Towards a unified theory of fiction
TOWARDS A UNIFIED THEORY OF FICTION
“There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it.
It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open.”
Every few days that I don’t write, any zen I’ve cultivated turns to smoke and a backlog of nervous tension seeps in like sludge. Eventually I’m reminded during those gloaming moods: I need to write. I don’t choose to want this. I don’t want to have to choose this. But I do have to. It’s an addiction, a compulsion, an obsession. Got it? Kind of? Good.
Except that’s not it. Not entirely. The thing is I just need to write fiction. I need to use my brain to abstract my experiences, my inner life, my dreams, my frustrations, my existential agita into stories. It’s so I can make it make sense to me, does that make sense to you? It’s like, if I don’t do it I tend to suddenly getting to feel like a bag of rusted parts.
And that’s putting it politely.
Well that’s not totally it either. We’re getting close, but there’s something more. I’m still trying to figure it out. I’ve been trying to figure it out since college more or less, and more and more each year since at least 2017. For the last five years, it’s a safe estimate to say that I’ve been writing every day or trying to, and by trying to I mean thinking about how I haven’t written yet, or journaling about it.
And that’s after a decade of staring out the window wondering whether I could ever be a writer, quitting jobs, solo vagabonding and self-bonding, navigating your garden variety of physical and mental health breakdowns, a hellacious Saturn's return, one way tickets, misadventures, a couple of heartbreaks and so on. A messy painting; the art of living outside a 9–5.
The funny thing in my mind, during these moments of itchy angst, it feels like I’m all the way back at the beginning again, because compared to my goals for this creative writing thing, I’m really closer to the beginning than I am to my goals. It’s going to take me a lifetime to get there, and that’s if I’m lucky.
Towards a Unified theory of fiction
As the life I dreamt of living back then starts to [FADE IN] all around me in the day to day, seeping into my awareness like the metaphysical fog machine is finally starting to work, I find myself suddenly at a juncture where I have what I want, and I want what I have:
My dream is no longer “to write for a living”- I’m already doing that. Mostly nonfiction, or let’s be serious, all nonfiction, as far as the paid part, but I did land my first paid publication, for a short story last year, which will be published in 2023. I made $20 for it, and to be honest, some days I feel like it’s the best $20 I’ve ever made. Yet.
But that’s beyond the point. I realize that writing is writing, or that I can learn and train myself to see it that way, so that I approach the world with the same curiosity, attention to detail, and dedication, discipline, and joy that I do with my creative writing. Like reverse engineering a make-believe world into becoming your reality. Or moving in that direction, day over day over day.
As my daydreams of yore about writing materialize slowly into existence, with a modest but incontrovertible list of publications to my name, I stand sturdier, just a tad, with that meager but material proof of accomplishment. Proof of existence of me, myself, you, as a real, life, bona-fide creative writer.
I should be grateful. I mean, I am. But it turns out, being grateful to writing isn’t enough. Because writing wants more from me. It wants me to write. Even though I have a job, or clients, or a family, or a body that groans with musculoskeletal pain each time I sit down at the desk. It still wants me to write.
And it wants me to write better. It wants me to write freer. It wants me to write without holding myself back for a change. It wants me to write what’s really inside me, waiting to be commanded into existence, one word and one sentence and one shitty first draft at a time.
So, stuck as I am in the gunk of losing my grip on the flow state lately, I wonder too if there’s a shortcut? Is there a way to poke my head into the lucid clouds of purpose, conviction, obsession, joy? How do I get there so that writing becomes more than a feverish hobby, a lifelong obsession? How can I transform myself into a writing force? How can I develop a vague and mysterious sense of destiny into a more pragmatic and targeted ambition, into a vision, and ultimately into more than a vision: Into a practice? A lifestyle?
Towards a Unified Theory of fiction
A unified theory of fiction is a philosophy, a method to the madness of an autodidacted creative writing process. Heretofore, wild discovery, willy-nilly, ad-hoc, reading philosophy papers and short stories and novels, taking notes as I recall my dreams, watch films, go on walks, do drugs, or listen to songs on repeat, to discover something, a spark, an insight, an anomaly, a paradox.
It’s been therapy, overtly and explicitly. My early pandemic stories were written from a place of burnout, fear, frustration, stress, pain, and suffering. My brain needed to make sense of it, to process it, to own it and spit it out, so that I could move on. I was semi-conscious during this process, I think, but it was equal parts watching myself perform and deciding how to do what I was doing.
Does that make sense? Not to me either.
Towards a Unified Theory of Fiction
“The actual process, in my experience, is much more mysterious and more of a pain in the ass to discuss truthfully.”
It’s the year 2022 somehow, so I guess we’re in the future now. I feel the need to go beyond writing as an act of discovery, into a more rarified place of writing my truths, of proactively and intentionally feeding the mysterious machine with curated raw materials: topics, issues, literature, writers, subject matter, films, filmmakers, and other artists, the poets and playwrights too if we’re not being picky, and the musicians, the explorers, the heroines and heroes of creative pursuit.
This also means I want to be writing with a clearer external purpose in mind, even if I’m not sure who my specific audience is yet. The truth is, I’ve been so obsessed trying to find my voice as a writer that I sort of lost touch with real life, with real people. This was before Trump, before the pandemic. Before the internet, before adulthood, too. Before marriage. Before the kid.
It means I know I need to look back at my fiction and get better not only as an editor, but as a writer: Do I understand what I was trying to do back then? Is it necessary to edit this story, and is it okay to leave some of those stories unexamined on the shelf, in an archive titled “early work,” so that I can move on consciously towards some new discovery, on my way to a new approach to writing, a refined process, a targeting of some next level of craft choices, trade success, and other creative ambition.
Writing to date has felt like a “push” process for me — I enjoy it, like weight lifting, it’s strenuous and methodical and repetitive and I enjoy it. But after a few years, I’ve found myself suddenly eager to change it up. It feels like I can’t do it that way any more. Perhaps I’m seeking a “pull” from the world — there have been brief glimmers where a story flies forth from me, nearly fully formed, as if “pulled” out by the universe. That’s what I want.
Towards a UNIFIED Theory of Fiction
study and bend the real world. climate change? solar punk. post-postcolonialism. postnormal times theory. psychedelics. the capitalist condition. real-world bad guys: vulture capitalists, criminal lobbyists, corrupt public officials on every rung of the ladder. who’s going to take them down? puncture the ennui. Existentialism and money and purpose and mortality.
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dream journaling and day journaling and novel journaling and work journaling and gratitude journaling and
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deconstructing Hindu mythology, subcontinental culture, and world history, towards some beckoning distant inquiry of race and moral philosophy, in terms of ethics, and ambiguity
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flash fiction. metafiction. epistolary. puzzles of prose. nonfiction. nonsense. a novel of stories. novel stories. silly and earnest poetry. satisfying. optimistic. funny. fabulist. hopeful. entertaining! lighthearted. original. the moral of the story is . . .
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writing workshops, story labs, screenwriting and film studies, DIY and with friends, organized into group projects, with homework assignments and phone meetings and structure and engagement and real learning. more than just for fun: a philosophy and mindset of playing for keeps.
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TOWARDS A UNIFIED Theory of Fiction
In my world-building entrepreneur phase, I spent a solid 30 months obsessing over the three-phase framework below:
But this is not a business blog post — it’s a writing blog post. My point is that my unified theory of fiction is approaching a product/market fit stage. I am seeking it out. I am paying attention to how to amp up the consistency, quality, and volume of my efforts, all at the same time.
I want a writing process that proves more replicable, even if it is producing bad stories.
Or, bad blog posts (audience gasps)
It’s easy to edit, or repurpose (or abandon) a bad story compared to sitting down and struggling to write a good one. My product/market fit stage as a creative writer is consistently producing stories that are readable, enjoyable, shareable. In order to get there more effectively, I’m pushing myself to evolve
TOWARDS A UNIFIED theory of FICTION
A unified theory of fiction is always evolving, by nature, like a kaleidoscope. Keeping it in sight is a real commitment. Here’s an example of one that I saw recently in the wild: The narrative wet-bulb temperature, by Venkatesh Rao (no relation)
The wet-bulb temperature is a complicated measure of the body’s ability to cool itself. It is a function of temperature and humidity, and when it goes above around 35C, the body can no longer cool itself through sweating. This is one of the many ways in which climate change is a more serious threat than you might think, since it can drive dangerously high wet-bulb temperatures.
Here’s the metaphor: we tell ourselves stories to regulate the amount of narrative tension we feel in life generally. Felt suspense is one measure of this tension (though it’s a rich mess of many contributing textures, such as cringe, horror, fear, amusement, mystification). We metaphorically “cool” or “warm” ourselves through stories (where “temperature” maps to a vector of attributes. Like thermoregulation, narrative regulation is a function of context.
Narrative wet-bulb temperature is a measure of how well narrative regulation can work in a given zeitgeist. Beyond some metaphoric equivalent of 35C, perhaps it becomes impossible to tell stories. Perhaps the appropriate scale is a weirdness scale, measured in Harambes. Perhaps above 35H, storytelling is psychophysically impossible.
As with climate, we have some ability to control our environments through the narrative equivalent of air-conditioning. Personal climate control, through management of exposure to the stresses of the general outdoor zeitgeist, can be done through gatekeeping information aggressively (this idea is central to the book I’m writing). But to the extent storytelling is a public act, such “air conditioned” stories can only be heard by those who share your particular cozy climate-controlled headspace.
We appear to have collectively accepted this particular tradeoff, in that we have collectively abandoned public spaces (and by extension, truly public storytelling) and retreated to the cozyweb.
That’s it for now. I can’t promise the next one will be any less rambling than this one. But I can try. ❤
