Worlds of Paul Jessup

I really think that’s what I love about writing.  I was remembering, the other day, being about 8 or 9 years old.  I considered myself a writer then, even then, at that time.  And I remember being in the car with my Great Uncle John, and thinking that I wanted to write a story about him.  A complete portrait of him.  The humanity of him.  I wanted to write about every detail of him, his personality, his world.

At the time I wrote a lot of stuff about science fiction, a lot of stuff about fantasy.  But I remember, at that moment, feeling a different need to write.  A different way of expressing what I wanted to express.  That, even though, I liked robots and lasers and dragons, I was far more interested in expressing worlds in context to the human experience.

And I still am.  There is something I want to express in writing (though I don’t think I expressed it yet), and I want to use genre as the way of expressing it.  Not because I want to shoe horn some stuff together, but because for me- for me as a writer- I need to express both.  It’s a natural thing for me.  When I write.  To delve into human characters, but also to have strange, unreal, bizarre things happen.  I can’t stop one or the other.  It is how I write- it is my voice.

If the soul is just a rising conflict of language, forcing itself, bubbling itself up out of the primordial ooze of images and thoughts, if the concept of being is just a jumbled mess of memories, experiences, words, language and narratives, then this is my bubbling persona.  This is my mental landscape.  And oddly enough, it’s been like this pretty much since I could remember- my twin interests in realistic portrayals of humanity and the strange, surreal, wonder kissed world.

That’s why, to me, plot is not as important as experiences within a work.  Heroism, while possible, is not as important as the mental mask that is the hero, the villain, the one being saved.  And for each moment where something tense and building is happening, I feel the need to add quiet little human moments.  Because these moments are important to me- as a reader, as a writer.  A moment, like the beginning of Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly Last Summer.  Calm moments, where the beauty of the world shines through, the humanity of existence is on display, and is overwhelming.

I heard a story.  I think it was from Kurt Vonnegut. For Armistice Day the fighting stopped during World War II.  Everyone put down their weapons, and there was a silence.  That moment- those are the moments I’m talking about.

I mean, what’s the point of heroics, of saving the world when we don’t get to see the world in all it’s glorious detail?  What’s the point of showing us all these acrobatic events if we don’t have an emotional anchor within the narrative to these characters?  World building should be more than just landscape and history and a few scatterings of mythology and a fake language.  World building should be character building.