The problem is that you have to be boring. At least at the beginning. You have to start in sort of this expected way. You have to tell them where you’re from.
Readers enjoy that, because they like to think that a place – that the mere geography of the situation – tells you something, tells you a lot. People like to believe this. I’m not sure why. And I’m pretty sure teachers tell them this is the case. I don’t get it.
For me, I feel like I’ve seen enough of people to know that a place doesn’t really mean anything. You can go to my home town, or any home town, whether it’s right here in Southern Illinois, or some redneck town, or the middle of China, and I guarantee you’ll find a bunch of types, the same types you find anywhere.
You’ll find the shy guy, the braggy guy, the bully, the weakling, the rich guy, the smart guy, the dumb guy, and everything in between. You’ll find people who are afraid to die, and people who like to believe they figured out the secret to life and are, like, placid. You’ll find people who respect nature and people who don’t.
So whenever I start reading one of these creative essays and it starts off with a place, be it a city, or a country, I get this annoying feeling like the writer thinks that I’m thinking “aha” and that part of me recognizes that the place says volumes about the whole thing, or also that they think part of me is curious and a little excited to be learning about a new place. Neither of these things are true, because like I said, I don’t really want to learn about new places, because I don’t buy into the very idea of “new” places.
Not geographically anyway. And I’m always worried that you’re going to start writing in detail about some uncle, or a mule, or a clay pot, or you’re going to start rolling out fancy foreign-sounding words, and I’m going to get bored instantly. Why? It’s boring to me because I’m not going to take the bait. I’m not impressed by exotic sounding stuff, because it’s all just another costume, a veneer, we’re all basically similar under the veneer, and by spending too much time talking about the window dressing, you’re giving yourself these easy outs, you’re delaying the actual hard, interesting stuff. Ideas. Choices. New territory, not merely new veneers.
It can take a lifetime to get past the veneers. That’s because there’s so much of it, such a huge, endless market for consuming veneer-based information, and veneer-based tourism, and veneer-based journalism.
And sure, maybe someone who grew up in a war-torn place has a slightly different attitude (about life and death and groceries and freedom and art and family and work and so forth) and I can see why it’d be cathartic to report that perspective, and why it’s important to at least hear it. I’ve read stuff like that and really enjoyed it at times, but only because I was able to stick with it through the detail-sodden intro, the “exotic” details of place of senses and fancy names. In some cases I’m able to get the pure human essence out from under the crappy situational window dressing.
Face it, most people like that stuff. I don’t. I don’t care about the ambience. How many wines can you taste, pipes can you smoke, tunes can you marvel at? And how many stories do you have to read about Batswana and Yakutsk before you get it thru your skull that foreign people are actually people, too? Enough. I get it.
Again, unlike just about everyone, I seek something beyond the essence of place, beyond the feel and vibration of a city. Isn’t that essence really just a ton of bullshit, a lie most are all too eager to luxuriate in and brandish/consume? Just because New Yorkers walk around and work hard and have diverse interests doesn’t make the air vibrate. People in LA aren’t all dumb, and folks in Italy don’t all sleep half the day. And if they did, big deal, I know people who buzz, people who are dumb, and people who siesta every day at noon, right here in my home town. It’s the same shit, different place. I know, because I’ve been there and refused to willingly be stupid.
I’d rather read something about a human beings on the planet earth. I don’t need to know what kind of shoes they’re wearing, or the village, or the kind of prayer services, or whether dad sold bananas, worked for parliament or made shoes or sold sandwiches. I don’t think it matters. It’s boring.
But if you think you have to tell me that stuff, tell me quickly, and realize, as you’re saying it, that it might not matter that much. Tell me because it’s part of the story, not out of some obligation to give me ambience or transport me, and surely not out of some navel-gazing self-important cathartic couch trip. I don’t need to smell the bentonite or the sweat, or hear the rabble and I don’t care about what your gramma meant to you.
Contrary to what you are taught, I really DON’T actually want sensory details in writing or in setting a mood, not unless they are crucial to the story. I don’t want the equivalent of looking through a slideshow of your trip to Maui. Maybe some people do – maybe they like the idea of armchair travel or a museum tour. I don’t.
When you write for that purpose, I see you as a boring person telling stories, and I’m supposed to sit there, sipping wine, with my eyes smiling, and hear your worldly tale. But it’s not YOU that I mind. After all, I can sort of understand wanting to tell your story, describe your village.
What pisses me off more, and bores me more, is that curious other reader, the one listening or reading who EATS THIS STUFF UP. That person bothers me. Their eyes smile for real and they’re not faking – they are who you’re writing for, and there’s more of them than there are of me, and it’s ruining it for me, and others like me, by creating a market of dumb curiosity that spins rather than actually walks. We get nowhere, we just get there more scenically.
Reading is so much geared toward people who are OCD nerdy fucking curious about STUFF. DETAILS. Cultural crap, the kind of stuff they put in the soup in Sri Lanka, or about how some old people met during the war. These are the exact people who don’t want to talk about REAL things very often, and they’re also the exact reason why so few people read these days. These are the people who follow rules in their real lives, most of them stupid, and take pride in doing so.
And when I say “real things” you’re going to want examples. I mean, if I’m going to be a big dick about this whole thing, and chastise most people in the world for caring about, well, anything, then I damn well better have examples of the kind of stuff that’s worth talking about, the real things.
The problem is, I don’t have any examples. All I’m saying is we’re all pretty much the same, we breathe, eat, excrete. Sleep, have sex (if lucky), we have families, we age, we do new things, we dream, we struggle, and so on and so forth, and I just don’t know that it matters all that much what kind of garb you’re wearing or what kind of language you’re speaking or whether you’re playing a zither. And I also know that it DOES matter to a huge amount of people, and probably it matters to you, and maybe you’re conjuring up a defense as you read this, maybe it has to do with flavor, or your firm belief that understanding new cultures opens doors to understand ourselves better and blah blah blah. You’re probably right, and you are probably on the path to all kinds of success.
Just know that most of it is a hand job, if you’re a writer, you’re being a good little scout by talking about the world and steering the camera away from yourself, not being all self-obsessed: but the dirty truth is I want you to be self-obsessed, because I am, but I’m also obsessed with you being self-obsessed, and I want to see you do it so I can see me in you, etc.
I don’t want you to be stupid, or shallow, or talk about things that a LOT of people have already talked about. I don’t want you to be me, I want you to be me plus extra eyeballs. That way I can absorb the extra part, I can expand that way. I guess I want you to just flail around and find some new cool things to talk about, stuff that I would have maybe eventually come around to think about on my own, IF I HAD TIME.
If you got in a fight, or got laid, I guess I want to hear about that, too, but only if there’s something that you genuinely think is bizarre or interesting about it. If you want to persuade me to do something I’m not doing, I’ll listen. Now we’re talking, a serious use of language, persuasion. Persuasion, coercion, begging, bragging even, it’s all fine. Just don’t give me a slideshow of your trip to Kankakee. Don’t walk me through the halls of the historical society when I’m ten years old and expect me to not fall into a permanent state of underachiever-hood knowing the world is fucking nuts they they put little bushy tailed kids into situations of such boring magnitude. If you want to say Samoans are strong, give me one example, just one – not a whole parable. Just say Samoans are tough and here’s an example: insert cool example here. I don’t need a whole song and dance – save that for my gramma.
Having said all this, there’s been a few times when I’ve read past the first few boring paragraphs, I somehow make it through, and eventually the piece grabs me, and by the time I’m done, I’m moved. This does happen, but it’s a miracle that I get that far, because there’s still a lot of time the writers spend trying to establish the power of labels, like this idea that a place and time and what your parents did for a living automatically tells you a lot about everything.
So the problem is, I don’t know. I guess I just want to read stuff that’s more about minds and less about regimes and bolts of cloth and merchant marines – or if it’s about this stuff, keep it about the people, the earthling, and less about the label, the dressing. I don’t care about unusual details, just unusual ideas, and I don’t need proper nouns like Sri Lanka. I don’t need actually breeds, for instance, like if you want to mention a dog, you don’t have to say chihuahua. Because if you do say chihuahua, I feel like you’re relying too much on the flavor of the word and the breed to tell your story, and I’m on to you, it’s too easy, and you’ve let me down.
Write something with no proper nouns. No specific breeds. No history lessons or life stories. Force yourself to make it interesting anyway.
Please, just write about us humans on earth without slogging around like a pig in slop with all the fucking details.
We’re not buying goddamn pillows with my mom at the department store. We’re writing. Make it fun and universal and useful to me as a human being, make it about YOU in a way that makes it about me, too, because I want to know what courage looks like, I want to know why go on living and so forth; or I want to laugh or cry, because, honestly, I could be watching Walking Dead or something.