I’m going to give you a piece of advice when you’re trying to learn something new: Never listen to people who try to make beginners feel like losers. For whatever reason, some people get off on making beginners feel like they’re worthless for attempting something. Maybe it’s because they feel threatened by new entrants, or maybe they were picked on as kids and this makes them feel powerful. Who knows, but generally if they’re trying to make you feel like a loser because right now you’re not that good at something, then just ignore them. They suck.
A thoughtful post in defense of genre fiction. And BAD genre fiction at that.
From the article:
It’s not about shutting your mind off, or any other excuse, it’s about opening your mind, to the brilliant little sparks of joy embedded in even the worst told stories. See, individual books might be bad, but as long as you pull some piece of love out of them, fit it into the gestalt of the hundreds of other books you’ve read, it’s still making you think, still making your world bigger. Disparate stories from different genres might be brilliant on their own, but they can’t contribute to your internal world in the same way. That would be like trying to assemble a puzzle from only corner pieces.
The endless piles of genre fiction are the key to happiness. They’re the key to picking out the things that actually make you happy in this world instead of the things that you’re told are good for you. Ninety percent of everything you read is going to be crap one way or the other, so make sure it’s the crap that makes you smile, and don’t apologize for it.
“The brain, it seems, does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life; in each case, the same neurological regions are stimulated. Keith Oatley, an emeritus professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto (and a published novelist), has proposed that reading produces a vivid simulation of reality, one that “runs on minds of readers just as computer simulations run on computers.” Fiction — with its redolent details, imaginative metaphors and attentive descriptions of people and their actions — offers an especially rich replica. Indeed, in one respect novels go beyond simulating reality to give readers an experience unavailable off the page: the opportunity to enter fully into other people’s thoughts and feelings.”
As things stand now, I am going to be a writer. I’m not sure that I’m going to be a good one or even a self-supporting one, but until the dark thumb of fate presses me to the dust and says, ‘You are nothing,’ I will be a writer.
I wrote stories from the time I was a little girl, but I didn’t want to be a writer. I wanted to be an actress. I didn’t realize then that it’s the same impulse. It’s make-believe. It’s performance. The only difference being that a writer can do it all alone.
Martin Luther King Jr. was not only a great leader and humanitarian but an amazing, powerful writer as well.
“Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, ‘Wait.’ But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim… when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky… when you take a cross-country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you… when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of ‘nobodiness’… then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair.”
- From Why We Can’t Wait by Martin Luther King, Jr.
“Don’t be dependent on anyone else — man, woman, child, or dog. I want to go everywhere, look at and listen to everything. You can go crazy with some of the wonderful stuff there is in life.”
