Twelve years ago today a very cool online magazine called Strange Horizons published my first short story. If you’re interested, you can read it here. It’s not terribly long (which is one of the things I love about short stories) and it’s even funny in many spots. It would be nice if you read it but you don’t have to. I mean you’ll fail the quiz at the end of this post but oh now I’ve said too much.
I wrote that story all those years ago just to see if I could. Specifically, to see if I could write a short story well enough that someone would pay me a professional rate for the right to publish it. It turns out I could and someone did, which was nice. Here’s the thing though–it also kind of screwed me up.
I’ve started a lot of stories since then and finished only one (and that one was for my kids). The overthinking part of my nature always takes over at some point in the process and wants whatever I’m working on to “be about something.” Wants it to be about more than just “seeing if I can.” Somewhere along the line I stopped writing to see if I could pull something off with characters and a plot and started worrying more about having it have a larger point. It sounds like a sensible sentiment in theory but in practice it gets a little too close to trying for art. And like the late, great Douglas Adams said, “The idea of art kills creativity.” Or maybe Vonnegut said it even better: “We are here on earth to fart around.”
Sometime after that story was published I stopped farting around. Writing-wise, I mean. IRL-wise I’m still a world-class farter, as my daughters can attest…usually from other rooms and through military-grade masks.
I can see tons of flaws in that story now but I’m still happy with a lot of it—especially the narrator and the humor. And yet…even now I still catch myself wishing it were more “about something.” I pretty much started this blog to evict that kind of thought from my head. If art happens by while I’m playing around with a pen and some paper, great. But, if I sit down feeling a need to make art, I may as well not even sit down since I cannot write that way. Everything I create doesn’t need to walk around bent over and sagging from the weight of A Larger Message For Our Times.
I need less art and more play. I need to fart around more. (Note from Paul’s daughters: No, really you do not. What you need is to get your gastrointestinal tract checked out. And maybe stop eating dairy.)
