Writer’s Cramp

My literary heroes write clearly. They Illustrate the world while they plumb the depths of the subconscious. They Illustrate people so we understand strangers before we get to know them. My favorite writers show you what their world is like; they transport you there. I’m not scared of sad stories. I do not fear being made uncomfortable (as long as the discomfort brings light out of shadows). I like simple stories. I like boring stories. I like a story that doesn’t have an arc and climax, if by the end, I’ve traveled to a place I’ve never seen. I am an explorer and I want to move freely, but I’m now planted firm. Books allow me to fly, soaring, but not oxygen-starved. There isn’t a writer that exists that I actually like. I prefer innocent fantasy, Alice in Wonderland being a favorite for many years: written by a possible pedophile. A dream broken and scattered on a lake with similar fragments of broken dreams. These dreams were hoisted in place by their creators, the same men who walked into trebuchets of their own fashion. I’m interested in writers I haven’t discovered. The fantasy of worldly animation, removed from American machismo, must exist. Someone writes these feature animations I’m sure. I want the hope that come from telling stories, minus the transphobic jokes that leak from Gaiman’s quill, not the pederasty of Piers Anthony, not the incestuous lust of Alan Moore. I believe I’ve clung too long to British writers as well. They lack the machismo, but all these men, heroes of fiction past, cover their perversion with their graceful lies; that is, until they can hide it no longer. I read The Bell Jar. It resounds within me right now. It cuts through the bombast of so many of my favorite writers (except Steinbeck, for whom I still hold dear). Hers was a good trick––but you can only perform it once. I don’t know where to go with my writing. I want to free us from the paranoid, the grotesque, and the delusional. My life, my story is sad, I cannot escape. I will have to tame my past if I want to create worlds in which I would prefer to live.