Mommy, where do stories come from?
Apr. 22nd, 2007 10:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
megwritesThere's been some discussion about the line between author and story, particularly in relationship to the Virginia Tech shootings and the fact that the gunman wrote stories which were particularly disturbing.
Stephen King even weighed in. You'd think that he's the perfect person to ask. If anyone knows about writing truly disturbing material, it's him.
But in a real way, nobody is the right person to ask because as far as I'm concerned, nobody is asking the right question. I think asking "where's the line between author and story?" is like asking where the line is between a mother and child.
To borrow from forensics, it's like trying to create a complete DNA profile of a mother from the child's DNA. Sure, you can infer some things (like genetic conditions, blood type, etc) - but you can't know everything about the mother just from the child.
Because children, and written works, take on a life of their own. Other people make contributions. The reader (or in the DNA metaphor, the father) has a say. A reader, depending on their threshold, may be very bothered by a work and call its creator a psychopath - or may be very taken by it and call its author a genius.
I think instead of asking about the line between author and story, we need to ask about the auctorial chromosomes. We need to ask what part of the author wrote the story.
Because the part of Stephen King's psyche that comes up with material is vastly different from the Virginia Tech gunman's. While I don't know Mr. King and certainly don't claim to know a thing about his thought processes - I think being a writer, I can hazard a guess or two.
The part of a writer's brain that comes up with things is, ideally, very detached from the part of a writer's brain that writes the grocery list and decides how to behave in society. Thus, you can have very mild mannered people who would faint at the sight of real blood writing about the most horrible things, and writing them well.
It's the reason that I can create a fantasy world, and even put parts of myself into it without the flow going the other way. It's why I don't start talking like my characters and dressing like them. Because there are two places for that world to exist - in my head and on paper. But never are my actions dictated by anything in that creative process.
But there's another mode of writing - the one I use when I journal. The one where I use all caps and I talk about how I'd really like to yell at the rude people in the supermarket or tell someone what I really thought of their tacky new outfit. And this flow does go both ways. Sometimes when I journal about things, I really do it (usually positive things like, writing more words or cleaning house or calling my mom).
All the same, things that I write in my journal have access to the real world through me. It's a two way street.
That's where yet a third part of my psyche comes in. It's the part that tells me that I need to take a deep breath and not say anything to the people in the supermarket. It's the part of me that tells me to act rationally, decently, humanely.
It's half conscience, half logic. It's the waggling finger that tells me to control my impulses. It says, "Sit up straight, eat your vegetables, don't talk back, behave yourself, use your indoor voice". It also tells me when to shut up, when to keep my hands to myself.
This is the part of the brain that failed the Virginia Tech gunman. Because between the time he had those guns in his hand and the time he fired, there were decisions to be made. Almost like a pop-up on a computer asking for permission to allow a site.
Except one of two things happened. Either those pop-ups that say "warning: shooting people is BAD! WRONG! FATAL!" didn't come up at all, or something in his brain just kept pressing yes until people died.
Either way, it was not creative part of the brain that was responsible for this atrocious, tragic event. It was the conscience, the logic that failed that day.
So asking if his writings were part of his inner violence is utterly pointless. Of course they were part of that. But they didn't come from a creative process. They came from a direct transcription of his obviously warped psyche.
Which leads to the question I think people are really asking.
When we see a piece of disturbing writing, how do we tell the difference between some lonely, shy kid who's the next Stephen King and the lonely, shy kid who is about to take a semi-automatic and kill people?
You don't.
Writing alone isn't enough. Just like a child's DNA isn't enough to completely recreate the mother's, a few very graphic stories isn't enough to predict who's a killer and who's just been reading Misery too many times.
You need more than that.
You have to look the lonely, shy kid in the face and ask questions. You have to talk to the parents, the friends. You have to go into their bedrooms and see if they're stockpiling weapons. And if you're really that disturbed, you need to call somebody and get some help.
I'm in no position to say what could have been done different at Virginia Tech, if anything. Personally, I think we might have to face the terrifying posibility that the only person at fault is the gunman. That nobody else could have changed anything.
We can scream about warning signs, we can scream about gun laws. But if a madman with no soul wants a gun, he'll find it, the law be damned.
And I certainly don't want us to become a country that can search your house or lock you in an institution if you write something that disturbs other people.
But the point is that the Virginia Tech gunman was not a creative writer when he penned those things. He was a journaler.
Let's take it like this. If Stephen King kept a diary, and if you read it, dollars to donuts it wouldn't look a damn thing like his stories. He'd probably talk about his family, may his writing (in general terms), what he did that day, memories of his childhood, things he hopes to do the next day. I doubt you'd find one decapitated corpse in the whole thing.
The same could not be said of the VT gunman. Because his journal (if he had one) and his writing and his thoughts and his actions were all the same thing. There were no checks and balances and locked doors between them. His theoretical journal would have been filled with just as many images of violence as the stories he wrote.
Or more simply: Stephen King writes fiction. The VT gunman was not writing fiction. Even if he called it that, it wasn't.
But the line between fiction and non-fiction is blurry and sometimes damnably hard to spot for even the most trained eye. And trying to use one blurry line to find another is just pointless.
In the end, when you have a piece of writing - all you have are the words and the decisions you make about those words. The author has done their bit. What it says about them is what you decide it says about them, actually. Until you meet the author in person, you can't really know.
So the question really should be: where's the line between the reader and the story?
And as to the Virginia Tech shootings, I would like to say that my thoughts are with those affected, the families and friends of the victims, the survivors, the students, and the school itself. I may be a writer, but for these things there truly are no words. I can only say this: may peace be with them all.
Stephen King even weighed in. You'd think that he's the perfect person to ask. If anyone knows about writing truly disturbing material, it's him.
But in a real way, nobody is the right person to ask because as far as I'm concerned, nobody is asking the right question. I think asking "where's the line between author and story?" is like asking where the line is between a mother and child.
To borrow from forensics, it's like trying to create a complete DNA profile of a mother from the child's DNA. Sure, you can infer some things (like genetic conditions, blood type, etc) - but you can't know everything about the mother just from the child.
Because children, and written works, take on a life of their own. Other people make contributions. The reader (or in the DNA metaphor, the father) has a say. A reader, depending on their threshold, may be very bothered by a work and call its creator a psychopath - or may be very taken by it and call its author a genius.
I think instead of asking about the line between author and story, we need to ask about the auctorial chromosomes. We need to ask what part of the author wrote the story.
Because the part of Stephen King's psyche that comes up with material is vastly different from the Virginia Tech gunman's. While I don't know Mr. King and certainly don't claim to know a thing about his thought processes - I think being a writer, I can hazard a guess or two.
The part of a writer's brain that comes up with things is, ideally, very detached from the part of a writer's brain that writes the grocery list and decides how to behave in society. Thus, you can have very mild mannered people who would faint at the sight of real blood writing about the most horrible things, and writing them well.
It's the reason that I can create a fantasy world, and even put parts of myself into it without the flow going the other way. It's why I don't start talking like my characters and dressing like them. Because there are two places for that world to exist - in my head and on paper. But never are my actions dictated by anything in that creative process.
But there's another mode of writing - the one I use when I journal. The one where I use all caps and I talk about how I'd really like to yell at the rude people in the supermarket or tell someone what I really thought of their tacky new outfit. And this flow does go both ways. Sometimes when I journal about things, I really do it (usually positive things like, writing more words or cleaning house or calling my mom).
All the same, things that I write in my journal have access to the real world through me. It's a two way street.
That's where yet a third part of my psyche comes in. It's the part that tells me that I need to take a deep breath and not say anything to the people in the supermarket. It's the part of me that tells me to act rationally, decently, humanely.
It's half conscience, half logic. It's the waggling finger that tells me to control my impulses. It says, "Sit up straight, eat your vegetables, don't talk back, behave yourself, use your indoor voice". It also tells me when to shut up, when to keep my hands to myself.
This is the part of the brain that failed the Virginia Tech gunman. Because between the time he had those guns in his hand and the time he fired, there were decisions to be made. Almost like a pop-up on a computer asking for permission to allow a site.
Except one of two things happened. Either those pop-ups that say "warning: shooting people is BAD! WRONG! FATAL!" didn't come up at all, or something in his brain just kept pressing yes until people died.
Either way, it was not creative part of the brain that was responsible for this atrocious, tragic event. It was the conscience, the logic that failed that day.
So asking if his writings were part of his inner violence is utterly pointless. Of course they were part of that. But they didn't come from a creative process. They came from a direct transcription of his obviously warped psyche.
Which leads to the question I think people are really asking.
When we see a piece of disturbing writing, how do we tell the difference between some lonely, shy kid who's the next Stephen King and the lonely, shy kid who is about to take a semi-automatic and kill people?
You don't.
Writing alone isn't enough. Just like a child's DNA isn't enough to completely recreate the mother's, a few very graphic stories isn't enough to predict who's a killer and who's just been reading Misery too many times.
You need more than that.
You have to look the lonely, shy kid in the face and ask questions. You have to talk to the parents, the friends. You have to go into their bedrooms and see if they're stockpiling weapons. And if you're really that disturbed, you need to call somebody and get some help.
I'm in no position to say what could have been done different at Virginia Tech, if anything. Personally, I think we might have to face the terrifying posibility that the only person at fault is the gunman. That nobody else could have changed anything.
We can scream about warning signs, we can scream about gun laws. But if a madman with no soul wants a gun, he'll find it, the law be damned.
And I certainly don't want us to become a country that can search your house or lock you in an institution if you write something that disturbs other people.
But the point is that the Virginia Tech gunman was not a creative writer when he penned those things. He was a journaler.
Let's take it like this. If Stephen King kept a diary, and if you read it, dollars to donuts it wouldn't look a damn thing like his stories. He'd probably talk about his family, may his writing (in general terms), what he did that day, memories of his childhood, things he hopes to do the next day. I doubt you'd find one decapitated corpse in the whole thing.
The same could not be said of the VT gunman. Because his journal (if he had one) and his writing and his thoughts and his actions were all the same thing. There were no checks and balances and locked doors between them. His theoretical journal would have been filled with just as many images of violence as the stories he wrote.
Or more simply: Stephen King writes fiction. The VT gunman was not writing fiction. Even if he called it that, it wasn't.
But the line between fiction and non-fiction is blurry and sometimes damnably hard to spot for even the most trained eye. And trying to use one blurry line to find another is just pointless.
In the end, when you have a piece of writing - all you have are the words and the decisions you make about those words. The author has done their bit. What it says about them is what you decide it says about them, actually. Until you meet the author in person, you can't really know.
So the question really should be: where's the line between the reader and the story?
And as to the Virginia Tech shootings, I would like to say that my thoughts are with those affected, the families and friends of the victims, the survivors, the students, and the school itself. I may be a writer, but for these things there truly are no words. I can only say this: may peace be with them all.
no subject
Date: 2007-04-23 12:36 pm (UTC)I enjoyed your whole post, but the above is mostly what struck me, as I've been thinking about this, too. I'm wondering, you who? People who are this on the edge would be very difficult to be around, let alone nose into their business. People who try, it seems, can't get very far.
As a society, we're not very well set-up for people like this. The focus is on guns, because those are tangible, but I agree with you regarding them. It seems to me that the real focus should be on prevention and targeting people who are shaky or on violent foundations (what you said :)), but even then, prevention is tricky.
If he'd gotten help\been helped before all this happened, I don't think we would have had news reports that said, "Yay! Thirty deaths were prevented!"
Well, thanks for listening, great post, and my sympathies are with the victims, survivors, students, and school as well. And for the shooter's family, as well--I can't begin to imagine the shame and horror they're going through.