Writing as Revolution: writing the books you want to read

terminalpolitics:

Some of my longtime readers will know that a couple years ago I was fortunate enough to turn my fiction-writing into a legitimate second-career. Now, I don’t believe in credentials or authority and all that but, as someone who writes books, I want to say that YOU have it within you to write them too.

And not only CAN you write books, you NEED TO write them. Let me explain why…

There is only one kind of book worth writing and that is the book that you have always wanted to read.

@neuropunk-travesty made a small post last week about issues with some literary genres (namely fantasy) and suggested “occupying” the genre – I agree that this is a great idea.

When we talk about something like “The Western Canon” the viewpoints, contexts, and backgrounds of the works are extremely narrow. Each work has been added to the Canon because it adds to a meta-theme of “canonicity.” This is an intentional act of curation of “acceptable” ideas and directly privileges certain ideologies over others.

For a long time the publishing industry served the same function. As it existed under capitalism, publishing embraced ideas of “market” and “demographic cross-over.” The silencing of certain perspectives was always chalked up to “market forces” – sorry, kid, nobody would PAY to read that…

But these industries don’t just cater to the tastes of a paying audience, they shape these tastes. They reproduce over and over certain formulas and tropes until the presence of the trope/formula becomes mandatory – Nice YA Dystopia you got there, kid, but where’s the love-triangle?

The homogeneity of ideas is not a failure of capitalism, it is in intentional product of it.

You will rarely find works of resistance published, and when you do it is always about “inverting tropes” – thus reifying the “reality” of these tropes even by criticizing them.

If you want to find radical politics in a paperback, good luck. Even something like feminism only appears in its most status-quo-friendly and commodified form. I spent the last week looking for lists of “Feminist Fantasy Lit” and multiple lists big-upped Game of Thrones. That’s a problem.

We will never see the books we want to read unless WE write them.

Now, you might write your book and then it won’t make it through the many ingenious gates of the traditional publishing – and that’s okay. Nothing truly radical ever did.

But today we have the technology and the digital infrastructure where you can self-publish and get your message out. And honestly, fuck it – you can always write it long-hand in a notebook or pass around your hand drawn illuminated manuscript and other people will READ it.

Because that’s the thing: a book does not exist until you actually WRITE it. Talking about it and planning it are all great but it isn’t a book until it’s read by someone.

Every single person reading this has something in them that only they can say. Every person reading this has within them a book that only they could write.

Our goal is to create a better world. But we can’t create a better world until we have imagined a better world. We must produce our own radical fictions and revolutionary futures. We need to seize the means of producing literature.

You don’t think your ideas are revolutionary? We have been taught to fear and revere the thoughts held in books. That’s because access to books is easy to control and censorship is facilitated by the publishing process. My friend, just the act of writing your own thoughts and placing them next to the “sacred texts” is a revolutionary act.

You have something to say. You have a book to write. You know that there exists a book that you have always wanted to read.

You will never be able to read it until you write it. WE will never be able to read it until you write it.

Get typing.