Creative People Aren’t Good (Part 2)

Last week, I had a few things to disentangle about the commonly-held societal more that being able to make stuff means you’re holistically smart. This week, I need to continue that train of thought to explain the cycle of sabotage plaguing online fandom communities.

As before, I’m talking about English-speaking communities in cultures I can access. I truly don’t know if other communities and other language-speakers are doing the same toxic shit that we are. If you know the answer, please reach out! I’m very curious, and I love thinking and talking about the ways that our culture and language shape us and feed into themselves.

I’m also obsessed with trying to understand exactly how things got so fucked up, why they’re staying that way, and how we can fix it.

Cultural self-sabotage: a case study

Let’s talk about Neil Gaiman.

People who’ve followed my career for a long time, or who know me personally, are aware that I used to really admire Neil Gaiman. I described his prose as feeling like a friend telling a whispered secret story to you in a dark room. Loved the atmosphere of his writing, his mystery-shrouded worlds and complicated characters.

 I’ve reconsidered an awful lot about whether he’s actually as good as I thought he was, but I’m not ready to reread his work more critically yet. (If you’re interested in seeing some critical essays, let me know.)

Obviously, a number of potent allegations about his predatory behaviour have emerged. Some authors and people in the writing world have quietly mentioned that his name was a sour one among the whisper networks. Long before the viscerally upsetting details came out in courageous articles last year, at least some people in the BDSM scene in Australia and in fan convention and expensive professional writing class scenes knew that Gaiman wasn’t to be trusted.

But Tumblr didn’t, and for a while, he was the internet’s beloved English teacher. All of the affection for queer or queer-affirming teaching professionals who saved so many of us from peers’ rejection and cruelty was projected onto Gaiman. He didn’t deserve it, but we didn’t know that.

And how could we? After all, there’s a persistent, clanging notion that to be a creative person is to be a good person. That’s not true, but how did we get here?

Gifts from god

Hang on tight here, because I need to contextualise this shit with cultural Christianity. I don’t think North Americans, especially ex-believers and non-believers and pagans and whatnots, really grasp the power of the background radiation of Christianity. Little turns of phrase represent the way our thoughts and feelings are shaped by this background.

Now, the idea of sainthood is particularly linked to Catholicism, which also happens to be part of my background, but it’s certainly spread beyond that. Like mildew and algae blooming in one corner of a pond, the idea that creativity is a divine gift is casually accepted – and pernicious. (I’m not getting into the Roman roots and how all of that affected the way Christianity developed ideologically because frankly, I don’t know enough about it, and I’m also not sure that it’s really relevant to the discussion.)

“Talent” is considered a gift from god. A blessing. An arbitrary state of being bestowed by deities or fate. Even secular people tend to talk about artistic skills as though they just happened overnight, as though someone simply woke up with them one day, a divine act of reward or caprice.

Creativity is a blessing, so the corollary of that is: creative people are blessed, and blessed people are sanctified, and sanctified people are better than others.

This simple assumption manages to hold firm against every single disproof imaginable. Simply put, we expect famous creative people to be saints, and then we get pissed off, shocked, and disappointed when – surprise! They’re just people. Even the goddamn saints weren’t saints, as any hagiographer will tell you. (I’m not a biographer of the saints myself, but I have a few scraps of passing knowledge.) St Jerome was famously cranky. Don’t even get me started on the Apocrypha, the fig tree incident with Jesus, or any of that.

There was a time when we saw the imperfections of saints and gods as inspiring and relatable, but in the current era, all of those flaws have been sanded away. Some mistakes have a degree of acceptability, but others are too deep to bear. The measures for which sort is which tend to be painfully arbitrary. (Trust me, I have a lot more to say about our internet cultural standards and how fucked up they are, so stay tuned for that in the future.)

What is talent?

Here’s the goddamn problem. Because we see creative skill as a Thing, an inherent quality rather than a gradually developed one, our culture has a very toxic relationship with it. We don’t want to talk about the hours upon hours of skill grinding required to improve at something, and we certainly don’t want to admit that sometimes, people will just not get very good at something they practice. We don’t understand why some people are good at a thing and others aren’t. Some level of enjoyment or satisfaction, plus the willingness to spend time and outlast frustration plateaus, are the only concrete metrics we really have.

But those aren’t sexy and mysterious, unlike the concepts of talent and inspiration. Can anyone grind their way to looking talented? Can everyone do everything if they work hard enough at it? The first one is a maybe, and the second one is too expansive a claim to earn an honest “yes”. That whole Malcolm Gladwell “ten thousand hours” thing has been debunked by a bunch of people more patient and possibly more spiteful than I am. (As usual, misinterpreting and overapplying a scientific study was to blame. Who’s surprised?)

And anyway, repetitive work and practice means embracing failure. Failure is stigmatized here, in the English-speaking Western world, and is thought to indicate a moral weakness or faltering of some sort, so who the fuck wants to embrace failure? No, better to sigh wistfully over the idea that talent or inspiration simply passed us by. Never mind that creativity works the same way as other muscles, including the need for rest days.

Above: my own slow, patient, grinding efforts to improve my drawing skills. Drawing gems is really damn hard.

Who should we be?

The thing is, as I talked about last week, just making stuff well doesn’t indicate anything about the quality of a person.

Let that sink in. None of the artists or creative people you like are guaranteed or even likely to be good, kind, or otherwise lovely by mere dint of their creative skill.

However, that means something rather nice – anyone who’s kind, patient, or otherwise lovely got that way by choosing to be so. Anyone can develop patience and kindness for others. It’s not a god-given talent; it’s a skill that’s trained.

Artists are not better people than the rest of the world – and we ought to forgive them for it, and the rest of us artists need to forgive ourselves for being messy, complicated, mistake-making creatures. We don’t owe the world goodness because we happen to be skilled at something. Kindness and generosity are their own rewards, not the side effects of a skill. Learning to give yourself and others grace, benefit of the doubt, kindness, and help? We can all earn those skills, regardless of whether we can paint a good sunset or write a brilliant string of code.

If you believe in God, maybe this is God telling you to give yourself some damn credit. If you don’t, then hey! Take it from me and my multiple therapists; recognizing your own achievements is a requirement for survival. It’s very hard to be nice to others when you’re busy being shitty to yourself, and not having been “blessed” with a “talent” tends to make people beat themselves up. It’s not easy to stop hating yourself, but just fighting the ideas about what makes people good, important, or generally better than you is a vitally critical start.

***

A writer and artist, Michelle Browne lives in southern AB with xer family and their cats. Xe is currently working on the next books in her series, other people's manuscripts, knitting, jewelry-making, and drinking as much tea as humanly possible. Find xer all over the internet: *Website * Amazon * Substack * Patreon * Ko-fi * Instagram * Bluesky * Mastodon * Tumblr * Medium * OG Blog * Facebook

Mortuary Files

 

I put on the locket

that I bought when my parents nearly divorced

and mourned you

although you had not died

 

I don’t rank the people I’ve lost

they’re just an archipelago of scars in my mind

 

In no particular order:

 

There’s K, the former stripper and aerialist

full of storms and fighting wit and pain

 

O, wry and small and deep-voiced

with beautiful insincere eyes

 

A different K, her fragrant hair like a summer storm

and shifting brown eyes

and heady cigarette kisses, her grey halo

 

T and L, a milkmaid and a fairy tale princess

one a competitor and one

a lost love

 

S, with hard firm eyes and

strong opinions;

tea, and tobacco, and a warm laugh

 

Some were friends, some were lovers—

or something like it—

 

I haven’t counted every fallen robin

(to steal from a better poet)

but the strafes and near misses score my heart anyway

 

And now my regard and respect for you

adds a headstone to the rows

perhaps I should have known better, but

 

whisper networks are like telegrams were; they travel fast

but sometimes, not fast enough

and when you need them, they’re too late

 

So the things that other people knew before

are things that I’m only learning now

 

If I’d known them then, would I ever have

seen the magic in your words

or just the plywood and glue and nails and paint

of hollow setpieces

 

Burning it all wouldn’t scour your fingerprints from my clay

I guess I’ll forever have to say “good art, bad person”

but now I wonder how good the art really was in the first place

 

All the awards in the literary world

don’t add up to therapy

 

(and on its own, therapy

Is not always good, or enough)

 

I don’t need for the people I love and admire

to be perfect

or even to know who I am

 

But I wish I’d trusted the madwoman in the attic

because you made your father’s mistake

and I guess it

Runs in the Family

 

I have my own stories and poems to write

and a beautiful new child to attend to

and beloveds

and friends

and an art collective

and an online community

and an immense, overflowing stack of books to read

by people that aren’t you

 

but the people I’ve lost pull me back to

grey and ashes and sepia

 

and sometimes, it’s important

to count what has been lost.

An Open Letter to Neil Gaiman

The day I found out what you did

Silver lockets might as well have been

 piles of ash flowing between my fingers

Nothing was beautiful 

in my basement,  I curled up on a beanbag chair full of stuffing 

And slept until it hurt less 

It wasn’t just the assault allegations

Those were pretty bad, sure

It was the quiet whispers and casual mumbles that 

You’d slept with fans 

Young ones

And even if everything was above board, I couldn’t help but think

If I had lined up for hours or run into you in the right kind of club

With padded walls and restraints on the benches

Would you have ignored me because I wasn’t pretty enough

Or worse, paid attention because I was

We are not strawberries to snatch from the roadsides of life 

And now that I am older and past what Orwell called “the wild rose beauty” stage

And I am a rosehip 

If ever I was a rose, which is doubtful

All I can see are the lines and rows of beautiful tough mysterious Fey young women that 

Keep cropping up in your work 

and kept swirling in adoring eddies around your table at conventions 

You knew better 

You had the power 

You could crush any one of them in the palm of your hand 

Who would believe a young nanny over a famous author 

You used to be the person I most wanted to have lunch with 

Now all I want 

Is to write better than you.

I may never be as famous; odds of that are high and stacked against me 

But I can push myself harder and climb higher and feel something deeper 

And if I can’t, well,

I’m at least going to try.

Trigger Warning: A Dissection and Confession, Part 1

Hello hello!

Today I'm going to talk about something ugly and difficult. Consider yourselves warned. But before I talk about trigger warnings and Trigger Warning, let's define the terms of battle.

What's a trigger, exactly? 

"Trigger: an event or circumstance that is the cause of a particular action, process, or situation.

• "the trigger for the strike was the closure of a mine"

In mental health terms, the action, process, or situation resulting from a trigger tends to be panic, anxiety, anger, or even violent defensiveness. The trigger itself can be just about anything, but the most common triggers tend to be related to violence or abuse.

Triggers are often connected to other symptoms of PTSD, but can appear independently, the invisible scars of trauma. They aren't the same as a Garcia Effect-coded food or experience, such as--in my face--honey-dipped hazelnuts, on which I once ate myself sick. (The Garcia Effect is responsible for ruining a food once you've gotten sick from eating it: one of the brain's adaptive measures to keep the body safe in a world full of potentially contaminated food and toxins.) A trigger is not the same as a phobia, although it can activate the phobia reaction. For example, two people with a spider phobia might react to it differently--one might have a phobic reaction on seeing a picture of a spider; the other might have the reaction only when in the presence of a spider.

The (not) wonderful thing about triggers 

The second thing to know about triggers in the real world is that they are sometimes reasonable and sometimes absurd. Some are reasonable, such as violence, car crashes, decapitation, and sexual assault; some are small, like the words "bitch", "fuck", or "psycho".

I know this mix of absurdity and logic in triggers too well. Some, like being ganged up on in a discussion or being in the centre of a circle of people who are annoyed at me, are 'sensible things' to be afraid of. Some of mine involve apparently innocuous situations. Being in all-female groups, for example, or being in a space with no hiding areas, or having someone sharply criticize the very short List of my favorite people/things (Neil Gaiman, Leonard Cohen, Neko Case, John Green, and Farscape) can throw me into a bout of nausea and panic.

For people who don't experience panic attacks or phobias or traumatic flashbacks, trigger warnings seem ridiculous: like impedimentia, rather than useful, helpful tools. When trigger warnings first caught academic attention, and wider internet attention, they got abused on Tumblr and drew ire and panic on forums. A lot of us (myself included) thought proper use of trigger warnings would lead to a spoiler-riffic, dystopian, creative hell. More on that later.

What's the big deal?

There was a time when I thought they were ridiculous. An attempt to keep people from their emotions, from dealing with things properly. I got fooled into believing the rhetoric some people were espousing, suggesting that trigger warnings would balloon out of control and end up spoiling novels, ruining all discussions, and basically leading to the end of intelligible discourse in classrooms and forums everywhere. Some survivors (!) called trigger warnings ableist, some said that triggers were too arbitrary to pin down, citing things like the smell of paint or breakfast or a certain shade of orange; a lot of other people called them absurd, and so on and so on, in circles. A few people took a more moderate response to the faddish appearance of trigger warnings, but in response to this extreme climate, Neil Gaiman announced the title of his next story collection would be Trigger Warning.

When I heard about that title, though, instead of rejoicing in the stick-it-to-the-man potential, I cringed. That was after I realised I had my own triggers, and after I had developed close friendships with a lot of survivors. I'd been reacting to things as though triggered, but not having the vocabulary for it made it hard for me to protect myself, and even to know when I was being unreasonable.

Wat do: the musical

So what does one do, then? Avoid the potentially problematic work, which lurks like a shark in the ocean at the end of the lane, or risk pain and suffering by facing the thing head on? In my case, Trigger Warning was a persistent itch. Today, I caved and bought a copy. I have not yet read the stories; only the foreword, which tackled the rationale for the title.

It wasn't as good as I'd hoped, but it was better than I feared. It tackled that triggers are not a punchline or an absurd thing made up for the sake of attention and tone-policing--well, it didn't address those last two directly, but it did validate their existence. I can tell Gaiman either isn't a person who struggles with triggers, or else has a different cultural perspective on them from what I'm used to. And then I managed to read an essay criticizing the book's approach, and even discuss it with my editor and some friends--without panicking or falling apart. Okay, so I almost fainted in the shower afterwards--but it didn't derail my day or make me curl up and cry, something that happened during a nasty attack two weeks ago. Baby steps, to be sure. But steps.

But this paragraph, the closer, imperfect as it is, gives me comfort. It could be read sarcastically, but I interpreted it as sincere. A corner of comfort is a good start, but there are other books that have not been labelled which perhaps should have been.

"There. Consider yourself warned. There are so many little triggers out there, being squeezed in the darkness even as I write this. This book is correctly labeled. Now all we have to worry about is all the other books, and, of course, life, which is huge and complicated and will not warn you before it hurts you."

And yet, people still complain when a trigger warning shows up, complaining that it limits their freedom or that it's distracting. The thing is--do we want to cater to people who want to pretend they haven't been hurt, or help the people who have been hurt to brace themselves?

The thing to know about triggers is that they are basically pressure points. We all--from the angriest Men's Rights Activist, to a survivor and pro-choice activist, to a socially isolated government clerk, to a homeless person couch-surfing until they can make ends meet--have pressure points. We all have demons in the dark. So if you, too, are one of the people skeptical of the utility of trigger warnings, especially simple, general advisories like "Mature and violent content" or "warning: explicit description of child abuse", try to think about your own pressure points. Try to remember the last time something apparently arbitrary brought back a memory, and made you cry or panic or burn with rage. Remember the last time you felt out of control, or laid in bed and stared at the ceiling because it was absolutely impossible to imagine doing anything.

The Thought Police are not coming for anyone, and there are no Compassion Police to make us treat each other with sympathy. We ourselves have to take responsibility--for the sake of those who can't, but also for the many more who are trying.

The weirdest thing, though, is that having trigger warnings actually improves our ability to speak freely, rather than restricting it.  Yes, Virginia, you can have your cake and eat it too. How? That's coming up in part 2.

***

Thanks for dropping by the nest once again. Leave your comments, rebuttals, and vehement agreements below. Don't miss any of the phuquerie--get on the mailing list. Find Michelle on Twitter, Facebook, and on Tumblr, and find her work on Amazon. Check back on the blog to see when one of the irregular posts has careened onto your feed. This is the one and only SciFiMagpie, over and out! 

Breaking News: "The Loved, The Lost, The Dreaming" Review by C.E. Kilgore!

Hello hello!

I haven't reposted any reviews of my work in some time. I kind of figured that the links on the side would be enough for you readers to be sated with. After all, tooting one's own horn and all that can be annoying if that's all one hears about from said corner. However, when I saw this in the GoodReads Discussion about my book, I may or may not have lost it a bit. By that, I mean 'pumping both fists in the air and yelling "NO INFO DUMPS!" in joy'. I'm blown away by her thoughts on TLTLTD.

C.E. Kilgore is a writer I admire, but I don't dare provide too much information yet. Just make sure you go buy her books, because they're brilliant; it was an honour to have such a writer give me a review like this.

Book Review – The Loved, The Lost, The Dreaming

Posted on May 18, 2013 by C.E. Kilgore — No Comments ↓

The Loved, The Lost, The Dreaming
by Michelle Browne
Genre: Sci-fi Horror / Speculative
Publication Jan 2013
Series: None
Rating: 5 Stars

Synopsis: (From GoodReads)

Nightmares bleed into the waking world. Featuring a full-length novel, “The Underlighters”, and eleven stand-alone short stories, this collection blends fairy tales, horror, and science fiction. A city of shadows lurks underground. Restless ghosts, eerie dolls, and spiteful stepmothers wait among other dreams. These are haunting stories of love, madness and small disasters.

Review: – 5 Stars

This book includes a full length novel which is then followed by eleven short stories. The novel, titled “The Underlighters”, is told through journal entries written by Janelle Cohen, a late teen girl who is coming of age in a post-apocalytpic/disaster Earth future in which Earth’s population has been forced to live underground by a mysterious substance known as Dust.There are two very uniquely developed storylines that unfold within the pages and excerpts from Janelle’s journal. One of them is her own story, which tells of her experiences living in an underground city, her job as a training electrician, and her relationships with her father, her friends and her past and present partners. The other story is the mystery of the Dust, how it has forced mankind underground, the question of exactly what it is, and the strange things that start to occur both above ground in the abandoned cities and underground where mankind thought they had found refuge.

I am not a fan of first person narratives, and I am an even bigger non-fan of journal style prose. So, when I began reading The Underlighters, I will admit that Michelle had to do a great deal to win me over and get over those two stylistic hurdles in my head. To say that she accomplished this is an understatement. My biggest issue with first person narratives has always been the that while you can often gain a limited-but-biased understanding of the main character, the other characters remain flat and unexplored. I have only read a few authors who have managed to overcome the first person narrative objective limitation, and Michelle Browne has been added to that very short list. Not only did I gain a good understanding of Janelle’s character, I was able to form very good impressions of the other characters in the book through Janelle’s interaction and realistic observations in her journal. My second issue, the journalistic style, is because many authors who use this style can leave the reader with a feeling of being told a disjointed story. Though Michelle’s book did not change my dislike for journalistic narrative, she did an excellent job of telling the story without it feeling like you were only catching glimpses or disconnected pieces.

Aside from Janelle, the novel is full of three-dimensional characters and an exploration of different relationships, from father-daughter, to friendship, to partnership. One thing that might cause readers a bit of raised eyebrows is Michelle’s very bold inclusion of all manner of sexual orientation and partnerships. In The Underlighters, the society is accepting of all types, seemingly without discrimination. There are even those who don’t define themselves as a gender (Michelle uses xer / xim  / etc instead of her, him, ((replacing h with x)) when referring to these types) and there are those that are defined as “inbetween” (bisexual). Janelle, in the beginning of the story, is dating a female, Chloe, but she explains past relationships with a male, Raheed. She later explores the idea of polygamy. I think this exploration and inclusion is refreshing and adds unique flavor to her story.

The gooey center of the cake that made me really enjoy The Underlighters was the world building. It is beautifully done; both the above-ground abandoned cities (known as “Up”) and the underground city Janelle lives in. There are no info dumps and the two distinct worlds are revealed slowly through the journal entries. This slow world building eases the reader into both very alien environments and also adds to the mystery/thriller aspect of the story.

The mystery of the Dust was the cherry on top that earned five stars. Michelle does very little foreshadowing, which is often where authors stumble and reveal to much, giving the mystery away. Instead, Browne reveals tiny clues and pieces bit by bit, drawing a thread through each journal entry that gives you tantalizing ideas as to what Dust may be and what is really going on in Underlighter, but you won’t fully figure the mystery out until Janelle does.

By the end of The Underlighters, I had already given The Loved, The Lost, The Dreaming five stars, but the good points didn’t end there. Browne follows up the main story with several stand alone short stories for the reader to enjoy, each of them a glimpse at darker worlds within the imagination, dripping with delicately crafted description draped around solid bones of intrigue, mystery and emotional strings. I have only read three of the eleven stories at the time of this review because I find myself wanting to savor them. I want to devour them slowly and be able to revisit them in between my other review readings for a refreshing breath of really well crafted writing.

In a word – recommended. Keep an open mind and you will be rewarded with a dive into the depths of imagination that may leave you questioning, breathless and inspired.

So, yeah. This. I'm going to go wipe some tears away and get back to work on my next book now...keep in mind that an UNCENSORED (i.e. the same version as in the anthology) version of The Underlighters is in formatting right now and will be released for you guys THIS SUMMER! Woohoo!

*****

 

Thanks for dropping by the nest once again. Don't miss any of the phuquerie. Find me on Twitter, Facebook, and on Tumblr. More interviews and witty commentaries are coming. Keep checking back to see those surprise posts, too. This is your darling SciFiMagpie, over and out!