To read Part 1, all you have to do is click to the previous post!
The unused epigraph for this post is:
“We are never more creative than when we are at odds with the world and there is nothing so artistically destructive as comfort.” – Excerpt from Nerd Do Well, Simon Pegg’s autobiography
I wanted to find something from Simon Pegg because Hot Fuzz is one of my favorite movies of all time. More importantly, Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright’s “Cornetto Trilogy” influenced me quite a bit when it came to writing Falling for the Protagonist. They come at satire from a place of love. Hot Fuzz especially is so clearly an homage to buddy cop films, not just a satire of them. Satire can come from a place of disdain, too. It can be made for cheap laughs. The Scary Movie franchise is a good example here. Is it satire? Yes. Does it come from a place of love? Not in my opinion. These movies seem to be more intent on disparaging and poking fun at horror tropes. Same goes for Not Another Teen Movie and others of its ilk.
I love romance novels. I also find many romance cliches and tropes to be hilarious or overdone. I wanted to express my love and poke (gentle, well-meaning) fun at the same time. Just like my heroes Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright.
As for the quote above, I simply agree with it. Wholeheartedly. For many creatives, the medium (or media) we choose to work through becomes our therapy, our chance to express our strongest and deepest emotions. When I am at odds with the world, I write. Sometimes I create amateur art, too. The utter destruction of America as a country, for example, led me to write blog posts and create art based on a quote from Frankenstein.
I had a teacher once who said that a book was a conversation between the author and a reader. Naturally, being all of fourteen or however old I was, I thought I knew better than this teacher. What an idiot! How can I have a conversation with the author? The book is their words. I never get to give my words back to them. Plus, Jane Austen is dead! I can’t give her my thoughts on feminism or whatever.
Anyway, cut forward a decade or so, and I finally came to understand what this teacher meant. Any time you read a work, whether it’s a memoir or a fictional story, the author is presenting their thoughts and experiences to you, and you, in turn, bring your own thoughts and experieinces back to the text. In this way, you can converse with the author. Just because they can’t hear your side of things doesn’t mean your side is nonexistent. The same is true for looking at a sculpture or painting. Watching a movie. One or more artists is presenting a piece of themselves to you, and you, in turn, offer something of yourself back. This is how artistic interpretation works in a nutshell.
Incidentally, this is why AI “art” is such a travesty; you cannot converse with someone who created art for no reason, who doesn’t know the “Why” behind their own creation. To bring it back to the Simon Pegg quote, comfort is “artistically destructive.” If we don’t feel anything, the urge to create is absent, or worse, perfunctory. Because it cannot feel, AI art is, therefore, empty and meaningless. Real art is of and for emotion, which is why it is (and must be) inherently and exclusively human-made.
What was I feeling when I sat down to write Falling for the Protagonist? Helpless, maybe. Scared. COVID-19 had changed the world forever. Politics in the U.S. were as precarious as ever. I had no idea how I was going to become financially independent. I didn’t know how to protect my sons from anti-Autism rhetoric. And I was buried in romance novels, noticing all these tropes and laughing over some of the patterns I’d noticed. I poured my discomfort and uncertainty into Falling for the Protagonist. I used that book to examine gendered dynamics and the entitlement that some people feel to other’s time and attention. As noted in the previous post, I explored reality through fiction. (For more of this, please feel free to check out a feature I wrote for Culturefly.)
Have I made a point? Who can say? There will be one more post about my “unused epigraphs” and then we will move on! If you are reading this in the UK, it is likely that Falling for the Protagonist is already available in a bookstore near you! If you’re in the US, the release date is September 22nd! Preorder now!
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