Writer's Bloc

There are a lot of reasons (excuses) I give myself not to write, but there's one that stands out as an extension not only of the trouble I have thinking of stories, but also an issue I find myself considering (in various aspects) on a regular basis.

The main purpose of a fictional work, in a traditional sense, is to tell a story about a character, typically focusing on a single character more closely than others even in a story with a stable of protagonists. (I know this is a generalization, and that there are specific examples that break this trend, but I'm making no attempt to cover those specific cases - in my mind I'm addressing literature in general)

The "problem" I run into is that for a story to catch the attention of the readers, the character about with the story is written must be interesting in some way - exceptional in ability, motive, or circumstance...in short, a character who is expressed as an individual, rather than as a thread in a collective narrative.

The collective narrative is the "background" of a story that we, as readers, share with each other and with the characters of that story as being a common set of assumptions about the way the constructed reality of the story works. In general, these assumptions are causal and ubiquitous - in a story set in the modern day, the collective narrative tells us that (barring exceptional circumstances) turning a key in the ignition of a car will cause it to start. Flipping a switch will turn on a lightbulb. Educated people, white people, males, and urban/suburban-dwelling people typically enjoy certain privileges less likely to be shared by their less-educated, non-white, female, and rural counterparts. In a historical setting, the collective narrative might suggest different ethical norms, or different styles of dress. In a fantasy setting, the collective narrative might suggest that—so long as the prescribed formulae are observed—magic works, or that dragons eat peasants. The collective narrative provides the framework (often drawn from tropes already present in the genre, or normative cultural memes) through which the author, the characters, and the reader can come together and create a common understanding of the world the story exists in.

What makes most stories interesting, however, is that the central characters exist beyond the collective narrative - the characters, and consequently the stories, that we enjoy the most are decidedly non-normative. The stories we are drawn to are the stories of characters who defy normativity and pursue, either voluntarily or by necessity, goals that exist outside the realm of their typical experience.

Let's imagine the renown Lord of the Rings trilogy. Would Tolkien's famous story have been nearly as compelling if Frodo had remained in the Shire and pursued the normative goals of his hobbit community, rather than embarking on an adventure that would become a world-saving quest? I suspect most readers would say "hell no!" to this.

And yet, for me, this is one of the hardest parts of writing. Partly by upbringing, and partly by scholastic training (I studied sociology as an undergraduate), I have a strong tendency to seek out and identify institutions and cultural norms, and to try and intuit how they operate individually and collectively. I've developed certain schemata to a level of sophistication so that when a person mentions a certain action in a certain context, my mind immediately begins to identify cultural and institutional factors that would come to play, and probably series of events that would result from the interaction of the person' action, and the collective response to that action. In short, these institutions and norms create a sort of system that informs the collective narrative (in this case, the narrative being real life). And in most instances, the major purpose of the collective narrative is to preserve and iterate itself, to ensure the longevity of the society it reinforces.

With this in mind, every fictional story (and a great deal of non-fiction as well!) becomes, in addition to everything else it is, a story dealing directly with the role of an exceptional individual in a society with a self-defensive resistance to exception. It automatically becomes a narrative relating the conflict of the individual against the collective. By their roles and their actions, the central characters of a story challenge some of the basic assumptions of the collective narrative they exist in.

What still causes a great deal of dissonance to me is that so very often, the central characters of these stories are successful in their endeavors. This doesn't equate with either the schemata I've constructed about the way a collective narrative works, or my own personal experience. And so although I find myself continually returning to written word as a means of expression, and discover powerful ideas locked in my imagination, I have a great deal of trouble committing them to paper because the motion of individual achievement is in conflict with my expectation of a collective narrative that represses individualism in the interest of self-preservation.

Now I want to make it clear that I do not have any objection to exceptionalism, or to individual achievement either in real life or in literature. I get just as invested in stories of triumph against overwhelming odds as do most readers. Rather, as I was thinking about writing and storytelling, I began to realize one of the major reasons I have trouble writing stories that I find satisfying...or finishing stories that I do. Every story contains at least two seeds - the story of individual achievement, and the story of the collective narrative. In my mind, I tend to automatically assume the collective narrative carries more weight than the individual achievement, and so I arbitrarily limit myself not to what the central characters can do, but rather what they could do.

When writing, it's important to keep in mind that the collective narrative is a cohesive system, but it's not a closed system. There is no reason that a character can't challenge a very basic assumption of that narrative through the course of a story, and do so successfully. Interesting characters are liberated from the collective narrative, and given freedom to ignore, break, or even change the "rules" that govern them. Don't let anything limit your imagination! Just be careful about how you handle it - an incomplete narrative can destroy verisimilitude, interrupt the natural flow of a story, and potentially confuse and frustrate readers. If readers can't extrapolate the rules of the collective narrative from your story, then they'll be less able to appreciate when your central characters break those rules.