People Are Messy. So Let's Tell Messy Stories.
Great news! My upcoming novel Lessons in Magic and Disaster just got a starred review from Library Journal. They call Lessons “a breathtaking work of magic, grief, and love.” And they say that my “vulnerable depiction of relationships and challenges within queer and trans communities is heart-wrenching but still reflects hope and optimism throughout.” I love this review so much, because they really got what this witchy book is about.
Just a reminder… if you pre-order Lessons and submit your receipt to this Google Form, then you’ll get a special reward in August: a PDF containing bonus material from All the Birds in the Sky, plus a novella-length preview of the sequel, All the Seeds in the Ground. I really really appreciate your support!
Life is confusing. How can your stories reflect this?
Ages ago, I wrote on social media that I prefer ambivalence to ambiguity. In other words, I’d rather know what’s happening, but see the characters struggle to figure out how they feel about it. I prefer this to the opposite situation, where I know exactly how the characters feel, but I have no idea what’s actually going on.
Social media being social media, I got a certain amount of pushback on that post, and I've been noodling on it ever since. So I figured I should unpack this notion a bit more now — since what is a newsletter, if not a place to rehash social media disputes? (Please don't answer that!)
The truth is, I like ambiguity just fine. And ambivalence can indeed be overused — in one of my stories, I even have a character say that there's nothing worse than unearned ambivalence. And of course, it goes without saying that real life contains large amounts of both ambiguity and ambivalence.
But the truth is, I'm way likelier to get annoyed by ambiguity, especially when it feels gratuitous or actually cowardly.
Okay, let's break it down.
When it comes to ambiguity, we're mostly talking about the reader not knowing for sure what the heck is up in a story. (When the characters don't know what’s up, that's a mystery that may or may not be solved, but either way, it feels different than the reader being kept in the dark.)
I'm a huge believer in the notion that readers like to do work — both imaginative work and detective work — to make sense of a text that is deliberately opaque or simply not spoon-feeding them. So I love any use of ambiguity that invites the reader:
to ask questions
to reevaluate everything they've read up till now, and
to do imaginative work to construct a version of events that makes sense to them
There's also ambiguity that exists at the margins, where we confront the fact that some things will simply never be knowable. A story in which the major facts are clear to the reader, but where there are a few details we can speculate over or wonder about, is in fact my jam.
Nevertheless, I do get sick of ambiguity when I start to suspect that the author simply isn't willing to commit to a particular storyline. I can't read the author's mind along with their books — so I can never know whether the author has a clear sense for themself of what the truth is. But when I start to suspect that an author is leaving things ambiguous because they’ve decided it's just too hard to pick a lane, or that they're not confident in their ability to pull off a particular story element so they've decided to leave it questionable, that's when I get stroppy. I hate it when I start to feel like an author is just chickening out.
Above all, I’m sick of stories in which we're never sure if fantastical or otherworldly stuff is really happening, or if it's all in the main character's head. Maybe there was magic, or maybe it was just a delusion??? Sure, this can be done well, and I’ve enjoyed not knowing for sure in the past. But it can also start to feel as though an author is afraid of being tarred as a science fiction or fantasy writer, so they're preserving plausible deniability.
It really depends on the type of story you're telling, of course. A surrealist blobstorm is going to have way more leeway to leave me confused about which way is up than a seemingly grounded tale with a realistic tone.
The reason for that social media post, which I'm all forcing you to watch me relitigate, is because I feel like it's very hard to have both ambivalence and ambiguity in the same moment. If nobody’s sure what the heck is even going down, then our main emotion is going to be confusion and bewilderment. True ambivalence can more easily occur when we at least have a sense of where we stand.
As for ambivalence… I've written before that I like characters who have strong opinions, who feel strongly about things and who chase their goals. That's not the only kind of character I like, but it is one sort of character that I like a great deal. An opinionated character can always buy me dinner.
My love of ambivalence comes down to two things that I adore: conflict and complexity.
Conflict is pretty self-explanatory, it's that whole Faulkner quote about the human heart in conflict with itself. Who doesn't love watching a character wrestle with two conflicting desires, or with desire and duty? Or even two different duties? My absolute favorite stories are usually the ones where people are deeply torn.
Complexity requires a bit more unpacking. I usually adore characters who can't quite make sense of their own emotions, who are struggling to make sense of what they are feeling or what they really want and need. I love characters who lie to themselves about who they are and what they are doing. Repressed characters, who have buried trauma or feelings that they can't even admit to themselves, are welcome to come sit by me. People who have a giant contradiction at their core — like their stated beliefs come with a giant asterisk, or they are two different people at once and those two selves perch uneasily together — are my absolute favorites.
As much as I adore watching a character uncover facts and solve external mysteries, my most loved kind of story is about someone who starts out not knowing important things about themselves and slowly gains more self-awareness over the course of the story. Ambivalence, to me, is the mechanism by which people often find that they don't know themselves as well as they thought they did.
But more than self-deception, I see ambivalence as the natural state of adulthood. The stress and weirdness of operating in the real world as a grown-up makes it damn near impossible to cling to a simple narrative about what we feel and want. This is one major reason why therapy exists. It's also a huge driver of the story in my upcoming novel Lessons in Magic and Disaster — shameless plug alert.
Final thought: reality is just confusing as fuck. What the hell is going on? Why did I just do that? How do I make sense of all of these smudgy, blurry ridiculous feelings? How can I be a good person when I'm living in a dystopian barfslide? How do I care about people when nothing they do makes any goddamn sense? How do all of the shitty compromises I made yesterday impact the decision-matrix for the shitty compromises I'm going to have to make today?
It's exhausting to live in a world like this. Sometimes I want fiction to help me escape into a world where things are a bit more clear-cut — but I also desperately crave stories about people who are navigating all of this garbage and coming out of it with their minds and bodies intact.
Music I Love Right Now
Jocelyn Brown is a legendary R&B vocalist, but she’s mostly known for her work with other groups. She sang for Inner Life, Nuyorican Soul, Chic, Incognito, Musique, Dazzle, Change, Cerrone, and a buttload of other artists. Her solo career is notable for one dancefloor-filling hit, “Somebody Else’s Guy,” which is a BANGER:
But most of her career is stuff recorded with other artists, making it hard to assemble a Jocelyn Brown discography. (If you’re lucky enough to grab the 1995 Deep Beats compilation, that’s a great place to start, but no clue how easy that is to find these days.) So it’s great news that somebody recently put out a compilation of a ton of her appearances as a lead vocalist on other people’s stuff from the late 1970s and early 1980s. It’s called Walk Before You Run, and it’s just crammed full of great disco and funk featuring this unmistakable, ringing voice. You can get it on Bandcamp — and hey! It’s Bandcamp Friday today! Go get some great funk. (I also highly recommend the first two volumes of Supafunkanova.)