Why stories?

Oh hi. It's been how long? I'm still alive. It's only been a month that so wasn't necessary whatever. Anyway. I kind of fell off the blog in the last month or so of my semester, but now I'm on break, so no more excuses. I've kept track of the amount of posts I've missed (I intended to post every Monday and Thursday... *cough*...) and hope to make them up at this point. We'll see. I've got projects planned (but who knows if they'll get done), so there's some post fodder.

This last semester was probably the biggest workload I've ever faced, and I definitely questioned the point of a lot of things that are emphasized in my department--or really I questioned the point of literary analysis. That class was pretty much my pet peeve of the semester even though the professor and the discussions were awesome and the pieces we studied were decently interesting. You see, I'm not really interested in analyzing literature for the sake of analyzing it, and this class really reminded me why. I think it's good to know how to analyze and to what ends people have analyzed things, but unless I have a reason besides getting a grade, I can't help but find my heart isn't in it when I have to pretend to be objective. "The text made me feel x because the author did x" is way more compelling to me than "x thing the author did means x and that's significant because x". Literary impact and interpretation are highly subjective, so why should I bother trying to write objectively about it, or even write about it at all if it doesn't touch me?

That said, most of the stuff we read does touch me to some degree (although the stressful conditions imposed by the schedule we study them by is not very conducive to me putting out quality product regarding said material.) Not a lot, though, just in a "yeah! that makes sense" kind of way. What I like, I like because I recognize and can relate to it. There's the "so what?". If I go any further, I'll just be talking about myself, not the text. I like it because I see myself in it.

That said, I think literature does more than just make us readers feel lonely. It also helps us understand ourselves and our surroundings better because it shapes and reflects the values of the society we live in. If we analyze our reactions and what about a text makes us react that way, it teaches us about ourselves, the people around us, and what factors shape the ways we think and perceive. It's one big mirror/camera that records more than we can ever hold in our hearts and minds at once.

Not that making us feel less lonely isn't important. In doing so, we grow to care about the characters we read about, which I think is also important. In fact, perhaps it wouldn't be inaccurate to think of the ability to give a fuck as a muscle that needs exercising in order to keep functioning--and caring about fictional characters helps exercise that muscle so we're better equipped to use it in real life. At the same time, it can also validate things we see in ourselves but not in other real people because they're too personal. It seems silly, but humans seem to really thrive on validation from other humans. But when everyone is too scared they're the only one that does something or feels some way about something, none of those feelings get validated even if they're common, and we become basket cases who hide ourselves away because we're sure people will think we're weird. Fiction becomes a safe place to talk about these things where they don't implicate real people (or at least, provide said real people with plenty of plausible deniability), but at the same time, we know it comes from people. So it still works as social validation--which makes it easier to care about our own well-being. More flexing of the care-muscle, in short. And that's why fiction is important?

... at any rate. I've got a thing to polish. Maybe I'll have another draft done before the break's up. And maybe one day it will be fit for the general public to view, and someone will read it and obsess over my characters as much as I do and we'll both feel slightly less lonely.