The Newsroom

We have to look at our own inertia, insecurities, self-hate, fear that, in truth, we have nothing valuable to say. When your writing blooms out of the back of this garbage compost, it is very stable. You are not running from anything. You can have a sense of artistic security. If you are not afraid of the voices inside you, you will not fear the critics outside you.

And what, you ask, does writing teach us? First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is gift and a privilege, not a right. We must earn life once it has been awarded us. Life asks for rewards back because it has favored us with animation. So while our art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age, or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all.

Anything you dream is fiction, and anything you accomplish is science, the whole history of mankind is nothing but science fiction.

Hon­estly, I think the bar­ri­ers are imag­i­nary, the walls have already been breached and the key to lit­er­a­ture in the early 21st cen­tury is one of con­flu­ence. There’s not much high and low cul­ture any more: there’s just min­gling streams of art and what mat­ters is whether it’s good art or bad art. But then, I come from comics, and miss the days when it was a gut­ter art-form in which nobody was expected to make art; and think that SF was much more vibrant and rel­e­vant before they taught it in uni­ver­si­ties.

To this I say, find me anything at all dumbed down about Ursula K. LeGuin. Show me oafishness in Phil K. Dick. Show me how E. Annie Proulx understands human nature better than Ray Bradbury does.

As another high school English teacher, here’s my take: Unlike ‘awesome’, ‘epic’ isn’t a particularly useful word in its main sense. (And it never meant “truly amazing.”) When did anyone describe anything as epic besides the Odyssey and the occasional really long movie? As an English teacher, this slang redefinition is a boon. Since ‘epic’ now means “really cool in a beyond-other-things sort of way”, when you do teach a REAL epic, it will automatically be cool, because it is, by definition, epic. And when the kids read it, and realize that what happens to the main character is even more epic than anything they’ve ever called epic, the book will be even better to them.

If there is a book you really want to read but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.