A Fine Tuned Sense Of The Ridiculous

I was on the phone with my mum the other day, discussing the impending upheaval in my life — not only a potential new job but a definite move of house, whether it comes with the new job or not — and I realised that despite the very serious nature of the choices I’m facing this year, we were both laughing an awful lot. It made me think about why I spend so much of my time amused at basically everything that happens to me. One of the things I often hear from people, both in brickspace and online, is that I’m capable of making ordinary things funny. It’s something I prize, because I’m not what you would call a funny person, but I can see things as funny. And I think that’s a huge key to my writing, as well, which I didn’t work out until, well, just now.

I don’t know when my sense of absurdity developed or how, not like I know other things. I know when I found my work ethic (college — late but at least lasting) and I know where my aesthetic sense comes from, because my family gave me that, between my gran the painter and my parents who took me to tons of museums and performances when I was young. I don’t know how I learned to find the ridiculous in the ordinary.

I wasn’t a class clown as a child, and the way in which I express my view of the ridiculous isn’t necessarily spontaneous. It comes through in my writing because I sit and think about how to frame things. Some of it is turns of phrase picked up from here and there, but that’s just dressing to the essential viewpoint I have on the world. I didn’t necessarily believe my high school English teacher who said good writing comes from honestly expressing the way we see the world, but I do now, because I’ve done it.

The next story I’m hoping to work on, called Tunnel, primarily concerns the way in which families interact, and in real terms concerns the structure of Chicago, the way it’s built on Other Parts Of Chicago, and the way we have this massive underground network of passages that nearly nobody knows about. Really, the latter part came first; I wanted to write a story about the underground, and the sibling issues came out of that (and, admittedly, out of my own issues with my brother). But there’s an aspect of the story which keeps trying to take over, and it’s the ridiculous aspect: I call it Bob And The Dragon.

Because see, in this world, there’s a dragon living under Chicago. The dragon is a fun fantasy element; the ridiculous part is that very few people ever encounter the dragon, and the only one who seems to care about him is a guy named Bob. Bob is incredibly ordinary, he’s just a dude in a suit and he doesn’t have much life drama or any ambitious aspirations, but in his spare time he is a dragon tamer. Bob is the one who rescues people from the dragon and buys it expensive sushi and hugs it when it eats people he doesn’t like. Bob is ridiculous. Even the other characters think so.

And I don’t know where that ten-degrees-off-normal viewpoint, which allowed me to produce Bob in the first place, comes from. Possibly from the fact that I wasn’t an especially funny child; I spent some of my childhood and most of my teen years angry, because I was smart and could see that I was surrounded on all sides by bullshit. I can remember my mother telling me it’s not bullshit, it’s just hoops to jump through, and not thinking that was particularly better, but it’s true: much of life, much of the time, is a series of hoops. Some are fun; some are just tedious, and would be unnecessary if more people either saw them at all or called them out when they did. Dress codes, for example, are 1% necessity and 99% ludicrous. I like wearing suits and I still think it’s stupid to make me wear something less comfortable and less efficient to move in for the sake of appearing “more professional”.

When you see how much bullshit you spend your life putting up with, and the rituals you have to undergo — for me, at the moment, all my annoyance at the interview process is coming to the fore — you can either laugh or get angry. I’m too damn lazy to spend my entire life angry, so I suppose, at some point, I chose to laugh. Very likely the novels of Terry Pratchett had a huge influence on this decision as well, since he’s especially good at laughing at bullshit. However it happened, it is the base I stand on to write my stories.

Writers build worlds — it’s a necessary part of what we do. Even if your world is a realistic one, even if it’s nonfiction, you have to re-construct reality within your work. If your world’s not realistic, or if it’s only loosely based in reality, you have to do more. Personal viewpoint influences how that world is built to a massive degree. You don’t have to see a laughable world; you can be angry at what you see and want to change it, or you can see the world in shades of fantasy, or any other viewpoint you happen to have. But having a firm and critically thoughtful view of the world, knowing what you see and what you think of what you see, is absolutely necessary. Until you have that, writing for other people is a struggle that will fight you. Writing, and fiction in particular, demands every part of you, and it’s difficult to give it so much if you don’t know what you’re handing over.

In my case, what I tend to give my writing is laughter; either with the world or at it. Both are effective in their own way.

Commercially Sexual

The other day, there was an article in the Guardian entitled “Good Sex In Literature: Why Is It So Hard To Find?”

It’s not what the article was actually about. Well, I know leading headlines sometimes help sell papers.

The article was, actually, a sort of mashup of questions without many clear answers. One of the questions was why, in this era, writers feel that their work isn’t commercially as viable if they don’t include sex scenes. The obvious answer is, of course, that sex sells, and now that more open discussion of it is permitted in our culture, authors have the option to include sex scenes without being arrested or having their books banned. It is, actually, a privilege to  be able to write about sex. And even if you are uncomfortable with that privilege or choose not to take advantage of it, the fact that it’s now there means that if you’re not taking advantage of it, you may not be selling as well as someone who is.

It’s not that sex in a novel automatically equals better sales; a well-written book is better than a book full of bad sex anyway, and will probably sell better. Not to mention that books which are formally focused on sexual themes, like erotica, are still struggling to be accepted in the public eye. I’ve written for erotic publishing houses, so I’m aware of the fine line they walk. Books like 50 Shades Of Grey, which are explicitly sexual and heavily focused on sexual themes and yet  become bestsellers, are the exception, not the rule. But clearly there is some cachet to a novel with a steamy subplot.

The most interesting question in the article was, to me, why authors are hesitant to include explicit sexuality in their stories. I’m not sure what the deal is with the guy who wrote the article, who posited that it’s because novels are a more intimate experience or the production of a single individual or imply that the author has participated in the specific sex act being described, but he seems to be overlooking a fairly major, fairly simple explanation.

It is hard to write about sex because then people think you want it. And we might be more open about sex but that doesn’t mean we don’t still think it’s a shameful thing to want, pursue, and enjoy.

I haven’t included sex in many of my published novels; only one of the four has an explicit sex scene, a threesome between a married couple and their close friend. Mainly it’s because sex wasn’t necessary in two of them and would have been creepy in the third. In the novel where I do include explicit sex, the scene is there for a specific reason. But I have written a lot of fanfic, and a lot of it has been explicitly sexual. Sometimes it’s been specifically sexual, written for no other purpose; sometimes sex scenes have been included as part of the plot; sometimes sex scenes have been included because sex is fun and it draws eyeballs, and in fannish culture it’s more permissible than elsewhere. I’ve written from the point of view of different sexual orientations and genders during sex, as well.

Every time, without fail, when writing a sex scene I think to myself, what if people think I want this? This particular kink, this particular position, this particular partner (or set of partners). What if people think I want this, or worse, what if I want this and people figure that out?

And then I think fuck it, so what if they do? I’ve already amply proved that I like sex, and that I want sex, so what do I care if people think I enjoy a specific sexual act? I’m a writer. I’ve written torture scenes and I don’t enjoy torture, I’ve written scenes set in prisons and believe me, those taught me just how much I never want to go to prison. We have a lot of hangups about sex, culturally, but as a writer I’ve found most hangups of any kind can be adjusted by reminding yourself so what? You don’t have to watch anyone read your novel.

A lack of squeamishness about sex and a confidence in my ability to portray sex acts I don’t necessarily personally enjoy was something I learned from fandom. More importantly, the article author’s last enumerated fear — that writers are afraid they might draw attention for writing terrible sex — is also something I don’t have, because I’ve had a lot of practice reading, writing, and talking about sex.

You don’t have to put sex in your stories, particularly if it doesn’t belong in the plot you’re working or if you don’t, you know, like sex. But if you do want to put sex in your story, fandom’s certainly the place to go to learn.

One More Story I May Never Write

I went down to St. Louis a few weeks ago, and on the train (I love trains!) I caught up on a lot of reading and viewing and learning. One of the shows I watched was a documentary called “Inside America’s Money vault”, which wasn’t so much about a specific vault as it was about the way money is created, regulated, and stored in the United States. They talked a bit about the national mint, and the anti-fraud measures it takes on its bills, and the way bills are treated, possessing an intrinsic value above the material.

Then I flipped over to a TEDtalk by Noah Charney; Charney is an art history expert specializing in art crime who runs a fantastic blog on the topic. Having done a bit of studying in the subject myself — and having read Charney’s writing for some time — I found he wasn’t saying anything I personally didn’t already know, but he was saying it in a different context to what I’d had before.

As Charney says, and as most people who study art crime for any length of time know, most art heists aren’t done by clever gentleman thieves or on commission of secretive billionaire collectors. Most stolen art that isn’t stolen for political reasons eventually — sometimes very quickly — ends up in the hands of organized crime, where it is used as collateral, loan, or payment in various illegal financial dealings.

One thing Charney said struck me in particular: the reasoning that art is used because it leaves no cash trail. And it occurred to me that while paintings are a good way to buy and sell cashlessly, the fact that you truly can’t sell them for their full value on the black market (usual black market price is about 10% of their legitimate worth, I believe) and that they are bulky and require specific care — not that I think crooks often bother — makes them more trouble than they’re worth.

Except in some specific cases (most notably Chinese antiquities, at the moment) illegally obtained works of art are like dollar bills: they do not in themselves have the material worth of the value they represent. They are symbols of value.

So I thought, why not simply mint one’s own currency? Be clever enough about it and nobody would even notice what it was, outside of the circles in which it was used. Why shouldn’t some enterprising crook create the national criminal mint?

In real practice, of course, it’s a ridiculous idea. I know that. There’s no way they could keep it under wraps forever, and anti-fraud measures would be more trouble than handling paintings. Besides, it’s not like some crooks haven’t all but done this anyway; reach a certain level of wealth, and you can open your own bank to launder your money. Apparently this happens in Russia a lot. I’ve done research profiles on Russians who used to be “goods importers” of dubious provenance and now own a bank.

Theoretically, however, it’s a damn fine story. You could even make a short-term profit off minting criminal coin: buy up all the stolen paintings you can find with your minted money, which gives the “crime dollars” value, then ransom them all back to their owners. Insurance pays the ransom (this is apparently a relatively common con), the owners get their paintings, and you get a cut more than you paid for them.

Frankly, I’m also a bit worried for Noah Charney. He’s one of the most vocal agents for art crime education, and he’s very prominently pulling the curtain back from the way art theft and organized crime interact. Narratively, if you had some clever, attentive art history professor who assembled all these re-ransomings into a grand theory of art theft and money minting, who knows what organized crime might risk to keep him or her quiet.

It’s a seductive story. I’m not sure I’m up to writing quite such a Dan Brown-esque thriller, but perhaps one day.

So many stories to write, so little time…

An Author In Search Of A Novel

I am picking up today where I left off a few days ago, with my examination of YA literature; you can read part one (the problem) here, and part two (the research) here.

After months of trying to finish the essay that those two parts began, I realized that my search for a definition was in fact the wrong search. I should have been searching for a process, because process often defines product. So, thinking as a creator of literature rather than a consumer of it, a few things became clear.

I decided that marketing, definitions applied by others, and even adolescents’ self-definitions don’t matter to the creation of this particular form of novel. In this sense, a YA novel is not a book about something. Except in the rarest of cases, a YA novel is an adult talking to a teenager. Everything else is window dressing.

So I thought about motivation and message and after that came a very simple three question formula (I do love things in threes).

1. Why do I, an adult, want to talk to young people?
2. What do I want to tell them?
3. Why do I want to tell them that?

Mind you, calling them “young people” makes me feel so very old, but I am more than twice the age of the youngest readers on this blog, and I was an adult before some of my presumed target audience was born.

Here’s the kicker about these questions: they are sequential. Each question leads to the next and you can’t get to two without answering one. Question one is vital because I have, in fact, heard writers answer it with “That’s where the money in publishing is”.

That’s a bad answer. Possibly not the only bad answer, I haven’t been through every answer, but certainly a bad one. Even if the statement itself is true — there is a lot of money in YA lit — it’s not the way you ever want to answer a question about your passion.

Anyway, it’s a good question to keep one honest, because it’s the first step in not condescending to your audience. It’s what sticks me down, because initially I thought I don’t want to talk to “young people”. But then I thought, really, it’s more most young people. The Dead Isle came as a surprise YA Fiction to me — I’ve had many parents buy it for their kids, or to read with their kids. It does carry a message that is not exclusively for the young, about compassion and justice and the power of creativity, but that message is conveyed by young characters.

The characters I created for The Dead Isle are the kind of kids I want to talk to. Shy, nerdy, brilliant Jack. Affectionate, cheerful, isolated Clare. Independent, aggressively sensible Purva, who has no patience for the games of others.

But the question isn’t who, the question is why, and I suppose the answer is

1. I want to talk to young people who are who I was: shy, nerdy, smart, independent, relatively happy despite my isolation, old before my peers were, already sick of the bullshit. Because I’ve been there.

I didn’t get very many books about me. Catcher in the Rye was one. Ender’s Game (despite Card’s horrible politics) was another. The Magician’s Nephew, my favourite of all the Narnia books. Dragonsong by Anne McCaffrey, which might not be highly acclaimed literature but was valuable to me. These are books of varying quality and era and genre, but they were books about me and they gave me comfort. They taught me about my future.

So assuming those are the kids I want to talk to, the kids like me, what do I want to tell them? I’ve got friends with kids, Olivia and Irene and Harry and Vivi and Little Sam and Noel and Gabriel and a handful of others. I can’t lie to them or be cruel to them. For one, I will get totally busted by their parents.

What do I want to tell them?

2. Well, basically, what I want to tell everyone: that compassion is a high and difficult art, that greed is insidious and cruel, that the world is waiting for people to discover it. I want to explain how the wonder of discovery makes compassion easier and greed more difficult and how the more those two balance out, the closer you come to justice. And sometimes I want to tell stories just plain ’cause I like telling stories.

Three is a little more abstract, because the answers lie in the first two questions. Why do I want to tell kids that?

3. Because people told me about compassion and greed and wonder once, and I believe strongly that what they said was true. If we as a species are going to do more than murder each other and destroy our only home, I think everyone has to understand it. I don’t have all the answers but I have the tools to get us there if kids who are smarter than me take the philosophical hand up that I’m offering them.

So in the end, I don’t know if I want to write a YA novel, or I should say another YA novel. If I did, I doubt it would be one any trad publisher would be interested in. But if I do want to, now I have the knowledge necessary to lay it out.

Really, it’s what I’ve been doing all along.

Failing At Wikipedia or, It’s YA Because It’s YA

This is part two of my exploration of YA Literature and how to define it in a useful way, as a writer who may be interested in writing it. I’ve talked a bit about the initial problem, which is not only a broad one of definition but also, in my case, a specific issue with experience. When last we left me, I was stuck without a formal conception of what YA Lit was.

And so I went to the internet, looking for how they defined it. Sometimes, the best way to define something is to find someone else’s idea of the thing and figure out where you disagree.

When in doubt, start with Wikipedia and a skeptical expression.

Wikipedia says that YA Lit is literature written for, published for, or marketed to adolescents between the ages of 14 and 22 (22, Jesus, that’s an old Young Adult) but really that’s not that helpful. It’s a book for kids because it’s written as a kid’s book, essentially, or even just because it’s sold as one. I could have gone full-out with The Dead Isle; I could have marketed it as a YA adventure, since three of its four main characters are under the age of twenty and the fourth is very much cast in the mentor role. But I wanted the story to present as a book with broader appeal — and while there’s no length limit on YA novels, it’s an awfully long book.

Reading onwards, Wikipedia diverts fairly quickly into a discussion of the most prominent member of the YA Lit family: the “problem novel”.

Problem novel refers to young adult novels in the realistic fiction category that “addresses personal and social issues across socioeconomic boundaries and within both traditional and nontraditional family structures” (Cole 98). Some of these themes include: identity, sexuality, science fiction, depression, suicide, drug abuse, alcohol abuse, familial struggles, bullying, and numerous others. Some issues that are talked about in young adult literature are things such as friendship, love, race, money, divorce, relationships within families.” [....] In a paper written by April Dawn Wells, she discovers seventeen common traits of young adult novels. These include: “friendship, getting into trouble, interest in the opposite sex, money, divorce, single parents, remarriage, problems with parents, grandparents, younger siblings, concern over grades/school, popularity, puberty, race, death, neighborhood, and job/working.”

Thanks, Wikipedia. You just defined all of literature. Subject matter, it seems, is not going to be much help. It’s all very well to say that YA Lit concerns identity, of which many other aspects including sexuality, class, family, and race are a part, but if that were true I wouldn’t have been the only kid in AP English who liked The Great Gatsby.

Primarily, the focus is centered around a young lead character and the reader experiences emotions, situations, and the like through this character and is able to see how these problems/situations are resolved.

Also that sounds like an invitation to “write down” to the reader as you instruct them on problem resolution, and we’ve discussed “writing down” already.

Granted, I think the above is important because it can expand. I haven’t read The Hunger Games, but I understand that they are in major part about the resources that teens have at their disposal with which they can help repair damaged societies.

So there was my first answer, but not a particularly satisfactory one.

I considered a survey of the “big names” in YA Lit, but that has shifted over time as well, from the in situ dystopia of SE Hinton to the imagined dystopia of Suzanne Collins, from Catcher In The Rye to Go Ask Alice to the pulp suburban horror of my generation’s teens. Even defining Catcher In The Rye as a young adult novel will probably get me some flak, but most people I’ve met who love it do so because they read it as teenagers and could relate to Holden’s attitudes and predicament. That says something to me about the audience it got, whether it wanted it or not. And given that it is now marketed to teens in the form of classroom reading…

So I could have gone all out, but a survey of the world of YA literature just sounds exhausting. I thought I’d set that aside as a last resort. I hit upon the idea to look at contests — competitions asking for YA submissions with the winner being published or a published story being rewarded with publicity. Surely those would have decent quantifications for YA; they’re looking for the next big thing, after all, they should know how to ask for it.

The work cited will illuminate the teen experience and enrich the lives of its readers through its excellence.

Uh.

To be eligible, a title must have been designated by its publisher as being either a young adult book or one published for the age range that YALSA defines as “young adult,” i.e., 12 through 18.

Guess not.

Other websites were a little more helpful — or more cynical, depending. An article at Jezebel states:

Since as far as I can tell, these categories exist primarily for schoolteachers, booksellers, and award-givers, Fine Lines will from now on define “YA” as any book read in one’s own company from the time one learns to read to the time one pays one’s own rent.

That’s actually quite useful. As is this quote from a school library blog critiquing a story that is only YA in the sense that it’s marketed to teens:

this journey doesn’t feel like the teen journey (from acted upon to acting upon).

In that vein, James Dawson, who I quoted in the first essay, has a novel theory about children:

I had a recent conversation with a librarian concerned at the number of year 10 and 11 pupils reading EL James’s erotic bestseller Fifty Shades of Grey. However, she also admitted that many realised early into the book that it “wasn’t for them” and chose to pursue it no further. Teenagers are as capable as any reader to decide what is right for them. As a 12-year-old, I had no access to young adult fiction because it didn’t exist. Instead I went straight to Stephen King and James Herbert. I was able to choose what was suitable and unsuitable.

But none of this is all that helpful in giving me a framework.

Which is where this essay stalled for months.

And then last week I thought, I’m going about this wrong. I’m coming at the problem as a consumer, not a creator. I am both; most of us are. But I was using the wrong half of me for this particular issue. I’d been looking for what a YA novel is, when I should have been looking for how a YA novel comes to be.

When I finally swapped over, the solution to the problem was a delightfully simple series of questions, and they came very easily. I’ll be discussing those on Friday, so stay tuned!

How Do You Solve A Problem Like Everyone Under The Age Of 22

I keep circling back to this essay. Every time I put it away, I eventually come back to it. It is the essay in which I try to define YA literature.

And it got really long, so this is the first of a three-part series in my examination of YA lit. This is a rough essay, and certainly some of you out there are more well-versed, so suggestions (not for books to read, oh god, please not for books to read) and critique are welcome.

So today’s topic is an introduction of the problem.

I made a post once about how I had difficulty with YA lit, both with writing it and plotting it. Most of the people engaging in the discussion at the time made a good point: I couldn’t very well be saying that if I didn’t have a good definition of what it was. Besides, defining a problem is the first part of solving it. But a definition of YA lit is like a definition of porn. Most people just kind of know it when they see it.

I thought a lot about how to define YA literature. I thought about discussing how I never liked children much even when I was one; about how I started reading “Tween and teen” books when I was eight, and how when I was a teen I was mostly frightened of the other teens around me. I fled to the adult company of the newly-minted internet, and avoided most of my peers. It’s not a particular badge of pride or shame, it’s just what is: I was never any good at being a Young Adult, and they still hold that mysterious power for me. A cool kid at the age of sixteen will always be cooler than I am no matter how old I am. I don’t especially have a burning desire to encounter many.

I also thought about the discussion that my readers had about “writing down”, a reaction to the condescending youth-aimed literature of the mid-twentieth century. SFNovelists had an essay on what YA is:

It described fiction written for adolescents, who weren’t quite ready to move on from Middle Grade books to more adult reading matter, but who nonetheless wanted more complex and challenging subjects. What this meant was that YA books had a more limited vocabulary and syntax than books written for adults, and it showed. We found the language patronizing, and the characters, often simplified to make the author’s point, annoying.  YA was for people who, we thought, didn’t really like to read, or they’d learn to do it properly.

One of my commenters posted a quote from a LeGuin essay from 1973:

All you do is take all the sex out, and use little short words, and little dumb ideas, and don’t be too scary, and be sure there’s a happy ending. Right? Nothing to it. Write down. Right on. [...] But you won’t have every kid in America reading your book. They will look at, and they will see straight through it, with their clear, cold, beady little eyes, and they will put it down, and they will go away. Kids will devour vast amounts of garbage (and it is good for them) but they are not like adults: they have not yet learned to eat plastic.

Now, on the one hand, good points all; on the other hand, see what I mean about how frightening Young Adults are?

It’s also easy to say kids should be treated like intelligent beings, because lord knows I wish I’d been treated that way more often, but it’s not the end of the story. Children aren’t miniature adults, even the really smart ones. I wasn’t any good at being a kid, but I would have made a shitty, irresponsible, miserable adult, too.

I considered studying the loud and vicious debate that’s going on right now regarding “darkness” in YA literature. It does look as though things have been getting darker, but I wonder. Kids half a generation below me get Hunger Games, but I got Christopher Pike novels — and we both get The Hobbit and the Narnia chronicles, just like our parents and grandparents did. They weren’t any less dark, really, they just had fewer televisions in them.

And I think it’s better to write dark books for youth and let their parents decide, rather than legislate what a writer can and can’t say to a fourteen-year-old. The publishers are already going to keep those gates pretty tight. One YA author, James Dawson, said that the things publishers keep from YA lit are the three S’s: “Shagging, swearing, and slaughter”. Despite, as he points out, these being three very popular things with teenagers.

And while Dawson doesn’t like being told what he can and can’t write, he’s aware that if he wants his books published, there are certain things that won’t fly. This isn’t necessarily a problem with self-publishing the way I do it, but of course traditional publishing still has perks that selfpub doesn’t, and one of those is a very strong connection to schools and libraries that buy YA literature.

At the start of this I was left with the problem that I am trying to understand books written, in the main part, for someone I never was, in a field (traditional publishing) to which I don’t fully belong. I could read a lot of YA Lit; in the past, I have, particularly in college where I used to pick books at random from the YA shelf and read them to relax. But I never read them at the right time, first too young and then too old, and finding the patterns and traditions is hard going.

So I turned to the internet, and we’ll be talking about that adventure on Tuesday.

YA Literature and DEEP IRONY

So, WordPress prepared a “2012 annual report” for me, explaining my most popular posts, my number of visitors, and various other factoids about my blog. Thirty thousand hits last year; not too bad.

You can see the complete report here.

Mandr, my hat is off to you, my little comment monkey.

What’s funniest about the annual report is that this is the year I released The Dead Isle, which could reasonably be considered YA lit, and my most popular post is about how I can’t write YA lit. Somehow I feel this is the story of my life.

I’m not objecting, really. Mostly I’m just confused.

Anyway, it’s an interesting read for me, and for you guys it’s a back-end look at what I do, the way my internet life works, the stuff I see that guides me. I don’t know how I ended up living such a feedback-driven life, but to be honest I’m kind of enjoying it.

The Seduction Of The Fearful

A couple of weeks ago I posted some images from an old comic book that were — well, let’s call them subtly risque. It was an alternate reading of the text, to be sure, but it did make one scratch one’s head just a little.

I got a comment on the post from a regular reader, to the effect that she wasn’t sure if censorship boards ever even looked at comics like they did at movies. This was my reply, and I thought it merited a rewrite here, because I think knowing about censorship and knowing why one stands against it is important. Especially in light of the recent scandal over Nobel Prize for Literature winner Mo Yan’s pro-censorship stance and Salman Rushdie’s public condemnation of him for it.

Comic books in particular have a fairly dark history of censorship that ties into McCarthyism, racism, and homophobia. They’ve been a heavy target for fearmongers. But fearmongering often only glances off the surface of any given narrative — you can’t swear in comics but you can murder, you can’t show sex but you can show musclebound men and busty women in spandex, you can’t (well, couldn’t) show an interracial relationship but you could show Cap and Falcon fighting evil together.

Comics censors had a lot of rules but they rarely looked into the deeper story, the part that grabs you by the emotions no matter what the medium. Take Arnie as an example. In the Captain America comic books, there’s a story where Captain America in the sixties meets a man he knew when they were growing up in the thirties named Arnie. When they reunite and catch up on each others’ lives, he finds out Arnie is gay. They couldn’t explicitly state it — which is of course wrong — but any gay man reading it back then and certainly anyone reading it now (and probably a lot of heterosexuals back then) could clearly get the message.

Cap accepted Arnie without hesitation or question, defended him, and avenged his partner’s death. The censors said “You can’t say gay” so the comics said “Cap’s best friend has two failed marriages and a roommate named Michael who makes him happy” and Cap said “I’m glad you’re happy” and a generation of gay comic book readers understood implicitly that Captain America was okay with them. It wasn’t ideal, certainly, and the story itself wasn’t perfect, but the censors couldn’t get the meat — they could only get the shine on top.

Censorship is evil, but it’s a very narrow evil, and stories always find a way, which is why censorship has never won and won’t ever win. You can burn a book, but you can’t burn a story.

You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police. Yet in their hearts there is unspoken – unspeakable! – fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts! Words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home, all the more powerful because they are forbidden. These terrify them. A little mouse – a little tiny mouse! – of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic.
— Winston Churchill

The Madness Painting

Ivan The Terrible and his Son Ivan on November 16, 1581 by Ilya Efimovich Repin, painted 1885. (The State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow)

I had the opportunity to see this painting on tour at the Royal Ontario Museum a few years ago, which was the first time I heard the story of how it drove Abram Balashev mad.

The painting depicts the real-life murder of Ivan Ivanovich by his father, the Tsar Ivan IV Vasilyevich, in 1581. Supposedly, Tsar Ivan (known as Ivan the Terrible) had beaten his son’s wife for wearing immodest clothing, and had caused her to miscarry. His son apparently confronted him about this and, in a fit of rage, Tsar Ivan struck him on the head, killing him.

When it was first exhibited in 1885, it was considered obscene, ostensibly due to the graphic portrayal of the bloody wound, though I suspect the madness in Tsar Ivan’s eyes was part of it nobody wanted to even mention. Rumour says that it made women faint. There are whispers that it drove people who viewed it to suicide, but nothing recorded.

On January 13th, 1913, a young man named Abram Balashev, suffering from severe mental illness and supposedly obsessed with the painting, took a dagger to the Tretyakov Gallery and stabbed the painting multiple times, ranting about the blood.

You can see in the detail that he pretty much went for Tsar Ivan. Though, as has been pointed out to me, he missed the crazy, crazy eyes.

The painting has since been restored, but the legend hasn’t faded. On the one hand, it’s a cautionary tale: don’t look too closely at art, don’t listen too closely to the story, because if might show you something that you can never recover from.

On the other hand, it fascinates me. It’s not the only artwork to ever be attacked — the Mona Lisa has had more than a few — but it’s one of the few that people believe actually drove someone mad, like the legends that when the Furies appeared onstage in the Oresteia, women in the audience spontaneously miscarried out of fear.

That’s a strange sort of holy grail for any artist, visual or literary or otherwise. Certainly most artists don’t want to cause harm, but to make something out of yourself which has that much power is a temptation, and perhaps sometimes a desire.

Did the painting drive Abram Balashev to insanity? Probably not. We know now that most mental illness is caused by biological factors. It’s likely that Balashev was already on the verge when he became obsessed with the painting, and it simply became a focal point for his suffering. It’s not terribly likely that the painting itself ever actually drove anyone to suicide, either, even if it was more graphic and “obscene” than the culture of the day was accustomed to.

But as a story, it’s compelling. It’s mysterious. A magical object that has the power to alter reality simply by existing.

And it’s a dare: do you take the risk, look at the painting, and face the power it presents?

Don’t Know? Ask.

About a month ago I came across an article in one of the websites I read, and it listed a bunch of “tools for writers” and, more specifically, for self-publishing writers. These lists are sometimes really helpful, and sometimes not so much. This time, most of the sites were either ones I already knew about or ones that weren’t relevant to me — I don’t hire professional editors because I am poor, and some writing websites are fairly obviously aimed at people who are just starting out. It sounds like hubris but I don’t generally need tips on getting motivated to write or finishing what I’ve started or certain elemental tricks of the trade. They clash with my technique or talk about aspects I’ve already incorporated. Artists have very specific individual styles, and sometimes theirs just don’t mesh with mine.

I did come across one website that was by writers, for writers, which looked interesting and professional enough that I thought I’d give it a shot. Sometimes these things pan out.

This one is making me bonkers.

Many of the writers seem obsessed with what readers want, but they’re not very good at figuring it out. They have two essential pathways: shrug and admit that nobody knows what readers want, or do that and then try to write “universally”.

Writing universally is very difficult and very dangerous because trying to please all the people, all the time, generally makes you bland and boring. Nobody takes risks if they’re trying to make sure everyone loves them. Which is not to say that one should try to offend people intentionally, or shouldn’t care about giving offence, because causing hurt is the opposite of the goal of most art. Art is meant to elevate, not demean, or if it does take a shot it should be at the proper targets: hypocrites, the powerful, the cruel. Molly Ivins said “Satire is traditionally the weapon of the powerless against the powerful. I only aim at the powerful. When satire is aimed at the powerless, it is not only cruel — it’s vulgar.”

When I was in college I read an article about a production of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” that had been translated into Japanese and performed in Japan. When the lights went down on the final act, the audience was in tears. It was described as the ultimate example of universal writing, that this quintessentially, forcefully American play could elicit such a reaction from people who came to it from a totally different culture. But it also made sense, because it is a play about the attempts of ordinary people to attain immortality, to leave their mark and be remembered, and how often our attempts are thwarted by the society we live in. It’s a lofty goal, to write about something so huge with such sincerity, but making it interesting and engaging requires a great deal of talent and skill that not everyone possesses. Certainly if I did, my books would sell better.

What makes me crazy about this website is that the writers seem to come at the question of what readers want with a degree of hopelessness, with the certainty that nobody knows what readers want. There are two problems with this hopelessness:

1. Writers are readers. We are “the public” same as anyone. We’re not isolated gurus on mountains. If we’re doing our job right, we’re eclectic readers, critical thinkers, and students of the market. There is no reason a writer should need to consult some mythical, homogenous “public” in order to know what to write about.

2. Everyone else is a reader too. Everyone around us reads something. It will rarely be the same thing. There is no single “public” to write for, because the public is made up of individuals exactly like us, who have different tastes, different cultural backgrounds, and different personal histories. That said, if we pay attention to the people around us and actually ask them what they think, we stand a very good chance of learning how to write for them.

I keep wanting to grab these people and yell extribulum at them, which would be funny seeing as how they’d have no idea what this means and I’d look like a crazy person. But it’s true: they’re so wrapped up in what people want, and meanwhile here I am, giving away my first drafts so that I can find out, deliberately asking people what they want, always trying to learn what stories people like to hear and how they like to hear them so that I can combine this desire with my own and make a good story that people want to read.

A lot of people, when faced with large and frightening problems, seem to forget they can ask questions. I don’t know why we’re so afraid to ask questions, though I suspect it has something to do with the assumption that a smart person will already know the answer. But the first thing I do when I don’t know where to start is to make a list of questions I have to answer. Usually asking the question shows me where I have to go to answer it.

The end result is, of course, that I removed the website from my reader feed. I’m busy reading books and industry news; I no longer have the time for people who keep discussing a question without actually asking it.