The Thursday! Newsletter 1-48: Art Don't Hurt
Volume 1, Issue 48
I'd like to talk about telling stories.
Which is to say, I want to talk about how you tell stories. Did you know that you are a storyteller, even if you don't write particular stories? Did you know that you, my artist friend, are a storyteller? Same for you, poet. Any you, sculptor. And you, singer. And you, person who doodles on a notepad during the boring work meeting, You are a storyteller.
Got that? Good. I didn't want to have to spend a lot of time arguing about that point because I wanted to get on to the good stuff, which is this: You control how you tell your stories. Your story is not in charge. Your story idea is not in charge. Your characters are not in charge.
You are in charge of your creativity. You.
I write this, perhaps a bit more vociferously than I ought, because of meme I saw recently, a take on the "Did it hurt when you fell from heaven" pick up line that's gotten repurposed roughly ten bazillion times, as social media memes do. Here it is:
My answer? No. Because my short story is not a novel. My short story knows better than to say something that ridiculous, for two reasons. First, no short story has enough to be a novel. Movies show us, quite often, what happens when you stretch one farther than it should go. When a director grabs a short story and tries to make it more than it is, they have to add a lot. Every single time. Sometimes, as in the case of The Shawshank Redemption, it works very well. Other times, as in the case of the movie A.I. based on the Brian Aldiss movie "Supertoys Last All Summer Long", it fails horribly. Most times, you get the latter. The former is the rare and pleasant exception.
A novel is...bigger. It has to be. You have to have a couple or three different things going in a novel that you simply can't have in a short story. You need those things because you have a lot of space to fill. Part of the pleasure of a novel is that you can take your time to get where you need to be. Not so in a short story. In a short story, time is of the essence. Every word matters. You need to convey an emotion, hard and strong, then get done.
If you're writing a short story and you suddenly realize you're writing a novel, then you were writing a novel all along. You were never writing a short story. Trust me on this.
Now, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that, especially if you're new to writing either thing. If you have some experience (and I assume the Electric Literature people do), you might need to put in a bit more planning work. I don't mean outlining and all the plotting stuff about which many people have written many books, but the basic notion of what you're actually doing at the keyboard. If you are writing a short story, you should mean to write a short story when you sit down. Otherwise, how will you know when you're done? Same for a novel. Will you just let your story idea, raw and wild, pull you all over the place the whole time you're trying to pin it down so that others can have the joy of it? I think in that case you're not a writer so much as a garden hose without anyone holding the end. You're throwing ideas and characters and cool things you imagined every which way, but you're not telling a very good story. That might be fine (might be) if you use your first draft as an improvised brainstorming session -- you write down every plot line and macguffin and character and side-character and cool setting you can imagine and then go through it all later to see what works and what doesn't. I can see how you might make that work at the very beginning but only then.
Here's the thing that tweet doesn't quite say that I believe needs to be said quite a lot. Storytelling is not accidental. Stories don't just emerge from the land of spells and fairies. Storytelling needs intention and purpose and a certain measure of control even from the beginning, and you, storyteller, give those things. You are in charge. Your brain. Your idea. Your story. Mean what you write.
There are times when you have an idea and you don't quite know what it is so you sit down and write a while so you can see the shape of it. At that point, you're not writing anything in particular. You're exploring. You're looking for borders. In art, you're doodling. In music, you're noodling. In kit, you're caboodling. Once you know the rough size and shape of your idea, you'll know what you likely have -- a short story or a novel or a poem or an epic.
I recently wrote 30 poems in 30 days (which you may read on my website under the One Crazy September tag). I didn't always know the exact size of each poem I'd write, but I knew none of them would be long. They couldn't be long. In most cases, I only had a couple hours in which to write them. My poems were not epics. A couple of them could have gone far longer, but they didn't because I wouldn't let them. I had a couple ideas for another poem I want to write that will be more extensive than a day's worth of writing. Those ideas went to the side. They were not the right ideas for that day. I didn't let them intrude.
I am the storyteller. I am the poet. I must control my stories and my poems.
Likewise, you must control your art. Here is why: if you don't control your art, you will never produce art. Your ideas will always run over whatever boundaries you may want to set, including a finish line. Your ideas will always want to be perfect and unique and brilliant and profound and...you get what I'm saying. Creation is not an act of inspiration. Creation is many acts of will. You decide when to start. You decide what to say. You decide when you're done saying it.
This is important because if you truly believe yourself a slave to whatever idea does or does not come along, you're never going to make your art. You'll have a bunch of half-finished products that could be one thing or another. You'll be dissatisfied with what you do finish because it's not quite yours. How can it be? You were only the conduit through which it poured.
On the other hand, if you take your idea and examine it, get its shape and size and feel and sound and color, find the emotions in it you can elicit from others, then shape that idea along its own lines to a work you construct, well, who knows what wonderful thing you can make?
I'll tell you this for sure, though. It won't hurt.
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What I Wrote this Week
"The Night Lords", a little fantastic poem about the moon and its servants.
"Like God, but Better", a poem about us and a thing we did a long time ago.
"Another Knight's Tale", a poem that was a lot of fun to write!
"The Evening Swing", a story about taking care.
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