I write fiction. My stories are weird. They are violent and sexual but the violence is seldom gruesome and the sex rarely explicit. There is nuance in the weirdness.
My fiction is like dreams to me. It is the turning of thoughts and feelings into symbols and scenarios. Writing the stories focuses my thoughts and tempers the feelings. I am confused at first but understand after finishing.
Readers are shocked by my themes. My Black Death series is about black women serial killing young white women. My Weird World series has children as the nameless baddies, and they are slaughtered in droves. My White Empires books are about Nazis and Confederates as sympathetic antagonists.
If my fiction is political, then the politics are contradictory. Why would black women be heroes killing white women then Nazis and Confederates be sympathetic for killing black people?
The social commentary in my stories is not propaganda. It is me dreaming about things that affect me in my real life. My society frets racism and fascism and I am made to fret accordingly. I sublimate my anxiety into stories written to be enjoyed.
I imagined little boys as cannibalistic savages and little girls as brainwashed conscripts. I am not worried about little boys eating me or little girls shooting me.
Children are human nature before it is tempered by maturity. In reality I am more likely to be murdered by a man than a woman and a woman is more likely to hate me over politics. These distinctions are exaggerated in my novel The Wayward School for Girls to emphasize them, as if enlarging a picture to make it easier to see.
My fiction is typically weird because they are my waking
dreams, quite literally. Like the dreams of my sleep, they make more sense as
nonsense.
Sometimes dreams allow us to see the real world better. The themes reveal themselves, in the process. What we do with what we find determines its relevance.
ReplyDeleteI agree with every point. I must add that the weirdness is weird because it is what we look like on the INSIDE, as spiritual creatures.
DeleteFiction itself is a dream come true through it's production as the written word and then potentially in other mediums.
ReplyDeleteI agree. When people tell me ideas for stories but never write them, I tell them that their stories do not EXIST until they are WRITTEN. They fade away, in a lifetime.
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