Writing as a Life Line

Lately I've been thinking about art, especially writing, as a life preserver--tossed out to save the individual from drowning in the sea of generality. I recently heard a famous author (pretty sure it was Clyde Edgerton) basically say that one of the great things about writing is that it allows you to focus on an individual person's experience, and that this was especially refreshing in today's generalized world. Ever since, my mind's frequently wandered to this idea in the shower.

If you can call 21st century culture "generalized," it might be because of what Neil Postman called "information glut" (if you haven't read Amusing Ourselves to Death, I'll weep bitter tears until you do). Rather than getting fully invested in only one or two stories at a time, we get bombarded with bits and pieces of thousands of stories every day. Instead of a long letter from a close friend or family member, we see hundreds of short "tweets" or "statuses," often from people we barely know or don't know at all. As a result, we tend to just skim the surfaces of human experience, seeing only the short blips of information people make public on the Internet, and these blips often follow mass trends, such as the most popular hash tags on Twitter.

Sometimes it feels like a similar thing is happening to Hollywood movies. It's not enough to explore the struggles of one or two people; the rest of humanity has to get involved (example: you can't just have a child battling an illness--it's gotta turn into a global pandemic). That's why I love films like Life of Pi. On one hand, it's a grand, visual spectacle, but it's also an intensely personal, intimate journey of a boy and his tiger.

That's enough, inner film nerd...anyway, I don't wanna pick on technology too much. As Postman also explains, new media both "giveth" and "taketh away." The Internet may overload us with useless information, but it's also the world's biggest library of useful information. And social media allows people to organize, share stories, and solve problems on a mind-blowing scale (when they're not posting cat memes, of course). But a constant flow of stimuli and distractions can also make a person lose touch with the smaller, deeper, more internal experiences of life, and forget the subtle differences that make each of us unique. This is why writing is more important than ever. Through their work, writers can cut straight through the mass culture and focus on the thoughts, feelings, and sensations of one specific person.

By now you're probably thinking, "okay Laura, let's get to the cartoons," and I don't blame you. So I'm gonna get off my soap box for a minute and offer a visual aid:

On the left, we have all of humanity. On the right, we have a guy named Mike. Mike is somewhere in that big blob o' people on the left, but it's hard to really see him unless he's magnified. Writing could be that magnifying glass. If you wrote a story about Mike, you could delve as deep into his character as you wanted.  Maybe you could explain why he wears that t-shirt with a bird on it, and why that bird looks like a marijuana leaf (my poor drawing skills are not an acceptable answer). If Mike were a real person and you wanted to write a compelling article about him, you'd have to really get to know him instead of just looking at him or sifting through his Instagram photos. Basically, the point I've been trying to make through all this babbling is:

Writing helps you see below the surface. It lets you discover hidden truths about life and people.

In fact, art in general does the same thing. In the words of Marcel Marceau, "Only through art can we emerge from ourselves and know what another person sees."

On a related note, I recently read Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea. Talk about an intimate story. In a huge body of water, on a planet with billions of people, there's just one man versus a fish. No one else is involved in his battle to catch it, and that makes it all the more powerful. It isn't a blockbuster about humanity's war against giant blue marlin, nor does the old man have a smart phone to tweet about his adventure ("Finally hooked that giant marlin. Gonna need a bigger boat lol. #gonefishin #awesome").

Since this was a really text-heavy post, I'm gonna leave you tonight with a sketch of a couple characters I created a while back. They're named Kimmy and Kristin, ages 11 and 16, respectively, and hopefully they'll star in their own series someday.