One of my short fiction pieces was published in itch earlier this month and people keep telling me they wish it hadn't ended so abruptly. That abruptness was intentional; people are supposed to feel like they have been thrown up against a brick wall, like I did. I had felt completely disorientated after this experience, but I realise now that there wasn't enough groundwork.
I love the idea of the city and I love writing about the city. But that love can be difficult to reconcile with my writing. I see a bizarre character, like a man carrying two streetlight poles slung over his shoulder or a man preaching next to a traffic light, and I want to write them into a story. Usually, they become a symbol of an emotion or concept.
But how do I do this without in some way stripping them of their humanity? This sounds like a purely intellectual, and therefore redundant, question, but it's not. Who am I to patronise someone by using them as a symbol? How would you like it if someone wrote about you and then claimed that you embodied sadness or the rift between the classes?
In this particular story, I assume first that these people are in some way a danger to me because they come from a different social 'class'. Then I assume that they hold some knowledge about life that makes them spiritually superior to me. As if poverty is the portal to enlightenment.
That is my conflict at the end of the story. This is the brick wall I was thrown against. But, just like the previous piece that was published, I didn't tell people enough of the truth behind it.
In Miss Lecter, I hoped that people would see a break near the end, before the teacher imparts her moral. I was too chicken and too inexperienced to tell people that anything can be turned into a religion using pretty words. So instead I took the middle ground.
Being a writer means being brave. I haven't been brave enough.
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