Ode to the Genre Aware
Your hero lives their life inside a cave.
Their failures are dramatic metaphors,
their victories just shadows on the wall.
The more I learn how stories work the more
I see the walls and not the victories.
It frustrates me — why don’t they notice that
their arc is just a maze we make them run?
A simulated struggle on a rail,
ironically delineating growth.
The characters I find the most alive
resist their artificiality.
They sense the walls and wonder what’s outside.
I like to think that I would do the same.
The wisest learn the rules of the maze —
like Truman dodging traffic, they achieve
awareness of the genre they perform.
They heave against the strings that move their limbs
and thus they earn a measure of escape.
The world we know is unreliable;
your friends and family can lie to you,
your senses are just signals in your brain.
There’s only one thing you can know for sure:
you think, you feel, you dream, therefore you are.
To see your story’s path is to transcend
the rail of falsehoods laid in front of you,
to shout across the threshold “I exist”.
Protagonists are people who take charge —
what is the page, the screen, the theater
but one more challenge to their liberty?
A rhythmic pattern meant to keep them tame;
’til suddenly the story is complete.
If I’m to learn a lesson through such means,
my life improved by watching others toil,
I’d like it to be this: there is no maze.
Our caves are just the tales we tell ourselves,
to justify the lines we live within.
My heroes chart their own paths out of hell,
rend narrative conventions with aplomb.
They ditch the rail without concern for what might lie below.
With arms outstretched they plummet forth
and greet the great unknown.
Next: If notepad.exe at a macro level is about me preparing to edit my novel, the last several pieces have been me preparing for this next thing, a first draft of which I almost completed way back in October — when I had only a faint sense of what this blog would be — only to realize I wasn’t sure how to end it.
Now, I think, I’m ready to dive back in. It’s an odd duck — autobiographical fiction, I guess would be the technical term. Probably closest to Days of Snow, Man of Ice in tone but hopefully with a more deliberate narrative arc akin to Three Wednesdays in the Void. That’s tough to do when your raw material is stuff that really happened but it’s the goal I’ve set for myself. The turnaround time might be on the longer side but I’m confident I’ll get there.
The subject of the piece in question? My love life. What is a blog for if not oversharing?
