As far as I can tell, the world is not crying out for my opinion on things, let alone the election. Nor should my voice be a particularly loud one as I'm a white male, which is as protected of a class as you get in our current instantiation of Democracy. I should say that if you voted for Trump, willingly ignoring his racist and sexist rhetoric, then I'd be hard-pressed to see eye to eye with you. This was not a normal election. Trump just settled a suit for 25 million dollars for bilking people out of funds with a faux for-profit University, and yet we expended a great deal of energy trying to combat the image of crooked Hillary. No. Donald Trump is what it looks like when someone is crooked, and we elected him President. I digress.
I write for fun. Or rather, I write for fun because I haven't found anyone who wants to pay me for it on a regular or semi-regular basis. As such, and noting my protected class, it's maybe deeply selfish to even talk about how this election has effected my perception of the written word. I'm not taking the usual tack that I've seen post-election: we're all in an echo chamber, the media lies, we aren't listening to one another, people aren't racist except when they are. Rather, it has deeply effected my understanding of why I write.
I had an interview recently with the Sierra Nevada Review, be sure to look for that on the internet the moment it arrives (crickets), and I talked about why I write. It's this old idea I had that fiction could build empathy by allowing people to briefly jump the fourth wall and get access to someone else's thoughts. Fiction has been doing Being John Malkovich stuff for centuries now. And yet, the results of this election make me question that premise and perhaps the ability of anyone to have access to any mind but our own. Even our fictional characters might surprise us by voting Trump.
The election has briefly shattered my desire to write and create, to give small portals into these fictional characters because I have people right in front of me, every day, who I managed to know nothing about. It seems implausible that fiction could actively go about bridging that unbridgeable gap between the you and the I. So why try?
There are many arguments for the continued role of writers in a post-Trump world. However, for the time being, I'm not writing about sadness and loneliness or the way the light slants across a snowy field. I can't do that right now. I don't know anyone. Not even myself.
Here is an owl:
I write for fun. Or rather, I write for fun because I haven't found anyone who wants to pay me for it on a regular or semi-regular basis. As such, and noting my protected class, it's maybe deeply selfish to even talk about how this election has effected my perception of the written word. I'm not taking the usual tack that I've seen post-election: we're all in an echo chamber, the media lies, we aren't listening to one another, people aren't racist except when they are. Rather, it has deeply effected my understanding of why I write.
I had an interview recently with the Sierra Nevada Review, be sure to look for that on the internet the moment it arrives (crickets), and I talked about why I write. It's this old idea I had that fiction could build empathy by allowing people to briefly jump the fourth wall and get access to someone else's thoughts. Fiction has been doing Being John Malkovich stuff for centuries now. And yet, the results of this election make me question that premise and perhaps the ability of anyone to have access to any mind but our own. Even our fictional characters might surprise us by voting Trump.
The election has briefly shattered my desire to write and create, to give small portals into these fictional characters because I have people right in front of me, every day, who I managed to know nothing about. It seems implausible that fiction could actively go about bridging that unbridgeable gap between the you and the I. So why try?
There are many arguments for the continued role of writers in a post-Trump world. However, for the time being, I'm not writing about sadness and loneliness or the way the light slants across a snowy field. I can't do that right now. I don't know anyone. Not even myself.
Here is an owl:
