Don’t Write What You Love

My birthday is the 18th of March. The anniversary of my father’s death is the 19th of March. This one-two punch often catches me off-guard, a double-whammy of anxiety and guilt that throws me off my game despite my belief that I’m feeling fine. As mentioned in the authors note for this week’s Saturday Morning Story, I honestly figured this would be the first time in thirty-eight weeks where I could not produce and post a story for my patrons.

Then Vulture did an article on Kelly Link, and I decided to spend Friday hustling to get a new story done.

My biggest influences have always been short fiction writers, and Kelly Link rates up there as one of the biggest. Stranger Things Happen and Magic For Beginners are two of my favourite collections ever, and half the reason I attended Clarion South in 2007 was the chance to get taught by Kelly.

In a lot of ways, her work and mentorship gave me a way into speculative fiction—2007 Peter had spent years in university writing programs, deeply immersed in poetics and post-modern narrative experimentation, and the fact I loved Conan the Barbarian and the critical work of Roland Barthes frequently left me feeling at odds with fans who argued “just turn your brain off and enjoy it” as a short-hand for “don’t critique or deconstruct the stories we love, lest we have to tackle the implications of such examination.”

(As if deconstruction and experimentation didn’t hold enjoyment of their own—I find it infinitely more fun than passive reception of a story)

There’s a really interesting aside in the heart of the Vulture article, which resonated with me heavily and got me back to the keyboard:

Rhetoric aimed at writers often makes a big deal of loving what you do. We’re encouraged to write for love, because there’s no real money in the craft of writing. We produce the books of our heart, because to write towards the demands of the market is to be labelled ‘crass’ or ‘a hack’. The subconscious message every writer hears is that you must love what you do, that you are not a ‘real writer’ unless you’re consumed by the writing process 24/7 (possibly to the point of self-destruction).

I’d spent two weeks feeling very grumpy with my short fiction and the Saturday Morning Story project prior to reading the Vulture article, vaguely dissatisfied because I didn’t enjoy what I was doing very much. The lock of enjoyment, thirty-eight weeks in, seemed to indicate a failure on my part. A good reason to think about winding things up and shifting my focus to something more fun.

Thing is, I undertook the Saturday Morning Story and the related Eclectic Projects releases to satisfy my curiosity: around whether it was still possible to create at the pace akin to the pulp short fiction writers of old; how doing so might change the shape of my career; what the impact would be on my process. I wanted to reset my relationship to finishing stories after several years of producing very little and thought pushing myself to hit a weekly target might yield some benefits.

Here’s an interesting thing about writing: it’s very easy to fight against your own instincts in the name of doing things “better” or “properly”. Writers who produce perfectly serviceable stories by pantings their way through the process feel the lingering need to plan and ‘doing things right’. Authors with a talent for fast-paced, commercial stories feel the need to write something fancy in order to achieve critical acclaim. Folks whose natural pace is 500 words a day, produced consistently and without a break, pick up a book like Stephen King’s On Writing and burn themselves out trying to match his 2,500 words a day.

Or, if you’re anything like me, you’ll fight against your natural interest in exprimenting with forms and voice in an effort to finally master the art of writing a chronologically consistent, vaguely realist story in third person, past tense (although every successful story I’ve written is anything but).

Not long after finishing the Vulture article I dug out Kelly Link’s collections, the Fabulist edition of Conjunctions magazine (issue 39) which introduced me to so many writers working in a similar vein, and a host of similar short story collections. I flicked through several stories which eschewed a clean, straightforward approach to voice and structure and embraced the stylised, discontinuous approach to narrative I’ve gone back to again and again since I began writing fiction. I found myself re-reading Link’s story The Hortlak three times, soaking in the voice.

Then, after weeks of working on a relatively straightforward story that played with a style I enjoyed when other people used it, I went back to a toolkit that interested me and started playing with a new idea. Twenty-four hours later—and ninety minutes before I was scheduled to post my weekly story—I had The Birthday Party finished and ready to upload.

None of this is an argument against pushing yourself or trying to master a new skill set as a writer, but it’s useful to remember that when you’re stuck and fighting against a piece, there’s something to be said for leaning into your comfort zone.