How to Make Art Obsolete

Or, woke/nationalistic/patriarchal/feminist/Christian art is propaganda

Last Thursday, in a near ten thousand word day, I finished the first draft of the novel I’m working on.

The end I’d been barreling toward since the first week of January arrived and it was both softer and harder than I thought it would be. I’ve gone to bed with these characters, dreamed about them, woken up with them, walked with them, talked with them. I’ve listened to their lives, letting them tell me who and what they are instead of imprinting my own experiences and life on them. E.B. White wrote, “Writing is an act of faith,” and I wrote recently that it’s an act of faith in yourself, but really, I wonder if it’s in an act of faith in your characters.

I do not sit down with a melody in my head, ready to transpose it to paper. I sit down and ask, “Where are we going today?” Stephen King calls writers like me “Pantsters,” those who write from the seat of their pants. Sure, there was a rough arc, an overarching theme that would carry, a thread running through, but how? How will they each weave that thread into the story of their life? No idea. No idea until I sit down to write.

Writing is practice. All writing is practice. All art is practice. I’ve always said this and won’t ever stop saying it. Practice means not just doing the scales, do, re, mi, but also improvising, re, fe, da. It means flexing your fingers and following the stories, wherever they go.

I read a piece recently in which the author wonders whether we can separate the art from the artist. In other words, they asked, what do we do when the artist of something we love, does or did something we don’t love? They worried specifically about particular stories being coopted for a plot devices.¹

I’m reminded of R.F. Kuang’s book Yellowface, about which I reviewed here and said more about here, and the question I think the reader is meant to ask: who gets to tell a story?

I worry that if the only people who get to tell stories anymore are those with lived experiences of the exact stories they’re telling, then that’s not telling stories anymore, that’s just telling your own story. And that leads to a lack of imagination and ultimately a lack of empathy for the stories we haven’t lived.

What good is telling stories if I’m just enforcing my own experiences on the characters within them? What good is an imagination if I can only use it to live within the frame of my own lived experience?

I mean the emphasis of that question to be on good. What good are we doing if we can only marginally fluff out the edges of our own white, Black, upper/middle/lower class, queer, straight, conservative, progressive, secular, religious, [fill in the blank] life? Why write at all? Really, I mean it, why write at all? If it’s just so those who don’t share our lived experiences can read about them, that doesn’t feel like making art but making propaganda—essentially bad art.

(

Owen Yingling

has some thoughts about why literary fiction sales have plummeted in recent years and I see some correlation here. Woke art is just propaganda, the same as formulaic romances or spy/cop/military books can be propaganda for patriarchy and nationalism.)

Louis Renard's Fish, Folio 4, 1754

The art is the artist practicing, improvising, imagining. The art should stand on itself because the nature of being human is to change but it is not, generally, the nature of art. Malleability is what sets the human artist and the art they make apart from one another. Even a published book is never final word (ask me how I know…). It’s just the word from that day.

We must be able to try to set the art apart from the artist or we’ll end up with bad art, artists trying to cram themselves into whatever box is culturally appropriate at that particular moment—and which is sure to change in a few years, making the art and the artist obsolete or, worse, anathema.

No, I say. No. I won’t do it. I mean, I am doing it, I have done it, and I’m constantly aware of the ways I’ve done it in this first draft, but I’m gosh-darned determined to undo it.

I concluded my review on Yellowface with these words,

There are no heroes in Yellowface; everyone is complicit in the deception: writers, editors, publishers, publicists, and readers. Yet, as one character says, “Writing is the closest thing we have to real magic. Writing is creating something out of nothing, it is opening doors to other lands. Writing gives you power to shape your own world when the real one hurts too much.”

And who doesn’t want that?

Right? Who doesn’t want that? I want that. I want to imagine a world in which the grief and pain of unmet hopes/expectations/love surfaces and finds resolution because there hasn’t been resolution in my own world on those things. I have to imagine it’s possible and so I’ve written its possibility. Does that make me complicit in coopting another’s story? Does it make me a liar or a thief or an appropriator?

No. It proves I’m being and becoming, I’m trying and failing, I’m practicing faith that something better exists, and participating in its possibility.

Books are finished things, but the ones who wrote them and the ones who read them aren’t. We bring our lived experiences to them, let them inform how they take shape on the page or in our minds, let them bear on us both in ways their makers intended or never dreamed of intending.

If we’re going to ask if we can separate the art from the artist, we should also ask if can we separate the art from the beholder of it.

That is the magic and mystery of art-making and art-beholding. There’s no easy answer to either question and when we try to answer either one with a final word, we make the art obsolete, which is to say, we eventually make ourselves and all artists obsolete.

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1. “Coopted for plot devices” is the definition of using one’s imagination to write fiction.