I don't know why, but I decided to write an unprovoked rant about fiction. Here's the end result.
So much has been done with fiction. So many places and characters have been made up, sometimes as a struggling artist you get to wondering what the hell is there left to do anything with? How many more dragons can put the hurt on a knight trying to save something? What else can go wrong on a faraway planetary settlement? Can four women sitting around a cafe table set in NYC not end up sounding like one of a thousand scenes from Sex in the City? Maybe. Maybe not. You have a voice inside you. A way of telling things no one else can. Give 5 great authors the same damn plot outline to any classic tale of whatever and you know you'll get 5 great different stories back. Got an idea that you're worried is too similar to Grapes of Wrath? I say, Who cares? I say, Do it anyway. I say, If all the good shit's been used up, get the hell down on your knees and scrape up what's leftover and make something, anything, just don't give up and do nothing. If all you see is a literary wasteland, then write wasteland fiction. Hold nothing back.
I told myself once, I want to kill a whale with my bare hands, so I wrote a story about a whale's last day on earth. I was in Costco once and thought to myself, "I wonder, with the way society is getting more and more open about sex, (albeit slowly, thank God) if you'll be able to one day buy a sex robot here." So I wrote a story about a lonely guy who does. In writing this paragraph I asked myself could there be a dangerous alien species that are shaped like toilets? Sure there is, because I'm going to make it happen.
I don't, in the least, claim to be good at doing what I think is fiction writing. But I know I'm fucking amazing at writing MY fiction, because no one else in the world can.
