When I took my first creative writing class at Truman, we were asked to write “non genre fiction,” meaning largely realistic stories. These are typically deemed to be more literary and serious than something with elves or aliens. I resisted, and wrote two of my three stories about faeries, but slowly this stance on genre and non genre fiction worked it’s way into my head.
When I took my next set of writing classes, one in prose and one in playwriting, I largely stayed in realism. Sure, I did a play about a bounty hunter in a post-apocalyptic setting, but it was really about coming home after a long time away and feeling replaced (I would argue that most good fiction, regardless of genre, eventually boils down to a story about people and their basic interactions and emotions). I may also have put a dinosaur in the middle of a love story. But mostly I wrote about realistic people in realistic settings and thought of it as serious writing (by which I mean I was serious about it and not that it wasn’t funny). I had myself thinking that in order to be a serious writer I needed to focus on literary, non genre fiction, and that the fantasy and science fiction which have always been my greatest loves were fun, but just not as meaningful or important.
Then my final project for playwriting came up, and I hated what I was working on. It was a one act about a bunch of high school friends the summer after their first year of college, trying to figure out how they’ve changed over the past year and whether or not they can go back to the way their friendships worked before they parted ways. There are things I like about it, but it was not cooperating. It was boring. The only people who could really relate without a lot more back story than I wanted to give were the people I went to high school with. It wasn’t working, and I was just not happy writing it.
As finals approached, I was naturally very busy. I had finally applied to grad school, a play I’d written was going up in the school’s New Works Festival and I was acting in another short play. I had finals to study for and a capstone to finish and numerous things to write and read and work on, but somehow my boyfriend managed to convince me to find time to read some Terry Pratchett.
And suddenly I recalled why I love fantasy.
I spent a lot of this summer reading Pratchett’s diskworld books, and that’s a tangent which I could gush about for much longer than I will here. Suffice to say that I fell in love. Despite the frequent humor and absurdity of Pratchett’s books, there was something incredibly powerful and meaningful at work, and it grabbed me by the heart and the gut and didn’t let go.
My play was tossed out and restarted.
I picked up one of the fairy tale short stories I’d written in that first creative writing class, and I revived that character to be my leading lady. The outline wrote itself. The play followed suit. And though it could use a lot of revision and polishing to become the best play it can be, it was mine. It was me, and it was true to who I am and what I love and why I’m in this business of making things up and putting them on paper for other people to discover.
Now I’m at school for comics, and I love it here. But I must remind myself constantly that I don’t have to tell serious or realistic stories to be serious about my work. There’s nothing wrong with comedy, or fairy tales, or alien planets, and in fact in some ways these may be more of a challenge than the largely autobiographical comics I’ve been working on thus far. I have often found that when I try to take myself too seriously no one else will take me seriously at all.
And so it is with humor and magic as well as realism and gravity that I head forward into my second month at the Center for Cartoon Studies.