To Archetype or Not To Archetype...

I have always been entranced with the idea of writing that challenges what writing is supposed to do.  I love when art rebels against itself.  I love how, when writing a poem and finding the language and space that poem occupies, that the urge to tear down the continuity of what I'd just created  tears through me to the page.

Included in my To-Do list are: write a story that tells the hero's journey backward, write one in which the typical steps are followed but out of cadence, write one that defies the pattern of storytelling we are so familiar with.

I wrote a children's book that feels alien, foreign to me.  The tone feels off, it's too preachy, it feels like a 1950s coca-cola ad.  Maybe that's the point.  I dreamed this book.

Writing it was like recreating a dream we can barely recall from the early morning haze and fluff we often ignore.  I am afraid that revising this story so that it makes sense might unravel the very thread I liked about it in the first place.

I talked about it with some friends and it seemed to make little sense.  The questions they raised were great and necessary.  When I got home and re-read what I'd actually written, I realized that there wasn't so much inconsistency in the plot, but that didn't make me like it any more.

To say that I hate the book would be dishonest.  Clearly, when the idea of scrapping certain details rattles me to my core.  No, I love the book.  It must be written.  Yet, I don't like the way I wrote it.  I did not write a book that I would like to read.

Or did I?

I read all of Laura Ingall's Little House books when I was little.  I love grainy old westerns.  I still watch Lassie and Andy Griffith.  Part of me is nostalgic for the simplicity with which the "good old days" were presented.  Where children and adults alike speak in such sensible tones.  The dialogue in those shows (Dobie Gillis) were never realistic. Did people ever really speak like they did on TV?

Now, of course, we expect that dialogue seem realistic.  That characterization is plausible.  But don't any of you still yearn for the kind of dishonesty in dialogue that betrays the writer's wish for society? Ought we not show the best ideas of our characters?  After all, are we watching art to find ourselves reflected as we are, or as we wish to be?