What does the world need from stories? This class has exposed me, somewhat, to what people want out of a story—not least of all what I want, don’t want, am tired of, am turned-off and -on by—but what is it that I need story to do for me, to show me?

I wonder if all this pressure on storytellers to “show and not tell” has diluted the art of fiction by restraining it to the imitation of nature—whether that nature resides in how the world works, or how human nature should/does work. My project for this quarter has a fair amount of sheer telling in it—every chapter has a mini-essay that describes some fact or facet of the speculative future in which the story is set—and in those bits of telling I’ve embedded ideas I think are interesting, presented in a manner I hope is easy to digest so that the ideas themselves can challenge the reader. The last quarter of this novel pushes into an almost entirely diegetic, explanatory mode, circulating around a variety of if‘s for the reader to choose between—and I am sure that, if I’ve titillated the reader enough to reach that point in the book, quite a few will be pissed off for being handed the reigns, so to speak, for how the outcome formulates the work as a whole—for how fate subsumes the actions and reactions of the characters.

What I think the world needs is freedom. Is imaginative freedom. I think people need to be goaded out of rote consumption and into a state of mutual creativity with the artist who has worked to provide them with an enjoyable experience. I admit that I get impatient with difficult art myself, and I want it to be gratifying, in the end—but the works that resonate with me are the ones that have expanded what I think is possible about the way we organize and interpret our lives—the ones that stir up in me an imaginative revolution, a peripeteia or reversal of my own values and conceptions of what is.

I teach preschool in the summers, and when I get stuck with the toddler class, I end up playing this game where I begin building something and a kid will want to break it down. I get annoyed with them and spend some of my energy keeping the kid at bay while I stack and stack and stack the blocks. And what I’m annoyed with isn’t that they want to break the damn thing down—that is, after all, great fun—but what I want them to understand is that the longer they let me build, the more they will have to break—the more resounding the crash!

Maybe telling—explanation—is more or less a “breaking down” of the story, a disassembling-by-way-of-reassembling the material of the story—the emotional and sensual content being subjected to intellectual re-contextualization. I speak broadly—I want art that releases bursts of power in my imagination. Every aspect of language is there for us to bend to our will, and stack up in such a way that, at the right moment, just the right amount of pressure causes a chain reaction, aided by gravity, that kicks up all sorts of dust—spurting out our ears as we return the book to the shelf.