I’m sure everyone who reads here has heard variations on “it’s easy to write: just open a vein and let it pour out”. What it is, is dying in order to live. Everyone who truly lives knows how this works. Writers do it all the time.
Of course, Sarah is to blame for this. Her post yesterday led me here: I was raised on books. Hell, I should introduce myself with “My name is Kate, and I am a compulsive reader”. If there’s print on it, it gets read. If there’s anything vaguely print-like on it I’ll drive myself insane trying to read it.
I have no memory of life before reading. My parents tell me I was reading simple things by the age of three – my memories from that far back are fragmentary and hard to pin down to any specific age or time – and by the time I’d started school I’d effectively forced them to use a height-based shelving system. If I shouldn’t read it, it was shelved too high for me to reach. What they didn’t realize was that I could climb…
I devoured anything in print. Enid Blyton, Laura Ingalls Wilder, hundreds of others I couldn’t begin to name. There were old books from my grandmother’s childhood (yes, English boarding school stories), my parents had old “books for boys” and “books for girls” with all their articles and serialized stories – I preferred the ones for boys because there was more adventure – books written in the 1900s for mothers to read to their children… and of course the ones I wasn’t supposed to read which I climbed to and investigated. Some I read, secretly, others were just boring (in some cases because I wasn’t old enough to get what was in them… I was a strange child).
At the same time I went through fads where if I got the choice I’d read a particular kind of book. At one point it was horsey stories (started, I think, by Black Beauty. Funnily enough none of the horsey books for children came close to that), then when I’d read out the supply at the local and school library I started browsing widely again until something caught my interest and became the next reading fad (possibly mysteries – I know the Famous Five was in there somewhere). Rinse and repeat… Historicals got a run, too. Of course once I hit science fiction and fantasy there I stayed, but I’ll still read anything if my supply of reading material is limited enough (for some things I have to be really bored).
Looking back at some of these old favorites with an adult eye, I see different things. I see the attitudes of the era, sometimes shining and sometimes reeking through the prose. No doubt future readers will see the same things with what I write. We’re all to some extent products of our time and have very basic assumptions built into everything we do.
And this is why, in order to fully live, you have to die.
Those assumptions, those attitudes, got there at a very early age. I’d guarantee not one Victorian or Edwardian writer who characterized their villains as “evil-looking” in a time when the belief that what was inside inevitably reflected on the outside sat down and deliberately set out to make the cannibal tribe look evil and the noble tribesman who assists the hero looks rather more… well… white. Their standards of what looked good were built as children in a time when darker skin meant lower class, rough, and possibly dishonest (their parents grew up in a world where pale skin meant you were wealthy and didn’t need to work outdoors). No, they wrote their story and their assumptions came along for the ride, and shaped the end result.
Basically, they’re so ingrained they become part of the person. So of course, when one of these assumptions dies so, at least in part, does the person who owns it. A really good writer actively seeks them out and kills them in order to build a new set that will allow them to write the next story even better (they might not succeed – but this is what allows writers to speculate on wildly different core assumptions… to a certain extent).
The thing with this is that when you immerse yourself into a different assumption set, you lose part of who you were and become… someone else. To write Impaler and as I write the sequel Kaziklu Bey, I take on what I hope is the mindset of a late 15th century Eastern European man. Each time I do this, it melds rather more with my own mindset, and a little more of who I am changes to something else. The merging kills part of who I was – I am no longer so certain that people should be judged entirely on their merits. To some extent this is a little more merciful: I never had much patience for stupidity, and my personal measure of “too stupid to live” would eliminate 90% of the human race. It’s also rather more cruel. I’m less inclined to forgive well-intentioned disasters, and have been known to express regret that impaling certain co-workers would ruin the carpet (okay, I do test software for a living, and sometimes what comes out of the developers hands is… beyond frustrating).
Sometimes, too, to really appreciate something you need to throw away all the preconceptions and just take it as it is. The cat doesn’t like to sit on your lap? Maybe a kitty bed on the desk where a free hand can provide snuggles is the way to go. The big six won’t touch your book with a barge pole? Maybe it’s time to take the leap of faith, lose that assumption that those in power also have moral authority, and publish it yourself (then again, if your book is thinly disguised Star Wars fanfic shipping Luke and Jabba the Hutt, maybe not… The lawsuits might not be the worst thing about that.)
You see? If in your imagination you can see where things might go if you just say “fuckit” and do what weird/bizarre/repulsive thing you’ve always wondered about, maybe you’ve got a story there. Or maybe a cautionary tale. But if you don’t die a little and live the new thing, you’ll never find out.
Mad Genius Club 
16 responses to “To live you must first die”
“Their standards of what looked good were built as children in a time when darker skin meant lower class, rough, and possibly dishonest (their parents grew up in a world where pale skin meant you were wealthy and didn’t need to work outdoors). ”
Interesting, I never really realized it but I naturally think of evil characters as ‘sallow faced’ unless they are described otherwise. This because I grew up thinking calluses and a ‘farmer’s tan’ were evidence of honest work, while people who either didn’t work or worked inside, such as lawyers, doctors and such were very possibly dishonest. (lawyers give everyone a bad name, all the doctors I knew growing up were completely honest, more than half however were stuck up and thought they were better than common laborers) Of course I was probably influenced by very heavy dose of Louis L’amour at a young age, where all the good guys labored outdoors, and I don’t recall descriptions from books like Walter Farley’s Black Stallion series, but since all the books I read as kid tended to be outdoor based, I assume most of the main characters were tanned and weathered.
I’ll admit, I found it kind of odd, growing up in a culture where golden-brown to dark-brown was the desired norm (otherwise known as a “healthy tan” if you weren’t fortunate enough to have one built-in). Pale meant you were sick.
Very good.
Thanks, Paul
[…] 6. And I’d be remiss if I didn’t pimp fellow Mad Genius Club member Kate Paulk’s latest post, “To live you must first die“. […]
The language also seems to stick as well as the attitude. Read lots and lots of Victorian prose and, hey presto, you start sounding like a Kipling or H. Rider Haggard narrator, both in vocabulary (not always a bad thing) and cadence. Other languages can do it too: I read a book or two in German and then I have to step back and de-clause my writing, and sometimes move the verbs as well.
Yes, the language does stick. It leaks into the spoken world too, which can cause some interesting results.
This is way too true. Doing historical research can be difficult sometimes because it’s not always easy to understand the assumptions behind a document. Even worse though, it’s not easy to really figure out what my own tendencies are. It becomes much..well… not easier….uhh…. more obvious why I’m writing what I’m writing when I sit down and try to work through my assumptions and what I take for granted. Once I realize what I’m thinking it’s not as hard to express. There are also times when I wonder if I’m expressing what I mean to. It’s a useful tool if you know how to use it.
Oh, yes. It’s not easy to do. Moving to a different country helps show what notions are assumptions (will have been in the US ten years this October).
One of the things I’ve found helps with historical research is to read translations of primary sources from the perspective that the writer was intelligent and knew what he (usually he) was doing. Then retrofit to what the likely mindset behind that was. It can be quite eye-opening to realize just how much we take for granted about our lives.
Books — and height-based shelving — were the cause of the most memorable beating of my childhood. Because my 7-year-old self wasn’t permitted to *touch* my sister’s treasured Nancy Drew collection, much less attempt to read them. But the makeshift shelves my father had nailed to the wall turned out to be somewhat less sturdy than I expected, as I attempted to exchange a completed volume for the next one …
You’ve helped me identify one of the things that has been bothering me that I couldn’t put my finger on. Thank you. I’ve been trying to look back at everything I write from the perspective of, “would anyone who isn’t *me* be at all interested?” And I end up thinking that all of it is probably Vogon poetry … because it isn’t “me”, but it isn’t “them” either. It’s … a lot of the time, my edits seem to turn things into an artificial construct that doesn’t suit anybody. Kind of like Esperonto.
Heh… I had one or two near-misses myself, particularly when the bookshelves were 12 feet high and rocked quite a bit when my 8 year old self got towards the uppermost shelves.
The correct perspective towards your writing (at least in my view) shouldn’t be “would anyone else care” but “do I care” and “is this as good as I can make it right now?” Use the latter check with caution, since the first one is the main criteria.
Even we strange folk have enough in common with the rest of humanity that there will be other people out there who are interested in what you’ve got to say. Maybe nowhere near as many as the American Idol audience, but – again, my opinion – more than zero is “enough” to justify writing it.
It’s strange, to live in someone else’s life part time. You find yourself striding confidently down the hallway . . . wait. I’m a mega-shy fat nearsighted . . . when did I start striding about like I was the Lord of Creation and knew what to do with this imaginary sword?
TRUST me, that is far from the weirdest part. Try writing erotic scenes from a male POV. It’s… odd.
I can deal with thinking alien thoughts. Alien body parts trying to convince my brain they exist are a bit much.
It’s times like that I wonder what drugs my subconscious is on that I don’t know about and why it won’t let me share.
And I worry about myself a bit as I invent methods of imaginary-intelligent-beings sex lives. And what would people be like if they really were telepathic? Would they develop a hive-mind? Lern how to shield their thoughts and keep out others? Or perhaps, given variation in a population, both? And do you realize how bad for one’s sexual enjoyment reading your partner’s throughts at the time could be? And AIs. Will they actually notice humans? From the inside of a computer, those slow bio-things could be rather easy to dismiss as totally unimportant and irrelevant to the war for the control of the e-world. :: whap :: Sorry, brain is over-revving and trying to lure me away from more editing. Speaking of death.
Ah yes.
FIDO.
Fuck it, Drive on.
I can relate.
Ev..yeah but sometimes when you’re mad about something FIDO just doesn’t cover it…RIFO on the other hand……