I always had a vivid imagination growing up. Usually this didn’t branch much further than blending my favourite characters together in some weird and wonder plot, that would be acted out via action fictions and my own sound effects. But as far as I was concerned these stories I was telling were of epic proportions; so much so I would sometimes repeat them, I admit – being eight years old and consistently original was challenging stuff, guys.
My relationship with fiction has always been quite vast, I suppose. My dad would always read me a chapter of a book before bed (we got through the entire Chronicles of Narnia together, before moving onto the adventures in Middle Earth). The first piece of writing I remember producing was, at best, Doctor Who fanfiction; it barely made it past two thousand words. The first long piece of prose I wrote was roughly ten thousand words about a vampire Princess. And in hindsight it was a naïve, childish story with poor pacing and zero depth. But I remember being so proud of it; so proud in fact I showed it off to my entire family. Big yikes.
But I’ve never stopped writing since; in fact, there’s been more than too many times friends have advised I take a break from writing as a new project consumes my originality once a month. Writing was the finest form of escapism; while all the TV series and films had that in buckets, the purest and most fulfilling offering of escapism was my own imagination, where I was in complete control.
Call me a control freak, or declare I have a God Complex; whichever shoe fits best.
Reading, however, I found more challenging. Growing up with dyslexia resulted in a vile mix of anxiety and embarrassment; I have memories of covering up my answers in spelling tests because what I had written was so shockingly wrong. When reading books, I would always find myself tripping over words, or seeing one word as another, only to look back seconds later and think myself so stupid for mistaking ‘sausage’ for ‘sharp’. I fell out of love with reading by the time I was eleven simply because I felt like I couldn’t read.
At fifteen I finished my first adult book of my own choosing; The Perks of Being a Wallflower. A real classic coming of age, one that came into my life at an appropriate time. After Perks I spent two weeks reading a six hundred page fantasy-horror novel set in a crumbling Scottish castle. Two years later I was getting through three six hundred-page novels in one week. I loved reading for what felt like the first time.
My tastes always differed. By eighteen I had developed a somewhat snobbish outlook on books; I declared I was going to read the classics – Frankenstein and Dracula, naturally – and had placed Cloud Atlas at the top of my reading list. The former two I only ever half finished, while the latter I never even purchased from the bookshop. By nineteen and twenty I was seeking to find my own identity in books and would spend hours searching through Goodreads for something that really screamed out for me to read. Being a gay man in the first year of being out, that was all I wanted to read out, but I found nothing really made me feel validated (don’t ask me about my feelings on Simon versus the Homosapien’s Agenda, and especially not the film adaptation).
Very quickly I began to wonder what the relationship between readers and fiction was, and what, as the title suggests, we owe to one another. Identity? Escapism? Self-esteem boosts? Or even simply learning? There was a lot I had taken from reading over the five years since I had really thrown myself into consuming and producing fiction.
Now, with a Bachelor’s degree in Media and Creative Writing (humble brag), and a third of the way through a Master’s degree in Creative Writing (yes, I’m one of those people, Barbra) I’ve come to understand my own relationship with fiction that I both consume and produce: I owe it my passion and my undivided attention, while it owes me escapism and kinship on some level.
Let’s talk about representation- and I do have a structure to my musing just bear with me. Representation in the last few years has become a huge deal; it seems you can’t see the release of new art without there either being praise or criticism for the vastness , or lack thereof, of representation and diversity. It’s become a huge thing that has, to a degree, changed the way in which we consume art, and in which people produce art. I, for one, think back to my earlier pieces of writing and can’t help but ask myself ‘why is everyone white?’
I don’t know about you, but I’m sick of reading about the standard boy meets girl, successful white couple (not that I was ever a fan of romance anyway). But when I reached the point where I couldn’t even pick up a fantasy novel without reading about forbidden love between two of the most mundane, cookie cutter characters, I knew I was about to snap.
Here’s an example: Normal People by Sally Rooney. To quote an old lecturer of mine, Rooney is a (read in French accent) ‘brilliant author.’ I’d seen several friends reading Normal People and always thought back to my tutor’s praise for Rooney. So naturally, I bought it. Currently I have sixty pages left but at the end of the day, it feels nothing more than a pretentious Irish novel about two white heterosexual teenagers whose only real conflict are that she’s from money, and neither of them are happy with who they are as people. There’s a class divide between the two, but not even that is enough of an issue for me to feel like there’s more than just the standard boy meets girl plotline.
It doesn’t nourish me, reader, it really doesn’t.
To an extent, even LGBTQ+ characters have felt lacklustre to me. They were either content with themselves and the world was content with them or they struggled internally only to come out the other end better off. Something about the narrative always struck… wrong for me. Something of it felt unbalanced and false; like someone was trying to pull a mask over my eyes and tell me ‘this is what you want’ but it wasn’t. While the gestures of novels where openly gay characters were embraced and accepted freely is lovely, a deeper part of me always wanted the grittier, darker stories where they weren’t perfect, so that I could root for them more. So that the tender moments would be sweeter. I wanted a character that felt like more than the camp, mildly feminine poster boy for twinks whose purpose was to serve either the blonde mean girl or dorky heroine. I always felt as if I was owed more.
I’ve worked by a rule for the last three years when writing: if this character is a white, cisgender, straight person, do they need to be that? If the answer is no, how can I make them more diverse. Think on it now when you read a book; ask yourself the next time you find a basic and familiar character and wonder, could I change x about them, and would that change that plot? If so, would that plot be more interest and rich? Go on, I dare you.
I’ll try to wrap this up now; I can sense myself running away with the topic. What does fiction and the individual owe one another? Put simply, fiction owes us the chance to be anyone, be anywhere, and experience anything. While we, the reader, owe it our passion and our thirst for stories. We owe it our humble admiration.
As a writer I always wonder what a new project is offering not only me but others. Is it something that would make me as a reader excited? If the answer is no, then it doesn’t need to be said or written.
Is there an ideal way to deliver on any of the above, so that everyone felt as if fiction was delivering the things it owed them? Absolutely not. To think so is to wait for the perfect melody. Then what should we be doing? I can hear you ask. Make sure you’re doing everything in your power to deliver what fiction owes to its consumers.
Written by Aidan Kavanagh.
Read more of Aidan's writing here on his blog. (Sometimes I have the honour editing of his work guys, he's really fucking good).
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