Why, eh?

23Apr08

Today I was excited to see the Summer Reading tables had popped up at my local B&N.  I picked up one of those previously overlooked chestnuts, A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle.  Then I spotted Peter and the Starcatchers by Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson.  Not inexplicably, I found myself migrating to the neighboring shelves of teen and young adult books.  It was there that I discovered the gorgeous book pictured below.  Freaks by Annette Curtis Klause, with cover art by Fables artist James Jean.  Just look at it!

Some time ago I decided that if I were ever to trick myself into sitting down and writing a whole book, my roost in the industry would surely be YA or children’s lit.  It’s the savviest demographic, the one that doesn’t really put up with anybody’s shit. They know the fakes and they’re not interested in the posturing you might find in books intended for my own crowd.  

It’s been suggested that every writer has a Great American Novel rattling about inside them.  I cling to the morbid hope that the zygote of my own Great American Novel might be fused to a twin, something silly about a down-on-his-luck orphan, and that the latter might absorb the former to create some transcendental YA powerhouse to rival the collective catalogs of Rowling and Dahl (both of whom I worship rather zealously).  Even if my nonsense could sit in the same department as James and the Giant Peach or Bunnicula or The Outsiders, I’d be thrilled to my very toenails.  

Books were never so important to me as they were when I was in elementary school and I didn’t have brothers or sisters to torment and be tormented by.  Each day I’d drag my imagination, invisible and thrashing at the end of its tether, to School or Church or the Library.  I couldn’t very well leave it at home.  It was ravenous.  It consisted on books and cartoons and creative friends with tall tales and limericks.  

It hasn’t tired of them.  

But palates evolve and expand, don’t they?  It bristled, at first, at Shakespeare, but then it found the puns and wordplay snared between its teeth.  Sophisticated, but still a confection.  It tried Hemingway and pushed the plate aside (for now).  It turned its nose at Ayn Rand and pulled some Lowry from its pocket when no one was looking.  Evolved and expanded, sure.  But rare and insufferable are the clods that tire of cookies.  

I don’t mean to belittle the classics or even the new literati of emerging MFA students (many of whom agree that there’s a bit too much self-importance and pouting in the Literature section).  I read what I’d deem a fair share of important, contemporary literature.  But my tastes are in line with the McSweeneys of this world, champions of genre fiction like Michael Chabon.  My writers like comic books, genies, old pulps, fractured fairy tales.  And these are of course things I like.  Things I have liked since I could like things.  Enduring things, I’d argue.  

A hero of mine who happened to own his own chocolate factory and employed musical locks sprung only by Rachmaninoff tunes once said:   “A little nonsense now and then is relished by the wisest men.”

Another hero of mine, this time a three dimensional one, a man whose name I am honored to share, a man I simply refer to as Dad, once said: “Don’t forget the funny.”

Together, these form the simple tenets of my philosophy as a writer, as an artist.  Don’t be afraid to be silly.  Don’t be afraid to be vulnerable.  Too often writing, words, they’re all a suit of armor.  They’re a blunt object.  They’re artifice to get what you want and to make people believe you’re a wonderful person deserving of admiration, wealth, canoodling in BMW’s.  But what if we just used them to communicate and to relate to someone else just as silly and vulnerable as we are?  What if we just cut the bullshit and agree that dragons are, in fact, pretty awesome?  Altogether compelling and exciting.      

I’ll always be a kid without brothers or sisters.  I’ll always be a bit fascinated by cowboys and interstellar travel.  I’d wager that plenty of people are.  I just wish more of them would admit to it.  

Put away childish games, some say.  But we play games our whole lives.  The games we play as adults just aren’t nearly as fun.  When we pretend, we don’t so much know we’re doing it.  And we don’t always have the option to stop.  

And isn’t that silly?  

Filed under: on writing, ramblings   |  4 Comments