I haven't edited this. It's rough and impromptu and I wrote it in an editor that doesn't try to catch mistakes. I haven't even read it over a second time. I'm pretty sure that there's holes in the logic and bad spelling and bad paragraphs and awful sentences. You know what though? Given the topic, I don't care. Maybe one day I'll take this post and scrub it up and make an essay of it. Probably not though. Enjoy the imperfection. I'll take the time that I didn't spend on it to write something that I care about more.
-----
I haven't blogged here for a very long time. I suppose I didn't want to. I don't blog often, and I when I do there's something romatic about blogging on whathowadsworth.com as Jason Secrest the transdimensional owner of a randomly magical mansion. Moreover I've felt like I've been promoting a kind of a false sense of truth, like that harbored by William Goldman in his novels by S. Morgenstern. It's fun to say that "This is the truth, a hard to believe truth, but a real one." I guess that I've felt that I'd be betraying my lies if I ever wrote something as myself, just a guy in provo that wishes that he transported to a mystical mansion at a whim. I don't know what I'm so worked up about it for. It's not like truth and fiction in this matter aren't seperable and obvious. At anyrate, I did want to touch on something in the art of writing. It's something that I've been trying to work out in my head for the last several month's - and when I say trying to work out, what I really mean is avoiding... but an epiphony struck me today, and I'm gonig to do my best to iterate it.
Imperfection is the topic of the day. Imperfection is what really get's at my writing. It's my biggest hangup. When I don't write, it's because I'm scared that what I write won't "work." I suppose to understand what I mean by that we should back up a touch and go over afew principles of fiction. Specifically, let's talk about the Willing Suspension of Disbeleif. Coolridge, a contemporary of William Wordsworth invented that term. Willing suspension of disbelief is what people do when they want to enjoy a work of fiction. They find it in themselves to say, "Well that couldn't really happen, but just for now I'll pretend that it could." Then they read a work and digest it and pull bits of insights about life and the universe from a story that they knew was fake from the beggining, but that they pretended was true.
The problem with fiction is that it has to sell its lies. A person has to almost consiously declare that they are willing to overlook things that it finds illogical, or "wrong" about a story as they read, but the more frequently they have to do this (and the less intentional the lie they swallow seems) the harder it is to accept the lie and read on. The thing that keeps them "suspended" in a willing self dilusion is the promise of reward. They need a profound thought, or an identifiable situation, or a clever phrase, or a satisfying interaction with something in the book. They're like miners, chipping through the face of the lies. At first they only need little traces of a vein of gold, but as they go they need more and more until they hit the motherload. Then the book was worth it.
What I'm driving at is that readers are tough customers and they notice everything that's wrong, and to much of what's wrong and to little reward leads them to put the book down. People balk at a phrase that's off or a reaction to a problem that seems stupid, or a bit of plot that twists in a way that doesn't seem believable within the bounds of their current suspension of disbelief.
That's what's killing me right now. I notice what's wrong with my book. I notice what's illogical. Then, what I don't notice, my friends pick up on when they read for me. Then all I can see is what's wrong. I have a hard time believing that the rewards of what I'm delivering exceeds the effort of reading it. So I'm scared of my book or scared of my blog, and I start to dread writing it and then I stop writing, and I come up with excuses not to do it.
For me, the art of learning how to write, is the art of understanding that all the best works are flawed.
I watched the BBC program Sherlock. Love it. Great series. But their's so much wrong with it. I'm just going to take one example of this: Season one throws out a pretty big cliffhanger that at the end. They stopped in the middle of a scene in fact. Season 2 picked up exactly at the same spot and resolved the immediate problem. It was aweful. It did not work for me at all. Or maybe I'm just stupid and I didn't observe whatever clever interplay that the screne writers thought that they'd made obvious. The funny thing is that after struggling through that stupid scene, I didn't care about it. I shrugged it off and giggled my delight at the next scene. Especially after that aweful bit of plot, I was on the edge of my seat wating for sherlock to say something rediculous, or explain away the stain on somebodies shirt.
I've got to get past the idea that all of the wholes in my fiction need to be plugged. It'd take a much more clever person than I to get everything about it perfectly right. The whole thing is a lie after all. It's my job to write the story the best that I can, polish it within an inch of it's life, and then release it into the wild. These first couple of books are going to be pretty aweful, but I've got to get past my fear of writing them and just finish. The next one's will be better. And the next few after that will be better still, and the next few even better.
So, it's on that note, that I'm going to shake off my fear of writing crap and finish this stupid book.
-Jason
