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I believe that literature is one of today’s greatest refuges from the insane grind and suffocating toxicity of modern life. We live in a constant hurry, trying to accomplish everything at once and remain “productive” all the time.
Before becoming a writer, I was part of this grind. I was forced to work over fifty hours every week, and had little extra time to stop, breathe, relax, and enjoy life. My work was slightly better paid than the average low-level job, but it wasn’t worth it. I was wasting away.
I recognize that this is the reality of most of our younger generations. We wake up early, eat quickly, commute in densely packed, polluted streets, and grind all day. When we return, our attention becomes like a bloody slice of beef thrown to the sharks: every type of entertainment, from video-games to streaming, to social media, fight for every last second of our attention to sell ads and subscriptions.
Literature is one of the last escapes of this grind. Books don’t sell advertising (for now). They can demand a lot of attention and concentration, especially so called “high literature,” with difficult concepts and multi-layered meanings. But, the best books to escape the grind of modern life are those that offer what I call “brainless fun.”
This doesn’t mean that the book itself is stupid. Brainless means “requires little thought.” Instead of demanding great feats of concentration from the reader, a brainless book uses words to evoke interesting and entertaining pictures that are quick and easy to visualize and understand.
Doing so, the book serves as a resting port for the busy and exhausted brain. The sound of its words imitate human speech, and slow down thought. The pictures evoked are easily formed and easily maintained by the eye of the mind, thus resting instead of tiring. The story comes easily, using presets like well-known tropes and genre devices as shortcuts to deliver story.
Many will say that my books are dumb, shallow, anti-literature. They will claim that literature should be haughty and intelligent, overflowing with subtext, complex layers, and excellent social criticism. But, whoever says this never used a book as a tool to rest a tired brain.
Since I was a child, I’ve been reading adventure fiction. Our lives are excessively urban, and mine was especially suffocating during most of my early years. I grew up in a remote, miserable, arid, culture-less, extremely limited neighborhood where the only things that flourished were cacti, dusty dive bars, pentecostal churches, and crack dens. The people around me were sadly ignorant, and hopelessly so. Out of my bedroom window I had a desperate sight of a sea of densely packed rooftops, a busy highway, and the polluted smokestacks of a factory. There was no beauty, no nature, and no green.
This is the reality of many of us. What do you see when you look out the window? Is there any green?
Adventure is a genre of travel. A well written adventure book transports your mind to a wonderful natural landscape. It offers the textures of freshly rained grass, dew, mist, untouched forest, pleasant winter sun, and flower-scented wind. It lets you listen to the roaring gush of a waterfall, and to the delicate blow of a breeze against the highest leafs of a tree.
Adventure novels shows you things that city life completely destroyed, such as the colorful tapestry of stars at night. They let you practically taste the smell of morning fog and recently-rained dirt.
As such, they are the ultimate escape. Movies offer some of this travel, but only visually. Movies can’t properly stimulate the other senses. Music also offers a certain travel to a better, more natural environment, but they’re purely auditory. With fiction, all of our senses are stimulated. Books have the power to transport us to another realm, like a dream.
This is why I write adventure. My books are set in wonderful natural places, like jungles, deserts, fjords, taigas, tundras, and sandy beaches. They happen on the decks of wooden ships, inside old-timey trains, and on horseback. These places have smells, tastes, sounds, and textures that we barely have access today.