Ignoring the Rest

For most of my life I have treated my skill for writing as a parlor trick. I grew up with a perception of myself that told me that my voice did not matter: either I write exclusively for myself and delegate it to obscurity, or I sell my voice to the common denominator of the masses and soil its integrity. There never felt like an in-between.

I decided to pick up creative writing when I was my most depressed and lonely in my life. My career had taken me nowhere, my friends didn’t like to disrupt their routines, and social media was simply a non-starter. I decided to take up creative writing because I was inspired by my own interest in storytelling as an unexplored branch of mathematics. Emotions, I thought, weren’t just something that is felt in the moment of experience: they were something that could be constructed using a combination of sublation (in the Hegelian sense) and subtext.

Sublation, as I apply the term to storytelling, is nothing less than setup and payoff. The cat wishes to catch the mouse, she stalks quietly around the corner, then pounces on her prey. A Tibetan monk wishes to protest the erasure of his culture, so he douses himself in oil, then ignites his body. The actions of character gives voice to their goals by modifying that which has been established earlier in the tale.

Setup and payoff is explicit in the structure of a story: namely, one must say that the monk is protesting the erasure of his culture before his self-immolation can be fully interpreted. Subtext, however, is that which is communicated by what is left unsaid. It is text that can only be inferred based on some form of shared experience with the reader.

Subtext is most often based on the subtleties of human behavior that people eventually pick up on as they interact with others. This makes for quick moments where characters are suddenly given the life they need to make an audience feel comfortable imagining the story as being a simulation of reality. A simple exchange of “you know, I think you talk too much,” met with a sly, “yeah, well…” can leave a reader guessing at the character’s intentionality without needing anything explicit in the text. The guessing is the character. It provokes the reader to reason about what was left unsaid and this tricks the mind into conflating their intrapersonal dialog with the character of the story. This is how a narrative establishes verisimilitude: the simulacrum of reality.

Subtext is where the art of writing truly lives. All else is syntax. However, the interpretability of subtext is contingent on shared history, and when writing in isolation, it is easy to become overconfident in the universality of one’s lived experiences and perspective. And it is here where alienation is manifest.

In retrospect, it was quite ironic that I had come to explore these ideas at a time when I was most lonely in my life. Perhaps this was what made creative writing such a pleasure. It reignited my love for other people at a time when I felt as if I had been totally robbed of it. Yet, the pleasure of epiphany is swift and fleeting, and without the joy of discovery I must then return to my initial dilemma: do I keep my writing to myself and face obscurity, or do I share my writing and risk alienation?

There really is no shame in choosing obscurity. Art that is ephemeral is intrinsically beautiful. And the risks of alienation can be frightening. You might be ridiculed and criticized in a way that feels like being punished for allowing the silent depths of your heart to feel heard through narrative. But, alas, I am a seeker of glory for reasons I cannot fathom, so I chose to share my writing—damning the risks. And yet, what I was met with was not alienation… but obscurity.

It’s easy to rationalize why this is: reading is an investment of time and everyone wants a guarantee of return for such investment. But, in a way, it felt worse than criticism or alienation. It felt like abandonment. Like it was my fate to forever feel forgotten, nameless, and lonely.

However, there’s some words of wisdom that I once received that helped me overcome this. A stand-up comedian I met once said to me: “if you can make one person in the room laugh, you’ve done your job—you’re a comedian.”

Suddenly, I had discovered the in-between. A thin fold between the dichotomy of obscurity and alienation. I had discovered the audience of one.

So I write and ignore the rest. No longer do I consider myself sharing my thoughts with the world. I no longer care about appealing to any common denominator or selling my voice to the highest bidder. No longer do I feel compelled to promote or advertise my work. Because I know that I am making someone laugh. I know who they are because they are me. They feel lonely the same way I feel it, they feel embarrassed the same way I do, they feel vulnerable and angry the same way I am. I know it, and they know it. And without the silent voice of my heart to share with them, they will be lost the same way I have been. And this cannot be tolerated.