love note to a fantasy character
love note to a fantasy character
She’s wild and ballsy and sees what she wants to see. She is my avatar; she is all the things I want to be. The things everyone wants to be. She’s surrounded by different parts of me – my insecurity, my arrogance. They move in predictable ways; I know their every turn.
She’s unbothered by avant-garde and ultramodern expectations, pretentious standards of nonsense. They condemn the archetypal, censure the sentimental, attack any attempt to produce something from the heart and not from the brain fixated on being at the head of this pompous art revolution. Unadorned, uncomplicated. It’s a book with beautiful unrealistic characters, snappy unrealistic dialogue, absolute disregard for the criticisms of post-post-postmodern skeptics obsessed with the new and different – with cloying sentences that stink of abstraction, that hint at hidden meanings buried so deeply that even the author has forgotten what they are.
In my stories people have stories. They’re theatrical, archetypal, sentimental people, vital and flamboyant. So human that they could be real, so fantastic that they couldn’t. Dark colors are vivid and pulsating – coruscating, even, and that’s exactly the word I’d use. Movement is sudden and guttural, even when the tide sighs or a firefly lights up, described meticulously like a fencing match. Everything matters.
To live and write in a world is the greatest thing I can imagine. To live and write with justice done to the people I make, to the world I make, surrounded by people unresponsive to society, who move with my melodrama and my wide sweeping words, not against it. A cutting idea stays with me from the tests I took when I was younger, a cynic, a postmodern: “This writing that you do, that so thrills you, that so racks and exhilarates you, as if you were dancing next to the band, is barely audible to anyone else.” She hears this and we feel the same rage. There are people who will dance with me next to my band, and I’ll live with them, not the one’s who can’t, who say it’s impossible, who write things dryly and skeptically in that way that I hate. What I write is for her, and for me.