Am I writing what I really want to write?

The last year has been weird for everyone, but the weirdest thing about it for me is that it's been maybe the best year of my life in terms of good things happening to me. This has been true both at work--where I recently left the job I'd had for seventeen years in order to take what seems like a dream job to me--and in writing. It's hard, of course, to feel like celebrating these good things when the world is falling apart, and a big part of me is waiting to see what the comeuppance of all these oddly timed nice things will be, but since it's hard to make genuine progress in life or in writing, I'll take it wherever and whenever it comes.

In writing, the three biggest breakthroughs were:

1) Getting my story "Jajangmyeon" published in The Chattahoochee Review, just before they closed for good. (We might, before it's all said and done, lose as many literary journals as restaurants to the pandemic). I'd like to post to the work, but TCR generally puts only a limited amount online, leaving the rest for the print journal. When they closed up, they seem to have done it in a hurry, not even saying goodbye on Twitter or on their website. So there is literally nothing online from their last journal. The most I can do is link to the Tweet they put out announcing the final volume. 

2) Winning the Robert Day Award for fiction with New Letters for my story "Lobu Hoteru." This story was, in some ways, the culmination of my career at the job I just left, because it is a working out of my feelings about both North Korea and the paradoxes of surveillance. 

3) I'll have a story published soon by The Bellevue Literary Review. This story is loosely based on one of my three brothers, who joined my family through adoption from Hong Kong when I was eleven. He came with his biological sister. They had what must have been a befuddling existence in Ohio, and this story was my attempt to get at the emotional truth of what it might have been like for them, if not the literal truth. 

"Why I write" is a boring question, but here's an answer anyway

If I never publish anything else ever again, I'm satisfied with what I've done now, and least in terms of answering the "am I any good?" question. Satisfying one's own need to be validated isn't maybe the best reason to write, but I'm sure I'm not alone in that I can't deny it has been a reason for me. 

It's not the only reason I write, though, nor the biggest. The strongest motivator for me to write is something like this: I feel like the universe is constantly gaslighting me, and I want to explain how it's doing this, in order to see if I'm alone, or if anyone else feels the same way. I'm hoping that I might write something that can be like the opening of the floodgates when one person says they've been abused by someone, and then another comes forward, and another, and then it's pouring in from all over. 

My deepest impulse to think and write probably all stems from one brief but memorable episode when I was in first grade. I was standing in line on the playground to come back in from recess and regretting that I had to go back in. Normally, seven-year-old kids are trained by that age to accept that you can't always get what you want, and there are things you just have to do, so there's so sense complaining. Normally, that was me. I was a model student in first grade. But at that exact moment, I wondered for just a few seconds about why the world is a place where we must come in from recess, why we can't just spend our lives doing the things we enjoy. Surely, it could have been something else. It could have been anything, so why was I sheepishly trudging along in a line to go back into the building when that's not what I wanted to do? In fact, when you got down to it, why was there something rather than nothing at all?  It was a combination of both the theodicy question and Leibniz's great question, and they both came crushing down upon me at the same time. 

These weren't original thoughts, of course, not that I knew that then. But with these kinds of thoughts, it's not really the novelty of the thought that gets you, it's the occasional moments when the undeniable truth of it hits you square during your unguarded moments. It's the visceral nature of the realization when it sneaks in and becomes momentarily more than just an abstract concept. It happened to me the other day, when I was worried I might not be up to the challenge of my new job, and I consoled myself by thinking, well, I'm well over halfway to death, in all likelihood, so if I screw my life up, at least I'll have done it for a short amount of time. That then led me to realizing that I really am going to die one day, a realization that hit me closer than I usually let it.  

Life seems to be some kind of joke, but I can't really get the punchline, and while I'm puzzling it over, everyone wants me to go on with life paying bills and going to the dentist and folding laundry. All of which just makes me feel like everyone is messing with me. How can everyone go on with the show like there isn't a giant, burning question making everything we do seem pointless? I mean, I do go along with it, because at heart, I don't trust myself that they don't all just know something I don't know, but at the same time, a big part of me is undone by the weirdness of being here and how I can't make sense of it. Somewhere, there's a Jake Weber who never really came in from recess that day, and is still roaming the playground at Orchard Hill Elementary School, muttering to himself.

I know, I know, I KNOW! -- This kind of thinking is a privilege 

Unsurprisingly, the kind of writing I tend to intuitively connect with the most is that which speaks in some way to this essential alienation of humankind from the cosmos in which we are placed. Moby Dick is my go-to answer when someone asks me about my favorite novel, an answer I haven't improved on in the twenty-five years since I first read it. 

That's not to say I don't appreciate writing focused on other concerns. Modern American fiction focuses a lot these days on issues related to gender, racial, and other identity-driven equities. I don't dislike this kind of writing, and I don't want to suggest I think it's somehow less than writing concerned with the alienation of humanity or other existential dread-focused considerations. 

I rather think of culture the way Tolkien described the origin of the universe in The Silmarillion: everyone only knows part of the whole melody, and we can only begin to understand the entirety of the theme if we all join our voices. I might not have heard the original voice of God when it comes to racial or gender issues, but I can still hear and appreciate when others sing from that part of the overall theme. It's just that to me, those issues are always going to be in brackets. Yes, it'd be nice to figure out how to make life better for everyone, but can we please get back to the question of what the point to all this is? Modern fiction's predilection for stories that focus on the experience of being other from white and male and cis-gendered and straight strike me a little bit like what a class in etiquette might have felt like five minutes after coming back to the classroom from my lightning bolt moment on the playground. I understand that it's important to be kind to one another, but can we please talk about what just happened out there? 

It's at this point that I preemptively state, like Kurt Vonnegut's alter-ego narrator in Slaughterhouse Five, "I know, I know, I KNOW!" I know that being able to be more concerned with what the point of life is than the struggle to merely preserve life is a function of the various types of privilege I enjoy. It's easy to whine about the absence of a clear reason to life when nobody is actively putting a boot on my neck to put an end to my life. I know. Perhaps the types of concerns I'm talking about belong only to those privileged enough to worry about them.

I don't think so, though. It's not like these worries are ever totally absent from the best writers who mainly focus on equity concerns. The irreducible, baffling, disorienting absurdity of life is there in Danielle Evans and Jamel Brinkley as much as it is in Shakespeare or Melville. One senses, reading them, that they are aware that once their characters fight through identity issues in a more specific sense, there is still the much larger identity issue to deal with--not just "Who am I?" but "Who are any of us?" 

Is this what I'm really writing about?

I've gotten better. That's my whole trajectory as a writer since my early forties, when I really started to try. Getting better has meant marginally more and more success with publications, but I want to be sure that when I'm getting better--a big part of which is reading the best fiction of the day--I'm not abandoning that fist grader who still needs me to find a voice for him. Of course those identity and equity issues are important, but Jake Weber probably isn't the best guy to write about them, because that's not what got seven-year-old Jake Weber into such a tizzy he's never gotten over it. I sometimes feel that I'm writing what people want to read now instead of what I myself want to read all the time. 

I don't mean to say that I'm writing cynically, trying to craft stories about equity or identity I don't myself care about, imitating many of the stories that are received well in American fiction now. I mean more that being aware of what editors want might be influencing me in small ways. For example, my story "Jajangmyeon" got a lot of positive feedback from the first thirty places I sent it, but nobody was quite ready to pull the trigger on it. I made a small but significant change to one passage, one that turned the main character from sexually confused and possibly asexual to clearly homosexual. I did it, I think, because I was trying to make him a character with motivations that would be immediately intuitive to the reader. The change accomplished that, but I wonder if it might have taken away some of what made the story unique. The old passage: 

He doesn’t feel sexual attraction to Doug. He is pretty sure he isn’t gay, although he wishes sometimes he could be, just to traumatize his mother. If he’d been gay, he figures, he’d have known for sure when he was in the army.

He’d had more than enough chances in the army to know if he was attracted to men. There’d been hundreds of naked men and plenty of lack of supervision that presented opportunities. But it never seemed right to him.

At the same time, he couldn’t think of a girl he’d ever been that attracted to, either. He figured it had something to do with how he had never met one he couldn’t imagine eventually turning into his mother.

I felt like that was something honest, a guy who's so messed up from childhood, he can't even figure out what kind of person he's really attracted to, because his mother is so in his head in everything. Now, here's the change. I didn't change much else except to take out those passages above and substitute with this:

Before driving a moped, the last time he felt an excitement like this was when he read those sexy manhwa or went to the bath house with the soldiers in his company in the army. If it hadn’t been for church, he wouldn’t have known to feel shame about it, but because he did, Jong-min avoided scrubbing the backs of his comrades, who thought he was aloof because of it. 

You could say I was just making the story more streamlined, and I'm sure that's what I thought I was doing. Clear motivations is a story characteristic I was thinking a lot about when I made the change, and that's why I made it, not in order to give the story more appeal to an editor looking for the right diversity to fill out a volume. But I'm not sure the story didn't eventually get picked because of that. It finally got picked up soon after that change, and when I pulled it from other journals I'd sent it to, another editor said he'd been just about to pick it, too. 

The long and the short of it

In any event, from now on, I'm writing only stories that would have appealed to that seven-year-old Jake. If it doesn't scream from hell's heart I stab at thee, I'm not writing it.

Resigning from my old job and starting a new one means I'm going to be busy learning new things at work and not have much time to devote to writing for a while. I knew this, and I'm okay with it. Certain sacrifices had to be made, and overall, I'm hopeful they'll be worth it. So when I do have a few minutes to devote to writing, it's going to be on what matters most to me.

I probably won't be blogging much for a while. I've already fallen off a lot in the last few months, hoping I'd get this new job. It's going to get worse before it gets better, but again, I think this is a good thing for me overall. Hopefully, I'll feel solid enough in six months to get back to blogging next year's BASS.  

The best cure to extremism is cultivating uncertainty

"For it was the loyal, the idealistic and the brave who did the real damage. The devout and patriotic leaders of Jerusalem sacrificed tens of thousands of lives to the cause of freedom. Vespasian and Titus sacrificed tens of thousands more to the cause of civil order. Even Agrippa II, the Roman client king of Judea who did all he could to prevent the war, ended by supervising the destruction of half a dozen of his cities and the sale of their inhabitants into slavery. How much better for everyone if all the principal figures of the region had been slithering filth like Josephus."

-P.J. O'Rourke, "The Two-Thousand-Year-Old U.S. Middle East Policy Expert" 

The military, apparently suddenly aware that its ranks include those who dream of taking up arms to protect the country from all enemies, including itself, is enacting a "stand down" (break in routine to conduct training) on extremism. While acknowledging the training is not a panacea--Really? All those safety stand downs on drunk driving before long weekends don't stop people from driving drunk? Then why did we have to do them before every long weekend ever?--the Department of Defense looks upon this as an important first step.

The training is available online, so even if you're not in the DoD, you can still treat yourself to the thrill of a dry-as-dirt, utterly uninspired and uninspiring look at "the meaning of the oath" to the Constitution both the military and civil servants take. It's likely to be what all DoD training is: a dull preaching to the choir to nearly everyone, and an invitation to rebel even more to the few intractable outliers. 

I was talking recently with a friend about the "Flight 93 Election" piece arguing for supporting Trump prior to the 2016 election. Published by Claremont Institute member Michael Anton under the pseudonym Publius Decius Mus, it argued that conservatives who weren't thrilled about Trump should get off the fence and support him. That's because the 2016 election, in his view, was a last stand against encroaching liberal views that would sink the republic. 

There's an underlying premise to the argument, which I would term the "if I am right" premise:

If conservatives are right about the importance of virtue, morality, religious faith, stability, character and so on in the individual; if they are right about sexual morality or what came to be termed “family values”; if they are right about the importance of education to inculcate good character and to teach the fundamentals that have defined knowledge in the West for millennia; if they are right about societal norms and public order; if they are right about the centrality of initiative, enterprise, industry, and thrift to a sound economy and a healthy society; if they are right about the soul-sapping effects of paternalistic Big Government and its cannibalization of civil society and religious institutions; if they are right about the necessity of a strong defense and prudent statesmanship in the international sphere—if they are right about the importance of all this to national health and even survival, then they must believe—mustn’t they?—that we are headed off a cliff.

It's tempting to laugh this off as marketing. Every political backer in my entire lifetime has called every election "the most important election of our lifetime." But there's something about Anton's tone that is different. He really means it. 

The stability of society rests on people lacking the strength of their convictions. No, really.

It's easy to be terrified by Anton's reasoning. In his view, America is a war between opposing ideologies, and there is no reconciling the two, however much we really do seem to make an uneasy compromise work day-to-day, even if it's a compromise held with ill will by both sides. There is no choice but full-scale resistance by any means necessary. Conflict is inevitable, even desirable, and perhaps it's better to bring the conflict to a head sooner rather than later. 

What makes Anton scary isn't what he believes, it's the certainty and strength with which he believes it. Every "if we are right" has an assumed, unwavering "and we are" to it. The reason a particular brand of conservative has troubled the councils of the great isn't that they believe in something they're naming "originalism," or that they don't believe there are thirty-seven genders, it's how much they believe in it, enough that some are willing to "charge the cockpit." They're ready to overthrow the generally good thing we've got going, because in their minds, it's not good at all, and the day after tomorrow, it's going to be a literal hell on Earth unless they act and act now. 

Wouldn't many liberal beliefs be equally dangerous if held with the same strength? Wouldn't any belief that's willing to interrogate an "if I'm right" proposition unflinchingly to its logical conclusion without entertaining at least a sliver of doubt that it might not be right? For example, if all the liberals who like to fob off the axiom that "there is no ethical consumption under capitalism" really believed that to their core, they'd be physically attacking the system every day of their lives. Or, if they didn't want to firebomb oil rigs or assassinate heads of banks, they'd at least take their own consumption out of the equation by killing themselves. If you really believe every economic decision you make in a capitalist society is inevitably unethical, then don't you have a duty to at least stop making all decisions? If you don't want to kill yourself, you could at least go try to live in the woods.

But very few liberals who claim to believe in the fundamental rot of capitalism take these kinds of actions. They might claim to respect the few who do, but ultimately, most are going to shrug their shoulders and say, "Well, whattareyagonnado?"

Ah, Hormone Monster Rick, you truly are the spirit guide we need in these troubled times.

Conservatives are wont to chide liberals for being hypocrites. To which I say, "Yes, you're right, and that's why I'm with them." If liberals are, on the whole, marginally less likely to take their beliefs to extremes, if they are troubled enough by doubts--or just apathy, because after all, there's a latte with your name on it about to finish being made--then that's the group for me. I'm with the group willing to consider it might be wrong, even if it only acknowledges that possibility in a practical sense while still verbally asserting its certainty it is never wrong. 

I imagine a reader might be troubled by how glibly I seem to be endorsing indifference, which I understand. A reverence for an uncertainty that makes our convictions lose the name of action could easily lead to a compliant population, one unable to stand up for its own rights. But of course I'm not a stickler for hardcore political agnosticism anymore than I'm a hardcore proponent of any belief. I'm agnostic about being agnostic. If you are generally resistant to agitprop because you realize that taking the tenets of said agitprop seriously would have unsettling intellectual consequences, then you're exactly the kind of person who can start to trust herself when you feel a situation really does require strong action. Even Hamlet, the patron saint of self-doubt, roused himself to strong action when he realized that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were taking him to his death.  

Furthermore, I'd say there are probably one or two issues on which every person is likely to be deeply educated enough to merit sustained and deep engagement. But if your whole life is taken up by one life-or-death struggle after another in issues ranging all over the political spectrum, then it's likely you have an addiction to heroic action, not a reasoned commitment to a limited proposition based on your tenuous determination that it is the right course. 

A world of people humble enough to doubt their own positions isn't a dystopia. Self-doubt strong enough to make radical opposition rare is something you can't build a stable society without. Imagine if everyone really did believe whatever they believed with the strength of conviction the "Flight 93" essay is calling for. You couldn't get a zoning law passed in the smallest city council in America. 

Being willing to put your own security aside in an emergency for the sake of others is, without question, heroism worth admiring. It's human behavior at its most sublime. But being willing to put your doubts aside to more or less let a thing operate, even imperfectly, is only slightly less admirable, because if that weren't the default position of nearly every human being on the planet, there might not be human beings on the planet.