FICTION'S RED THREAD (AND THE MINOTAURS WITHIN)
Fiction cannot survive on tyranny or collaboration alone. Down that path await our minotaurs.
It is a strange balance, fiction. On the one hand, fiction like all art, demands a force of will, of vision, a lonely autotelic devotion that easily becomes tyrannical — but fiction also thrives on collaboration with other voices, with the outside, which can just as easily dilute what makes the work unique, flatten what makes it powerful.
The tyranny within is not always obvious until the writer is forced to accommodate external voices that do not agree with their plan (for the book or their careers). Similarly, the collaborative aspect is not always obvious — sometimes it’s just between the writer and whatever books / narratives are guiding them through the minotaured confusions that must be overcome to complete their task. Sometimes the collaboration is more explicit — a reader or an editor.
These strands — the tyranny and the collaboration — are ever in tension. The tyrant writer will never succeed because in their impenetrability and self-absorbed incuriosity they refuse to accommodate useful input that contradicts or unsettles their dominion. Same for those over-collaborators who cede too much power to the outside, who let the outside compromise what’s vital about their vision.
Managing the tension between tyranny and collaboration is one of the defining tasks of the writer, who like the farmer, must master a thousand jobs. We writers need to be stubborn and self-possessed enough to accomplish our hard task, and also curious and permeably spontaneous enough to incorporate counter-currents, to be in conversation, and include it in our work.
Fiction cannot survive on tyranny or collaboration alone. Down that path await our minotaurs.
The writer’s job is by necessity contradictory: to be the only one speaking and at the same time to seek and include voices that both strengthen the fiction and undermine the writer’s (and often the fiction’s) authority / tyranny.
I view tyranny and collaboration as the braided red thread that will lead us through the labyrinth. Pull on one strand too strongly and the thread snaps — hold either of these too loosely and the thread will slip from our grasp.
We don’t always get this right. Sometimes we are mazed at the page level; sometimes at the story / chapter level; sometimes at the book level. Sometimes it’s the tyrant that leads us astray; sometimes it’s the outside that dead-ends us. Sometimes it’s a chimeric combination.
Nothing will help us more in the labyrinth of the work like understanding our relationship to each of these strands and crucially which strand we favor, are vulnerable to. After all, very few of us are perfectly symmetrical in our forms or talents. Both strands can cause trouble for us depending on the moment and the task, but usually there’s a a side we favor or, perhaps more accurately, that favors us.
To know our relationship to these strands — to understand which we favor and why is essential to getting through the labyrinth. The better we comprehend this dynamic tension within ourselves, the more consistently we reckon with it, the easier the work becomes. Sometimes we solve this tension at an unconscious level and sometimes if you’re like me you address it more overtly, by being curious about and addressing the strand within that’s hypertonic or the one that’s hypotonic, the strand that you cling to too loosely or that is wrapped impossibly tight about you and your art.
Personally, I wrestle always with my cibaeño father, who never listened to anyone, a dictator in training who placed his pistol on the table during dinner, and with my sureña mother who seemed to believe that nothing she could do would change her fate. I wrestle always with my own doubts and resignations and self-recriminations. These are my minotaurs, and despite what the legends tell us minotaurs are not here to be escaped or slain but to be understood and ultimately quieted so that you can focus on following the red string of your art to whatever it is you need to write.
Tyranny. Which is fear-based. So little agency as a woman growing up in a fundamentalist culture that I tend to self-protectively bar the doors. I like this idea very much, finding the right tension between threads.
Very good post. The tyrant in my writing world is not so much my ego, but my copy editor, who refuses to do her job (punctuation, grammar, syntax) unless the story grabs her. When the tyrant in me rears his head, an undercurrent of collaboration surfaces that only I see.