Rethinking Old Issues

Man, it’s really been a while. March and April are always such busy months that my head is always in a bit of a whirlwind and trying to write ANYTHING that isn’t school related is a futile activity. But now the stress is over, I have four months reasonably full of leisure time ahead so writing can go back to being a priority. The cherry on top would be for the weather to actually start behaving like spring. Which it actually seems to be doing now, fingers crossed. Oh, what simple dreams I have when I don’t have to worry about school. It’s kind of nice actually.

I haven’t entirely neglected blogging these past two months. I did try to write a post in between the mayhem of final assignment deadlines and studying for exams, but something about it just wouldn’t work for me. I was really struggling with it to the point where I just decided to completely give up on it. So, instead, I decided to inspect the shipwreck it turned into, and write about that.

I think there were two major contributing factors to why I was struggling to write that post. The first is that I think I chose a really complicated topic and tried to take a definitive stance on it. The second is that I seem to be going through a weird phase in my state of mind. Have you ever had a point where you start questioning absolutely EVERYTHING in your life? When you start wondering what the point is to everything you’ve been planning and working towards up until now? When you start wondering if you even want any of that anymore? That’s basically where my mind has been lately and it throws a lot of things up in the air. The topic I wanted to write about was, in a nutshell, what kind of writer I want to be. This is a question I’ve been kicking around in my head since I was 13 and decided that was what I wanted to do when I grew up. As I sat down to write, I thought – rather naively - that by now I had a relatively firm stance on it. But, as is often the case with me, once I did, what I thought I had all figured out started to unravel, and it did so very quickly. For a long time I’ve equated “good” writing with literary writing. I suppose it’s not all that surprising for an English major to have such a conviction – they kind of brainwash you into thinking that way. So, the way I saw it was that I had two options: either be a literary writer (and by extension “good”), or be a popular writer and be, well not so good I guess. But the problem with that for me was that a lot of the stories and the writing I consider to be good, and that have truly inspired me, aren’t always what people might consider to be literary. This was a big problem for me. It was a real conflict for me to think that what I felt a deep attachment to wasn’t considered quality work - at least in the respectable, literary sense - especially because I wanted to write similar things to what I like to read. So I guess I kind of created this binary for myself that resulted in me being unhappy with whatever choice I made. Writing that blogpost made me realize just how confused and undecided I still was about the topic. And this made me very anxious for a while. It was like living my Literary Theory class all over again and, believe me, that can be a bit of a nightmare.

So I decided to be a reasonable person and took a step back. And once I did, I realized that first of all, the use of the word “good” is problematic in itself, because that is such a subjective judgment. Literary is a little bit better because it has more defined parameters (sort of), but good is a matter of personal preference. And realizing that made me realize that I just have to focus on writing things that I consider to be good, to be worth reading, and to have some kind of merit to them. That way, I can figure out what I like to write and what seems to work for me as I go. The rest I suppose I can leave to other people to worry about. Which is not exactly easy for me – I seem to love to worry about things I don’t need to.

Something that gives me hope is the way I’ve been expanding my horizons lately. This last semester I took a course about the Canadian Short Story, mostly just to fulfill program requirements and not really because I was interested in it. But part of my reasoning in signing up for the course was that if I was going to be a writer I should at least have a good sense of different genres of writing - widen my understanding and expand my repertoire. Try things I may have prematurely written off and see how that impacted my writing. And it turned out to be a really good idea. While I didn’t like all the stories I read (actually I liked a very small number of them), there were some that really caught my attention and made me rethink my approach to my writing. The result? I’ve decided to try my hand at writing short stories for a while. Initially I rejected that idea because I’ve always been incapable of keeping a story short, whether it is one I’m writing for fun, one for school, or just a story I’m tell my friends or family. Somehow it always seems to turn into this long-winded and elaborate thing. So I guess I just decided that short stories weren’t my thing, sat down to write novels and that was that. But after taking that course and learning how short stories push the boundaries of genres in terms of their length and complexity, I decided that maybe I was capable of writing a short story after all. I just had to stop restricting myself. That was kind of a miraculous revelation in itself. I am definitely my own worst enemy.

Another miraculous revelation of sorts was that the short story is actually a perfect medium for an amateur writer. Something we discussed at length in my course was how short stories could exceed the stereotypes placed on them, the biggest one being that a short story has to be a certain length. Alice Munro in particular, it seems, doesn’t like this limitation. Seriously, her short stories are NOT short. But, still, a short story is contained enough that it allows for practice in continuity and completeness. By this I mean to say that a short story is almost like a snap shot of a larger story. You can choose how much detail you include, but nevertheless it captures just one piece of a bigger picture. And that means that it lends itself well to practicing opening stories, writing the middle to stories, and, most importantly, practicing endings. I’m a little notorious among my friends for enthusiastically starting writing projects, promptly losing momentum shortly after, and then never returning to them. This means I’m decent at writing interesting openings to stories, but pretty much untried at writing middles or endings. Short stories, I think, are a good way to kick this habit. Or, at least, that’s is what I hope will happen.

Interestingly enough a chance to put this new strategy to work is coming up fairly soon. My university is running a creative writing course next year and in order to get into the class I need to submit a portfolio by May 15. This means I have to kick into high gear pretty much immediately, so that should be interesting. I already have an idea in mind. I’m not entirely sure how it’ll survive the journey from my head onto the page, but I’ll have fun writing about the process here, so keep an eye out for that.