BITE ME

HAS CREATIVITY DIED?

I sit here lamenting. That in itself is an old word. Who laments anymore? One or two of you will possibly go to the dictionary right? Let me save you those precious few moments: To lament - according to my trusted thesaurus tab always left open - is to 'regret' or 'beat one's breast' or 'eat one's heart out'? Okay, this last one is a bit over the top, but you get the idea.

I was at the supermarket yesterday with Dylan, an almost daily habit; he being one of the few males who actually enjoys shopping? Yeah. Anyway, he's made friends with one of those guys who round up the trolleysin the car park and push them up the escalator and back into the supermarket. He's a few years older than Dylan, and he has dreams. Newly arrived from Sri Lanka, his English isn't the best, but hey, who cares? They've struck this friendship and yesterday, he told Dylan he might be promoted. Where do you go from trolley-collector? To a Coles Express Petrol Station. From there, various promotions later could eventually lead him to Area Manager, something he really, really aspires to.

I digress. As they stood chatting, I looked at the trolleys. It was hard work, manually pushing them up the long escalator. When their conversation ended, I said to Dylan:

"Hey, wouldn't it be cool if these trolleys were like the robo-vacuum cleaners - you know - returning to their docking stations once you'd unloaded them? I mean no longer having to return them to the bays, and no more hunting them down from the odd spots irresponsible shoppers dump them in right?"

Dylan is well-used to these 'profound' things coming from me odd moments. I mean I thought about Pet Insurance fifteen years before it appeared. I 'invented' GPS over two decades before it was unleashed to the general public, when the first portable phones made an appearance... I have notes about it! And don't let me go on about how I considered solar phone batteries either... Or the self-driving pods you just call - like a cab - and they pick you up and drop you off, kinda like a personal 'public transport system'. I described them in a story I wrote way before the concept of self-driving cars had made any appearance and we were still driving with leaded petrol.

I know, I know. The possibility is very real that someone was already working on those ideas as I was thinking them. There's probably someone inventing the trolley thing even as I speak right?

I digressed again. This has nothing to do with my bouts of 'ingenuity' or prophetic musings or even anything concrete really. But it sort of ties in...

I lament the loss of creativity.

Tasked with completing a romance novel - a purely fictional work - I am vainly trying to stay away from clichés and the stereotyped scenarios surrounding me. Partly why I write non-fiction I guess.

Protagonist/antagonist/side-kick/best friend/initial dislike/bad boy attraction/good boy in friend zone/some shenanigans/fatal attraction/the dawning moment/true love conquers!

Seriously. I read books and I watch movies and every time, the realisation that I could have written it myself. Again. Sometimes I speak the words, knowing in advance what's coming in the dialogue. How sad is that?

And I wonder is this mass-produced 'romance' consumer driven or have we as consumers been conditioned to expect and accept it? I search in vain for that one story which differs. A love not scripted to a formula? I seek creativity, the product of a mind unfettered by expectations and suppositions. A story offering a new perspective, maybe turning the formula on its head – but no, even that's been overdone alas.

Most of you who read my work profess a dislike for 'romance' novels. The kind on here? That's why you read me. Yet some of the best literary works throughout history have been romance-based. Love. This one word has produced profound works. We call them 'classics' now though...

So what happened? I ask you, the fiction-writers producing works under 'romance' and the newly popular 'chick-lit'. What happened? Why are you all regurgitating the same story, minus a few alterations - just to differentiate it enough from the million others? I ask as a non-fiction writer: Why are you driven to repeat and repeat?

This repetition is nauseous to readers such as me. I want to puke; I want to scream at you for conning me with your perfect cover and your alluring title. I want to yell at you for wasting my time by giving me something I could have written and something I have read so often I have it memorised down to the smallest sub-plot...

This is not vanity reacting. Nor is this a personal attack on you. I simply want to know how this happened. Why this happened. Why the 'you' with a few million reads is despicable to someone like me. Unintentionally on my part, for I don't want to despise you see, I want to celebrate you; I want to rejoice in your creative spirit. But I can't. Your words forbid it. Your clichés and your stereotypes peg you as just another peddler in my mind.

So I sit here. Truth be told, this exercise in fiction on my part has a purpose. I want to reach more of you; I want to speak with more of you. Non-fiction writers such as me have a small audience by default. The assumption being that you can't 'escape' or 'lose yourself' in someone else's reality. There is no such 'romance' in biographies or other telling bits of selves... The majority of you pass us by and click instead on the hottest new romance or chick-lit title, right?

So here's the thing: I feel that in order to reach you, I must join you, I must push the nausea aside and create yet another regurgitation. Fiddle around some - just enough to make it that little bit different and yeah, you'll consume me.  

But if I write the way I want to write, the way I dream of writing romance... I will languish unread; I will be 'disappeared' in the great sea of pulp, drowned out by the millions of multiplications. So I won't accomplish my objective. I won't reach you and you won't read me. The title won't attract you nor will the cover. Nor will my words sadly...

Yes, I lament the loss of creativity. There are times I am lonely and I want to lose myself in a great romance, a love that sweeps me along, carries me to wondrous emotions, unknown, unrealised expectations - hell even a genuine surprise or two. I want this love to feel real, I want to feel this love, take it inside, treasure it, return to it, maybe even virtually underline some bits... words I want to particularly remember or to quote, or to print out and put up on my wall, along the Jane Austen quotes, or the Anais Nin quotes... even Shakespeare's...

I don't want smut, you hear? I don't want crudity and nudity and profanity. That's all around me in real life. The escape I seek is from these very things, yet I find myself imprisoned in them again with every subsequent read.

As a new writer, you are often told to "write about what you know". What you know is what you live and what you read I guess. So through no fault of yours, you do just that.

But that's just non-fiction disguised as fiction see? Taking bits and pieces of people, (including yourself) and situations around you and giving them other names - disguising them in the stereotypical format... that's not fiction!

You may as well write like I do see? Speak the absolute truth, "get naked" as my good friend  @TheAlvarezChronicles - "Chasing-wattpad - Getting naked on Wattpad" said recently... and write non-fiction.   

Will I write this romance? Truth be told, I probably will. Even if it languishes unread, even if it fails to reach those of you I want to reach. Why? Because I feel I can. Because I want to prove - at least to myself - that a writer can break the formula, despite the mire of pulp, despite the lure of millions of reads and so many gushing followers prompting me to write accordingly.

And, because there might be one or two of you who wish the same as me, who might rejoice alongside me?

I will not accept this current genre as being all there is. I will not accept that creativity in Romance has died.