wrong place and pile on twenty different genre labels and always end with “I promise it makes a lot more sense written out.” Even if you can clear that hurdle, though, you’ll still feel like a hack years later when you dig up the post celebrating the completion of a novel that you now know is unsalvageable. The other option is not talking about it, at least not until you’re ready for beta-readers. But you only need to let it slip once (and it’s hard not to, given how much it dominates your life) and suddenly you’re faced with that “What’s it about?” question again, and you feel like a self-important moron for staying silent. 

All things considered, it seems like the only right way to do it is to make your novel an international bestseller before it’s even finished, and that hasn’t worked for me yet.

I’ve finished first drafts of seven novels so far. I’ve announced four of them online (two on this blog) and stayed silent on two. Actually, I guess by writing this post, I’m choosing to announce the seventh one as well, which I finished this past Sunday.

To be clear, I’m not bragging. I’m admitting that I’ve written drafts of seven novels, only one of which I’ve ever seriously edited*. A writer saying that is like a mother saying, “I’ve given birth to seven children! One made it to kindergarten, I think. The rest I haven’t heard from in a while.” 

The problem, as I’ve written about often before, is that I always get distracted by the next story to wander through my mind. Things were especially bad back when I had a policy of letting each story sit for a year before revisiting it, by which time I’d be knee-deep in a new story, and the awful first page, if I even took the time to look at it, would convince me to drop this story before I could waste any more time on it. For me, writing new stuff is like discovering an uninhabited island, brimming with bright and endlessly diverse life. Editing, on the other hand, is like  finding an island that’s been overpopulated to extinction and sterilized by pollution and trying to find some use for the land. As much as I want to see something of mine published, the short-term thrill is addictive enough that I find a way to rationalize my behavior. I say that the next story will be perfect and published the first time around. No matter how many essays and interviews with successful writers tell me that’s worthless, I can’t help believing it. Even now, less than a week after finishing my last novel, I’ve got ten pages of notes on a new novel and I’m half convinced that I should just go ahead and start it, instead of polishing one of the seven novels, seven novellas, or countless short stories and other projects I already have.

But maybe I shouldn’t be quite so hard on myself. Back in early high school, I remember thinking that I’d be content forever if I could just finish anything I started writing. No need for publication, or any reader but me: if I could only give my story an ending, it’d be enough. And at an author-talk last year I heard the novelist Lan Samantha Chang** explain that publication, or even recognition, isn’t the eternal happiness most young writers expect it to be. The story doesn’t become any better once it’s printed and bound and shipped to bookstores. Aside from the odd one-novel-wonder like Harper Lee, most writers are probably never satisfied, and if we were, we’d never be productive again. This isn’t to say that I’m proud to finish seven novels and abandon most of them. But maybe I’m not quite as stuck as I thought I was.

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* And the one I did do some work on, by the way, has a sexist subplot that I don’t know how to remove and a protagonist who makes it through a good seventy five percent of the story just standing around and blinking. If it has a chance of publication, that’s a long way away.

** Who wrote All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost, which I highly recommend.

Chivalry and Tragedy

Note on the photo above: I went to the ruins of a French castle with my Dad as a kid, and I wanted to find a picture of that, but there weren't any, so here's one of us just hanging out.

Arthurian legend is one of those weird things in our culture where only the parodies really have relevance anymore. People mostly know king Arthur from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and the vast majority of times I hear “Lancelot,” it’s a sarcastic way of calling someone annoyingly moral*. Most animated movies based on these stories have a moment where they try to prove that “this isn’t your classic story” by showing a self-reliant damsel or bumbling knight, but what kid in the audience knows about the classic stories anymore? What adult, even?

It’s not all that complicated why things got to be this way: the stories and tropes stuck with Western culture even as the poems that inspired them became too archaic for most people to take the time to read**. We still have a vague sense of the chivalrous battles and heartfelt romances of the Knight of the Round Table, a sense of a purer time when our culture was young and our world was simpler. Maybe it’s just me, but I could get nostalgic for the stories of the Round Table even before I knew anything about it. 

I don’t think it’s just me though. And the way that T. H. White plays with that nostalgia is what makes The Once and Future King so effective.

It’s a difficult book to get through, funny and charming much of the time, but filled with digressions made for a readership with better attention spans than most of us have anymore. And, though it’s populated with Arthur, Merlin, Lancelot, Guenever, and all the other old names, it almost never deliver what we expect from an Arthurian story: romance and combat. Swordfights and jousts are often the most boring parts of the book, and usually the shortest, with White often dismissing an entire battle with a sentence like “They fought on foot for two hours.” We get a lot of dialogue around the morality of battle and the effect it has on the knights and the world around them, but the actions itself is rarely a draw. Meanwhile, the relationship between Lancelot and Guenever, the only real instance of romantic love in the book, is almost entirely out offscreen or told in summary. I don’t just mean sex; we hardly ever see real affection between Guenever and Lancelot. As with fighting, we know an awful lot about the romance’s results: Lancelot’s conflict between his religion and his love, Guenever’s growing envy as Lancelot spends more time with his actual wife, and we know both characters well enough to care about each of them. But as for proof of real love between the two of them, it’s almost completely absent.

This absence of the core appeals of Arthurian legend doesn’t make The Once and Future King a bad book by any stretch. In fact, it’s what makes it so great. Because it’s important to remember that, as old as the book may seem at times, chivalry was as foreign and fantastical to the world it was written into as it is to ours. Those readers had come looking for the same Arthurian tropes, and so they, like the modern reader, were a little confused that all the good stuff was kept hidden and undramatized, and a little anxious to see when it would be out in the open.

And White puts it out in the open at the most tragic time: when we already know it’s over. By this point the reader knows that a faction of rebellious knights are planning to catch Lancelot and Guenever in their affair. Even Lancelot knows on some level, he’s been warned, but he goes to Guenever’s chambers anyway, and dotes on her and brushes her hair. They’re already old by this time: her hair is white, the excitement of their love is past. But there’s a gentle affection between the two of them. And when we see it, it feels so much more powerful than if the love had been introduced outright, because it isn’t a simple love, it isn’t a love without stakes. It’s a love with a cost, the cost of Camelot itself, and so it means something.

The same pattern recurs a few pages later with the other element of chivalric tales: fighting. A knight arrives to catch Lancelot in the act. Lancelot goes up against this armed and armored challenger almost naked and wins. It’s the only fight scene in the novel that feels truly tense, mostly because it’s the only fight scene White chose to dramatize. And, like the scene with Guenever, the fight has the same melancholy aura to it. Even if you didn’t know that this was where the Arthurian legends turned sour, you could guess that, when Lancelot kills the knight sent to arrest him, things can never be the same again. The one fight we got to see was our last.

If White had written the story the way it’s expected to be written, with steamy romance and epic battles from the start to the end, it would’ve been awfully boring. That’s because the same quality that makes these things easy to romanticize and dream about also makes them dull to focus on for very long: they’re weightless. A knight and lady falling in love with only trivial obstacles, who never sacrifice anything to be together, doesn’t really matter much. Neither does a battle against a knight too evil or a monster too dumb for their death to matter. But we still love these things, in a sidelong and absent-minded way, because they’re uncomplicated enough to be loved easily. White takes that love and makes it tragic, because whatever is easy can’t last. Even though I’d never want to take the time to read the battles and romances that White skims over, I still miss them once I know that they’re over. I miss them in the same way I miss childhood; not any particular time or experience in it, but just the general emotions I might not have ever really felt as a kid, and that I don’t have a prayer of articulating now anyway**.

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* Which is kind of ironic, since Lancelot is mostly characterized as a guy cheating on his best friend’s wife, who knows it’s wrong but can’t help himself.

** Having read one genuine Medieval poem (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which is widely regarded as one of the most accessible), I can say that yes, they really are a struggle, even if, in this case, it was worth it.

** Sorry for not doing something more timely in such a crazy and depressing week. Honestly, I felt I needed to write this as a sort of distraction from all the craziness and depression. Then the post turned out pretty depressing in its own right. Sorry.

The Protests and Christian Wrath

There’s really only one thing to talk about right now*.

The other day I ran to Linden Hills, one of the further removed and wealthier parts of Minneapolis, and only found one direct artifact of the rioting: a smashed window in a small jewelry store. In nearly every other store, though, there were some signs that were a little less directly about the protests, some painted on the plywood used to protect the storefronts: #BlackLivesMatter repeated a hundred times, Martin Luther King quotes, lists of other black men murdered. One local children’s bookstore had tiny red handprints under the message “Justice for George,” while the bakery next door marked itself a minority-owned business. I don’t doubt that many of these were put up by people who legitimately believe in the cause, especially because many of them put up similar signs after the police murdered other black men. But I also can’t help but remember the Bible story of passover, when every Israelite family put a mark of lamb’s blood on their door so that the angel of death, out to kill each firstborn Egyptian, would pass them by. The business owners are sending the same message in their store window printouts as the Israelites did in the blood mark: “We’re on your side. Spare us from your wrath.”

It probably seems a little harsh to compare the protesters to a vengeful God, and maybe it is a little misleading when the vast, vast majority of them are peaceful. But keep in mind, God is good in this story. In what seems almost too on-the-nose, the angel of death came to punish Egyptians for keeping the Israelites as slaves. It can be hard to relate this wrathful God to the common Christian understanding of a gentle, forgiving Jesus. In fact, I often explain away troubling Old Testament stories as misinterpretations of the divine truth. But the fact remains: punishment, wrath, and righteous fury have a place in Christian morality. And if there were ever a time for these, it is after an unjust murder, supported by a rotten system.

All of this is a very simple idea applied to a very complex situation, though. For one, we don’t know who exactly is doing what in the rioting. A family friend in the Twin Cities had to leave her home Saturday night because the entire street was lined with cars with out-of-state license plates, every passenger white and male and visibly angry. Also, I feel the need to say again (because it isn’t said often enough) most protesters are nonviolent, so we shouldn’t attribute the destruction in the Twin Cities to the entire group. Maybe the most important complication, though, is that the people whose places of life and work have been destroyed by the riots have legitimate suffering and pain.

Still, something to remember is that property matters, but life is always infinitely more important. That’s something I think we as a country have been bad about lately: we mourn the 100,000 dead alongside the growing unemployment and failing economy as though they all deserve the same level of grief. In the same way, I’ve often heard people say, “What happened to George Floyd is terrible, but-” and then go on to say something about looting or rioting. But none of the burning buildings or shattered windows can ever match the tragedy of a human life lost. And that human life didn’t disappear on accident or out of inevitability. George Floyd’s life was taken a racist system that has killed countless other black men like him. I believe that these protests can lead to change, which will save lives of black men who shouldn’t be at risk anyway. And, in that way, these protests are truly Christian.

What isn’t Christian, though, is the police and Trump administration’s response. There is nothing Christian, nothing good under any moral code, in firing tear gas and rubber bullets at nonviolent protesters and reporters. Worst of all is Trump himself, who had police fire tear gas at priests who were handing out medical supplies to protests in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church, all to take a photo of himself holding a Bible, to try an convince the nation that his racist opposition to reform is somehow Christian.

It’s hard for me to read a sentence like that last one and not despair. And I know that my despair is nothing compared to what people of color experience routinely.

Acknowledging the tragedy of what has happened and hoping for what change might come from it is a tight balance to keep. But at least, when this tragedy is impossible to hide from, we might finally motivate real change.

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* For those of you reading this blog long after the fact, a little more than a week ago a black man named George Floyd was murdered by a police officer for using a fake $20 bill. It has sparked a lot of peaceful protest, some arson, vandalism, and looting, and a lot more police violence.