Writer's Block

I should be writing fiction. Or even nonfiction. But I don't really feel like it.

I've seen lots of professional and nonprofessional writers say that it doesn't matter whether you "feel like" writing, that to wait for a muse to inspire you or a mood to overtake you is lazy and self-indulgent and dooms you to failure.

I use to be a technical writer, and in that case, I would say it's totally true. It didn't matter whether I "felt like" writing that assembly instruction document. I just sat my ass down in my $600 Aeron chair and banged that fucker out and collected my paycheck at the end of every two weeks.

I could even blog every day. I think I may try that in December to just prove that it's true.

But the fact is that writing something that I deeply care about is different, at least for me. I forced myself to write two more porn stories after the first one because I originally envisioned a little quartet and I had even made the cover art for them. But I didn't enjoy writing them. I was bored with them and exasperated with trying to find synonyms and figures of speech to repeat the same physical acts. It was only a tiny piece of off-the-cuff theology I invented that amused me, and you can see it in the product. The first story is the only one worth anything, the only one that works as porn OR as narrative.

So I have to somehow find my way through this writer's block in order to write something decent again. Something worthwhile. Something I can love, so that someone else might enjoy it too.

"I'm Spider-Man"

:Or a little armchair literary theory for your Sunday morning.

I have two degrees in textual analysis, based largely on psychoanalytic and structuralist and post-structuralist theories of meaning, which is all bullshit in the end because meaning is always contextual. 

And so, in light of the failure of big words and pseudoscience to explain the human condition, I turn to my favorite source of wisdom: comic books. (Or movies based on them.)

(I've said before that I would rather children learned morals from Marvel than from the Bible, and that remains true. Even if, as JL pointed out, "with great power comes great responsibility" is actually a paraphrase of a Bible passage, the Marvel moral philosophy is not cluttered with teachings that run counter to that lovely sentiment. )

But the quote I'm thinking of this morning is from the end of one of the Toby McGuire Spider-Man movies, though I forget which one. It ends with Peter in English class where his teacher sums up all literature as asking the question, "Who am I?" 

That statement is brilliant and simple and true. All stories, whether comic books or "great literature" come down to asking that question. Who is the protagonist? Whether the plotted events of the story change the hero, or reveal his true nature, or break him, or fail to change him at all, the story is, at its most basic, about who he is. 

Something to keep in mind for this month of marginal, uncommitted participation in #NaNoWriMo.