Here's the thing: anyone who has ever seen my drawings or read my writings or seen my videos may have noticed that I tend to lean towards darker subjects, with rape, murder, chaos, abuse, and torture often being key components. When I was a child, people found this amusing. They would smile as I put up drawings of monsters devouring a city, or people fleeing in terror, some of them being squished, trampled, or set ablaze in the process. But as I got older, their smiles began to fade. The drawings became more detailed and colored with vibrant red blood. The poems and stories described characters meeting their demise in graphic detail. The videos became more serious, and unsettling, and even depressing. It was only at this point that someone realized how "problematic" this could be.
Being a weird and lonely kid, I had since become skilled in finding a refuge within my own head. So I was not really paying attention to people's gossiping and commentary for a long time. Until, of course, my first book came out. And I began to hear, from various people: "Are you going to write a nice story?"
At first, I wondered if maybe this was a reflection on the quality of the writing itself; as in, "this sucked, when are you going to write something good?" But then I realized that it was a comment on the subject matter, which addressed things such as rape, murder, prejudice, and genocide. None of these things were "nice", I guess. Not really. Few people would say that they are. But in the context of the situation, it came off as being less of an issue of portraying the subject matter itself and more of an issue on how I was the person writing it.
It is no secret that any type of female "artist" (writer, painter, poet, dancer, etc.), while possessing a reputation for having the possibility of provocation, still walks a fine line between what is socially acceptable and what is not. When male artists draw, sculpt, and generally portray phalluses and vaginas for the sake of "art", no one bats an eye. Or at least, they just roll their eyes. "Boys will be boys" and all that (which, as I'm sure most of you would agree, is a statement that is bursting with bona-fide BULLSHIT). When people think of women artists, they probably picture a painting of flowers. Or a house. Or a mother with her child. Or perhaps a photo series that portrays the delicate nature of butterflies and robin's eggs. And if a woman dares to venture into the world of provocative erotica, into the realm of pain and suffering and disturbing imagery, then she must be nuts. Or cynical. Or both. In other words, it's not the "right" type of art that we should be producing. To which I say: ARE YOU KIDDING ME???
It's often interesting that even in the world of art, we still follow a set of rules. Men make this, women make that. Horror and fantasy? Oh, that is much too complicated for a woman to write. Blood and guts only cause you delicate women-folk to faint. Go and type up another romance for housewives, you Jane Austen wannabe. Demonstrate your frustration at centuries of sexual repression by churning out great works of literature like Fifty Shades of Grey and Twilight. Because that is what good "creative" women do, right?
Here's the thing: I am not ashamed of anything I write. I put four-letter words between my pages. I have described people of all ages being traumatized and murdered. I add as much seriousness and brutality as the story needs. I will never play it safe, because to do so would be to lose. There is no room in the creative world for people consumed by fear and shackled to the expectations of others around them. And what about those naysayers? Well, if you draw a painting of two robot girls kissing, or write a story about a group of children being murdered, or craft a provocative scene out of clay, then they are all just going to have to fucking deal with it. They can go off and live in their little bubble, and pretend that the world is full of rainbows and sunshine. They can go and create what THEY deem to be "appropriate" art (which they won't do anyway).
This is exactly my point. As a fiction writer, I pretty much write bullshit. By that I mean that not a lot of stuff, of course, in my stories is actually real. But the emotions, themes, and struggles most certainly are. So to brush all of the pain aside, to write a story in which nothing significant or bad or terrible or awful ever occurs, to provide a happy and super-dee-dooper story that makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside, would be to disregard the fact that anything terrible ever happens in real life. Books, like other forms of art, offer escapism, but even so, ignoring reality instead of facing it and learning to cope with it will not cause the pain to go away. We need to face our pain, and confront our fears. Does it make us cynical? Absolutely not, and we need to stop believing that it does. To turn away from the past is to deny it ever existed, which will result in grave consequences. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why I cannot afford to write a "nice" story.
You can have your cake full of rainbows and sunshine and act like nothing bad is ever going to happen. But for right now, I will take my blood-covered words and rigorously use my pen until smoke comes out of it.
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