Europe and "Literature"

“Terrified of the open road. Yeah, where it leads ya never know…Rebels are we, though heavy our hearts shall always be. Ah, no ball or chain no prison shall keep. We’re the rebels of the sacred heart” – Flogging Molly “Rebels of the Sacred Heart”

No, no particular reason I started with that one. I’m not going to talk about rebellion or prison. I did visit the Chapel of the Sacred Heart once, though. It was during a trip to Europe with the “Colorado Ambassadors of Music” when I was a junior in high school. They had an orchestra (in which I played violin), a band, and a choir. We toured seven countries in ten days giving performances and touring the sights. In the chapel I lit a candle for my friend Tom who has multiple mialoma-a very rare bone cancer. Maybe the candle worked, he’s still alive and relatively healthy these days. His original prognosis was phrased in weeks and months, not years.

I’m getting sick, and it’s unpleasant. I woke up yesterday with a clotted feeling in my sinuses and it’s gotten worse since, so now I have a perpetual sore throat. Tonight is my last class for the summer Flash Fiction course I signed on for, and that’s a relief. It’s a graduate level workshop, technically, but half the people in it have never been in a workshop before and half of those have never written creatively before. I’ve been a bit frustrated with it. Not only is there the discrepancy with experience, there’s also the fact that this is a literary environment.

Literary = “I have to show the deep psychological issues of life, as exemplified by trauma and introspection.” Don’t get me wrong, there’s lots of wonderful literary work, but it has a trend of making writers freak out and put too much pressure on themselves. I just prefer a commercial mentality.

Commercial = “I have to write an entertaining story.” Wait a minute before you call me shallow or superficial, I can explain. Writers who genuinely want to entertain readers will, as a matter of course, write interesting and human characters with naturally developed plots. These are most interesting to readers (read: intelligent readers). Sure, there’s a lot of fluff on the Bestseller list, but there’s also a lot of good stuff there too. As a for instance, let me cite Joss Whedon. Folks who haven’t watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer often have a bias that it’s teen fluff. Yet, the show deals with real issues: teen sex, natural consequences, relationships, trust, power, self esteem, and many others. The actions characters choose to take on the show have natural (or supernatural) consequences and no none gets off “easy.” Still, at the bottom of it all, is the desire to entertain, not “think deep thoughts.”

This was supposed to be a short post. *Sigh.*