For as long as I've been writing fiction, people have told me I should try to writer a thriller or a mystery novel or some other genre book. That way, I'd make some money, and then I could go back and do the literary stuff that I enjoy doing. I always tell them that it's not for lack of trying that I haven't written those books. I just get bored. I've written a couple sci-fi stories. I've written one "crime" short story. But they never really look or feel like the genre things they're supposed to. I don't mean to suggest that I pretentiously can only write "literarily," whatever exactly that might mean. Many literary books I find to be just as formulaic as a genre novel. Sally Rooney's last book, for instance, which I blogged about, I count as one. Again, that it follows a literary formula doesn't mean it's a bad book - just that there's a formula in place that isn't so different from a thriller or some other genre novel.
Here's the actual problem and why I probably can't write genre stuff: I'm just very interested in day-to-day, moment-by-moment life. The very basic struggle of it. The very basic sense of dissatisfaction that arises there. And the basic, interesting sense of joy, also, when one is present in it.
Additionally, from what I can see, we are constructing stories all the time, inwardly. We might be sitting at a computer, looking at a video on Youtube about gut health or something, while at the same time an internal drama is playing out about someone we've had some small altercation with at work. The nuance of that is interesting. Then, we might think about how that altercation is not unlike altercations or disagreements we've had with our father, in the past. Then we're in the past in our mind, while also being at work in our mind, while also being on Youtube externally - that's super strange, and to me, incredibly interesting and frankly, exciting. That we're creating all these worlds without even realizing we're creating them. And as we're thinking about our father, our altercations and disagreements, we're seeing that one of the reasons we don't get along with the person at work is that they remind us of our father. This is what I call a small epiphany. It's not some grandiose thing, but it is a basic insight into something. And then we might see our own hangups - is our dad really that bad? Or did we bring our own shit to that relationship? The little tracks in our thinking just kind of spiral like this, and if we can pay attention to it, I think there's something rewarding there.
What is this meant to say? I'm interested in writing hte inner lives of characters, and I'm interested in treating daily life - that grinding, seemingly boring thing that everyone is involved in - as worthy of being fictionalized. I see no reason that a small, mundane moment at work or in the home or in the car on the freeway or on a walk with a dog can't be as dramatic, interesting, and compelling as a story in which there's been a murder, and we're trying to figure out that murder. What if the internal story is a story about how unhappy a person is, and they see they're unhappiness, and they're trying to understand how to end it - this too is a story of discovery, of someone mudering their own sense of happiness, and then, hopefully, finding a way out of that hellish place of the mind. Those are just the stories I'm drawn to, and that I want to represent on the page. Not because I think literary stuff is better than genre stuff, but because it's what I understand. In this way, I see people making art all the time - they make art with their very lives, and that itself is beautiful and worthy of exploration, but if they don't see that they're making it, I feel like someone should point it out, and that's part of what I'm trying to do. I'm not saying anything positively or negatively, nothing political, nothing about morality; I'm only saying, Look at your mind and how you create worlds moment-by-moment.
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