No. 10: If You Really Knew Me
Confessions of an Artist
Blame it on Facebook.
They showed me a free preview of a manhwa — a Korean genre of comic, in the vein of manga — and I went down a rabbit hole for two weeks that had eyes popping out of my head. This was a world of storytelling I’d never known. A realm of pure id, brazen and unabashed. Much like Korean cinema, which lives in the extremes, these comics spilled over with violence, sexuality, horror, taboo, in a way that often had me gasping, blushing, and even more, asking the question again and again: who in the world made this?
Usually, the answer was surprising — a sweet, soft-spoken, mid-20s female, who despite the primal chaos on the page, was an impeccable professional in real life, immersed in managing deadlines, story beats, consistency of artwork, and the pressures of satisfying a rabid audience, awaiting her next chapter. Zero signs of the absolute madness in the art. As if the artist had fully cleaved their shadow from their human self, each thriving in their own worlds.
Another incident comes to mind from this week.
I was the guest speaker at a Young Writers’ Conference in Belleville, Illinois, where dozens of kids, from grades 1 to 8, laid out their finished short stories and novellas on display tables. As the audience filed in, I read as many as I could, absolutely gobsmacked by the beauty, imagination, and intensity.
There was one in particular that got me — a 3-page tale called “The Unseen Struggle,” by a 12 year-old named David, who told the story of a homeless dog, ignored, unloved, and uncared for, who despite suffering a cruel world, finds a moldy mattress that he finally makes a home out of and dies. Yes, it is as tragic and devastating as it sounds. It was also gorgeous, lived-in, and wise. (The last line: “Though the dog felt rewarded in its final moments, no one ever gave a single thought to its existence.”)
I was still sniffling by the time they called me up for my speech — not just by the emotions of David’s story, but at the thought a 12 year-old had written it. Who was this kid? What had David been through that gave him access to these emotions? Was he the dog? Did I need to flag this to somebody?
After the speech, I signed books, mulling all these questions and how a pre-teen had managed to summon bigger emotions in me than a recent 600-page bestseller I’d recently wasted my time reading. Meanwhile, a tall, bouncy kid with big blond hair, a lot of friends, and a diamond-bright smile had scooted up to the table, holding his book.
My eyes popped.
Yup.
David.
“You wrote the dog story?” I said, aghast.
He smiled even bigger. “You should have seen last year’s.”
All of this got me thinking about that popular MTV show from the 1990s called “If You Really Knew Me,” a non-fiction reality show, where kids at high schools had to confess their deepest, darkest fears and secrets and desires to each other as a way of bonding and showing vulnerability. (Needless to say… this would not work today.) In the show, it was these secrets that were the currency, the soft underbellies of our identity that brought everyone closer.
Reading a book or a story is such an intimate experience with an author that it’s natural to want the novel to be its own version of If You Really Knew Me. And yet, twice in one week, I’d made the mistake of trying to literalize this connection between art and artist. Which is a stupid error for me to make because my own art has very, very little resemblance to my own life.
The School for Good & Evil is obsessed with twins, love triangles, questions of paternity, matricide, fratricide, and a lot of other -cides. None of these things have featured in my own personal story. (Probably a good thing.) Beasts & Beauty is even more out there — a transmutation of Grimms’ fairy tales into darker shadows of themselves. “The Princess Game,” a novella for Amazon, is about elite, prep school boys who commit a series of fairy tale murders. They speak in a language that I don’t speak. They derive from a world and background I have no access to. And yet, it flowed out of me as easily as Sophie, Agatha, and Tedros did.
So where was all this coming from?
Any beginning writing workshop will tell you: Write what you know.
I want to yell back: Where is the fun in that???
What I know is that my life is idyllically calm. I write, I work out, I see my friends, I go home to my goat-farmer partner, and we are asleep by 9:30 (while our Bernese Mountain dog that smells faintly of the goat and cow poop she ran around in all day snuffles nearby).
To me, then, writing about what I know is the opposite of art. It’s transcription, it’s replication, it’s boring.
Instead, I want writing to be about spelunking into the uncharted darkness of what’s inside — that mythical “source,” as the Tao Te Ching calls it — where we have access to a realm beyond memory and imagination. A place where we write from what we don’t know instead of what we know.
All of this built to an inflection point when I was starting this new novel, because I had zero clue how to write it. The main character didn’t resemble me in the slightest; the world building is completely alien; and the sheer ambition of it made SGE look like little living-room drama. Plus, the range of tones and subjects I need to know about in order to make it work… Take a look at these two non-spoilery passages that happen pretty close to each other:
1.
“That polar bear! Toto is his name. So graceful, swimming laps back and forth – 80 of them, I counted once – ignoring the crowds, even when he takes breaks to stretch his back or look at the sky, like he’s in his own meditation.” She’s more intense now, hands to chest, talking faster, English at a Spanish pace. “Each morning, they leave a little mound of ice for him, like a reminder of where he comes from. He rolls around in it, rubs himself with it, hangs onto every last morsel until it melts. It brings tears to me every time. And yet…”
2.
“EWO, Flight Deck. Three bogeys detected. Any IDs on the aircraft?”
“Flight Deck, EWO. Negative on ID’s. Fast movers, 45 miles out. Attempting communication.”
Static crackles and pops.
“Flight Deck, EWO. No response. Bogeys 35 miles out.”
“All stations, this is Tactical. Inside 20 miles is protected airspace. Maintain security perimeter at 20 miles. Repeat: 20 is a redline.”
“Flight Deck, EWO. Still no ID’s. 30 miles out. 29… 28…”
Looking at these passages together makes me think of two books that I recommend any aspiring artist read back to back:
The War of Art by Steven Pressfield
Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert
Both books get to the heart of the existential relationship between artist and art — and the idea that the more you can shrink your identity and allow yourself to have faith in the unseen dimensions of yourself… the more surprising places your art will go. Certainly in this new novel, I’m going way, way off the map.
Will I land safely?
Does it matter?
In the end, if there’s anything I learned this week, is that there is no artist. Not in the way we want some fixed answer as to how a great piece of art is made. Because the more you search and hunt and pin down that answer…
…the more like magic it all seems.
Have you made the mistake of conflating artist and art? Is it even truly possible to separate them?
Until next week –
You have beautiful and thought-provoking reflections, Soman! I've subscribed now, and look forward to read more.
WOW, this week’s topic is genuinely amazing. I believe there will always be a discussion about how people think artists should be versus how they actually are. It’s as if the dreaded “But you don’t look like you could write/make something like this…” is always haunting us. Nevertheless, I find it increasingly amusing to write about topics I know nothing about or that don’t exist at all in the way I imagine them to be, because this allows my imagination to soar and delve deeper into the details of the story I’m creating.
In a way, writing about the great unknown is a means of shattering the mundane image of reality by defying the laws of nature and telling a story that transports others to a distant land they can only visit through the pages of a book or in their dreams. It is both fun and precious to put yourself in the reader’s point of view and appreciate others’ art for what it is: a creation from their hearts.
Also, I’ve recently discovered that it is more common than not to find that a piece of art is very different from its creator. For example, consider an author of an epic love story who has never found romantic love herself, or an author who describes the training of an assassin without having exercised a day in her life, and so on. Yet, within the story, something of the author still glimmers—something that only the artist knows is there, while the work itself leaves others puzzled as to how that person could have created something like that.