Cute is Not What I Want

As a writer, I tend to collect bits of advice on writing.  Some of it is good; some of it is not.  (I’m sure you’ve noticed that people like to give advice, even when they don’t really know what they are talking about.)  Those of you who are writers are probably familiar with some of the things I have heard.  “Show, don’t tell.”  “Write every day.”  “Expect rejection.”  And, the subject of today’s post, “You are your own worst critic.”

Things like this wouldn’t be repeated so often if they didn’t have some truth to them.  I’ll be the first to admit that I can be a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to my work.  I remember the long period before I judged my sci-fi novel to be “finished”.  Every time I spoke to my mother, who had read the draft, she would demand that I just send it to a publisher already.  She judged it to be just fine the way it was, but I wasn’t satisfied.  I still get ideas on how to improve it and have to stop myself from going back and tinkering with it. 

But where my writing in general is concerned, I’m not entirely sure that I am a harsh critic.  Rather, I wonder sometimes if my work can ever be fully appreciated by anyone but me.

That sounds a bit big-headed of me, doesn’t it?  Let me clarify.  I am currently working on a fictional blog written from the viewpoint of an angel.  After a few weeks and ten posts, I have three followers, one of whom is myself, and I average a whopping one view a day.  That’s all right; I know how big a place the internet is, and how easy it is for something to get lost there.  What does bother me is the feedback I am getting.  Friends and family call it “cute” and “charming”; they say that it makes them smile.  That’s nice, but it does have the kind of undertone of someone looking for something nice to say.  And I can see where they’re coming from.  It’s still early days for the story, and what I’ve posted so far does not have much depth.

The problem is the whole story is based on an idea that I don’t know how to explain.  If my narrator knows how the world works, and supposedly his readers know how it works, why would he tell them what they already know?  I have a deep hatred of info-dumps, and I’m not Disney; I can’t put all my exposition into a charming song.  So I’m left with passing references to the big questions of what angels are, why they do what they do, how they are divided and structured.  Someday I will get to that, but I’m not sure my readers will hang around that long.  It’s frustrating, because I have this beautiful idea that speaks to human nature and the moral evolution of our race, a story about a war fought in the souls of women and men, an intricate tale of free will and choices that can change the world.  And readers call it “cute”.

I live with my stories every day, and not just with the events and the timeline, but with the backstory, the history, the culture.  I have entire worlds living and breathing in my head, and my writing is a constant struggle to put everything into order.  But it’s a task at which I could spend my entire life, and short of unhinging my skull and turning my brain inside out, I’m not certain I will ever be able to show everything.  There will always be some crucial detail left out, or else the words will be wrong and my readers will not understand.

Maybe this whole post is a self-indulgent wallow that proves more than ever that I am my own worst critic.  Maybe I’m on to something here, and if so I might as well never bother to share my work again.  But despite everything, despite my struggles and my failures and my perfectionism and the banal compliments, I do believe that I have something to say that the world might want to hear.  So I will keep posting my work into the echoing silence, hoping someday I might get a blip in reply.

Gun Control Means Using Both Hands

Today, while driving to work, I glanced at one of the cars passing me on the highway.  The license plate and model made me think that it was a young mom behind the wheel, one of those cool moms who always keeps her hair styled and always wears shoes that are both sensible and attractive.  Yes, I do spend much of my time imagining such things while driving. 

Then I saw the bumper sticker on the back of the car: “Gun control means using both hands.”

This disturbed me.  I am decidedly anti-gun, and so the addition of an AK-47 to my pleasant image of the soccer mom in khakis and sweater vest was jarring.  It made me wonder about all of those who insist, in the face of all the gun violence that happens and keeps happening in the United States, that owning guns—and not having that ownership restricted in any way—is a basic human right.  Why does it make so much sense to them, when it makes so little to me?

Comic borrowed from the Baylor Lariat

Well, I’m beginning to see their point.  With all the violence in the world right now, it’s common sense to have a plan as to how to protect oneself and one’s family.  You only have to watch some of the many videos from Trump rallies to see exactly how vicious humans can be to one another.  I understand that, and I sympathize.  But does your self-defense plan really require a weapon that will allow you to end a human life from far away, with just a twitch of your finger?  To me, that is drastic and horrifying, and it should be to you, too.

But then I had an epiphany, and not a very pleasant one.  The people who resist gun control are afraid.  They are terrified by what is out there in the world, by the cruelty and violence that still run rampant throughout this world.  They have no trust in the human race in general, and so they close themselves into little mental bunkers, armed and alarmed and ready for any twitch of movement on their grounds.  I doubt even with all these defenses that they would feel truly safe, because it’s not something external that they’re afraid of.  The capacity for violence is in everyone, and they not only see that, they feel it.  Kind of makes me feel sorry for them, to be honest.

What they don’t realize is that violence is not the answer to the problem of violence.  I spoke to one of my coworkers about the subject today, and his justification for keeping guns was that he had been threatened by a gun once, and it was scary enough that he got one of his own.  But then he became that frightening figure for someone else, who probably went on to arm himself and threaten others, and so on and so on.  It’s a vicious cycle, one that could continue in a downward spiral until no one feels safe enough to leave their house without a 9mm tucked into their belt.

The only solution I see to this problem is not to allow yourself to live in fear.  I have lived most of my life in rural Virginia and never once laid a finger on a gun.  What’s more, I’ve never felt the need.  My family didn’t lock our house at night, and we were never robbed.  More recently, my roommate left her wallet in her car for a night and a day, sitting clearly on the front seat, and it was still there when she returned for it.  I’m well aware that there are dangers out there, that I may one day be threatened or hurt or even killed, but I've never felt that fear.  Even if I did, I would never want to save my own life at the expense of someone else’s.  That would only make me the aggressor in a crime I did not want or choose, and that would be harder on me than being the victim.

I choose instead to put my faith in humankind, knowing that while there is risk in this choice, there is also hope.  If more and more people make this choice, then the dangers that we see in one another will grow less and less, until maybe someday, no one will be so afraid that they need to keep a murderous weapon behind the front door.  Maybe someday, we will be brave, and those around us will look less like targets and more like people.