I’ll start this blog post off
with a light philosophical conundrum. You know, because that’s what really
draws the reader in. Blaise Pascal’s logical argument for the pursuit of a
belief in God suggests that, based on the possible outcomes of believing in God
(infinite reward if s/he does, finite loss if s/he doesn’t), it is more
beneficial for a human being to try to
believe as opposed to entirely disregarding the possibility for the existence
of a God. Many of you have surely heard this argument before and will likely
not change your belief in God simply because a dead philosopher says it could
help you in the end. Nor am I really concerned with convincing anyone that God
exists in 500 words or less.
What
I am concerned with are the consequences of believing in something simply
because it is inevitable. In my experience, nearly every writer I’ve met has
certain things in common historically. We all loved stories, in one form or
another, from a very young age. Personally, I started off with an obsession for
cartoons and movies and fantasy novels. The idea of a story has always
captivated me. Storytelling, as an art form, is etched somewhere deep inside of
me. And, for me, this is God.
When
I first put pen to paper, so to speak, it was actually a box of crayons. My
mother told me recently that she used to find picture books that I had drawn on
printer paper and folded into my own books. Often they were of scuba-divers on
deep sea expeditions, or of astronauts finding an abandoned spaceship. This is
when I became a writer. And I am confident that anyone in a MFA program became
a writer long before they ever wrote their first “real” story.
But
what did I write, exactly? Right now, having been trained to understand writing
through particular lenses, I would say that those picture books were most
definitely fiction. I would look back on my scribbled dialogue and tell myself
that was the beginning of my career as a fiction writer. But only in
retrospect. Back then, before there was even an idea of fiction or nonfiction
or poetry or academic essays, I was telling a story that was as real to me as
my blood or my skin. I was telling the story of a real diver; a real astronaut.
Because when I started writing, the boundaries disappeared. I’ve heard many of
my peers call this some form of escapism. But I would argue that I never wrote
with an impulse to escape. I wrote with an impulse to explore.
My
point here is a simple one: writers are storytellers. And all writers exist in
a system of classification. We applied to schools under the guise of a
particular field: Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry. And these classifications are
certainly not useless distinctions. But they are just that; distinctions. They
are the lines drawn on a map to make travelling across the U.S. feel as though
you are putting puzzle pieces in their comfortable corners. However, these
lines are drawn for the reader, not the writer. The writer (in this exhausted
metaphor) is the cartographer.
So
ultimately my query to all MFA students, and more so to all writers and
storytellers, is this: How much does your “chosen genre” dictate your writing?
How much do these boundaries between Fiction and Nonfiction and Poetry and
Academic writing matter to what you are producing? Are you jeopardizing
creative exploration in favor of comfortability?
I
should note here that I AM an advocate of genreless writing, in theory. But I
am still bound by Fiction and I always will be in some way. And this is why I
keep the young storyteller with the crayons at the ready. The writer on the
fringe of reality. Because in my naivety, I was as close to boundless as I had
ever been. I was able to explore reality by creating the unreal. I was able to
paint infinite futures out of poetry. I was on the search for God in an 8x12
piece of printer paper.
And that’s
really what it comes down to. I hope that, with an awareness of genre and form
and how they either encourage or discourage or guide or misdirect… I hope we
are able to write with the same ontological hope embedded in Pascal’s Wager.
That it is worth trying to write
without genre in mind, even if the results end up being the same. Because the
infinite gains outweigh the finite loss.
Nicholas Becher is working on his MFA in Fiction and is in his 2nd Semester at FAU.