Let’s get one thing straight.
I am a star. Not in the metaphorical sense of a shining bauble to coo over and capture in camera flash, but in the fierce and wild sense of the cosmos. I burn white-hot, powered by an engine humanity cannot dream of touching, strong enough to alter the very matter of myself, to merge the unmergable atom. My parents are a solar wind and a nebula, a thing cast out and a thing destroyed, and I am what they have spun me into being as, a thing untouched.
And you are not. You are tiny. You have looked up into the sky on your little world and seen the speck of light and named me and drawn me into constellations, but you see a memory of the dead and distant past. You could not bear my present. My touch would burn you, my light would blind you, and so you cling to the small light of my past, and I spin my planets and moons in a song you will never hear, and mourn the fact that you could not stand with me as I am.
So next time you wish you could reach up and touch me and make me into that small light, remember: I am a star. You have not had a hand in my creation save to throw petty stones and place me in pretty pictures with cruel stories, and you will not have a hand in my future.
And to the small light, remember: this is only a distant memory.
So I wrote a short story that I’ve been posting on here bit by bit (I WILL POST THE NEXT SECTION, I SWEAR TO GOD) and I happened to have written it for a class and I brought it in to be critiqued and I just. I can die happy, because I straight-up witnessed a room full of Very Serious Critical Authors (yes I am a little derisive of my Very Pompous College Peers) get into a violent ship war. It escalated to shouting, the teacher looked horrified, and at least two people had brought in copies of the story annotated to support their ship–and these two came in armed and loaded for bear. Or heteronormativity, but same difference.
And so after class I came back to my dorm room and burst through the door and announced to my roommate:
“I have thrown the golden apple of ambiguous lesbianism among the masses and war has broken out.”
And honestly I’ve never been so proud of a sentence that ever came out of my mouth.
I’m taking that creative writing class and I just. Okay. Guys. Explain me a thing. WHY have I read two stories in this past semester about rape? I mean, I guess the one was more about abuse followed by murder (see my rant here), but still, Christ. Honestly I’m going to meet with the teacher about the most recent one, which I’m supposed to critique for Thursday, and just be like, “I fucking cannot do this. I am not objective enough to say shit about this girl’s writing. This is pages upon pages of a girl who witnessed the rape of someone she considered a friend and did nothing, and I have spent way too much time on the wrong side of that equation to be objective here.“ I just. Do not understand why rape is the thing. Like, guys, it’s not like it’s edgy and cool, okay, I promise, people have been hideous to each other since fucking Ur was nothing but a twinkle in the eye of some random ape. They’re not treating it as a very deep trauma and dealing with the fallout and handling it with as much care and compassion as possible, it’s not even fucking productive, it’s just annoying, Christ, fucking STOP.
Also, I honestly don’t care if it makes me a cultural heathen, I don’t like weird abstract writing that’s intended to ‘push the boundaries of what we think of as prose.’ Like, no. It’s not a failing on my part if I want to read fantasy novels with, oh, I don’t know, plot and characters and literally anything other than obsessive navel gazing. The next time I have to read the literary equivalent of that very famous piece of modern art that’s literally just a piece of plywood painted uniformly blue, I am going to scream.
Every once in a while I remember that, during the last round of workshopping people’s writing in my fiction class, I got into a fight with my teacher and the rest of the class about whether or not motive mattered in writing. This one story was about this guy who was a serial killer and his girlfriend who…evidently knew he was a serial killer for months if not years and did nothing and the last scene was her murdering him with poison in his food. (There were a lot of really heavy rape-y abusive overtones and I was kind of like…sweetheart, have you considered therapy rather than exorcising your issues onto all of us.) And I made what I thought was the totally valid remark of “Well, it’s not clear what makes her snap and murder him; like, she’s known for a while, generally people don’t just suddenly DECIDE to kill their significant other who they’ve shown no violent inclinations toward in the past without some sort of prompting, and like you don’t need to get into the motive much in the story but maybe hint at it? Because murder?”
And the whole class basically sat around talking about how motive doesn’t matter and it’s fine that she just kills him for no apparent reason and how in writing it’s fine if there’s no motive because the characters do what they need to for the writer’s plot to work and I was just like “Wow, that’s right, this is why I fight with most of you about writing so much, it’s because in order for a plot to function, motives need to…like…exist.”
Like, if your character goes to get a smoothie, it matters if they’re getting it because they’ve had a bad day and smoothies are a fave, or because they’re on a health kick and they’d rather have a milkshake, or because they’re meeting someone there, or whatever. It changes the character’s backstory and behavior. Am I crazy?
