THE SOLARIUM

Literature elevates. Every flutter of a butterfly’s wings has the potential to rival the significance of a complex character’s innermost thoughts.

In Lolita, which reveals more about Humbert Humbert—his leading monologues, or his casually cruel disinterest in the many fragile lives fluttering around him?

While awaiting his victim in the office of her summer camp’s administrators, he notices a winged insect in his periphery. He does not grant it the dignity of understanding. He cannot tell what it is. This is Humbert Humbert’s defining flaw: the inability—or unwillingness—to tell beauty from ugliness, love from perversion, moths from butterflies.

Nabokov, a lepidopterist, favored butterflies in his works. He understood that literature is not only the zenith of human expression but an opening—a chance to bring that which is more than human into view, imbuing it with equal meaning.

Understanding the other becomes imperative in understanding the self. In a kinder world, the other would be loved for its own sake. For now, the dehumanized and non-human alike must content themselves with being made mirrors. At least mirrors are studied.

So goes the conventional argument for diversity in books.

Increased representation encourages those not being represented to develop empathy. Also, marginalized readers like myself get a few pity mirrors of our own. However, when the need for representation is flattened into merely wanting books we can see ourselves in, centuries of rich literary tradition are ignored. 

Lolita was not written for Azir Nafisi, the author of Reading Lolita in Tehran. Nabokov, who notoriously disdained women translators and rarely afforded female characters the same complexity as his male protagonists, hardly set out to become a feminist icon. Regardless, Lolita became a symbol of liberation among the women of Iran’s intelligentsia.

Nafisi and her students saw themselves in Nabokov’s anti-totalitarian magnum opus—to imply they needed a written invitation from the author himself is beyond patronizing.

Why, then, do we need representation? It is not only a question of wanting to see ourselves, but of imagining ourselves.

As Black gothic horror author Eden Royce writes in the foreword to the WordFire Press edition of Of One Blood, which I served as a student editor for, “How can we not have imagined other worlds? How can we not write about our desires for more, for better?”¹

We are not content with mere mirrors. We are not content with coats of brown paint hastily applied to stories by white authors. We are not content with existing only in allegory. Nothing viewed through the stained glass of language is without meaning—we want to be architects of that meaning, too.

Literature is sometimes derided as mere escapism. If reading provides an escape, it is not from but to—toward a more thoughtful future, a world of more nuanced perspectives. Imagination is a gauntlet thrown. Readers welcome the challenge.

***

The above is a writing sample I recently submitted as part of a publishing fellowship application. The window is still open for a few weeks, and the recipient of the fellowship won’t be announced until August, but, regardless of the turnout, the application process has resulted in a piece of writing that I’m proud of.

Just applying to something can be a rewarding process. Whether you win in the end or not, it presents a challenge, and you will always find yourself stronger on the other end for having faced it.

I’ve noticed that I tend to be more productive when I have a challenge in mind–anything from NaNoWriMo to a simple class deadline. Because of this, I decided to give myself a fresh challenge:

OUTLINE WEEK!

What is Outline Week? Every day for the next week, I am going to set aside two hours to work on novel outlines. I’ll begin from scratch each day with an all-new outline. By the end of the week, I’ll have outlines for seven different novels.

I don’t expect to finish these. It generally takes me anywhere from a couple days to a week to complete a novel outline, and that’s not taking into account character sheets, setting notes, etc.

Also, I generally only start outlining when a concept has proven its staying power. I didn’t create an outline for She Who Bleeds Stars until I had already been writing bits and pieces for it for well over a year. I only outlined Lemon Squares in All Dimensions in the leadup to NaNoWrimo 2022 despite having intentions of creating that novelization since I wrote the short story.

Starting with an outline will be new for me. I’m hoping the challenge will cause me to think more seriously about vague ideas I’ve been floating around to myself and inspire me to get work done.

Also, I tend to burn out on projects if they’re the only thing I work on for an extended period of time. My plan for these outlines isn’t for any of them to jump to the top of my priority list, but rather to ensure I have plenty of alternate options to choose from when I need a palate cleanser.

Getting that honorable mention for “Lemon Squares in All Dimensions” has revitalized my interest in the novelization, so I’m considering that my top priority moving forward.

Just not next week. Let the outline extravaganza begin!

As for upload scheduling, I will get that final Artemis Fowl review up this Wednesday, and next week’s Constellations post will feature mini-pitches for the projects I’ve outlined. I can’t wait to share them all with you!

My next YouTube video, which pits artificial intelligence against animal intelligence in an unexpected way (let’s just say that the art of writing is going to the dogs) will go up on May 5. Also, I plan to release a bonus video for the launch of Of One Blood on the 14th, so stay tuned!

1. Of One Blood will be available for preorder starting May 14 at wordfirepress.com/gpcw ↩︎

(Solaris is not my legal name. Shocking, I know.)