A couple of things recently got me to thinking about how I identify myself as a writer. First, I have many friends who are published authors, ranging from the highest-falutin literary high-brow to proud but low-brow hacks and everything in between, and I adore all of them. What they write has very little impact on how I view them, despite being raised and educated to automatically assign more importance to the “serious” writers of “literary fiction” than the authors of commercial fiction. Yeah, that’s called snobbery, and I don’t like that about myself. My inner elitist, though, is pretty well entrench – and tragically, at the very least, how I do not judge others is definitely how I judge myself.
Second, two articles about writing hit the waves this week, one in response to the other. The first was Mr. MFA’s “Things I can Say about MFA Writing Programs Now that I No Longer Teach in One” which was…unsurprising. His entire slant is towards high-end literary fiction, the kind that wins important awards and will be assigned reading in classrooms decades from now, and his comments reflect his belief that not all people have the talent to write that kind of story. The other, Chuck Wendig’s “An Open Letter to that Ex-MFA Creative Writing Teacher Dude”, was also unsurprising, taking the tack of a commercial fiction author encouraging writers of all stripes to never give up, to keep writing, and to write what they want to write.
Simply put: one perspective is elitist, the other is populist. Never the twain shall meet.
This reflects my issues with writing. Honestly, for the past seven years, I’ve mostly defined myself as a fanfic writer. It’s where the bulk of my creative energies have gone, and I am very proud of (most of) the work I did during that time. But in the hierarchy of “being a writer” it’s the lowest, most shameful and most denigrated rung on the ladder. It’s not even on the ladder, it’s the dirt at the bottom that the ladder rests on…and I could carry that metaphor into some kind of positive affirmation but what I’m talking about here is not my opinion but the mainstream perspective, which is definitely mired in the hierarchic model (fanfic at the bottom, great literary classics at the top).
But fanfic was a natural home for me. Despite being raised in a very elitist environment when it came to literature, I’ve always leaned towards the populist side of writing. My first long stories were Star Wars and Star Trek fanfiction (I was around ten to twelve years old, this was back in the 70s), and my first truly original stories were pretty horrible mary-sue affairs. Adults would cluck about my “talent” and encourage me to “expand my horizons” but I really didn’t want to. I loved spaceships and adventure and romance and horses. (Look, I was twelve. Horses. OKAY?)
The result of this dynamic was an intense feeling of shame for wanting to write “fun stuff”. That stuff doesn’t count, it’s embarrassing, it’s low-brow and a waste of my talent.
When really, a waste of my talent was not writing regularly for over ten years.
Between 1997 and 2007, I mostly did not write (long story, lots of reasons, ref. Grieving Futures). Fanfiction got me writing again because it didn’t count and I had nothing to lose; no one was judging it aside from other fans, because most writers liked to pretend it didn’t exist, and I did it under a pen name anyway. It was a safe place for me to unfurl as a writer and simply write without shame the things I wanted to write. I wrote a lot of smut but also some interesting forays into social issues and relationship exploration as well as murder mysteries. I’m not defending the quality of that output, but I am defending the fact that writing fanfic saved my writing life.
Then, eventually, I was confronted with the idea of writing my own stories, full of characters and world-building I created myself. Some of that was influenced by fanfic practices (fancasting my characters, playlists, etc.) but a lot of it comes from a life of enjoying a rollicking good tale. I want to entertain people, give them characters to embrace and journey with and love dearly.
So I did. Under a pseudonym.
The elitist in me was still ashamed of the idea that people might judge me for writing commercial, popular fiction. There was the idea that I could go one way or the other, and as long as my populist side was safely tucked away under a fake name, I, KimBoo York, might still be able to write the “serious words for serious readers” that the elitist in me demanded.
But here’s the thing, and I think it applies to a lot of goals in life: you can say you want to do something over and over until you are blue in the face, you can make plans to start doing it, you can talk about how you are going to do it…but if you are not actively doing it or trying to make it happen, it really is not as important to you as you claim it to be.
That’s it.
If you want to learn to draw but aren’t drawing, or you want to dance but aren’t dancing, or you want to run a marathon but aren’t even jogging, then no, you actually do not want to do those things. You like the idea of doing them, but you don’t want to do the thing. Not really.
Not to say there aren’t reasons for why you aren’t doing them, but….well, no. There are no reasons, I mean outside of illness, depression, physical pain or life trauma (the eternal exceptions to all rules! RESPECT!). There might be a lot of reasons you are not the lead in a Hollywood movie, but there is no reason you can’t study acting, memorize and practice classic monologues, or even go to auditions just to get a feel for the process. Barring health-related reasons, if you would rather take your precious down time (from work, from parenting, from care-taking, from whatever) and do anything other than the thing you claim you desperately want to do? Then you don’t want to do it.
Here’s what I mean: I want to learn French. I would be so cool to speak and understand French! But I don’t ever actually practice learning the language. Duolingo makes it dead easy, and free, and there really just is no reason I could not spend half my lunch hour learning French. But I don’t. Ipso facto, I’m not as enamored of learning the language as I think I am.
Likewise, “serious words for serious readers” never happens. Oh, it’s true that I’ve tried my hand at writing a few non-genre, literary short stories about real people. I bored myself, okay? BORRRRRING. Hated it. It made writing into a pretentious chore for me.
Last fall, as I saw how little time I was investing in something I claimed was important to me versus how much time I was investing in something I really do love, I realized that the elitist in me was the minority voice. Mr. MFA Dude can have his literary pretensions, I’d rather hang with Wendig and many of my friends on the populist side. My literary heroes are Elizabeth Peters, James White, Arthur Conan Doyle, and all those Star Trek novel tie-ins.
My equivalent of “tossing my hat into the ring” is my paranormal, poly-romantic, adventure story Wolves of Harmony Heights. As most everyone knows by now, WoHH started off as a NaNoWriMo story back in November. I blew past 50k words and kept going. It’s still going. It will probably hit near 150,000 words total (well into the 400 page mark) and I plan to self-publish it.
Yes, self-publish it. Why? For the same reason I started writing fanfiction back in 2007: I have nothing to lose. I’m not writing this story to land a great contract or become famous or rich or popular. I’m writing it as a testament to the stories I love to read and watch and, yes, write. I’m writing it because doing so, as hard and frustrating as it is sometimes, is just plain FUN. I’m writing about werewolves and witches and bad guys and good people and in the end, the fact that doing so is personally rewarding to me is enough. That’s why I’m writing it, that’s why I’m publishing it. That’s more than enough reason for me.
At long last, I’m admitting and accepting what has really, truly, and always been true: I’m a populist writer. And for the first time, I’m not ashamed of that or trying to hide it away. As they say, haters will hate, and they are welcome to waste their time doing so. Me? I’ve got stories to write.