Author I Wish I had Known About Sooner: Stanislaw Lem
“Too much beauty undermines the marriage vows, too much knowledge leads to isolation, and too much wealth produces madness.”
― Stanisław Lem, The Cyberiad
Genuine creative writing ability is hard to come by when you’ve convinced yourself to continue reading books that don’t pose a challenge. Reaching out and choosing new genres of writing creates ideas and learning.
People have a good excuse for disliking certain genres because the books offered are challenging, which takes away the relaxation found in reading.
For example, reading the classics is stepping back into school for some but for others they're the only books they can joy.
The classics were daunting for me because I thought I was too stupid to understand. I thought I would never be able to understand Charles Dickens or Fyodor Dostoyevsky, but I was wrong.
I thought reading them as much as possible would make me more knowledgable, but only by reading other authors did I learn more about these two writers.
Going outside your regular choice of authors is choosing to discover reading de novo.
Authors are gatekeepers to different worlds, and they can revolutionize or create a genre of writing. Great authors and writers show a sense of confidence that comes from being their own masters.
Stanislaw Lem is a revolutionary author, and his work took my naive mental picture of creative writing and burst open a new multiverse of possibilities.
Stanislaw was not scared of writing. Nothing stood between an idea and writing it down.
Stanislaw Lem Embraced Originality
Stanislaw Lem is a total wordsmith and storyteller. His book, The Cyberiad, is full of scientific and psuedo-scientific terms that fill the reader with wonder or headaches.
I don’t understand all the specific scientific terms within his books. But when he writes, “This was, he told the King, a femfatalatron, an erotifying device stochastic, elastic and orgiastic, and with plenty of feedback; whoever was placed inside the apparatus instantaneously experienced the charms, lures, wiles, winks and witchery of all the fairer sex in the Universe at once” — I know Lem wasn’t new to kinky ideas.
No one can tell you what will work but many people will keep you from even trying.
Stanislaw Lem had the government holding him back and in fact, the government forced him to edit sections of his works as to agree with Soviet Union ideologies.
People want new and strange ideas but they are afraid…at first.
Being different and yourself is tough, especially now with so many creators. I recently saw a trailer for a new Netflix film coming out, and I could only think about how much it reminded me of the book I have been writing for a year now.
Your book about three-eyed, humanoid dragons might be a total success, but who’s going to know unless its published. Don’t wait for your ideas to die off or get published by someone else.
My Own Quagmire
I’ve recently been in the worst creative moment of my life — worse than when I turned in a rice covered dinosaur as a second grade school project.
I was supposed to create a model dinosaur environment with a paper dinosaur as the main piece. My family couldn’t afford glue but we managed to make glue out of rice, and I didn’t even have a box to create the illusion of a background but I turned it in.
My project wasn’t good or great but it was probably the most original ever.
I have had zero motivation or ideas about what to do, so I reopened an old unfinished book and started editing. I quickly realized that I was actually writing, and I was writing better than I had only a year ago.
Then I thought about how much better I would have gotten if I had written more consistently this past year.
Stanislaw Lem was constantly writing, constantly pushing his ideas out onto paper, which is something many writers fail to do.
I’m also guilty of this, wanting to write one or two books and have immediate success. We want companies to hire us for copywriting gigs when we still haven’t proved anything. We think we’re good but there’s only one way to prove it.
Don’t Fall to Distractions
Getting down and pushing out distractions is what will make writers, especially in today’s world. Distractions will eat up the small fry writers that aren’t serious enough about their own careers and writing.
Reading The Cyberiad gave me more motivation and desire to simply write and not think about my own future and place in it. If my writing ends up nowhere then oh well.
Stanislaw Lem is an author everyone should read at least once and is an inspiration to anyone writing science fiction. No one should tell themselves that there isn’t enough time for writing if that’s what they really want.
