Storytellersunplugged

Our own Richard Steinberg is swapping in for Janet Berliner this month with the following essay - DNW

“Many of us spend our whole lives running from feeling with the mistaken belief that you cannot bear the pain. But you have already borne the pain. What you have not done is feel all you are beyond the pain,” Saint Bartholomew

That’s my job.

Making you feel all you are beyond the pain.

But you can not move beyond the pain, until you’ve felt it.

I know damned well that you don’t want to feel it.  I know it and I don’t care.  If what I am as a writer is to have any meaning in a “cosmic sense” (beyond contributing to our communal act of self delusion) then I must make you see the pain and then beyond that pain for the meaning.    This doesn’t mean that I must write in universally dark and horrid tones that wither the soul, causing endless despair.  Neither does it mean that I should write froth and escapism in the hope that it will ease the pain, for a time, and thereby heal.

No.  It means that if I am to be worthy of being a writer, as opposed to a creative typist, I must present pain as it is: an element of even the most blessed lives.  To ignore that pain is not to write fiction, it is to write denial.

“Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearièd,
For ever piping songs for ever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
For ever warm and still to be enjoy’d,
For ever panting, and for ever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy’d,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue,”
John Keats

One of the most important issues facing contemporary writing is an unwillingness by writers to place pain in perspective; as opposed to dwelling on it, or ignoring it completely.  Like the need for the character of a waitress or an executioner, pain is part of the tableau of life.  Even, perhaps particularly, in fantasy life.

Imagine The Wizard of Oz without Dorothy’s pain of loss and abandonment; the “Wicked” Witch’s sense of grief at the untimely and quite horrible death of her sister.

How about Horton Hears A Who if an entire world isn’t facing horrible and inevitable destruction, as their would be savior faces incredible pain and ridicule for his heroic and selfless stance.

Our job as writers - if we’re to be serious about this thing as something other than a way to fill time in empty lives and/or make ourselves feel more intelligent than others around us - is to communicate truths.  If we entertain, how much more effectively those truths connect with our readers?

And if you would communicate truth, you must communicate pain.

“I have no desire to sing only in darkening tones of loathing and horror.  But to exclude those tones for an illusory feeling of betterment is to create a picture of a rose standing by itself with no background or other subjects (even minor things within our memories) in the picture.  How are we to realize that flower’s brilliance without holding it up to lesser floral tableaus; if only in our mind’s eye?  The essence of beauty is a thing of comparison,” Eliza Keary

Now before you run out and hack off your left little finger, that you might write happier, more rounded pap of roses and puppies and pastoral settings, let me add a warning:

The dark, the smoldering, the pained fanged shadows of our souls can likewise not be fully expressed with meaning and pith without the more positive, upbeat, and redemptive sides of the argument.  Does Hannibal Lector make any sense without the knowledge of a world that is horrified by his sanguine taste?  Of course not.  Without that addition of perspective, The Silence of the Lambs is just a cooking review.

Dark requires light.

Light demands the dark.

The contrast between the two provides definition, detail, and meaning.

Too often, I have read adequately written pieces that so lacked this definition that I couldn’t make it to the end of the work.  Light seasoned with dark, dark sprinkled with light not only provides the so necessary contrast that leads to readability, it gives clues to the reader on what it is you want them to take away from your piece.  I’ve seen so many works of horror in the last ten years that are truly brilliant, but quite unreadable because of this deficiency.

With no sense of the good, how are we to judge the evil?  Remember, your reader brings to your piece everything that they are.  Always.  But without your stage directions how are they to apply their own experiences to your message.  And if they can not apply their own reality, how in Hell (or Heaven) are they to connect to the work?!

And before I go any further, let me address the elitists out there who cry at the top of their lungs:  IT’S MY WORK! IT’S EVERYBODY ELSE’S JOB TO “GET” ME; NOT MINE, TO REACH THEM!

You’re right.

Masturbation feels good, can be emotionally rewarding, and leaves a sense of accomplishment of sorts.

But it does not create life.

Life has colors and depths, textures and tones.  So too, writing.  Writing with life meets these same tests.  Life is not about surviving, but living.  Living is not existing, but participating.  Participating is not about continuing, but exploration.

“Creative people who can’t help but explore other mental territories are at greater risk, just as someone who climbs a mountain is more at risk than someone who just walks along a village lane,”  R. D. Laing

It is the exploration of the light within the dark, the dark within the light, the native in contrast to the alien that brings depth to writing.  It is depth which gives our readers a reason to read on, to care what happens; whether or not a character triumphs or is plunged to its ruin.

There’s been enough masturbation in the world.

It’s time to create life.

BELIEVE!