Hey, so you probably heard I was asked to speak at the Glasgow International Fantasy Conference on my 2015 project, The Rats in the Walls. The talk went great, and I’ll be publishing the full text soon, but in the meantime I wanted to give some of the high points of the trip.
First off, while walking around Glasgow, I could catch a few glimpses of the Glasgow Necropolis, which was awesome. I’d never seen a graveyard like it, and the ‘skyline’ of monuments on the hill made it look like a true city of the dead. The giant doors in the hillside were especially cool–they made me think of the gates of a city, leading into the earth.
Second, the actual Conference took place in Glasgow University’s chapel, which was beautiful. The University is over 550 years old, and a lot of the passages still feel more like a castle than a modern building. The presentations, including Phil Harris’ talks on worldbuilding and game design, Rob Maslen’s lecture on the book as a fantastical object, and Julie Bertagna’s speech about her YA fantasy series, Exodus, were fantastic.
Third, I ended up meeting some great people at the Conference, including professors, writers, and academics. It was great to hang out with fantasists, instead of having to expand the gathering to include the other SF genres, like sci-fi and horror. There’s a lot of things unique to fantasy, and for once I was able to talk with people who were familiar and excited by the ins and outs of fantasy worldbuilding without having to explain what it was or how it worked. Most surprising of all, I was surprised when I found out the University had recently christened a new Masters in Fantasy Literature program, and that many of the attendees were members.
Fantasy has been dismissed for decades as commercial, not ‘serious’ literature. Most people who get their writing degrees see a significant stigma attached to writing fantasy in a university setting, including the director of the Odyssey Writing Workshop, who I interviewed recently for Outer Places. It was good to see more attention and credit given to fantasy as a genre at Glasgow U. At the same time, I felt a bit uneasy when the time came to present papers: GIFCON did so much to accord itself with traditional academia, both in the topics that were presented (including a Marxist interpretation of Dark Souls) and the way people spoke about them. For example:
While listening to a presentation about using a psychoanalytical approach to the dreams and visions in Game of Thrones, the moderator asked the presenter if he had thought about alternate interpretations of the characters’ dreams, ones that didn’t fall in line with his thesis. The presenter responded that there were a lot of visions/dreams that didn’t match up, but he’d focused on the ones that did.
As someone who’s gone through a Bachelors Degree program and written a couple academic essays for Clarkesworld, I’ve slowly realized that academia, especially academic scholarship on literature, is primarily focused on viewing one tiny facet of a subject in one very specific light, then discrediting or ignoring anything else that contradicts it (or admitting the contradictions and claiming that you’re ‘grappling’ with a complex topic that defies even self-definition). I know I’ve been guilty of this–it’s hard to take a complex world and distill a consistent, meaningful pattern from it into writing, rather than just be selective about what you pay attention to and pretend that everything else falls in line. But that latter attitude encourages a very narrow view of any given topic, and the moment it’s presented outside of its very familiar (and tolerant) academic setting, it suddenly appears incredibly myopic and (sometimes) even indulgent.
The ‘indulgent’ element is especially galling. So much scholarship, when it gets down to it, seems to be initiated because the author thought it ‘interesting.’ Certain aspects or viewpoints on a topic are discarded because the author thought it would be ‘more interesting’ to explore what they wanted to write about. There’s also very little consideration for an audience outside other experts in the field, which means all this supposed knowledge will never reach anyone outside a small circle of people. These aren’t new concerns, but they are persistent, and it makes me wary about treading deeper into the academic sphere as a speaker or writer.
GIFCON was a great experience and I hope it grows over the coming years, but I hope that it takes a note from its popular audience and material and moves away from emulating contemporary academia. I don’t know. I’m certainly not advocating for anti-intellectualism, but at the same time, attending GIFCON and seeing fantasy taken ‘seriously’, it throws into sharp relief that there are deep problems in the way academia approaches knowledge and literature. Maybe there’s something to be said for being underground, unexamined, and mocked by the establishment–it means we don’t have to play by the rules.
P.S. The milk in Scotland is delicious, cheap, and plentiful. 10/10.
If you read Neuromancer, you remember the surreal paradise of Straylight, the space station Case and the crew travel to. You remember McCoy Pauley, the “Flatline,” his accent, and his bizarre dead man’s laugh. You remember the sequence when Case jacks into the matrix to take on the T.A. AI. And if you’re like me, you remember the last line, “He never saw Molly again.”
The entire story of Neuromancer took place in 270 pages. All of its minutely detailed worldbuilding, its revelations about Riviera and Wintermute, and Case’s struggles to get over Linda Lee are encapsulated in those 270 pages.
Page 270 is where I stopped reading The Eye of the World from sheer disinterest. There were no characters I cared about, no aspects of the world that captured my imagination, and nothing in the plot that made me keep turning pages. In the space of 270 pages, the same length that entire masterpieces of fantasy/sci-fi have been written, nothing of substance had even appeared to give me a reason to finish the book.
Let’s go deeper here.
Wizard of Earthsea. If you read the first book in the Earthsea series, you know Ged becomes Ogion’s apprentice, travels to Roke, stays a year in Kurremkarmerruk’s tower learning runes, builds a rivalry with Jasper, unleashes a gebbeth on the world, fights a clan of dragons to a stand-still, finds the Ring of Erreth Akbe on an abandoned sandbar, and travels to the end of the world to confront his own death in 183 pages.
The Fellowship of the Ring. By page 200 in The Fellowship of the Ring, Frodo and his friends have already made it through the Old Forest, the Barrow-Downs, and the encounter with the Ringwraith on the road. They’ve encountered Elves on their travels, watched Bilbo disappear, and Frodo has learned about the diabolical nature of the Ring and the stakes of destroying it.
In 270 pages or less, each of these stories accomplished what Eye of the World did not: present an engaging cast of characters, the beginnings of an interesting, well-paced plot, and a reason to care about any of it. You could say everyone’s tastes are different, and that if I didn’t like it, that has everything to do with me and little to do with the story. As a writer, I disagree.
To borrow from Harry Plinkett’s Star Wars prequel reviews, a litmus test that every character in fiction should be able to pass is to have someone describe them without explaining their appearance, their job, or role in the plot of the story. What’s their personality, their character? What do they want, and what drives them as a person? Taking a step beyond that, are the character’s desires or goals driving the story and their actions in it? What will they get at the end of it all, what’s their “payoff”? All of these are roundabout ways of saying “Why should I care about this story and what happens in it?”
I couldn’t answer any of these questions about the characters or the plot of The Eye of the World because, as in most D&D campaigns, the story lurches forward because The Plot requires it to. This isn’t a story about people struggling for something, this is a puppet show. Set on a pair of rails, the characters have to play along with no agency and no motivation beyond staying alive, nothing personal at stake.
I’ll make a note here about Egwene, who develops the desire to become an Aes Sedai after Moraine reveals her ability to channel. Egwene has a personal stake in getting to Tar Valon: she wants to become special and learn the extent of her abilities. But Egwene’s presence on the journey to Tar Valon is so incidental, so badly rationalized as “a part of the Pattern,” that it renders her whole role in the plot moot.
But what frustrates me almost as much as the characters and plot is the insistence on the part of fans that The Eye of the World represents good, even great worldbuilding. As I’ve said before, good worldbuilding has very little to do with depth or complexity and everything to do with how it immerses readers in the story at hand. Looking at H.P. Lovecraft’s Mountains of Madness, the overwhelming detail of the expedition’s gear and supplies ends up grounding you a scientific mindset that makes everything afterward, from the frozen city to the ice to the shoggoths, all the more credulous and frightening. Instead, The Eye of the World alternates between spending page after page describing mind-numbing, mundane medieval farming life and reeling off long expositions about this world’s history and lore, the most egregious example being Moraine’s recounting of the heritage of Edmond’s Field. There is nothing immediate and applicable about these details, like Neuromancer’s complex descriptions of the technology Case is using, and nothing vivid and interesting that reminds me I’m in a fantasy world, like Case’s wanderings through Night City.
Someone might argue that Jordan’s writing, the prose of the book, is what makes everything hang together. I read 1100 pages of Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon almost on the strength of the writing alone. If anyone sits down and compares the writing in Eye of the World to a random chapter in Cryptonomicon (even the one with the Captain Crunch), the difference in sheer vividness will be immediately clear.
So, to sum it all up: I don’t think The Eye of the World is a good fantasy book. I don’t think it represents what fantasy should be, or what a book should do. If it can’t give me one good reason to keep reading it in the span of pages that other books have told entire stories, I think it’s safe to say that it’s not a good book overall.
[Stands up, pushes chair back]
I’m going to go back to my triangles now. Let me know what you think below in the comments.
If Captain Jack has taught me anything, it’s that sometimes you’ve got to dream a little dream. He doesn’t have much advice about how to build a magic system around dreams, though. N.K. Jemisin already uses the term ‘narcomancy,’ meaning dream magic, in her Dreamblood series, but after sketching out the magic system for the new story I’m working on, I found my narcomancy resembled William Gibson’s Neuromancer more than Killing Moon.
In a similar way to Case in Neuromancer, the narcomancers in my story operate by immersing themselves in an alternate reality and working from the inside. The reality in this case isn’t a Matrix, but a dreamscape that stretches across the world, with dreams and dreamers showing up as brainwave patterns, tuned to certain frequencies like bands of radio stations, each frequency representing a different stage of sleep—alpha, theta, delta, or REM.
I got the idea of imaging brainwaves as radio bands from Kevin Mitnick’s memoir, Ghost in the Wires, which explains (sometimes tediously) how he and many other hackers started out as ham radio operators. There was one repeater frequency, 147.435, that they called “the animal house,” a channel that was open for anyone to scream into, spread rumors, or meet random people. I liked the idea of tuning a radio into a certain frequency and hearing people’s dreams from all over the world, sort of like John Cheever’s The Enormous Radio. The idea for a worldwide dreamscape also came partly from Serial Experiments Lain, which touched on the Schumann resonance as a means to create a worldwide consciousness using the Earth’s magnetic field, then merge reality and the Wired into one. These ideas are really interesting to me, partly because they straddle the line between real scientific phenomena and fantasy.
The dreamscape, as I’m imagining it, can be visualized as having several different bands, or layers, each one corresponding to a different sleep stage:
Part of the job of the narcomancers in the story is to find “bands” of dreamers in delta sleep and begin trying to trigger them into moving into REM sleep, where they can start manipulating their dreams. REM stage sleep is also known as paradoxical sleep, because it closely resembles the waking state of brain activity. It’s strongly associated with vivid dreaming, and it’s usually in this stage that you have real trouble distinguishing reality from dreaming.
REM stage sleep is also when a sleeper’s eyes begin to move rapidly behind their lids, hence the name: Rapid Eye Movement (REM). Imagining someone’s eyes moving hyper-fast, as if trying to keep up with thousands of flashing images, made me think of the mentats in Dune, who have a similar association with eyes. Their blue-tinted mélange-addicted eyes signaled their superhuman ability to think and process facts like computers, and in a similar way, I imagined a sleeping narcomancer attaining an almost superhuman level of consciousness during REM, allowing them to deal with huge amounts of sensory input and making them able to pull off a performances.
REM stage sleep, like every kind of sleep, comes in cycles, with the brain diving and rising through the different stages several times over the course of one night. As the night goes on, REM stages become more frequent:
This brought me to another idea: sort of like a bank heist, what if narcomancers could only operate during their REM sleep, in 40-50 minute periods? It would almost be like a high that would wear off in time, forcing them to operate quickly, get in, play their music, and get out before their REM abilities wore off.
But there would have to be another hurdle for narcomancers to help distinguish them from regular dreamers: lucid dreaming. When I dream, it usually feels like I’m in a trance, like I’m watching myself doing things from somewhere slightly removed from my body with no real conscious control (Fun fact: sleep paralysis, a possible side effect of being woken up from REM sleep, often causes this same feeling, called bodily dissociation, also known as ‘having an out-of-body experience’). How could narcomancers, and musician narcomancers, hope to operate something akin to a mental DJ set when their mind isn’t working at top capacity? The only way to attain that kind of conscious acuity would have to be through lucid dreaming, where one would be able to recognize that they’re dreaming, then think and act as if they were awake.
To answer the question of how to attain lucid dreaming, I turned to 1980’s drug culture. Since the story was originally inspired by the rave-like EDM concerts of bands like Daft Punk, I turned to one aspect of rave culture: party drugs. So I invented a liquid, opium-derived product with a lot of similarities to morphine, which is apropos since morphine derives its name from Morpheus, the god of dreams. It’s also the kick-ass main character of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series, but that’s another story entirely. Sezumi, this fictional drug, would have one new feature apart from morphine: it would allow lucid dreaming once it put someone to sleep.
But another aspect of narcomancy, one of the key elements of manipulating dreams, comes from a unique phenomenon that’s also connected to lucid dreaming: binaural tones. Caused by playing two high-frequency notes with slight difference in their frequencies, binaural tones are sine waves that cause the brainwaves of the listeners to begin to synch with the binaural frequencies, meaning that you can ‘tune’ your brainwaves to certain patterns, such as theta or delta rhythms. This would be tremendously useful for a narcomancer who has to move between different stages of sleep, but there’s another use for it that makes it the central skill of narcomancy when paired with lucid dreaming: synching your brain waves with the brain waves of dreamers, then manipulating them.
Consider it a very primitive form of hacking, to use the Neuromancer analogy again. While lucid and on your REM high (with a 40-minute window) you find a frequency band with many dreamers’ brain waves operating on that wavelength, then start using binaural beats to manipulate them into attaining REM stage, then fine-tune your brainwaves to match theirs. Once you’re on the same frequency, you’re the only lucid person around, while everyone else is operating on the subconscious level. From there, you can begin manipulate and shape the dreams into something like reality-bending art, using music as your tool.
I have a fascination with the metal buttons on pay phones, the pixels on old Zenith televisions, the writing on IV drip bags, and the lettering on manhole covers. I walk around New York with my hands running over metal railings and my eyes sweeping over the small details. Every stairway in the New York subway system has a letter and number designation written on a small plaque below one of the steps. Every restaurant in the city has a health rating in the window. And at the intersection of Madison and 30th Street is a Toynbee Tile.
Sometimes I sit on the wooden benches in the subway and imagine being the last man on Earth, confined to the island of Manhattan. I imagine crawling over every inch of it, studying a single patch of street asphalt with the same intensity as the Mona Lisa. There’s that scene in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, where Cameron is looking at A Sunday Afternoon on La Grand Jatte, and he keeps looking closer and closer at the little girl, and the camera keeps zooming in on her face until it’s nothing but a bunch of colored dots.
Art has low resolution. Life, on the other hand, has infinite resolution.
There is a school of writing that says your job as a writer, first and foremost, is to notice things. This is what I was taught. It’s the same school of thought that stresses concrete details in every line of your writing, so that every dimension of your story is vivid, tactile, textured, and beautifully, truthfully rendered. All those candy wrappers and weeds poking through the sidewalk are your material as a writer, because they evoke the realness of everyday life. And that’s your job as a writer: to render life as realistically as possible. And you learn to do that by noticing the small details.
If you read American Psycho, 30% of the book is taken up in a meticulous catalogue of the colors, cuts, and brands of every character’s suit, tie, shoe, dress, cuff links and handkerchief. In fact, much of Patrick Bateman’s life seems to be taken up in the pursuit of an encyclopedic knowledge of style, fashion, and taste. This isn’t just because Patrick is a psychopath. It’s because all that matters in his social circles is the minutiae: the length of your coat sleeves, what you order at restaurants, and what kind of stereo you have. As you read, you begin to learn the language of affluence as if it’s a foreign culture, with Patrick as your guide. You get immersed in his world, his mindset, through the small details. So when the murders begin, they feel that much more surreal.
This kind of writing is based around the ideal of ‘verisimilitude,’ which is the appearance or quality of being real and believable. It’s what allows us to become immersed in a story, and, for a while, believe that it’s real. Many writers today do it by mining everyday life for those small, concrete details: smells, sights, textures. Those details immerse the reader in the story, and allow the illusion of fiction to happen.
So imagine you’re telling a story in a time, place, and universe that doesn’t exist. Imagine you’re writing second-world fantasy.
Maybe now you can understand how fucked you are. You don’t get to immediately pull from a shared pool of experiences. You don’t get to see your world laid out in front of you every waking minute, in all its minute detail. No, instead you have to steal, jury-rig, and cut from whole cloth the sights, sounds, and textures that will immerse your readers.
Watch a weather forecast, look at a street map of your town, or pick up an English-to-French Dictionary, and you’ll realize how hard it is to make up a world from scratch, down to the smallest details. But the real world is a good jumping off point. Learn about Zoroaster, the Zen poet Basho, and the economic collapse of Detroit. Then begin to work your way down to the feeling of varnished wood on your fingertips as you run your hand over the ribs of a suit of samurai armor, which is called the do. Find out what the little recycling number is on your box of cereal, and what that means about its composition. Stay up all night and watch the sunrise alone, and remember how it felt.
I think to make a good secondary world you have to be a whole universe boiled into one person, but if you do it right, you’ll never stop learning. About the stars, about music, about human history—fantasy is about bringing back stories from the bounds of imagination, and writing it is your excuse to explore it. What you’ll find, I think, is that you will begin noticing the small details around you, the pay phones and manhole covers, and admiring them as works of art, just as much as Beowulf is. There’s beauty in the small details.
And I think the advice given to writers, oftentimes, is the same advice given to those who want to make the most out of their life. Kafka wasn’t very upbeat, but he was always telling people to chase the sublime, to dive into what they feared the most in order to uncover what they needed to live. And there’s a quote by someone, maybe Picasso, that every piece of art is a self-portrait. I think that makes sense for writing fantasy, because if you’re going to write it well, it’s going to be ingrained in the way you live and the way you look at things.
Still, people will ask why you spend so much time building worlds, cultures, and metaphysics for worlds that don’t exist. What’s the use of these stories, or fantasy at all? There’s a scene in Wizard of Earthsea, when Ged picks up a plant called fourfoil, and asks the mage Ogion what its use is. Ogion replies,
“When you know the fourfoil in all its seasons root and leaf and flower, by sight and scent and seed then you may learn its true name, knowing its being; which is more than its use. What, after all, is the use of you? Or of myself? Is Gont Mountain useful, or the Open Sea?”
I imagine kneeling down on a sidewalk in New York and picking up a sprig of fourfoil growing out of the seam between the cement and a building. There is no use for fourfoil, but in that moment, with fifty-story buildings looming all around me and planes flying overhead and dozens of people walking by me to get to a bar or Grand Central, I see a spark of another time, another place in its tiny leaves.
If I can immerse people in a story, what is the use of reality?
The meaning of the story of Don Quixote changes depending on the teller, but it begins with Alonso Quixano, an old man who reads so many stories about knights and dragons that he loses his ability to distinguish between fiction and reality. In his delirium, he sets out as Don Quixote, knight-errant.
There are some windmills in there, too.
What a lot of people don’t realize is that Don Quixote, upon its publication, signaled the death of the chivalric romance, the same books that told tales of knights and magicians, giants, chivalry, and virtue. Don Quixote was a clever, vicious satire in addition to being one of the greatest novels of all time, and its rise put the chivalric romance out of fashion. It also started a debate: what effect do books have on people’s minds?
I was watching a video by Evan Puschak about worldbuilding in fantasy yesterday. In it, he makes a couple of suggestions about the nature of fantasy novels, world-building, and the relationship between authors and readers. These, I think, were his main points:
Reading is not the author telling the reader a story—reading is a game in which the author makes implications and the reader uses their interpretive toolbox to create their own interpretation of the story.
Worldbuilding in fantasy novels today is largely based on a passive mindset within the reader because the reader is dependent on the author for the truth about their world.
Fantasy readers’ intense desire to learn about an author’s fantasy world is dangerous because that obsession acclimates readers to passively accepting other forms of ‘worldbuilding,’ including political ideologies.
Fantasy novels like Viriconium that challenge readers’ assumptions and make them question their preconceptions about literature and the world are valuable because they cause readers to abandon a passive mindset.
Evan’s video ends on the note that we should seek out impish, challenging books that don’t conform to our ideas about fantasy and make us question our relationship to the novel.
I agree with some of Evan’s points and I disagree with most, but it’s not really the points Evan makes in the video that I want to talk about. I want to talk about the ideas that lie beneath them, because those are the ideas that I really disagree with.
Running underneath Evan’s suggestions are concepts like the death of the author, Sausserean theories of symbol and language, sociology, Marxist literary criticism, and the Hegelian idea of the dialectic. I want to explain what these are, and what they mean to me when it comes to fantasy and writing.
YOU ARE ALONSO QUIXANO
When Evan says worldbuilding is dangerous, he uses a line of thought that’s influenced by sociology and Marxist literary criticism, which views humans as objects that are primarily shaped by their society and culture, constantly subject to different ‘ideologies.’ Ideologies are sets of ideas meant to manipulate people into certain behaviors, and are generated by those in power to control the populace. Evan compares George R.R. Martin’s worldbuilding to the commercial and political ‘worldbuilding’ of L’oreal and Fox News, and claims that if you readily accept the former kind, it’s easy to accept the latter.
The main idea of the video, which is subtitled the ‘perils of worldbuilding,’ isn’t about whether or not fantasy worldbuilding is the same as the commercials and commentary of shampoo companies and news networks—it’s about the Marxist idea that you, as a person, are solely the product of your society and culture, and that you are so vulnerable to be conditioned to accept certain ideas that worldbuilding in fantasy novels is dangerous to you. The books you read are acting on your subconscious, constantly rewriting your thoughts without your knowledge and guiding your decision-making in the future. Before you entertain the ideas in the video, you have to accept that premise.
FRODO LIVES, BUT GOD IS DEAD
Evan also shifts the definition of how a novel works in his video, claiming that a story is created through a reader’s interpretation of the author’s writing. This is different from what we usually expect the relationship between reader and author to be: the author comes up with an idea for a story and tries to convey it as best they can to the reader. Evan is substituting a model of reading that stems from a concept called “the death of the author,” in which the reader, not the author, is the person who decides the meaning of the story. The reader does this by looking at the story through any number of different lenses—these can be socio-political, religious, economic, or racial.
What Evan is finding problems with specifically, however, is worldbuilding within fantasy. It’s a corruption of the relationship between reader and text, he claims, to have a dimension of the story that is not up for interpretation—in this case, the geography, history, and magic of the fantasy world, which is all understood and explained solely by the author. That, to Evan and his theoretical background, is a problem.
This is because Evan’s body of literary theory, called critical theory, is also influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche, an existentialist philosopher who rejected any philosophies that claimed to have a monopoly on truth and morality, and instead claimed that we all must find own definition of morality and our own way to live our lives. One of Nietzsche’s famous claims was that God was dead, meaning that in this new, modern era, appeals to universal truths, like religion or Kant’s philosophy of deontology, had proven to be irreparable failures, and that we had entered a new era of unparalleled freedom, unbeholden to any external authorities.
This comes all the way back to authors being the source of truth about their own books. Evan and critical theory reject authors as being the final authority on their own works, because in their view, there is no such thing as ‘truth,’ only interpretations.
THE IMPOSSIBLE DREAM
Finally, Evan’s encouragement to seek out books that make us question our assumptions about fantasy and novels themselves (as well as his championing of Viriconium) comes from an idea called ‘the dialectic.’
The dialectic is a way to chart the growth and development of ideas, and begins with a thesis, or the proposal of an idea. Then a negative reaction comes, called the antithesis, which disagrees with the first idea. The two come into conflict, and create a synthesis, from which a new idea is taken. Then the process starts all over again. The dialectic, according to critical theory, should be a model for the way we live and think: everything we accept should be treated as a thesis to be questioned, negated, deconstructed, and rebuilt anew.
The directive to constantly challenge yourself and your preconceptions, to unsettle or overturn the established order, and especially to pursue books that do not conform to the usual structure of a novel comes from the idea of the dialectic. On the surface, this seems to be the essence of open-mindedness and the progressive ideal—question, debate, discover!—but the problem is that there is no goal or ideal that the dialectic is striving for. Every thesis must be attacked simply for being a thesis. More than that, we should not strive to find something true and eternal and constant—we should pursue constant change, never allowing ourselves to build a dogma. The dialectic is change for change’s sake–there is no utopia it’s trying to achieve, no final goal.
What is the goal of writing and reading, then? To deconstruct and question the definition of reading and writing, and build a new model. The cycle will then begin again. Like the dialectic itself, books and reading are not avenues to truth, catharsis, understanding, or meaning–they’re ends in themselves, to be explored, destroyed, and reconstructed.
In the mindset of the dialectic, it’s quixotic to believe in any kind of truth or any purpose to reading and writing beyond being an exercise in thesis and antithesis: everything is just grist for the mills.
MADDEST OF ALL
I wrote a manifesto for why I write a while ago. It starts like this:
“I don’t know if it’s a characteristic of this age or a sign that we’ve come to a fuller understanding of life, but nothing seems certain today. The more you pull the string of who you are, who you love, what you should do and why, the more string keeps coming. There has to be something solid to hold onto, something that’s undeniably true. And what I inevitably come back to is the knowledge that if we are all lost, we are lost together. Writing is a way to bring people solace by showing them that, ‘in the face of all aridity and disenchantment’, there is solace in each other and wonder in being alive.”
And it ends like this:
“I want my [stories] to soak into their mind until little black drops of it start dripping onto their soul. There’s too much in our hearts that never gets to see the light of day: terror, sorrow, joy, desperation, and wonder. When a story begins to awaken these feelings, it reminds the reader that, dear God, life has some sort of power running underneath all these crosswalks and Wednesdays and rent payments. It’s like waking up from a dream and seeing the world for the first time, unfurling in all its terrible and asymmetric beauty.”
Writing, to me, is about creating something that illuminates people’s lives. That comes from my belief that there are truths that can unite people, and some human condition that we share, and that I, as a person, can create stories that evoke that human condition. This belief stands in opposition to the philosophy that drives Evan’s assertions about fantasy writing and worldbuilding, and it goes against many of the critics who are trickling into the sci-fi and fantasy genre, many of whom are influenced in some way or another by critical theory.
This, for me, isn’t just a conversation about literary theory; this is a discussion about how we view the world and what guides our lives. That’s why I care. I’ve told my side, now it’s up to you to go out, read some more, think some more, and decide what you believe in.
I’ll end with a clip from Man of La Mancha, a movie that shows another side of Don Quixote, the novel that killed knights and magic. This scene shows a fictional Miguel Cervantes and his answer to why he writes.
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Let me put something in perspective.
