One of the worst things a writer can do to their work is follow a manifesto.
I don’t know what drives creatives to do that to themselves. And I especially don’t get why they would sit around a table and create parameters and guardrails around their art. But I have watched it stifle good work and lead to breakups between artists and writers who then spend their time cutting down the apostates instead of doing the work.
This seems especially true with the surrealists for some reason. These are people whose creative instincts are far greater than most of the rest of us. My admiration runs deep. But they always seem to be bickering about who belongs and who doesn’t, to the point where they seem to be more like parts of a jealous confederation than a movement or a worldview (or whatever categorization they prefer at the moment).
I’ve put out two anthologies of work (Surrealists and Outsiders - Thrice Publishing) and couldn’t escape controversy even as an ally.
I made what, on the face of it seemed like an innocuous comment about themed calls for submissions for surrealist venues. It’s a long standing practice as collaboration is one of the hallmarks of surrealist work. But I said I wonder why bother to put such limits on the creativity. Yeah… I said that.
What followed was a rejection of one of my submissions not on the basis of what I submitted but on the basis of what I said. What followed was the usual “unfriending” over on Facebook and, I suppose, my name stricken from the rolls. All of which was kind of a shock since I am not, never was, and never claimed to be a “surrealist.”
This led me to the understanding of what has been axiomatic in my experience since then; You haven’t arrived until you get a surrealist pissed off at you.
But it isn’t just them and, as I remain forever intrigued and supportive of their work, they aren’t actually the only thing I’m talking about.
Building walls around “the way a thing should be done and how to do it”, no matter the “movement,” also has a tendency to create a catechism of exclusion and inclusion. A tree house club where only certain kids can come up and join.
Silliness.
In the course of finding their voice a writer can go through many phases. They pick up the work of some great author or even a lesser-known author whose work they admire, and maybe they follow that inspiration as a kind of lead. They do some research on the “movement” that writer belonged to and try to formulate their work to that idea.
Or a writer becomes enamored of a certain “school” of thought. I’m talking about things like post-modernism, pre-post-modernism, magic reality, absurdism, things like that. Helpful and intuitive as a certain defined approach may be, the problem begins when the writer finds they are trying to squeeze in the art-view of the ideology into the work whether it should go there or not.
I am speaking from experience. Early on, I was criminal #1 in this regard.
And it was only when I threw off the boundaries and let the work speak for itself regardless of any affiliation or inspiration, that things started to get accepted off the slush pile. There was a lesson in that for me that might help other writers still struggling up the ladder.
But there can also be a landmine in this approach, and there have been times when I’ve experienced it.
Every now and again you may run into publishers who needs you to follow a manifesto, and reject your submission because it doesn’t “fit” anywhere. This too is a problem.
I will never understand the narrowness of a literary school or art movement with strictly defined guidelines, even if I can certainly understand how a writer gets themselves involved in such a thing. At first it may seem as though you may have found your “tribe,” but in the end you have to ask yourself if squeezing your material into an ism isn’t limiting what you are doing.
Maybe for most writers this is not a thing. Maybe such a discussion only addresses a certain kind of work. Once a writer has found their mantra there’s no need for such self-exploration. I get that.
Though the desire to refer to yourself as someone with an -ist suffix may be great and even a matter of comfort, there is also strength in being unaffiliated.
Even after thirty-some years and still as the king of the slush pile, in my cover letters I have of late resisted the temptation to call what I’m doing anything in particular. Surrealist, Absurdist, Pre-Post-Neo-Classical-Modernist-Gibberish… anything. And just let it sit as it is, whatever it is.
And in spite of getting people all mad at me and stuff, I’d still like to know why anyone would put an ideological limit on their creative impulse.
It just seems inauthentic and untrue.
Thank you so much for this. I've spent way too long reworking a book trying to make it fit into the typical structure of its particular genre when I've always known in my gut that the way it wants to express itself is atypical. Yes I want to improve the craft of it but frankly you can do that until the cows come home and die along the way. You don't want to entirely lose the joy of the thing!