The Greatest Book Ever Written

Okay, that's a slight exaggeration, but if you ever lack for creative inspiration, the best book ever written has to be Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, by Scott McCloud. Creativity is a sticky wicket, and it seems to need as much prodding as you can give it. This book, which purports to be about the production of comics, is really about the philosophy of creativity. I wonder if McCloud knows that? 

Anyway, it is a brilliant book because he describes in deceptively simple prose, through the medium of a comic book, how we perceive and conceive reality through words and images. This makes it an epistemological text, which is fascinating because of the meta-awareness it brings to the creative act. McCloud shows you, through a discussion of postmodern gaps and fissures, how the brain expects something called 'closure,' which it uses to create stories. Essentially, the brain takes each image provided by the artist, and creates the story it expects to see, providing the answer, or 'closure' the brain needs to know what to expect. Obviously, if you analyse that thought, you realise the difficulty, as McCloud discusses: we tend to create the version of reality we draw, or imagine, for ourselves, through our brain's need for 'closure.' This has its limitations.

Using the metaphor of comic books, the reader takes an illustrated, clever, and witty tour through the history of art, and sees how the artist's rendition of 'reality' morphs to fit our needs for simplicity through what McCloud calls 'universal identification.' This ultimately involves the creation of the comic image. He asserts that humans remember each other's faces in the simple lines that can easily become a cartoon, and that this is part of how we think about one another, and the world around us. 

The most compelling part of his argument lies in the notion that comics is a "mono-sensory" medium, and that only one of our senses is engaged when we read a comic: our eyes. However, that makes what happens between the frames absolutely crucial to the other senses, and his assertion is that what happens between the frames is key to our individual representation of reality. He also makes a highly cogent argument that all other art has this effect as well, in that all art engages the imagination, and compels the mind to create a story. 

Therefore, he not only discusses art, art history, and the importance of the comic book to the world of design--he also paints, step-by-step, a fascinating explanation of how creativity works. This is a very rare ability, because I certainly have never seen a book so entirely focused on how the individual artist goes through the steps of creation that is not then a boring "how-to," which this is not. Now, creation is a process so steeped in wreaths of mystery, that finding someone who explains the process so cleverly.... is a god, of course.  

There aren't a lot of books that thoroughly explain the creative process. There is Csikszentmihalyi's Flow, which is an explanation of the psychological realm of creativity.  Although Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way is inspirational for many, it is not really an explanatory breakdown of how creativity works (but she has since published Walking in This World: The Practical Art of Creativity, so I am going to have to check that out, since it looks like it addresses many of these issues). I don't know of anything else written about creativity that has Scott McCloud's marvelous sense of humour, though, and that alone makes reading this 215 page comic book so wonderfully fun. He has a series of books now, too, although I have it on good authority that Understanding Comics is probably the best of them.

In the land of writing...

intentions are crucial to understanding. I am finding once again that my intentions are possibly exceedingly hard for me to convey, especially when I don't know how my message is coming across. For example, I wrote a protagonist in such a way that my readers legitimately did not see what I saw; they saw him as a bad guy, which is interesting but disturbing, because I certainly did not intend for him to be perceived that way. Then this whole huge discussion ensued about what is a hero and what is an anti-hero, and I found myself getting really annoyed with one of my discussion groups, because my character was misunderstood. 

Which has lead me to the realisation that I myself can easily convey my feelings and my persona incorrectly. Think about it: if your medium is limited to the textual realm, the possibility for others to completely misunderstand what is in your mind and your heart is high. My character, inaccurately written, conveys his emotions and his reality badly. I do the same when I do not say what I am feeling or thinking for fear of saying too much. 

Apparently, this fear of saying too much is something my protagonist and I share. I didn't realise that until today, because overnight I was doing a lot of rewriting of chapter one, and began to see that the protagonist holds back a lot, and so do I. For what purpose? Certainly not to obfuscate or lead others astray, but mostly as a defense mechanism against pain, against making mistakes, against my own stupidity. How often have you said precisely the wrong thing that lands you into hot water? It makes you unwilling to ever utter another wrong or incorrect word, since words seem so easy to misconstrue. 

I need to find a way to express my own, and my character's emotions more clearly. He and I are both getting bogged down and it sounds like we're lying or we're insincere when nothing could be further from the truth.

The Vexed Subject of Voice, Part Two

Here's the real problem with the concept of "voice": it depends entirely on the notion of the individual. Now, you're thinking, so what? Well, I'll tell you so what. The problem with this point of view is that for postmodernists, there is no such thing as the 'individual'. There are multiple perspectives, multiple points of view, and one person contains all of them, not one single unified identity that creates this mythical 'voice'. 

Think about it; if you were to express yourself in all the identities you maintain, you might feel schizophrenic. What are your separate identities? Do you use a different voice in each role you play in the world? I'll bet you do. You don't use the same voice to speak to your significant other that you use when you talk to your child. Does this mean you are all these different people, or that there are various facets to your 'personality'? (another vexed term for postmodernists). 

So if we contain multitudes, as Walt Whitman presciently put it, then how can we be held to one voice? Where do we get the idea that this one individual identity exists? Well, most recently, from the Modernists and the Romantics before them. We have inherited the notion that the individual reigns supreme. We have long forgotten the nameless, faceless, seemingly identity-less days of the Medieval period, or the Dark Ages, when an anonymous monk toiled in silence over his book of psalms. And we don't want to go back to those days, either. We want authorial rights, and we want them now!

If you spoke in all your various voices that you use during the course of the day, would you sound crazy to yourself? Would you doubt that you have one unified identity? Try thinking this way and see what happens. Better still, try writing down what each persona you live with would say, and all the different ways you have to say something, thinking specifically of your audience and the context in which you're likely to say it, and realise that you contain many voices. And that there's nothing wrong with that. 

Sorry I complicated this seemingly uncomplicated subject. I have a habit of doing that. ;-)

 

The Vexed Subject of Voice, Part One

"Voice" is one of those amorphous terms I object to, and cannot fight, since the concept of individual "voice" dominates the field of creative writing. What does it mean, though? Why is it such an elusive subject? And what does it mean to "find one's voice"? Here's the problem I have with the term, first of all: it's vague. Even though a critique of your writing will often include "strong voice," or "lacks a clear voice," it is never apparent what the critic means by that, because they themselves only know it when they see it--or don't see it. They learned the concept of voice in school from teachers who were taught Expressivism, a movement that relies on Romantic ideas of individual expression for its theoretical basis. 

Secondly, it's inaccurate. Everyone has a voice. Everyone. Every writer who ever wrote anything writes in their own unique style, which is what "voice" apparently means, first and foremost, these days. So what critics mean when they say your writing lacks "voice", then, is that it lacks an individual style that separates it out from everyone else's writing. Okay, now that we've cleared that up, what can we do about it? And is it realistic to expect writing to carry a truly "unique" voice that doesn't contain echoes of other voices you've read before? I say this because, realistically, no one writes in a vacuum. We are all influenced by one another, and every writer I read reminds me of someone else I've read. Every single one. None of us have ever recreated the wheel, not entirely. It's unrealistic to hold a writer to that standard. 

First, playing devil's advocate, let me ask, why do we need an individual voice? What's so bad about sounding like the author you love? Why shouldn't you aspire to copy, or mimic their style? When you take beginning writing classes, that's exactly what you do; you learn how to imitate the style of the writer you're reading, so that you can prove to your teacher that you understand the basics. The idea(l) that lies beyond that level of writing skill, however, is what plagues most writers. The ideal is that you will not want to mimic someone else, and that it is bad to do so.

The problem I have with this goes back to what I was saying above; it is entirely unrealistic to aspire to what critics love to label "a brand new voice." That's hype. There is no such thing as a brand new voice. What there can be is a new take on an old subject, told from a different perspective, using language you're not used to hearing. Anything reminiscent of someone else's writing that sounds too much like them, though, will be trash-canned, either for real or on someone's desktop. 

Why is that? Why is the search for that "new" or "fresh" voice so important to the writing community?  I believe some of it stems from the perpetuated belief that the act of writing is really akin to the divine. There is that unexpressed hope that you're going to read something you've never seen before that will lift you out of the mundane. That seems to be a deeply-rooted need, a wish-fulfillment fantasy for readers of all sorts. We're taught so many things about writing that allow these myths to persist, that the myth of the "fresh" voice is just one of many.

If voice is about your style, though, about how you say the same old thing, that's different, and that can be taught, and it can be nurtured. It is attainable. It is no longer a divine mystery.  

Overcoming hurdles

I cannot help but feel like I am in my element when the writing is flowing well. It can take a very long time for a project to get to this point, where all the pieces are starting to fit together, and the plot makes sense, the characters have dimension, the words are there. There are hurdles to overcome to get to this point; most of them have to do with resistance. 

I love writing, so why is there resistance? I've thought a lot about this. At first, the resistance was to the belief that writing for "fun" (as in, writing I enjoy reading, murder mysteries) had a purpose on the planet. That it could possibly have meaning, or that anyone would have any kind of need to read my writing, was the first hurdle to overcome.

The next hurdle came with believing in myself as a writer. This, it turns out, took years to overcome. Self-confidence depends, to some extent, on success, but when you've never published commercially, that self-confidence has to be built over time. Eventually, my love of the writing project itself simply took over, and I said, okay, whether or not this sells, I have to write it, because it is fun, and fun writing is okay. Entertaining writing (that is also educational) has its purpose too. 

I exonerated myself for not writing something "immortal" I suppose. 

And so now the world might get to see another historical murder mystery. There aren't really that many, so it's a small niche market. But I decided there's nothing wrong with providing entertainment. It has always been a hope of mine, ever since I read my first Agatha Christie at the age of 11 or so, to be a murder mystery writer, so what I'm really doing is fulfilling a dream I've always wanted to pursue, and since time is marching on, I thought I'd better do it! 

For whom do you write?

For a very long time, I only wrote for myself, in a kind of fog of focus on my subject and research, never really able to imagine my audience well enough to realise that they might have a perspective on my writing. I hated feedback, because it was very painful to me to hear criticism of any sort. I still don't like it, partially because of all the work I'm going to have to do to "fix" whatever's wrong, and partially because when someone tells you what they think you should change, it means they didn't like it the way it was. 

However, the mistake I made was in not taking my reader's needs and expectations into account. I've heard writers say that they must write for themselves, that they are their own critics, and that if they don't like their writing, how can they expect anyone else to? Although I agree with most of that, the part I have come to accept is that your reader determines how and what you write. Always.  

Ignoring your audience is also an indication that you've got yourself in that "isolated writer" mentality which is an illusion and a trap. If you want to be read, you need to know what your reader wants to read. Not that you have to pander to their taste, but that you do need to be able to listen when they offer constructive criticism. This was the biggest hurdle for me, because I had to be able to trust people who judged my writing enough to listen when they told me it needed certain kinds of revision. 

Ultimately, writing for your audience is a mark of professionalism, it seems to me. Writing for yourself is fun, but unless you want to please an audience of one, it won't matter as much what you think, as what the people you show it to think. The other "ultimately" about writing is that, as Plato feared, once it's been published, it's no longer in the author's hands to control what others think of it. The text is no longer all yours; you've shared it and opened it up to censure and praise. 

Getting Past Rejection

I can only take so much rejection. After a certain point, I get discouraged and want to give up. This happened 25 years ago, when I wrote an historical novel set in Hiroshima, Japan, during World War II. Taking the advice of a well-meaning editor, I didn't sell myself short, and didn't go looking for an agent, because he'd told me they were sharks who would take 20% of your proceeds, and I could get published without one. I believed him because he had worked for 30 years for Doubleday and had been Pearl Buck's editor during her heyday. 

However, after 50 unagented submissions to the slush pile, I began to rethink this approach. 23 out of 50 never responded at all; the other 27 either rejected the manuscript nicely, rejected it nastily, or rejected it because it didn't fit in with their list. The one rejection letter I will always remember was from a publishing house that only published, I was told in the letter, "dead Japanese authors." And since I was neither Japanese, nor, thankfully, dead, they weren't going to publish me, but the lady who responded was very kind about it.

Not giving up at that point, I took a new tack. I found an agent. I pitched the story in person. She loved it. I sent her the first three chapters. She responded that she was disappointed, as the story I'd pitched her was much more interesting than the story I'd sent her. This was discouraging, but I wanted a second opinion. I found another agent, this time, through the yellow pages. I sent her my manuscript, she read it, and we met. Again, I was told it was good, but would need work. The problem was that I was exhausted. I had spent 18 months researching and writing this book. If it wasn't good enough by now, I didn't have the interest or the resources to keep reworking it. 

I gave up writing fiction at that point, "buckled down," as my parents referred to getting a job, and put all of that behind me for a time. Instead of working as a writer, I began working with writers. I began to put all the pieces together, and, over time, started to understand some things about publishing that I hadn't when I wrote my first book. Now, at the time I wrote it, I attended writer's groups, went to conferences, and was consistently told "get this published now, don't even worry about finishing it," that's how confident everyone was that it would be published. 

What I learned over time was that if the market won't buy it, it doesn't matter how well-written it is, in your eyes or in the eyes of an outside editor, your readers, or anyone who isn't actually publishing it. What matters is what an agent can convince a publisher to buy, and if you can't get the agent on your side (if you aspire to a traditional publishing house, that is) you aren't going to sell it through an agent. To work with an agent, you have to take the market into account. That's one of the things I learned in rhetorical analysis--that audience awareness is the key to being heard. This attitude and approach makes sense when selling an idea to an agent or publisher, since the writer's audience--the publisher's customer--fuels the publishing industry. This was a concept I did not take seriously 25 years ago, but I do now.