One of my favourite quotes is ‘Fairy tales do not tell children that dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children that dragons can be killed.’ by GK Chesterton. It’s been brought out often enough, at least in my circles, that it seems cliche to like it, but it’s true.
The thing about this quote, though, is that someone had to write the fairy tales to begin with. Someone had to tell the stories. Someone had to create them. Why did they tell those stories? What were they seeking to learn from them?
Most of the interactions I see talked about are interactions between readers and stories (especially on the subject of deconstruction … that’s another topic). What I don’t see a whole lot is how much writing something can change the writer.
We know, psychologically, that writing things down has an observable and definitive impact; but for some reason I don’t see writers realising that that goes for fiction as well. The whole absurdity of ‘writing what you know’ being interpreted as ‘write only what is in your immediate experience’ is absurd for exactly that reason: a giant part of the reason to write is to learn. The best way to discover things you never knew about until you had to start writing them is to … start writing them.
For me, writing has always been a means to learn. Not just about myself — though that happens to — but the things I’m writing about. I set out to write things I don’t know anything about, because I need to research them in order to write them with respect and understanding. I don’t always get things right, but doing so opens me up to information and experiences I wouldn’t otherwise have, and that serves to push the capabilities of my imagination further. (Somehow, I keep coming back to writing about civil waste infrastructure … I’m going to wind up self-studying architecture or civil engineering one day, just wait.)
In fan parlance it’s pretty common to talk about ‘having a type’. The thing is that your types will tell you more about yourself than almost anything else. The characters you resonate with, the characters you write, are reflections of you and the person you want to be. My type can be neatly summed by, and with variations on, the phrase ‘a dutiful man of faith grappling with faith and possessing of phenomenal cosmic power he consciously chooses to gentle’. (I was raised by a single father who was a minister of religion and who was consciously and persistently contrary to the religious conventions he preached, in favour of gentleness and compassion.)
So, what do I tend to write about? Knights. Priests. Men of duty, losing faith and regaining it. The faith doesn’t necessarily need to be religious (though it frequently is, and not only in the Christian sense). Redemption, very often. Deconstructions of modern toxic masculinity are definitely in there, and I can trace that back to my upbringing. Grace. Compassion. Forgiveness.
I write about these things because as I write about them, I learn more about them too. The more I learn about them, the more I can change my future paths to aligning toward those values.
When I write about dragons, it isn’t to say they exist, or they can be killed. I already know that. It’s to remind myself that, sometimes, they can also be saved.
Aurichalcum Publishing 