revelations
Jan. 22nd, 2002 04:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mamajoanIt's the oddest thing how an issue that has been plaguing you for so long can suddenly get resolved just like that. Out of the blue you realize there's another way of looking at it that, despite all probability, had never occurred to you before. Then you have to wonder, why the hell not? and feel dumb for a while.
Inside my internal monologue (what do you MEAN not everyone has one of those? Don't tell me that, I can't take it), there's been this ongoing sort of debate for years, ever since I wrote "Learning the Ropes" and had to sit and think for a very long time about what my psyche was trying to tell me. Frankly, the story was different enough from anything else I'd ever done, or thought about doing, and it was then that I really realized: I must never, ever say 'I will never write a story like X.' Although I frequently joke about that, I think "Learning the Ropes" really helped me internalize it. And after all this time I'm still not entirely sure what the story says about my psyche ... but I know that writing it was very liberating, and sometimes I find myself thinking about going back into that universe, and that's my signal that I'm starting to feel trapped or stifled in my current writing.
Anyway, uh, where was I? Oh, my internal monologue. So there had been this argument going on all this time, over whether "Learning the Ropes" was, as my overly pretentious inner voice likes to put it, a deliberate deconstruction of the fascist patriarchal hegemony ... or whether it's just a love story. Really what it is, and this is what my pro-love-story inner voice has always contended, is a story about two women whose love is strong, whose relationship is strong, and whose ability to take self-validation from within themselves and from that relationship, rather than from society, is strongest. And because of all that, they're able to use their "powers" (for lack of a better word) to bring a similar sort of enlightenment to a third party.
But that's not the point, because the point is that to frame the story as a reaction to / satire on / renunciation of patriarchal society is insulting, actually. It's like, by talking about the story in the patriarchy's terms, you deny it its own terms. The entire framework of the tale is outside of patriarchy, so why would you even want to talk about it that way?
I guess I'm not very coherent in describing it, but basically it's that the story invents its own foundation on which to base its universe, rather than using the flawed one that I live in. And once the pretentious pontificating inner voice thought about that for a while, it was like, "Oh, okay," and I think now it's going to leave me alone for a bit. Which is cool.
So maybe it's time to think about taking some of the characters out of "Ropes" and seeing where else they might fit, in some other story. Or at least, let them sit on my shoulders and whack me over the head while I'm writing, to keep me on that track. Whee!
Inside my internal monologue (what do you MEAN not everyone has one of those? Don't tell me that, I can't take it), there's been this ongoing sort of debate for years, ever since I wrote "Learning the Ropes" and had to sit and think for a very long time about what my psyche was trying to tell me. Frankly, the story was different enough from anything else I'd ever done, or thought about doing, and it was then that I really realized: I must never, ever say 'I will never write a story like X.' Although I frequently joke about that, I think "Learning the Ropes" really helped me internalize it. And after all this time I'm still not entirely sure what the story says about my psyche ... but I know that writing it was very liberating, and sometimes I find myself thinking about going back into that universe, and that's my signal that I'm starting to feel trapped or stifled in my current writing.
Anyway, uh, where was I? Oh, my internal monologue. So there had been this argument going on all this time, over whether "Learning the Ropes" was, as my overly pretentious inner voice likes to put it, a deliberate deconstruction of the fascist patriarchal hegemony ... or whether it's just a love story. Really what it is, and this is what my pro-love-story inner voice has always contended, is a story about two women whose love is strong, whose relationship is strong, and whose ability to take self-validation from within themselves and from that relationship, rather than from society, is strongest. And because of all that, they're able to use their "powers" (for lack of a better word) to bring a similar sort of enlightenment to a third party.
But that's not the point, because the point is that to frame the story as a reaction to / satire on / renunciation of patriarchal society is insulting, actually. It's like, by talking about the story in the patriarchy's terms, you deny it its own terms. The entire framework of the tale is outside of patriarchy, so why would you even want to talk about it that way?
I guess I'm not very coherent in describing it, but basically it's that the story invents its own foundation on which to base its universe, rather than using the flawed one that I live in. And once the pretentious pontificating inner voice thought about that for a while, it was like, "Oh, okay," and I think now it's going to leave me alone for a bit. Which is cool.
So maybe it's time to think about taking some of the characters out of "Ropes" and seeing where else they might fit, in some other story. Or at least, let them sit on my shoulders and whack me over the head while I'm writing, to keep me on that track. Whee!
