Coerced Artifice Versus Wild Nature – Striking Balance in Writing and in Life

Throughout human culture, whether it be in art, politics, spirituality, food production, economics, or relations with other people, plants or animals, people's actions exist on a continuum between wildness and coercion. At our most human level, we desire a balance between cooperation and personal freedom. Only in recent state hierarchical adaptations (only about 1% of human history – 99% was spent living within natural habitat in small egalitarian communal bands) do we find coercion is even possible. Writing is an art but demands so much from the rational mind that it can be ambiguous sometimes as to how to strike a balance between wildness and coercion so that the work has wild truth at its heart but is shaped clearly enough to be communicated to another human mind. How can we present an organic representation of reality while manipulating that pure expression in order to catch and maintain the rapt attention of readers? Working through this dilemma leads to an interesting question that goes beyond the craft of writing and is central to the human condition: where is the line between artifice and nature?

As a writer in an MFA program, I'm at a loss when writers say that everything should be cut from fiction that does not advance the story or characterization. I am compelled by meandering narrative, even tediously slow-moving realism, the strange accumulative quality of random events, and characters that are not central to the plot. Not only is it difficult to know what is extraneous while drafting, but even when editing, it can be difficult to know when to cut when one's aesthetic aim is to create a complex and chaotic microcosm of eclectic reality. But the other day it came to me. I think what they mean is writers should avoid unintentional repetitiveness. That is, and truely, this is a matter of revision/redrafting, it's not effective to place a character in the same situation over and over again without new information or experience.

For example, I have a character named Margot who is addicted to crack at the beginning of the novel I'm working on. So there may be a scene where she wants to fix at work. Ok, now she wants to fix at home. Ok now I should not have her not want to fix at work again. At least not without some other new challenge, character or complexity. It does not advance the story to have her want to fix at work over and over again, even though she may want to fix at work day after day. Additionally, the same “type” of character in many forms, or duplicative “functional” characters only weigh a story down. I say unintentional repetitiveness, because, like music, it may be deliberately used to create a certain effect, but one should be aware of that effect. Regarding characters, maybe there are two young male characters who both seem menacing to Margot. In order for them to both work, they have to not only be two very different people, but they should also have at least slightly different functions in Margot's life. So, that's a definition that works better for me. Don't repeat situations/characters that are both the same and are serving the same purpose, that is, that are causing the same effect on the reader.

The revision of raw material brings me face to face with an idea that has been working through my mind for a while. There is a big experiential difference between things that are natural and things that are artificial, but what is the ultimate difference, considering humans and their works are part of nature and are thus inherently organic? Where is the line? This question seems related to the false dichotomy of nature versus nurture, as if one could exist without the other. That debate, biology/genes versus enculturation/socialization/parenting, has always bothered me because these things are obviously intimately interrelated, but so often talking-heads choose one side over the other. Scientific reductionism obviously doesn't do much to advance the understanding of this most complex, organic interaction.

All things can be defined as natural because created things are still created through human behavior and earthly materials, no matter how far removed from its habitat, but what we call artificial is the manipulation by one species to varying degrees of other species, materials, or members of their own species. In this way, we can re-term this dichotomy from “natural versus artificial” to “wild versus coerced”. So, within the broad nature of this planet, parking lots and all, we have a spectrum of things that are, on the one end wild, and on the other end coerced. Mutualistic balance exists somewhere on that spectrum, however, much closer to the wild end than our culture as a whole is currently. Because coercion requires force and struggle to go against organic structures and processes that have been naturally, organically and thus complexly adapted to all other surrounding factors for however long it took for those organic structures and processes to evolve, coercion wastes energy. It doesn't operate along with the natural grain of something( or someone).

Martial artists learn this – the most efficient way to deal with aggressive projected energy is not to struggle against it, but to find a balance of active/reactive movement that deals with the energy as it is and move with it as one wills. The same is true in meditation. The practitioner doesn't try to battle the nagging thoughts but instead allows them to pass out of the mind. Think about the violence of the combustion engine burning and shoving itself away from the earth into space as opposed to (albeit hypothetical) inter-dimensional travel or astral travel. Or swimming.

Consider the wasteful violence of arguing to control one's lover as opposed to striking a balance between compassion and an honest expression of one's own needs in order to find the harmony with one's lover's needs. Consider the wasteful violence of cutting down rain-forest in order to grow mono-crop for the consumption of factory farmed cows, whose very genes and bodies are coerced into creating cheap and toxic “food”. Contrast that to creating a community garden full of diverse heirloom crops. Diversity, small feedback loops, reduced carbon consumption: these all go hand in hand with the gentle re-localization of the economy. And when the economy is re-localized, power is re-localized, and coercion is reduced. The same concepts can be applied to the human religious impulse. For millenia, state cultures have been manipulating and violently coercing all people into bowing down to hierarchical state cosmology with a male boss-cop-king-doctor-god at the top as opposed to allowing people to remember/rediscover the egalitarian communal cosmology of the omnipresent energy of nature in all its manifest and diverse forms.

How does this anarchy rap relate to writing fiction? Well, it comes to finding a balance between the wild mind drafting and the necessary coercion that is revision/redrafting. When revising, be aware of patterns, of cause and effect, of meeting and subverting expectations, but allow your intuition to make these wild calls; allow nature to whisper cause and effect in your ear. As humans, we do work with materials, we cook and make art; it's our adaptation. And all species interrelate. However, artifice is so abhorrent and yet irresistible to us because we recognize it for what it is: extreme coercion. We must re-learn how to work with material, ideas, other species, the land and each other in a way that still respects and dances with the unique natures of those living others.