In the however many years I've been taking writing seriously, I've tackled both fiction and poetry. I've written a decent amount of fiction, and a decent amount of poetry. I've written some good fiction and some good poetry. I've written some bad of each, too. These days, I write fiction pretty much exclusively, for a pretty simple reason: I feel better at it. It was a fairly conscious choice (1) and the funny thing is I'm not sure if it was a cop-out. (2)
When I say I feel better at it, it's that I feel like I can more often get to the point where I feel like I've produced something worthwhile, something solid and good and worth having it be read by others. Statistically speaking, this would be tough to prove. I did write some poems I was quite proud of--actually, I've probably written more good poems than good pieces of fiction. (3) But I guess I've also written more bad poems than bad pieces of fiction--and more bad poems than good poems, too.
Writing poetry and writing fiction are two different challenges and it doesn't much surprise me that we don't have more accomplished fictionists/poets out there than we do. (4) For me, writing poetry was always about casting a really wide net and hoping something got caught. (5) It's easier to ditch a poem that isn't working than it is to ditch a story (or a novel) that isn't working. Once a poem gets near that point where it's all going to click into place, okay, then, it's tougher to lose the emotional and intellectual blah-de-blah that ties and binds you to it and makes you need to see it complete but getting to that point requires a pretty hefty emotional investment from the get-go, one which more often than not I wasn't willing to, or didn't feel strong enough to, put in. (6)
Fiction, on the other hand: fiction pretty much demands that investment up-front. When you're going to write a handful of thousand words as opposed to a handful of words, and when you know that a lot of things are going to happen along the way that might make things work better than you see them working from the start--though you of course get that hunch from the start that things might work out as well as you hope they will--I think it might be easier to get sucked into the process of writing the fiction without as much concern for where it's going to go in the end, than it is to get sucked into the writing of the poem. If a poem doesn't work in a couple lines, it's easier to feel like revision isn't going to make any of it work any better, so scrap it and move on to the next big bright idea. If a fiction isn't working in the first paragraph, you're probably on the right track, because the way the process works, you know that by the time you write the last paragraph, you're going to know better how to make the first paragraph actually work to serve the story. (Or, at least, you're going to know better what to replace that dreadful, cautious first step with.) Writing fiction seems more about finding out where the whole thing's going; poetry, there needs to be a little bit more firmly set, up front, to get to that point. (7)
So somewhere along the line I pretty much stopped writing poetry and devoted myself to fiction and now, some time later, a funny thing's happening: it's starting to feel like fiction's acting the way poetry did. Wide net, less return. This could be for many reasons, which I won't go into here, though I'll note that some are probably "good" reasons and some are probably "bad" reasons and I'm not sure which are the correct or appropriate ones right now, so. (8) But what all of this means is that, on a night like tonight, when I take a piece of fiction I've been working on and I feel like I've "finished" it--or found the appropriate point at which to artfully abandon it--the feeling is exquisite. And I'm not sure why that feeling exists or where it comes from--why was this piece worth pursuing through to a felt end rather than some other scrap of text on my laptop, what makes this piece feel like it's complete whereas other abandoned pieces feel like they could spin on and on into infinity with no end in sight--but I'm glad for it. Especially now, with my recent commitments towards actually trying to send pieces out to places that might possibly put them into print and place them in front of the eyes of people who could potentially become adoring, loving fans. It's a good feeling, and it makes it feel like it's worth doing this, and so, and so, and so. (9)
--
(1) Though when I made that choice exactly I couldn't say.
(2) I guess it depends on the reasoning behind the choice. If the reasoning was that I wanted to go with the genre that I felt like I could accomplish the most in, and to accomplish the most I should go where I feel the most confident, then no, no cop-out. If the reasoning was that I abhor a challenge and that I like the idea of being a writer but I don't want to stress myself out about it too much, so I should go with what comes more naturally to me, then yes, cop-out. The reasoning never got much more involved though than "I feel better at it so I'll do that and not the other," though, so I'm pretty much up in the air on the question. Of course this all raises questions about why write anyways, but that's probably a whole 'nother footnote.
(3) Never mind the fact that one of the pieces of fiction which I feel is "good" is an entire novel and that the longest poem I ever wrote was maybe a couple pages at most. Never mind that for now. Because maybe it's all just ultimately about the fact that there's potential money in fiction, not so much in poetry. Who knows.
(4) Right now only Stephen Dobyns comes to mind, whose fiction I've read little to none of and whose poems often read like short stories broken up into lines. Damn fine poems I'll say but maybe he illustrates the point.
(5) Nevermind, of course, that I did most of my poetry in college, when I was melodramatic and hormone-drenched. Well, okay, more melodramatic than I am now, at least. Hormones...point taken.
(6) Consider any "you"s or whatever to mean "me". I'm not dictating the way things are. I'm just working out the way things might be, in my case. Maybe. Or not.
(7) A couple notes here. First, again, this is all "me" not "you". No offense taken I hope. Second, I'll admit right out that I'm more impatient when it comes to revising a poem than revising a story, probably for the exact reasons noted above. I know nothing works right out of the door, but, it was always easier to toss a poem. Less investment, etc. So I know real poets probably revised the hell out of their poems way more than I ever did my own, even to my own so-called good poems, but, hey, I was young. Younger. Younger than I am now. Third I think, there's a point here about the words in poetry all counting more than the words in fiction, which is utter bullshit as far as I'm concerned. Words in poems don't "count" any much more so than words in fiction do--they're no more important to the work in either case. Which is to say that in either case all words are utterly crucial to the work. The piece, what have you. Especially now in our Internet-driven ADD culture when they're always a diaper to change or a movie from NetFlix on the end table or a vaccuum to go buy on amazon.com. You don't get extra words in fiction to just throw around; if so I could toss some Esperanto in at the end of every paragraph and it wouldn't matter because not all the words matter. The words are all crucial in each style--but, for different reasons. Which I won't go into because I'm done venting on this topic. Sorry. Newly-discovered pet peeve.
(8) For more on this you can probably see an earlier post on the relatively low amount of "finished" fiction to the high amount of time I've felt like I've spent working on fiction, which said post I'm not going to re-read right now to find out if there is interesting, insightful information contained within, but if you do and you find said connections to be worth examining, please chime in and let me know, because that would be cool.
(9) Oh, and there's another reason for writing fiction rather than poetry, and that's because I've been reading fiction far longer than poetry, and I've liked a lot more fiction than poetry, and so. Actually this is probably the most important or most influential reason behind my decision and just because it took writing this entire essay to reach the point where I could remember or realize that fact should not lead one to misconstrue this piece as a piece of fiction. Or as a piece of crap. Unless it is, then, be my guest.
No comments:
Post a Comment