Liz’s Advice Blog

dear liz,

i am trying to be a fiction writer but my fiction is riddled with problems. recently, i feel that my worldview is problematizing my fiction for readers, as they do not share it. it is as follows: i think children grow when they are set loose in the desert to play with zippo lighters and snakes and to expose their breasts through the fire doors of buses. i have expansive love for losers and misanthropes who are "doing fine," which is pretty damn good for this world and shouldn’t we all be so lucky as to be able to say we are? i also believe that breakfasts before funerals, haircuts from ex-lovers, and turkey hunts in our fathers’ dayglo vests are the holy stuff with which our lives are stuffed.

what’s my damage? -c.

Dear C.,

Your worldview is causing a problem for your readers, is it? You have readers?

I think your worldview is incredible. Your vision of cause-and-effect is wildly inventive. You couldn’t make up a philosophy more madcap, or is it madcapper? The insufferable Germans use the nonsense word weltanschauung to describe what you’re doing: creating a comprehensive conception or image of the universe and of humanity’s relation to it. A weltanschauung is an ambitious undertaking!  Most of them, if they are truly comprehensive, are likely to be misguided.

Your worldview is well-reasoned, iron-clad, as much as the pleas of any artist caught in his own web of lies.

What you’re doing is important. To humanity. So lay it on us.

Categorically, spinning fictions is what fiction does best. Everyone agrees fiction is the poorest art. Face it. Visual art has colors. Music, legally a drug in Thailand, has the unique ability to put us in a trance*. HOLD ON-I’m going to make this asterisk mandatory, so before you read the next line about the other arts, you’re going to have to look at the footnote here:

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*Music is really the best art, and I’ll explain exactly why.

1) It was the world’s first observational humorist, Aristotle, who first noticed that we can close our eyes, not our ears.

2) The human hairs inside the ear can convey currents at 20,000 signals per second, whereas photoreceptors in the eye are so slow they can be tricked by movies played at 24 frames per second. And probably less for someone like you, C., who can’t even manage 20/20 vision. So the next time you want to watch a movie, try using your ears, four-eyes!

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Continuing to the other arts… The theater, which includes T.V., has everything. If you are familiar with total theater, you could say that theater is a "total theater" …of the mind. T.V., a subset of theater, has the universal remote control. The internet has pornography. So as a writer myself, I have often wondered: what is unique to the art of writing?

It never takes me very long to answer my own mystifying questions. I agree, they are top-notch questions. I shall save you the trouble of thinking this one through, C., because it could take days. Days we don’t have. I’ll write it here. Although not that sentence, this one: The art of writing has the unique ability to be boring and wrong.

I mean, think about it! What is a novel? The good ones are inextricably told from inside the mind of someone single-minded and wrong-headed. Crazy misanthropes who think they know how other people think! Considering the resourceful habit you have of describing the way you "see" things, well, you’ll fit in just fine here.

The best thing fiction has going for it is the ability to mimic the boring, wrong things that float around your head when you’re tryin’ to chillaxitize yourself. Can’t fall asleep? Try looking at porn on the internet. Tried that? Didn’t work for you either? Try reading a book. Now, can you hear any voices inside your head? That’s what I thought. The melodious, insightful voice on the page has hijacked your docile mind.

So, C., when you are turning your diverting musings into stories, when your head is in the clouds with child burn victims who charm snakes, when you are miles away from a sober assessment of life, in your enchanting fantasyland of deserts teeming with cactus-to-cactus public transportation, you, C., the Plato of Williamsburg (Plato being the Louis CK of Athens), you, C., are Doing Your Job. That’s a term we use here in THE UNITED STATES OF AMER-I-CAN-DO-ICA.

So you have an incredible worldview! Go on, have one. Kudos. It means accolades.

It’s Greek,

-me

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 18th, 2007 at 12:02 am and is filed under Bombasticism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.