Some navel-gazing fluff about writing

In my boredom today, I watched a bunch of videos on CollegeHumor. Now, it may be just that I'm their target demographic, but I rather like the site and its vids. Sometimes they go for the easy joke, parodies that barely scratch the surface in the same manner that the "______ Movie" series does. Other times, however, they have biting commentary where it hurts to laugh both from sheer hilarity and because it's uncomfortable to acknowledge how true it is. One of the vids I watched took a swipe at one of my favorite directors, Tim Burton. It endeavored to satirize the elements that have become staid or stagnant in his work, to the point of showing up in all of his films. By this Burton fan's estimation, they were successful.

Tim Burton is a man with a very distinct voice as a storyteller. His world alternates between swathes of desaturated greys and blasts of loud primary colors, with all the gothic twistiness and disaffected loners that come with that territory.¹ I've always admired his insistence on being true to himself. He doesn't water down his vision for anyone else's sake, and I can get behind that kind of purity. But the video's satire is pretty damn accurate, and to my own dismay I felt like I could predict his latest effort, Alice in Wonderland, with utter ease specifically because his other work's given me such a clear idea of how his mind works.

Every writer wants to be distinctive in a way that makes them leap off the page. I think it's an inferiority complex about our medium--after all, we work with walls of text, not bright canvases or blocks of clay. It's not something that's easily demonstrable. If you're going to impress a girl, you're much better off playing her the song you wrote than you are dumping a stack of a hundred pages of black and white in her lap and saying, "Enjoy!"² A few writers have that ability, to utterly own a sentence from syllable one to syllable end. Stephen King does his whole stream-of-consciousness thing, Aaron Sorkin builds his stories on a foundation of rapid-fire dialogue, and Warren Ellis has perfected the art of the grotesque simile. But the rest of us work to achieve that standard, so that every sentence they write feels like it's undeniably theirs.

That balance is hard. You put more of yourself into your work, you also put more of yourself out there, and unless your true self is Guy That Everyone Likes³, the less likely it is you'll appeal to a bigger audience. Now, for some people that's fine--I personally would rather write something that a thousand people absolutely have to read than something a million people might get around to reading because they'd heard it was pretty good.

But beyond just not appealing to all the right demographics, there's the very real danger of stagnation. I want people to know what to expect from my writing in only the broadest strokes. Otherwise, I want them to stay guessing the entire time. I can think of a few writers who recycle characters, exchanges of dialogue, and even entire plots from project to project. Some don't realize they do it. Some do, and defend it with a cry of, "I'm just giving the people what they want!"

As an unpublished twentysomething trying to make myself heard in a city full of unpublished twentysomethings trying to make themselves heard, I'm not exactly a qualified expert, but I don't think the audience always knows what it wants. I think it thinks it knows, but a surprise, whether good or bad, is far more likely to trigger real thought and discussion in them than just more of the same. Of course, there are plenty of things to prove me wrong. Two and a Half Men is anything but groundbreaking, but it is also one of the most-watched shows on television. Meanwhile, innovative stuff either continually struggles for ratings like Mad Men, or dies an untimely death like Dollhouse.

I'm not exactly sure what elements make up my voice as a writer yet. I know I like wordplay, long exchanges of dialogue, female protags, Americana, and footnotes. But I also do my best to try and subvert those things if I feel I'm leaning on them too much.⁴ I'm still figuring out what does and doesn't work for me. And once I do, rest assured, o hypothetical readership, you won't be getting more and more of the same from me.

Unless, you know, that's what you want or whatever.

-PK


¹ A disproportionate number of them are also named Edward. And by "disproportionate," I mean "three."
² I did, in fact, do this once. Consensus is that I got a million points for style, and zero points for anything that actually mattered.
³ If you are, chances are I hate you. Which would mean you're not the Guy That Everyone Likes, so I don't hate you, which would make you oh my god I've gone cross-eyed
⁴ For instance, wouldn't that last sentence have been an absolutely perfect place for this footnote?