it’s never just one thing

I don’t like to let characters off too easy. Rarely does anyone come away from one of my stories fully unscathed, fully unchanged. Rarely is any character in my stories happyandnothingelse. And if it seems like they are, no they’re not.

In the world of fanfiction, the one that I inhabited, at least, there was little room for happybutalsonot. There were a lot of strife-endlessgayhappiness pipelines. But very little acknowledgement of the fact that endlessgayhappiness is very rarely the last emotion one feels, forever. And that’s a little bit of a storytelling thing (stories can’t go on forever, nor cover every nuanced facet of existence) but also a personal gripe of mine. It wasn’t really that I was misled by fanfiction, though there’s definitely some unrealistic romantic expectations pushed under the guise of “this life could be yours if only you’d reach out and grab it!”. Like if you just worked a little harder, you too could become one half of a pair of glazed-over homosexual numbskulls who never feel anything except the warm fuzzies of their gayness and touching each other’s butts while they eat pizza and watch Netflix.

It’s an unrealistic, fairly grating, and fairly shallow approach to writing. I am going to draw on some of my own experiences from those times in my life to illustrate my point. I suspect any of you from the live-and-breathe-it side of the fandom world will understand me when I talk about the almost feverish “can you be in love with a fictional couple” delirium that can grip you when you are in the true thrall of your current OTP. At the time, frog-in-a-boiling-pot-of-water-esque, it just feels like really intense happiness. It feels like just one, uncomplicated thing.

Looking back on this time in my life makes me sad. Because it was about as far from just one, uncomplicated thing that I could get. I needed to be that insanely, mouth-foamingly obsessed with Destiel because anything less would fail to suffocate the crushing depression and loneliness I felt for pretty much all of my teenage/young adult years. The more I loved Destiel, the less I had to worry about the fact that it seemed like I was incapable of loving others or being loved in return. The more I loved Destiel, the less I had to worry about the fact that I didn’t know how to socialize, or hold a conversation, or move through the world with a healthy amount of composure and confidence as I settled into my adult skin, something I am still struggling with, way past the age where such a thing could still be considered quirky or endearing.

I’ve spoken at some length about my troubled relationship with fandom, but the reason I bring it up here is not to throw yet another pity party about it, but instead to use a real-life example to show that one, uncomplicated thing is rarely anything but. That euphoria I spoke about two paragraphs up, the “my fictional men are looking at each other again!” joy, is a multi-layered, mostly-pathetic and cobbled together attempt at understanding romance, subsuming and projecting sexuality, internalized misogyny, ignoring reality, and yeah, just generally enjoying a hobby by a fat awkward female nerd who couldn’t string two normal-sounding sentences together if you stopped her on the street and asked her to name a woman.

And this is where it gets interesting, because that… is interesting. It is interesting that what seems like one thing is actually many, and contradictory to boot. It is interesting that what looks, on the surface, like a normal nerdy hobby is in fact the very tippy top of a Titanic-busting iceberg. If I may be so unhinged, this is great character fodder. Not literally this, not literally me. But the ever-titillating “and what else?” of it.

It’s an interesting spectrum, because a lot of fiction, both fanmade and mainstream, is flat. Tropes thrive in this space. Everyone gets exactly what they want, and expect, and that’s the point. Introducing complexity into this formula changes it completely. On the other end of the spectrum, you get the dudebros of yesteryear who did shit that didn’t make sense or had very little basis in their (fictional) reality, all in the dreaded, think-pieced to death pursuit of “subverting expectations”, Game of Thrones’ final season(s) being your Platonic example of such a phenomenon.

I don’t think I play in either of these spaces. I don’t like boring twee fanfiction and I don’t like splattering my audience with a battering ram only because they wouldn’t otherwise be expecting it.

I ran into this issue while writing novel 2. Because I was trying to keep it mainstream-friendly, I did a lot of emotional flattening. However, my natural inclinations as a writer really clash with that approach. What I was left with, upon reread, was a complex story where a number of emotional beats completely missed the target, because I was aiming for the wrong target. There was a storyline that ended with a betrayal of a daughter by her mother. Originally, the moment when daughter finally stands up for herself and calls mom out was played as a heroic, empowering beat for daughter, something you would generally expect in a story like this, in a situation like this. When I reread it, though, it was very clear this wasn’t right. As tumultuous and difficult as this relationship is, being given an “out” by way of betrayal, a way that a daughter can finally wash her hands of her shitty mom sans guilt, would never be easy or heroic or empowering, unless you also happen to be the protagonist of a tumblr post wherein everybody claps after. It’s not empowering to tell your mother to pound sand, even if she deserves it. Even if she really deserves it. The easy way out, what I wrote in the first draft, is to suggest the daughter has finally “won”. But she hasn’t. Because she’s a human, and humans tend to feel sad when their parent does something that negatively affects them.

There was another storyline, this one following the close friendship of two women that, by the end of the novel, had soured to a pretty unforgiving point. Not an uncommon storyline. Outside of a dour literary novel, in the world of twee romance (less sure re the dudebros of the subverting expectations crew, it seems unlikely they are familiar with complex, nuanced emotion), the expectation here, at least as far as I understand it, is to kind of… brush it off? Like, water under the bridge and all that, we will continue on as friends, business as usual, but thanks for the drama between the covers. It would almost be too much (when I was still convinced this story was more romance than dour fiction) to pull the trigger on a friendship in this way, to say, actually, it really is over. Maybe not yet. But its slow and inevitable decline, despite neither of them wanting to let go, marches ever closer. Guess how things went for this friendship in my first draft? And then guess how things went in my second? Maybe only now, many years too late, do I understand the rightly scrutinized sentiment from many a Power That Be of, “it’s like a romance, but it’s not,” to describe a very close same sex friendship, because when it’s over, it may as well have been. Just without any of the perks.

There are other examples, which is a bit unfortunate. That first draft was a true rough go. However, the fact that I can use them as examples now means that I identified the problem and have since addressed it. I was going for mainstream appeal (as mainstream as you can get with lesbians, anyway) but that was never really a match for my tendency toward happybutalsonot in terms of narrative subjects. Instead of getting out the cement roller and making it even flatter, I spent my months-long revision process roughing everything up to add back in some much-needed texture.

Once I started taking my writing seriously, I leaned hard into the bittersweet. In my Wangxian days, you can hear it rattling its cup against the bars of its cell. Even in the Supernatural days, there’s a whisper of it. Writing will never be a true reflection of real life— it can’t be, nor does it need to be, nor does all writing aspire to be. That being said, writing grounded in real human emotion (even when those emotions are very far from grounded themselves) tends to be what I gravitate toward. What is a true human experience without a bit of happysad and sadhappy and lovehate and depressedgiddyness and resignedexhaustion, not even opposites, necessarily, just different, and chafing against each other regardless? Emotions are much soupier than we give them credit for.

There’s a reason bittersweetness feels so right. It’s one of the few feelings that allows breathing room, that accounts for the fact that you are never just happy, or sad, or mad, or scared, or lonely. Maybe that’s why depression, already bad, is my worst offender. It’s the ever-flattening of everything. It forces one thing, and one thing only. I struggle with obsessive thoughts as well. If you’re at all familiar with my writing, fictional or on this blog, that will probably surprise you about as much as water being wet. And obsessive thoughts also tend to push just one thing, over… and over… and over… and then they get bored and move onto the next one. They flatten my existence. Sometimes, my mental landscape feels no different than a newly repaved megastore parking lot, baking in the sun as far as the eye can see.

I’m no psychologist, but it stands to reason that a natural response to the hideous flattening of depression and obsessive thoughts would be to explore emotions that run the gamut, and do so at the same time, pushing and shoving the whole way down. And the only place I can really explore that response is in my work. And in response to that response, no character in my work is ever allowed to be unreservedly happy. The generally understood best (but also dubious) practice of “write what you know” may apply here. If I ever write an optimist, it is here I am admitting to stolen valour, to writing about a life and experience I myself have never and will never know.

I understand why not everyone likes this approach. Real life is complex enough, and people are looking for an escape when they get horizontal to enjoy their screen time. As someone who seems to have completely lost the ability to escape into fiction or to feel uncomplicatedly happy, this is just business as usual. It’s funny, because I’m talking like I’m going against the grain, or indeed, subverting expectations, when really, I am simply incapable of unshackling myself from my own.

As my writing matured, as it crept toward “art” territory, bittersweetness feels like the inevitable outcome. So long as I keep writing, I keep expecting to mature. Although maybe I’ll re-focus my lens down the road. Without a crystal ball, I can’t say for sure. I am trying to write simpler stories for “fun” between novels. They almost certainly will prove to be more lucrative. However, I am not sure I’ll ever be able to put my love of the bittersweet aside for the sake of getting published.

The ending of the first draft of novel 2 had not been earned. It was in line with my bittersweet bible thumping mentality, but the bittersweetness itself hadn’t yet been properly threaded into the DNA of the story. Once I got those things aligned, it came together much nicer (bittersweet-er…). It’s kind of a downer ending, but then again, so was Don’t Worry. Importantly, though, they aren’t just downers. They’re downers… with a smidgen of something else. Maybe not hope, that’s taking it a little far. Even happiness is a bit of an overstatement. “Making a weary peace,” I will settle on, whether that’s the characters making it with the world around them, themselves, or both.

As the saying goes: Reach for the moon of happiness. Even if you miss, you’ll land amongst the weary peace of a silent, painless, unconscious death in the coldhot embrace of space.