Big Guys vs. Little Guys in the Creative Process

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“So, tell me about your process,” might be the most ill-advised conversation starter for a fact-based, left-brain type to put to right-brain, artistic types. If the non-artist, with a tendency for left-brain thinking, unwittingly enters into such a conversation, they’ll know the mistake they’ve about halfway through the artist’s answer. The smart ones walk away. Would that be rude? Yes, but it might end the self-mutilation fantasies.

Failure is a fundamental part of the right-brain’s artistic and creative process, but it’s not a dead end sign. It’s an obstacle, a lane closure sign, or a road flare that’s been placed there by others as a result of their failure. Elite, professional athletes experience failure more often than they succeed, 90% of startup businesses fail in ten years, and financial risk takers fail more often than they succeed. One of the primary differences between failure in art, and these other areas, is that most people will never see the artists’ failures, and they won’t want to see them. Artistic failure often occurs on a flea-ridden couch inside a dilapidated trailer park, never to leave. The artistic process involves failed starts, bad ideas, and love, that no one, other than the other artist, can see, appreciate, or understand.

“How do I create a great works of art?” a left-brained, fact-oriented individual might ask. You create. Every artist is different of course, but in my experience, nothing beats experience. The true artist should spend significant time in the corner of their trailer park home creating.

Are right-brain, creative types creating great works of art? Yes we are, every single time we create. Our friends and family might try to convince us that the piece we’re currently working on is a pile of dung, but we won’t know that for some time, if ever. We suffer from delusional myopia. We might eventually be able to see that one piece is better than another one is, but that doesn’t decrease the love we have for the other pieces that no one will ever want to read. The trick to evolving from a writer to an artist involves knowing when to move on.   

Harsh critiques hurt. Every time a reader tells us the project we’ve spent months on (at the very least) is not what we thought it was, it damages our interior organs. We pour our heart and soul into these pieces, and most of them aren’t very good. The dividing line between writers and artists rises here. Writers who cannot handle harsh critiques should probably quit the current job they applied for, because it gave them more time to write, and choose a career. (A poor Quality Review report is much easier to fix than trying to fix the ones we love.) If, however, that stinging critique feeds the competitive juices to create more dung, better dung, and so much dung that they eventually have enough material to mix it with the other necessary ingredients required to make fertilizer, they might be able to one day create a flower.  

When a left-brain, non-artist asks an artist about their process, they only want to talk about the flowers. If they unwittingly pushes the conversation deeper, don’t feel sorry for them when they start screaming for someone to help them out of that deep, dark cavern lined with the artist’s failures. They asked the question.

“If we want to know the fundamental elements of a serial killer,” criminal psychologists suggest, “we study their initial crimes.” The same holds true for writers. If the conversation starter really wants to know the road map of the artistic path, they’ll let the artist talk about the initial, unpopular particulars of the process.   

In that deep dark cavern, we’ll find some pieces that might have some appeal, but we’ll find that the artist stubbornly sought some angle they considered original. The other angle involves a tired theme on historical figures that serves to further a reader’s adoration of the subject. When we decide to tackle an article on an historical figure, however, we search for a unique angle that we feel analyzes them in a manner few have before. Originality is almost impossible to achieve, but it should always be the goal. Even if we adore the figures, we prefer to analyze them in a critical manner. The theme of this critique is that if we criticize an accomplished individual, there is an inherent compliment in there that we considered them worthy of critique.

The difference between writers and artists is a subjective one, of course, and it is a complex argument, but it might be as simple writers report on Big Guys and artists find little guys doing little things more appealing. Most of the characters on this sight are so niche, that they have trouble finding a niche. When the brilliant Seinfeld hit the airwaves, numerous friends recommended the show to us. “You have got to watch this show. This show is so you that you might be ticked off that they stole your whole mindset.” When we finally broke down and watched the show, the effect was everything our friends thought it would be. We were almost depressed a couple of episodes in. The observations that Jerry Seinfeld, Larry David, and all of the other writers of Seinfeld made felt so familiar they almost felt familial. We enjoyed the material they displayed on Seinfeld and Curb your Enthusiasm so much that it almost felt like they beat us to the punch. They were funnier than we are, of course, but their acute focus on the minutiae of life depressed us, because we thought that if we learned how to channel that affliction properly that could be us up there.

Writers capture Big Subjects of national and worldwide interest, but the focus of this site is on the little things that a little guy did on his way to the apothecary. When we’re watching one of the Big Guys, on one of the Big Network shows, interview a Big Subject who fascinates the world, for example, we obsess over the “staged walk” the production staff put together before the interview started. In the course of the interview, the production crew will cue the shot of the subject at work. We have no problem with that, as it displays the subject doing what they do. Yet, every interview segment interrupts their broadcast again with a shot of the man or woman of interest exiting their office and walking down the sidewalk. Why do we have to see this subject of interest walk away from his office, down a sidewalk? Who was the first producer to introduce this shot? What value does it bring to the broadcast? We can’t get past these quirks, and they distract us so much that we miss much of what the subject says following the staged walk, and in most cases, we’re not that interested in what the celebrity/news figure’s script says anyway.

We’re obsessed with these otherwise irrelevant forms of manipulation. Does the production crew believe that these staged walks might develop some sort of familiarity with the subject? “There he is walking out of his office on an otherwise average day, just like I do, and look Donna, he walks just like I do when I don’t know anyone is watching.”   

The eye-catching pieces on something familiar generate clicks, but most of the subjects that intrigue us are difficult to headline. Of the few eye-catching subjects we’ve covered, we’ve often found a less than traditional angle. Our M.O. for doing this abides by the rationale that it’s almost impossible to write anything new, different, or original. “Everything that you want to say has already been said, and that’s been said before too.”  

We analyze the other side, the less popular side, of what drives our ‘so niche they can’t find a niche’ characters to be so different. We prefer a critical view that attempts to analyze a subject from a more objective (some might say cynical) angle that scrutinizes the subject in a more comprehensive manner.

This guy that we’re talking to in our employer’s cafeteria obviously knows how to present us with his most photogenic side, we think while he jibber jabbers, but what’s in the other side? Is there another side? Is there a side that might surprise him if we dig deep enough? When we present this other side, we want to avoid being critical for the sole purpose of being critical. We all have less attractive sides, and some of us accidentally slip into the notion that the only noteworthy angle to cover is the negative. Quality coverage of the negative can be so exciting and provocative. It also has the feel of being more artistic, poignant, and meaningful. Yet, being negative for the sake of being negative can feel as tedious as focusing too much on the positives. If we do it right, the positive and negative characteristics of their other side, the less than photogenic side, should leak out in the course of the narrative. The presentation should feel comprehensive and organic.   

The characters we write about aren’t weird for the sake of being weird either. They’re not in visible pain, and they’re not manic-depressive. They’re just a little off. If we were to calculate them by degrees, with 90 degrees being the perfect angle, they might fall between 80 and 85 degrees. They’ve spent their lives a couple of degrees away from being normal, and we can see it when they accidentally flash their less than photogenic side. We consider it our job to capture that side, be it positive or negative.

If we met them on the street, we might consider them the most normal joe we’ve ever met. They have normal haircuts, a wage that permits them to purchase the latest fashionable clothing, and their company’s dental plan allows them to appear upper middle class with 2.5 kids in a two-bathroom house. They don’t say the wrong things either, for they’ve watched as much TV as we have. They know the bullet points we’ve established for identifying abnormal people, in other words, and they know how to assimilate. Those of us in the middle of the pack seek the fringe. Those on the fringe seek the middle of the pack, so no one considers us on the fringe looking in on the normal world. We want in, and an overwhelming percentage of us are not comfortable with exposing the eccentricities that have kept us on the outside looking in.

To find the insecure and overcompensating weird, we need to talk to them. We need to find a way to spend long hours with them, usually in an office space, sitting next to them, talking about our wives, our lives, and our lawn. Affectations of weird don’t comfort them. It sets off their spidey senses. So, we have to be weird too, and we are weird. We all have eccentricities, and when we share our eccentricities, they feel more comfortable sharing theirs. We take an “I give you me, so you’ll give me you” approach to our discussion.   

They’re guarded. They don’t know we’re writers patching together a quilt, because we don’t know that yet. We’re just talking to them. They’ve been mocked before, however, and if we are are going to have an enriching conversation with them, we are going to have to help them over their hurdles and through the multi-tiered mazes they’ve created for rubber neckers wanting to witness their eccentricities for comedy. This isn’t a Herculean task, however, because they love to talk about themselves. Most of us do. Most of us enjoy it so much that those in our familiar nucleus are no longer interested in our story. They’ve heard our stories so many times that we fear we might not be as interesting as we are. When fate puts us next to a curious person who is so interested in what we have to say, it’s exciting. We find ourselves saying things we wouldn’t even say in the comfort of our bedroom. Our spouses might cringe when we say such things, but we’ve had these thoughts bottled up for so long, and we’ve never had a person this interested before, and we don’t want to disappoint them for that would be disappointing.

Our subject might not know it, but we are carving them up, removing the extraneous fat from their testimonial, deleting the painstaking details involved in proving a point, deleting their tired repetition, and even deleting them from their story. It surprises them when we do that, for as embarrassing and revealing as their details were, at least they were their details, and they didn’t expect to see themselves deleted. They thought it was all about them. The talker has no problem laughing at themselves, of course, but to see their moment of crisis turned into a danceable number is just beyond the pale.

The difficulty involved in selling such strange, unconnected, and relatively unimportant pieces to the masses arrives soon after completion. “What do we do with this?” we ask after we’ve completed the numerous edits necessary. There’s no unifying theme or connection between the pieces. “What do we do with this?” ends up personifying the beauty of each standalone piece and resulting in their ultimate and final condemnation.  

While we’re in the midst of writing one of these pieces, we feel this might be the reason we ended up on this planet. We feel complete in a way we never have before. We think we’ve finally realized our purpose in life, and the extent of our talent, and we live on that artistic high for days. The bizarre experiences we’ve had with the subjects covered in these pieces have been so unique, and in some cases so profound, that we couldn’t believe that no one covered the subject before. After people laugh at the observations, they say one of two things, “I never thought of that before,” and “I don’t find the subject near as interesting as you do.”

They also ask, “What are you going to do with this?” We know, even before they ask that, that there is no book-length dissertation available. These are short pieces. There’s not nearly enough information or material for a book, and there’s no unifying theme or connection between the pieces. This ultimate “What do I do with this?” realization that our purpose in life, our raison d’etre, is nothing more than a (“B”) word prove quite painful.

The realization that we can be a (“B”) word, a blogger, is quite thrilling at first, until it becomes a condemnation. Over the course of a decade, and over 1,000 blogs, we might figure out how to master the art form that used to be called an essay, that others call narrative non-fiction, and most now call the blog. (The reader should not assume that I consider myself a master of this domain when I use the word, but that I’ve figured out how to communicate my thoughts in this form properly.) Once we achieve some level of satisfaction with the form, however, some of us start to think bigger. We assemble a greatest hits package of our best, most read blogs and send them over to a publisher. “What do you want me to do with this?” will be the theme of the door slamming shut in our faces, and don’t bother trying to fit your foot in that door, for it’s reinforced by the “No one wants to read a book of blogs!” sentiment that arose after its limitations were exposed by the path to losing 85 pounds and the funny things my cat did on Tuesday blogs. I’ve read reviewers on Goodreads and Amazon critique other authors of some of my favorite books condemn them by saying, “This reads like a blog.” They write that in the most negative way possible, and it feels like a tiny nail being driven into my spine.

***

I don’t know if it’s obvious by now, but I love writing these relatively inconsequential and irrelevant articles, and the fact that anyone (including you) might read one word I write sends warm and fuzzy messages to a very specific part of my brain that can lead to what they call a smile.

As proof of my unrequited passion, I now have an archive of over 1,000 blogs (some published, most shifted to the draft designation). As you read, go ahead and assume that I have obsessed over just about every word you read. I’ve spent an unhealthy amount of time trying to figure out if ‘a’ or ‘the’ works best in a sentence, I’ve restructured some difficult passages numerous times, and I’ve completely overhauled most of the articles that I’ve published on this site. Some professional writers footnote an article with a note “Edited on [the date].” Are we supposed to do that? I wondered. If I were required to do that, just about every article on this site would have this notation.

Some writers believe we can over-edit an article. “Guilty!” I say with a raised hand. Some writers think that if we over-edit, we strip the spontaneous fun right out of an article. “Perhaps,” I say, “but I would rather strip the fun out of an article than have some fuzzy funny that the reader doesn’t understand because they’re not able to link the setup to the point, because they don’t know what is going on in my head.”  

I obsess over what I consider the fascinating and unique qualities of each piece. I love little more than tying such thoughts into a tight, cohesive, 1,500-2,000 word narrative, but most of these pieces are self-embodied dissertations. They’re blogs. So, enjoy them for what they are, as I apparently am not going to make one thin dime off them. Also, know, as you read this crass piece of self-promotion that I never wanted to write this. You forced it upon me with your stubborn refusal to read them. This post is on you!

Pretentious Absorbers

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“You’re what’s called a pretentious absorber.” Stewart Griffin

“What’s that?” Brian the Dog

“You remember how Madonna lived in London for, like, a month and then started talking with a British accent? It’s that.” Stewart Griffin

“The easy life?” Betty Bettle asked her friends in college. “You think I led an easy life? My family had a small, family farm. If you know anything about farming, you’d know what a stretch it is to call that the easy life.” It was probably her fault they thought that. She told them too much about herself. She complained about how her overprotective dad strongly encouraged his daughters to stay home most nights. She made the mistake of confessing that her brother helped tend the farm, while she and her sister helped their mom in the home. She then compounded her mistakes by complaining about being cooped up, “I never experienced the world.” The idea that they didn’t see that life as an awful experience didn’t shock her, but she couldn’t see how anyone might mistake that for an easy life.

“I’m free,” Betty whispered to someone she didn’t even know at her first college party. Throughout that first year, she met so many different people from so many different backgrounds that she grew to love college parties. Betty got wasted at the first couple parties she attended, but she didn’t enjoy those nights the way those who unleashed did. She didn’t enjoy getting drunk or stoned, but she attended every party she could find. Betty found that she could be whoever she wanted to be at these parties, because no one knew her. She eventually ruined that by telling them everything about her, but she developed so many friends before doing so that they still welcomed her to every party they had.

These college parties introduced Betty to a slice of life she never knew, and she didn’t to just want to nibble at this newfound freedom, she wanted to explore it as much as she possible could. She wanted to meet more people, different kinds of people, have more experiences, and grow, but the problem was she never had any money. Her family never had any money, and even if they had, there was too much work to do at the homestead to travel. When her new, college friends introduced her to their friends from other countries, Betty thought she found something of an end around to her desire to travel.

For a variety of reasons, Betty was more attracted to people from other countries than she was anyone else she met in college. She wanted to be there when they dropped tales about life in other countries, because she wanted to learn everything she could about the world outside the Bettle homestead.

It confused her when her foreign friends began accusing her of living the easy life. She was so confused that she found herself becoming defensive. She lost those arguments so often, with so many foreign-born people, that she became convinced that they were right. No matter how many hardships the Bettles experienced on the farm, they paled in comparison to what some of these people had to go through. Over time, she found the best way to avoid being so defensive all the time was to go on offense. She found herself becoming so sympathetic to their plight that she became empathetic. She learned their plight so well that she joined her foreign friends in arguments they would have with any newcomers.

“You don’t understand how that offends my people,” Betty said when she returned home on a break. We knew nothing about her foreign-born friends at college, but we knew something changed her. We assumed that she heard that line so often that it became a reflexive response to her. The offensive statement she was addressing had nothing to do with the Irish, the Germans, Americans, farmers, or the Bettles. The statement was referring to involved the home country of her new foreign friends. When she informed us what she was learning in college, we assumed that this Irish/German woman was falsely attempting to assume the characteristics of her new friends, but we knew her so well that we couldn’t believe this was the case.

The only thing we could assume was Betty heard so many of their tales, and learned so much about their culture and customs that she began adopting them as her own. She learned how to prepare their dishes, and she eventually learned how to speak their language on a less than fluent basis. She did everything she could to have them accept her as one of their own, and when they did, she felt like she was one of them.

“Aren’t you Irish and German?” one of us said, in the midst of one of her rants. It shocked her. She said yes of course, and she blushed a little, but it was obvious that what shocked her was that anyone would call her out. One might suggest that she enjoyed the company of her foreign-born friends so much that she bonded with them, and that bond was so strong that she considered any offense made against them as an offense against her.

At some point, the revelations she learned led Betty to believe that her parents lied to her. Either that, or she believed her small-town parents just didn’t understand enough about the plight of human existence. When she learned “the truth”, she thought anyone who approached the issue from a different perspective was either as passively uninformed as she used to be or willfully ignorant. To further their knowledge, she used a “must” or “should” pulpit to help us all view matters from her new perspective as a foreign-born citizen.

Betty Bettle graduated near the top of her class, and she immediately entered into a career that paid her relatively well. She saved every dollar she could to travel to experience the world in ways she never could as a kid. She hoped to use the college degree and the extensive travel to establish a status in life that might lead to a station. From this station, she developed an approach, based on a level of pretentiousness she didn’t intend, whenever someone argued with her. “How do you think you know so much?” she said one day. “You haven’t traveled.” Her book smarts proved a little intimidating at first, and she sought to round up whatever street smarts she might lack due to her upbringing, by traveling.

As intelligent as Betty was, she wasn’t a great debater, particularly on this topic. When someone scratched at the surface, just a little, Betty crumbled. Most of her conviction was tied up in the talking points her foreign friends, books, and TV provided. She had no firsthand experience being a foreigner of course, so she could not answer follow up questions or challenges to her newfound passion, and we walked away from her thinking she was someone who did what she was told.

Betty’s sympathy for citizens from other countries and cultures was genuine, but it was also conditional. The foreign-born citizens she met in college provided her a prototype. Betty met foreigners who strayed from that model, later in life, and she developed narratives for why some might succeed where others didn’t, but she preferred to focus on those who required sympathy, and she developed a certain criterion of musts for them. She also developed a list of shoulds that they should exhibit. She considered successful immigrants anecdotal evidence of the foreign-born experience.

Betty Bettle always knew she was of Irish and German descent, but she ignored this fact so often and thoroughly that she viewed reminders as unnecessarily confrontational. As odd as it sounds for someone to try to convince themselves they are another lineage, how often do we become so convinced of something to the point of developing convictions? How many of our convictions are based on personal experience? How many of us use literature or philosophical text as a conduit to conviction? By doing so, aren’t we, in essence, using another’s experiences to modify our thoughts from theory to fact? How many of us absorb so many of our parents’ ideas and platitudes that we accidentally become them? Betty didn’t agree with her parents’ worldview, and she didn’t want to model herself after them. She agreed with her foreign-born friends in college so much that she ended up adopting their culture and characteristics as her own. Cultural appropriation was not a widely recognized term back when Betty was in college. As a person who abides by the prevailing winds, we can only guess that Betty now has a tough time squaring everything she did back then. She might suggest that she views her approach as complimentary, as she only sought to understand other cultures better, and if she accidentally adopted some of their customs and characteristics, it was unintended. To which the cultural appropriation crowd might say, “That’s what everyone says.”

Betty didn’t intend to be a pretentious absorber. It just sort of happened. It was an accident. It was something that happened in that way we incidentally mimic and imitate our parents, our teachers, and anyone else we admire. Betty never admired anyone to the point that she would mimic or imitate them, until she met those foreign-born students in college. She was so fascinated by their ways and customs that she hung out with them almost exclusively. She met their parents, and partied with their aunts and uncles, until she eventually gained acceptance among them. She never felt so accepted by a group of people before. She never truly believed she could change her ethnic heritage. It just sort of happened.

For reasons endemic to their upbringing, people like Betty Bettle choose to imitate and emulate sympathetic characters, and they do this so often that they begin to absorb their traits and characteristics until they exhibit them. The first question that runs through our mind when we watch this happen is how does an otherwise intelligent person begin to believe they are different? The next question is why do they do it? Are they trying to achieve some level of superiority? If that’s the case, why would they imitate and emulate people they regard as sympathetic? Are these sympathetic characters flawed, or in some ways relatively inferior? If they weren’t, why would Betty feel sorry for them? Most of us spend most of our lives trying to emulate and imitate the successful. Our desire to find some relative measure of success through money, love, or some other form of happiness drives us to imitate those who experience some measure of success in that regard. It has given birth to numerous multi-million-dollar industries online, in seminars, and in the book industry. Do we do it to one day achieve some level of superiority? Perhaps, if we consider it superior to conquer our personal flaws better, quicker, or in some ingenious ways others haven’t considered before. Pretentious absorbers believe that by imitating and emulating other cultures, they derive virtue. If we ask how they can abandon their own customs, tradition, and culture, they might provide a wide variety of reasons, but those answers won’t be clear or direct. Their answers won’t revolve around what it says about them that they do what they do but what it says about you that you don’t. They are pretentious absorbers.

Ruminations on Kafka

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Reading Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis story is akin to eating a delicious sandwich. As with a couple of great sentences, one delicious slice of salami can define a sandwich. Others rely on the relationship fresh, crisp cuts of lettuce have with the other ingredients. As with a great sandwich, we can almost taste the craftsmanship of a great story. Those of us who never worked in the sandwich industry, don’t know the symbiotic relationship these ingredients should have with one another, but we know it when we taste it. Those of us who worked in the industry, and have an intimate level of familiarity with the art of the sandwich, know that even the perfect symbiosis of the freshest, most delicious ingredients don’t matter without great bread. The quality of the bread is the great divide between an average sandwich and a delicious one.

The consensus on author Franz Kafka is that his craftsmanship did not involve writing great sentences. His prose was characterized by a Stanley Corngold as “luminous plainness”. I understand the ambiguity of that description, but while I concede that there were very few, some of these were great ones. Anytime we read a great story, like Metamorphosis, our inclination is to add some “could’ve been, should’ve been” lines. Maybe that’s the egotistical writer in me, but I do that with most stories. Yet, every time we think of a great line, it doesn’t seem to fit quite right. Where would we add, what would we delete, and how would any of it improve the prose, the rhythm, and the setting of Metamorphosis? In the course of our imagined efforts, Kafka is unveiled, his economy of words, and the meticulous choreography of his story.

I would love to see some early drafts of Metamorphosis, just to see what Kafka added and deleted in the course of his revising and editing. Did he have great sentences in the first draft only to realize they damaged the otherwise “luminous plainness” feel of the story? Did Gregor Samsa’s family have greater, more comedic reactions to Gregor transformation into an Ungeziefer ‘a beast unfit for sacrifice’? Did he vie for greater entertainment in the story, or did Kafka have a religious zeal for the story’s mundane feel? My guess is that in the early drafts of this story, Kafka had to battle with an egotistical need to add something more to Metamorphosis to make it more, because we all live by the credo that more is always more. Did he initially have one of the characters make an incredibly insightful comment about humanity that illuminated us on how insightful Kafka was? Most authors cannot avoid the conceit of informing their readers how smart and brilliant they really are, and they do so by creating hyper intelligent, incredibly insightful, and unbelievably brilliant characters. In lesser hands, the characters always know, because the author knows, and we know, and neither of us wants to think anyone involved is dumb, uninformed, or stupid, because that might reflect poorly on us and the author. In the context of the lesser stories, some characters know things they couldn’t possibly know, but the author has spent so much time helping us relate to and identify with their character that if she doesn’t know it’s an incriminating comment from the author on her, and everything she’s about. It could also be twisted and mangled into the author’s thoughts on us. Is the author talking down to us, no, that character “only be playing” because it’s later revealed to us that she knew all along, because she’s an anointed intellect just like us, and the author. 

Most people aren’t hilarious, charming, and wonderful people, yet we don’t really want to read about the characters who aren’t? We know this to be true, but in the ever-changing mind of the great author, some of the times story is sacred. 

Were Kafka’s characters funnier, more charming, more compassionate, more wonderful, or more something that every author wants their readers to think of them in those initial drafts? My guess is that Kafka probably had hundreds of versions before it reached final form, and that final form of Metamorphosis we know today is an exhibition of ego-less restraint.

Great writers work through their strengths and weaknesses in pieces no one will ever see. Some of them learn that their path to a great story hinges on great sentences. Others find that the devotion to ideas and style pays greater dividends. Some might suggest this is an author finding their voice. They do so in the course of reading others, trying to duplicate them, and eventually realizing what their own greater strengths and weaknesses are.

I might be wrong, but I don’t think any reader will finish Metamorphosis with a “Holy Crud!” reaction. The reader might start the story in that vein, but Kafka diminishes the shock of a human transforming into an Ungeziefer with a level of choreographed reality the reader might find mundane. Thus, when we finish the story, it sits on a shelf in our mind like preserved meat, until we process and digest it, in the manner we will a great sandwich. It might take a while, it might take an incident, but at some point concept of the story will hit us, and we’ll realize what a unique, and uniquely crafted story it was.

Whenever we read a great story, like Metamorphosis, we seek a reference point, a doorway into the mind of the author. Most great stories are about us, in some tangential manner. Some stories are so foreign to our experience that we cannot find our point of reference, because we can’t possibly find ourselves in such a ludicrous story. The brilliance of Kafka is that his writing relies on an axis of narcissism and objectivity. Is it narcissist to believe that every story is about us, or is it narcissist to believe that none of them are? How do we define a great story? How does a great story define us? Do we know someone for whom the author speaks, and do we wish they would read Kafka to understand themselves a little better? How would they do that, what do we hope they might understand, and are our answers to those questions autobiographical?

To paraphrase author David Foster Wallace, readers should imagine a door when they approach a Kafka work. We seek a doorway into Kafka’s mind so that we can understand his works a little better. We seek a reference point, a point of entry. When we think we’ve found the doorway, we start “pounding and pounding, not just wanting admission but needing it, we don’t know what it is but we can feel it, this total desperation to enter, pounding and pushing and kicking, etc. That, finally, the door opens … and it opens outward: we’ve been inside what we wanted all along.” 

One of the primary duties of every writer is to elicit emotion in the reader. How well they do this defines them. For one writer, it might be about the sentences, and for another it might be the idea that story is sacred. Some stories elicit instantaneous reactions, and some require some slow roasting. Some people don’t want to think too much. They want instant stories that provide a clear path from clear A to Z that culminate in an exciting conclusion. Millions of these books move from writer to reader, and the readers love them. Some of us prefer stories, like the ones Franz Kafka wrote, that reach in and fiddle with some different switches embedded deep in our psyche.

Kafka was an impersonal writer who chose to ground his greatest fantastical tale in reality. Prior to Kafka, and since him, most writers felt a need to form the basis for the fantastical with the fantastical. It just doesn’t seem realistic that something so uncommon should happen in a common home of common people. Kafka doesn’t fight against commonality in the manner some will by suggesting that the common can become uncommon. He chose to wrap his ingredients of “luminous plainness” in the idea and style, two slices of bread that made his story Metamorphosis historic.