Reality Satiety: A Rebuttal

Introduction

The following essay is something I wrote almost exactly eight years ago for a nonfiction writing class when I was going for my Creative Writing Master’s degree at Fresno State, as somewhat of a rebuttal to David Shield’s book Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, as well as a critique of the Creative Writing program and the snobbery that exists in the literary world. It’s a painful read in hindsight. Even back then, a part of me knew that this writing program wasn’t for me. It was for rich literary fiction writers. They didn’t teach me a thing about how to get published or how to survive in the real world as a writer. But I pushed on in hopes that the degree would help me get my foot in the door with literary agents and publishers, or help me get a teaching job. It has done neither. All it’s gotten me is $80,000 in student loan debt. The thesis I wrote wasn't being picked up by a literary agent when I sent queries out so I self published it without knowing how to market it. Would've been nice if they taught us about that. It was a colossal waste of time and money. I wouldn’t have any easier of a time getting published with this degree now than someone without a High School diploma. I would even go as far to say it was all a big scam. “Should’ve gone to trade school”, the conservative victim-blamers all say these days to people like me, millennials who fell for the scam that is higher education in the United States. Nobody was saying that ten years ago. I grew up being told college was a guarantee to success. Instead I can only get corporate wage slave jobs that you don’t even need a High School diploma to get because I lack enough teaching experience. And they sit and wonder why there’s a teacher shortage. What I should have done instead during my first semester is dropped out, gone home to lick my wounds, and then applied for Birthright Armenia and done an internship in Armenia, as I eventually would do in 2015. And maybe never come back, just get a job in Armenia and live there. I know in this alternate universe I never would have met my wife though, sadly. It’s just a thought. Shoulda, woulda, coulda. Taking classes in the Fresno State Armenian Studies program was fun, and I learned a lot, but altogether, it wasn’t worth it getting my Graduate degree. At least I was able to stop my wife from making the same mistake after she witnessed what happened with me after graduation. She was going for a degree, but they were not helping her get a job. The career center at her college literally told her to look on Craigslist for jobs that fit her degree in Digital Forensics. There are people who get paid to sit on their ass in an office all day and tell students to go to Craigslist. College is nothing but a scam. Anyway, here’s the essay I wrote eight years ago, presented here in its entirety.    

Suren Oganessian

English 245

Professor Church

December 13, 2011

                                                

Reality Satiety: A Rebuttal

            “Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?" - J.R.R. Tolkien

            When I started the MFA Creative Writing program at Fresno State in August 2011, I’d been so optimistic, so full of dreams and aspirations. It will be just like at CSU Monterey Bay where I did my Bachelor’s degree, I thought. Except this time, without all the pointless Latino Culture classes. Like in the creative writing classes I took at CSU Monterey Bay, all my professors will marvel at my writing, and all the other students will be jealous. I’ll be their star student, and I’ll make connections with insiders in the publishing business and finally hit it big.

            I was a big fish in a small pond back in Monterey, I’ve come to realize.

            You see, I consider myself, first and foremost, a fantasy author. Speculative fiction is my specialty. It isn’t the only thing I can write, by any means, but it is my favorite. But surely, entering a program called creative writing, I thought even if some people aren’t into that genre, they’ll respect my writing for what it is and give me some good feedback on it, maybe even finding themselves liking it if I’m lucky. Everyone has their own preferences; some people write romantic stories, some people prefer stories closer to everyday life, some people write non-fiction and some people write poetry. But it’s all basically creative writing. We’re all writers, so we should all have a similar sense of camaraderie, right? That’s how it worked back at CSU Monterey Bay after all.

            I was so young, so naïve, so full of dreams.

            But no, instead I am now the heathen of the MFA program. An outcast, scorned for not writing something you could force a 10^th grader to do a five-paragraph essay about. “Eww, genre fiction!” most of my workshop class thought after I workshopped the first chapter of The Epic of Ararat, my historical fantasy novel that takes place in Urartu (ancient Armenia) and concerns three princes who must try to save the kingdom from the vengeful dragon spirit that inhabits a mask that the king wears. A few in the class never even bothered to read or critique it, because it was too far out of the little reality bubble that they cannot allow their minds to venture from. I was informed (very belatedly I might add) that “literary fiction” was what I was supposed to be writing in this program. Apparently, my story didn’t fit into the very reality-grounded fiction that this writing program specializes in. In this creative writing fiction program, you could only be as creative as your professors allow you to be.

            Before coming to Fresno State I had never heard of there being a distinction between “literary” and “genre” fiction. I was blissfully unaware that such snobbery existed. Nobody had ever told me I couldn’t workshop fantasy. Nobody had ever told me that I could only write one style of fiction in this program. What was more perplexing was that not even those who were also on their first semester had any confusion about what we were supposed to be writing. They took to it like they’d been in the program for years. I was the only idiot. What makes fantasy so terrible? Are sonnets superior to haiku? Are odes a more valid art form than a ghazal? I guess I never took the class where we were supposed to learn that true art doesn’t include dragons. No, true art is about white, middle-class suburbanites struggling with some kind of emotional turmoil. If it sounds like I’m making hasty generalizations, I’m only mirroring the generalizations people have said about genre fiction. Don’t get me wrong, I respect literary fiction, as well as every form of writing, even the ones that aren’t exactly my cup of tea. I believe that they all have a right to exist, that not one form is inherently better than another. It’s about the way we express ourselves best. But it becomes increasingly difficult to respect those who don’t respect me back.

            However, since by the time this was revealed to me I’d already invested so much in being in this program (up to and including getting my aunt to cover my tuition until my late-arriving financial aid came in, narrowly avoiding being kicked out of school and evicted from my dorm), I was going to have to play by their rules. There was no turning back at that point. Besides, being in a creative writing MFA program had been my goal since I started college. So, I gave myself a crash course on how literary fiction differed from genre fiction. Most of what I found on the internet was written by other genre writers, heaving deep sighs and lamenting over being shunned by literary writers. I’m still having a little trouble figuring out how to distinguish between “literary” and “genre”, beyond understanding that genre fiction tends to be more fantastical while literary fiction is more reality-based. But then, how to account for books like George Orwell’s 1984 or the writings of Kurt Vonnegut and Jorge Luis Borges being classified as literary? Such enigmas! I suppose if you can see it being taught in school, it’s literary. If it’s more entertaining than thought-provoking, it’s genre fiction. But I’m tempted to think that Orwell and company are just well-written genre fiction that professors really like and give a free pass to, and don’t want to admit it is science fiction or fantasy.

             My problem with writing literary fiction is that reality and I never quite got along. The way I saw it before, if I wanted to write something realistic, I’d be a nonfiction writer. I thought fiction was meant to let your imagination run wild, to escape this horrible world, not immerse yourself in it further. But that seems to be what literary fiction is all about, at least in my understanding. And I didn’t know if I were capable of writing like that, when I was told I would have to. On top of almost being kicked out of school for late payments just shortly before this came to light, I nearly had a nervous breakdown over everything, along with a serious lapse of confidence in myself as a writer. Was my being admitted into this program a fluke? Did I really belong here? Am I a bad writer? I was so used to being praised as an undergrad. What if that was all dumb luck and I was really a failure?

            I did have one ace up my sleeve; the story that had gotten me accepted into the program in the first place. It was the tale of little Vartan Manukyan, an Armenian orphan who in 1915 had been living in an orphanage in the city of Van before all hell broke loose and the Turks besieged the city. I thought maybe this piece was realistic enough for the literary fiction writers in my workshop class to digest and maybe even enjoy. And so, rather reluctantly, I returned to this tragic tale for my next workshop piece, creating a new installment. I was out of options, and my next workshop was a mere few weeks later. I didn’t have time for self-doubt and emotional crises, nor to work out why my fantasy novel wasn’t good enough.

            The story itself started out as something I’d written my senior year as an undergrad to accompany my capstone project on the history of Armenian/Turkish relations. Being a Human Communications major with a concentration in creative writing, I was to do a 25-page report that pertained to my topic, along with 30 pages of fiction and two poems to accompany it. I developed it using a patchwork of different sources, ranging from eyewitness testimonials of Armenians living in Van at that time to the memoirs of one Dr. Ussher, an American missionary stationed in the city at the time. Some characters in the story (Dr. Ussher, Herr Sporri the orphanage director, and a few others) were real people. Vartan himself may as well have been real too, consisting of the combined stories of Armenian orphans and some of my own personality injected in (he’s as much of an escapist as I am, and really who can blame him). He took on a life of his own. The story needed to be real, after all I couldn’t have some Turkish genocide denier read it, snicker to himself and say “Heh, so the fantasy writer is writing another piece of speculative fiction”.

            But after writing 30 pages of it and turning it in with my capstone project, getting my A and then my bachelor’s degree, I’d had my fill of reality. I may be good at writing realistically about the genocide, at least so I’m told, but that doesn’t mean it’s what I enjoy writing about. The topic haunts me, depresses me, sickens me, and even gives me nightmares sometimes. In order to write about it accurately I need to immerse myself in it completely. I need to live it. I need to vividly imagine and feel everything my characters go through, to close my eyes and be in their world. It’s no wonder I’m an escapist fantasy writer. I hate reality. When reality isn’t boring, it’s painful. Reality is genocides that go unpunished. In his book, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, David Shields argues that we as Americans crave more reality. I must be an exception. Give me the plot. Give me the characters. Get me out of here. As far as reality hunger goes, I’m full. Besides if reality tasted like anything, it would either be tasteless, or taste like the disgusting Robutussin medicine I had to take when I was sick as a kid.

            But as it happened, Vartan’s story was just about the right length to send along with my application to Graduate School. So, when I was ready to complete my application, I sent it. After graduating at CSU Monterey Bay, I decided to turn my attention to The Epic of Ararat. Now here was the story I was born to write. I used my unfortunately boring year off from school (the economy made it hard for me to find a job, and the letters of recommendation for my applications didn’t come in on time to apply for Fall 2010, causing me to have to wait another year) to finally work on the novel I’d wanted to write since High School. Nearly every Armenian writer writes about the genocide; it is overdone in Armenian writing circles, even if not many outside of Armenian writing circles know about it. But what no one has ever done before is write a fantasy story that takes place in Urartu, back in the good old days, before Armenia became a hot commodity for every empire builder in the Eastern hemisphere. And no, setting wasn’t everything (a common complaint about fantasy). There are deeper meanings and messages, hidden between the lines. I didn’t want the villain to just be evil for evil’s sake. There had to be something behind it. I borrowed heavily from Carl Jung’s “anatomy of the self” when conceptualizing this villain, and researched heavily to make everything in the novel historically accurate; something a snobby literary fiction writer probably wouldn’t expect from a lowly writer of trashy genre fiction. After all, fantasy isn’t supposed to make you think, right?

            I think that this story has enough deep concepts and of course angst from the main characters (interpersonal family relationship angst, even) to compete with any piece of literary fiction. But no, it has dragons, it must be trash. No way is it on the same intellectual level as what everyone else in the program is writing. I’m almost tempted to write the same exact story only set it in the suburbs, give all the characters American names and take out the fantastic elements, and workshop it just to see if they’ll praise the same exact story when it’s written to fit inside their tiny reality bubbles. If you boil the story down and make it just about three brothers finally breaking away from their abusive father it probably could be literary. But it would also be boring. Even though I don’t especially like having to write about the Armenian genocide for the sake of being considered literary, at least that topic is interesting, if also painful. I just don’t write stories about modern, everyday life. So, if you’re wondering why I don’t just write something else ’literary’ if I dislike writing about the genocide, that’s why.

             I never wanted to be the next John Steinbeck or Ernest Hemmingway. I wanted to be the next J.R.R. Tolkien, or C.S. Lewis. Or better yet, the next Homer.  All of my author role models except the latter are frowned upon in literary circles (and we’re not supposed to write like Homer anymore, just write essays about Homer). But let’s look at how much more money the writers I like make. I’m sure J.K. Rowling never loses any sleep over the way literary fiction writers roll their eyes and scoff at her work. If they do hurt her feelings, she has plenty of money lying around her mansion to use as Kleenex. But doesn’t the fact that genre writers make more money go to show something? If literary fiction were really any better, why is it that more people are reading genre fiction? Why are J.K. Rowling and Stephen King household names when even the most acclaimed novels of modern literary writers seem to almost be underground cult classics celebrated mostly only by those in university English programs? David Shields (himself no fan of any kind of fiction, literary or otherwise) would argue that the publishing industry and its status quo of ‘the formulaic novel’ is mostly to blame, that people would actually rather read things closer to reality, and that the novel is a dying art. But I do not think that I am alone in my reality satiety, and I think the amount of money genre writers make speaks for itself. The ‘status quo’ wouldn’t be a status quo if people didn’t keep buying novels, and ones that don’t deal heavily in reality at that.

            My goal for The Epic of Ararat isn’t just money though. Okay, I don’t want to be broke of course, but I didn’t become a writer for money. My true goal is to write something that will both entertain and inform, something that will make people think, and maybe even spread awareness about ancient Armenia because no one seems to talk about it, not even the Armenians themselves. I’ll admit that story still needs a lot of work before it can be in the same league as other successful fantasy stories. Unfortunately, I will have to do this work without the help of my fellow students, because I’m not allowed to workshop it nor use it as my thesis. But actually, I’ve found that being in the creative writing program has helped me with my story anyway, because, surprise-surprise, fantasy really isn’t that different from literary fiction in a lot of basic, fundamental ways. There’s description, character development, themes and recurring motifs. I can take the critiques leveled at other stories in my workshop classes and apply them to my own work. My classes in the creative writing program have been beneficial to my novel in spite of everything. If I am able to do that, why was it impossible for some of them to critique or even read my work? “I don’t read genre” and “It’s just too different” are the only answers I was given, and I was left to figure out for myself what the difference was. If you have to ask about the difference between “genre” and “literary” fiction, you’ll never know.

            I personally came to the conclusion that the differences are only superficial. If you look past the differences, at their very core, they’re all the same. You can have well-written genre fiction just like you can have poorly-written literary fiction. From what I’ve seen literary fiction has its own clichés and tropes just like genre fiction does (the single parent, the closeted homosexual, characters coming to some revelation about themselves, etc.). But both forms can transcend them, they can both be about anything, whether it be about aliens or teen angst. I don’t see why fiction writers have to be so divided, why everything in fiction has to be pigeonholed into genres and why people close-mindedly act like one form is inherently superior to all the others. I long for the camaraderie I felt at CSU Monterey Bay, where all fictional pieces were workshopped equally, and it didn’t matter if your story were about dealing with a step-dad’s alcohol abuse problems or about dealing with a zombie apocalypse. It was probably only allowed because it was such a small program at such a small college, I realize now. Now when fiction as a whole is attacked by the likes of David Shields, I don’t even care anymore because my favorite genre is at the bottom rung of the fiction ladder anyway, and gets attacked by everybody above it. It’s nice to see the ones on top take some heat for once. I don’t want to feel that way, but I’ve been driven to it by the lack of respect speculative fiction is given.

            So after being sent into a self-esteem lapse from the largely negative review of The Epic of Ararat in my Workshop class, and striving to discover if I were even capable of writing anything literary (whatever that means), it turned out that Vartan, the real orchestrator behind my getting admitted into a program that only allows me to write literary fiction, was going to save me again. As it turns out, though his story was a historical fiction piece, it was also literary fiction, and possibly the only literary piece I’d ever written. After writing and workshopping an entirely new piece starring Vartan, about a real-life field trip the orphans of Van took to the real-life church of Akhtamar, it seemed to the class that I’d finally found my voice as a literary fiction writer. Besides some people calling me out on nonexistent historical inaccuracies that none of them had bothered to look up themselves, they were pleased with it. Even if the time and setting was still a little beyond the scope of many of their comfort zones.

            Of course, the point of Workshop classes isn’t supposed to be to write something your classmates and teachers will approve of, but to get some feedback on something you’ve already written. But I needed to impress them, and I needed to be told it was literary so I could know if I belonged here or not, and to know if I were really a good writer or if I were just kidding myself with delusions of grandeur before coming here. I silently smiled and nodded at being told it was “so much better than your first piece”; at that point I was grateful for any compliments, even if some of them did rely on taking a jab at my fantasy novel. I’ve had to become J.R.R. Tolkien’s hypothetical prisoner in his quote, writing about jailers and prison walls, to fit in and conform. Now I’m fairly certain Vartan’s complete story will become a novel, and it will likely be my thesis. Who knows, maybe I’ll even publish it, and then confuse and irritate my publishers by doing The Epic of Ararat next and going back to being a genre writer. Vartan chose me to write his story, and I’ll have to delve into the darkest aspects of reality to do it. If it is possible to hunger for reality, I wonder what over-eating will do.