*taps microphone*

Ahem.

Right about here is where I'd make one of those artistic statements. You know, talking about my Vision. Truth. Understanding. The deepness of me.

I was once required to make such a statement for a class. It wound up as the essay "Gustatory," which is somewhere in my gallery. One can avoid the actual topic by being amusing - it's a distraction from the main point, which is that, at essence, writers have little to say and take an awful lot of your time saying it.

Is this knocking the profession? Not hardly. Ask me in a month and I will tell you that writing is retaliatory. It's vengeance. The audience, they don't feel that you feel, and so you inflict it on them. Read Chuck P. if you want to see this vengeance laid bare. Or Jane Austen, if you want to see this vengeance veiled, quite literally. Or Edith Wharton. If Edith Wharton had a blog, half of New York would have flamed her to a crisp.

A month ago, my belief was that writing was cameraderie. Cameraderie is like vengeance, but nicer. Let's say you confide in a friend. You are inflicting your hurt upon her. Humans, peculiar animals, feel better when they share their hurts with other people. The only differences between confiding in a friend and going on a killing spree are action and consequence. The gunman or the friend, both want to know that you hurt because they hurt. That's empathy. Every positive emotion can be turned into a negative consequence - I can't recall who said this, but I once heard that the two most intimate things you can to do a person are kill them or fuck them. Women are more likely to be killed by their romantic partners than anyone else. It's cliche to say that love and hate are two sides of the same coin, but the same passion that ignites intense love of any kind quickly turns into intense hatred.

Perhaps later I will go into why I think about emotion so much - but for now, suffice it to say that my writing's always been about human emotional interaction. And the more I write, the more predictable they get. While we are given to irrationality, the moments at which we choose to become irrational, and the reasons for it, are by no means unpredictable. People don't surprise me much, even when they think they've put one over on me. And it is because, while writing, I think about possible outcomes and different situations; what would my character do if she was trapped in a tiny plastic bubble slowly filling up with water? What would my middle-management IT tech do if he were faced with overtaking the undead?

It is also cliche to say that nobody knows what they would do in an emergent situation until they actually experience it. I say, you're the same person whether you're figuring out a bug in a spreadsheet or helping people out of a fiery plan crash. Either way, you're reasoning out: Am I capable of solving this problem? Would I do better delegating? What is my risk, and why do I take certain risks and not others? I scratch that itch all the time - I haven't helped anyone out of a fiery plane crash, but I've had plenty of emergent situations happen to myself and happen right in front of me, and I know that I'm the sort of person who assesses risk to the other person, figures out a possible solution, and would help if I had the ability. Personal risks to myself rarely enter into it - even before I had a good reason to take my personal safety so lightly. (No, not saying what that is, but if you do some sleuthing I'm sure you'd find it.) The markers we traditionally associate with empathy or action fail us because they are more informed by our personal causes than by the person we're assessing. How someone arrives at their decisions is a far more important clue as to what actions they will take in the future, rather than what those decisions are. You want to know what a person will do? Figure out their worldview, and you can figure out how they make decisions. Figure out how they fit into Jung's archetypes - and how they don't.

Writing is psychiatry. (And vengeance. And cameraderie. And distraction, and dithering, and a rabbit farting rainbows.) Ever read a prose piece that just fell flat, for reasons you couldn't quite figure out? The plot was good, you liked the characters, but something about it was... off. That's a piece that didn't think about motivations, only actions. "Character A jumps off a building because she is depressed" exists in a shallow level. "Character A is depressed, and she jumps off the building not because Character B blew up her dog, but because her shoelace broke" is a little more intriguing - and true, when you think about how larger crises kick in those handy survival/distancing skills, but if the toast is a little burnt it can wreck an entire day. "Character A helps old ladies cross the street and brings water to flowers on a hot day, so when a prison escapee asks her for a meal, naturally she invites him in" - who wants to read about that naive ninny? What about "Character A is a born skeptic and believes it's every man for himself, but when a prison escapee asks for a meal, he invites him in against his better judgment"? Finding the common motivation in opposite people makes for a more compelling story. Simplistic types don't work for a complicated world.

The great works, particularly short works, can be summed up in one word. (Which explains my preference for one-word titles; if I can't sum up a work fiction or creative nonfiction in one succinct word, I haven't made myself clear enough.) Jane Eyre? PURPOSE. Notes from the Underground? MISANTHROPE. This need not be the actual title, and it need not be all there is to the work - but you need to have at least one word that, should a reader keep it in his mind throughout, will fit its parts. Thematic continuity. That is why writers have little to say and take an awful lot of your time saying it: everything that implants the emotional truth of the piece into your brain is not said outright. That would be boring. And possibly fascist. The gift is the distraction, the words that say to your brain "Look, over there! Hey, is that an onomatopaeia sneaking up behind you?" while the essence slips in through a back door and shoplifts little pieces of your soul. "Feel angry" as a direct command only works in amateur dramatics - the rest of us have to resort to trickery.

And it'll all change in a month, and it won't make any of this less true.