Sentimentality

There's this desire, I think, or this need, among writers to sentimentalize. For example writing classes are peppered with stories about the nameless old couple sitting at the bus station. Great lacey traceries of love and devotion and tragedy and betrayal are what a writer will tell you he sees spelled out behind their gaze: I'll tell you right now, he's lying his ass off.

A writer sees what everyone sees: a couple of people who a few incidents aside are probably beyond the realm of all conceivable interest. The woman is not sitting there reflecting on the great beauty that is life. The man is not remembering the sunny fields of his childhood surrounded by brothers who would all come to heartrending tragedy. The woman is thinking about reality television and the man, I know by virtue of being male, is thinking about tits.

Writers lie, folks, hate to break it to you. Every line you read of poetic sentiment, every lofty ideal, every moral anecdote, every glistening chain of events that leads to a Real True Deep Ultimate meaning is bullshit. Utter and complete. Irrevocable, weapons grade, dyed-in-the-wool horsecrap and take yourself for a credulous moron if you've ever believed a word of it.

No. Waitaminute, that's not right either. Art is described as a mirror held up to the world - but if it is, it should be a mirror that inexplicably makes the world less fat. Stories are lies that sugar the pill. Stories are lies people can get behind. Stories are ultimately all we have except the grim and certain knowledge that we are, collectively, animate bags of meat and saltwater granted sentience either through random accident or the contrivance of something we don't know anything about.

So lie away, guys. Stories destroy and stories lie, and stories can do everything from spark revolution to quell it, but what they should never do is show you a world as boring and dreary as 99% of the one you live in.