Setsuled's Journal

I've been spending the past several hours going through some of my older short stories, trying to decide which ones, if any, I want to include on my new web site.

I'm noticing a lot of things in them that're really pissing me off and making me question my abilities. I mean, sure, most of what I'm going through was written a very long time ago. Much of it comes from when I was in high school, so naturally I should expect my skills to be a bit rougher. But I was having this weird moment where I was wondering if I have gotten better at writing or if I've simply gotten different opinions about writing. Maybe I'm actually not as good as I used to be.

I know for a fact that I'm a guy who is quite susceptible to delusion. Am I really doing what I am "meant" to be doing?

That question resounds in my head, even though there's a large rational part of me that says it's a silly question. I know that writing seems to fulfil me in ways greater, and in ways more generally permeating of my me, than anything else. Why the fuck should I care if I'm "meant" for it if being "meant" for it means anything other than that feeling?

I guess it's all I have to go on in any case . . .

In his blog recently, Neil Gaiman quoted Kate Bush as saying, "Be kind to your mistakes," which seemed like a very good philosophy to me. So as I'm looking at my old works, I'm trying to just see whether I think the ideas are good.

I suppose, in the end, I think some of them are fun reads. Which, if it's not merely the due to the distortion of my perspective, is quite good, all things considered.

So I think I shall now officially stop entertaining self-doubt, at least for half a moment.

...

Also in Neil Gaiman's journal was a link to an essay by Ursula K. LeGuin addressing a lot of things about writing, one of which was the classic idea that a writer needs to write about what he or she knows. This rule, says LeGuin, after mentioning a number of the fantastical things she's written about, is fine, except that it wants a better definition of "know".

For some reason, I started thinking about scenes in her books where characters have to deal with the death of a comrade. Like each and every other droplet of LeGuin's writing, these scenes are always brilliant, and always affect me with genuine and appropriate feeling.

Although I know very little of LeGuin's life, she's lived long enough that one can assume that she has, at one time or another, had to deal with the death of a loved one, or at the very least, someone she's personally acquainted with.

I started to wonder if I, having never actually had the experience of someone close to me dying, can truly justify writing about death as much as I do (see, I told you the self-doubt'd only be gone half a moment).

Am I guilty of escapism, dwelling on subject matter that I couldn't possibly know about--in effect, creating pure delusion from the barest abstract concept of something real?

I know I'm always very emotional when I'm writing such scenes. I generally concentrate on . . . the idea that the world's irrevocably changed . . . the helplessness one feels about it . . . the frighteningly imposing reality of so suddenly being utterly severed from contact with someone . . . and the horrible feeling that comes with knowing that a loved one is experiencing great pain, or has experienced great pain, and it's too late to do anything about it.

I guess these are concepts that I may have been made familiar with through my life experiences in different ways. Perhaps I use death as a device to explore these concepts, rather than using the concepts as devices to explore death? Maybe I'm just stirring the big soup of related human experience, and the relevance of which end the stick's grabbed at is arbitrary . . .