Violence or Creation?
I’m no good at inventing people. It’s probably not something I should admit since I write fiction for a living, but it’s the truth all the same.
Occasionally, if I’m feeling poetic, I feel like a potter who needs a lump of clay to begin. Without it, I sit staring at the screen, wondering why no shapes are forming and nothing is coming to life.
So I fucking steal. And then I mangle. On a good day, I don’t spend too much time thinking about how they might feel if they knew I had taken a photo of them with my imperfect mind and twisted it until it felt like something I wanted to use.
Perhaps all writing is violence.
It’s impossible to capture an object exactly as it is, let alone a human being. Writing is the process of rendering a thing apart, looking inside it, and then putting it back together based on nothing more than a whim. And on occasion, it’s nice to think of my hands as dirty when I put them to keys; I gain some satisfaction from thinking that I have the power to break something.
When I tell you I kissed a French girl on a train, I’ve already taken away her humanity. She’s a girl, and she’s French. You’ve already formed an image in your mind that has nothing to do with her. If I tell you she was sarcastic, bored, and happy to make out with a strange young American without too much discussion, I’ve given her a touch of depth. She’s barely three-dimensional, but at least she’s more than a shadow puppet.
I’ve told you a dozen times about a girl in Converse who smoked copious amounts of weed, loved Rocky Horror, and (this is the critical part) gave me a blow job in a tree for all of twenty seconds. I’ve already done her a disservice. Sarah deserves better. Most certainly.
But since we’re in the mood for violence, she can write her own damn version of the story.
I can take a bartender or a stripper, or a barista and turn them into a vessel for my corrupt endeavors. By that, I mean both my fantasy life and my willingness to make money writing about them. It doesn’t make them real, but I’m not anxious enough to think I’m somehow affecting their reality.
Besides, each of us, myself included, represents a possibility more than a reality — the potential for instant love, passionate tension, or quick hard sex that means more in retrospect than in the present.
On the other hand, I could be wrong about everything.
Let’s say instead that inspiration comes from a thousand directions at once, and if I jump off a person to arrive somewhere new, how is that different from listening to a piece of beautiful music and being moved to create?
I might say that rather than violence, all writing is creative. It takes nothing away; how could it? Instead, writing, no matter where it comes from, adds something to our joined human experience, and the quality or depth of it makes no difference. All art is, is the universe playing with itself, and who am I to think I could get in the way, even if I tried?
I don’t mash clay with my hands. Instead, I sit and listen, and when the wind speaks, I move my fingers until the words appear.
And what could be more straightforward and sweeter?
I suspect the difference is a matter of mood. It comes with how I am the moment I sit down to write, and whether it’s violence or creation is entirely a figment of my imagination. My goals and intentions put forward how I tell a story, but then, I suppose, at the end of the day, those things don’t matter either.
This morning I’ll settle for a third option that feels hopeful.
Writing is neither destroyed nor created, but it does connect. Like all communication, it’s imperfect, it has to be, but perfection isn’t required. Instead, we bounce back and forth, explaining, listening, reading, and writing, and all we can hope for is that between us, we touch, and together, we feel like a part of the whole rather than isolated humans in an indifferent universe.
To write is to toss out a hope. I hope that someone will read your words, find meaning in them, and let themselves feel connected and alive.
And what a glorious hope that is.
