It isn’t About You

Had an epiphany talking to a friend on the phone yesterday as I walked the Charles during the freakish warm weather. I’ve been struggling, about what I should be writing, and who I should be writing about, about diversity and inclusion and my identity and my relationship to my family and how to be respectful and relevant, and he interrupted and said, ‘you can’t make this about you.’

You can’t write about the process because that writing instantly becomes the process, a higher level process, and that higher level processes swallows the lower level one and supersedes it.

Isaac Asimov once listened to a lecturer talking about his works and went up afterwards and smugly informed the lecturer that he was wrong, that he hadn’t meant half the things that the lecturer had dug out of the work.

The guy said, “Why do you think that you know more about this work than I do, just because you wrote it?”

Asimov enjoyed that. Then he went home and typed another novel before dinner. 

In A Perfect Vacuum, Stanislaw Lem sidesteps this by writing excerpts of novels and then the analysis, without the agony of having to write the books themselves.  Speculative Fiction as a genre is often guilty of this, of presenting maps rather than exploring territories. 

I have enjoyed my own vivisection, I think, in part, because I haven’t been teaching, as I should be, and I have imagined that was teaching myself and others in my analysis, and not spiraling into my own mind like an infected ingrown follicle. 

Analysis, like sex and tickling, isn’t the same when done on oneself. One can argue that like tickling it is impossible to do to oneself.  Unless you’re faking it. 

And here is the thing; if you can do it, if you can remove yourself from the equation enough for your analysis to be meaningful, you should use that energy, that remove to make more work, and let others do that job for you. If your work even warrants it, which, let’s face it, isn’t for you to say. 

It isn’t about you.

Getting out of your own way, letting go of anticipated failure or success or criticism, is vital for doing any of this with heart.

Anything that wakes you up and keeps you from entering the fictive dream? You have to let go of that. 

Michael Swanwick once told me to protect my head, when I confessed to him I couldn’t write anymore, after my Clarion, and I didn’t write fiction for 18 years.

It was a great metaphor. Analyzing your own work in public is like riding a motorcycle without a helmet. It probably wont kill you immedieately. But it is so fucking stupid.

There may come a time, with beta reading and workshopping and publisher feedback, when you have to step back and do this kind of soul searching, but for gods sake, don’t write about it and never share that writing if you do. 

I found in OS Card’s writing books many things that I felt cheapened his writing and diminished my enjoyment of his work. At a time when I had begun to emerge from my culturally conditioned homophobia, I found his defense of his own jaw dropping and I never felt the same way about him again. 

When I should have thought, as the reviewer did with Asimov, that I knew more about Card’s work than he did.

Doctors don’t discuss patients. Lawyers don’t discuss clients. For good reason. 

Your WIP is a patient on a table; it’s a defendant sitting in the witness stand. There are a very few proscribed things the professionals can say without a breach of professional ethics.

None of them are interesting. 

So, this is the end of a certain kind of talk here. I’m going to save this thing for my classroom. This is inside the beltway stuff. Inside baseball. 

Thanks for listening, as always. And goodbye for now.