Category Archives: writing philosophy

WHY I WRITE

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I’m late with this post.  Some crises of life have intervened and, at the moment, are ongoing.  My attentions are focussed on that, so I don’t have the patience or organization of thought to sit in one place long enough to write.  Instead, I am posting a small essay I wrote in 1998, for a class in the Johns Hopkins writing program.  I should, at some point, re-examine this question, consider why I write now, and whether the reason has changed.  But here is what I felt then, and for all my life before:

WHY I WRITE:

Why do I write?  Right now, I’m writing because characters keep coming into my head–characters with pasts and with futures that I have to get down on paper, or no-one but me will know they exist, and they’ll fade away.  Last year, or the year before, perhaps, the driving motivation was often something specific I wanted to say–political, philosophical–events or conflicts that brought on a Swiftian anger which writing (and expressing to a public) relieves.  But, when I started writing, in my teens, I just wanted to have fun.  To play.

There was nothing dramatic in the decision.  Reading, discussing literature, and writing were in the air all around me while I was growing up.  My father, my mother, and my brother (who is nine years older than myself) all read to me.  The three of them talked about literature around the kitchen table.  There were always books–history, philosophy, linguistics, mathematics, art, dance, mythology, poetry, and fiction, above all, fiction–read to me, handed to me, suggested to me.  Also, although I don’t think either of my parents ever published anything, my father had, before I was born, written stories and poems.  My mother wrote witty, artistic letters which really could have been short stories or the basis for them.  And she would come to my father the way one comes to an editor:  to comment, to suggest revision, to suggest a flourish.  My brother, in school, also wrote creative fiction–pieces that, these days, might be called experimental (who knows?)–like his own version of The Odyssey, or a satire in which a poor country’s ambassador to the United Nations writes home to his president.  But that’s what I mean by “in the air.”  It was just there.

The attitude toward writing was that one should have a sense of play.  Not take it too seriously.  Just take in the technique of this or that writer and feel free to try it out for oneself.  And that’s how I started.  Playing with styles, with words, with ideas.  I wrote a story in the style of Louis Carroll.  I wrote a dialogue in the style of Tom Stoppard in which two actors argue about whether they should take their bows for acting in his play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.  I wrote a story in which Oscar Wilde’s entrance into heaven depends upon the literary assessment of his works by a jury of fellow writers.  (I didnt’ write about personal things because I hadn’t lived enough then.  And I don’t write directly about personal things now, because I can only write poorly about things that are too close to the heart.)

Then two things happened.  I taught myself to draw.  And I became a lawyer.  (The latter can be blamed on my father, who handed me Irving Stone’s Clarence Darrow for the Defense when I was twelve.)  After working all day writing legal decisions, it was much easier to draw or paint than to sit down again and try to write.  So, for many years, I thought about writing but didn’t do much more than make notes on possible themes, or set down snatches on possible plots and characters.

What got me back to writing?  There’s nothing like a few deaths to make one realize they can’t put things off forever, to give one that kick in the bum.  My mother had always looked at my art work and said, “That’s nice, Jess, but you should be writing.”  When she died, I thought, if not now, when?  So I began again.  I found I had some things to say about politics (in the broad sense of the word), and philosophy–about my view of the world–and I used poetry as the means of expression.

At the same time, I kept telling my father about an idea I had for a novel, and he kept telling me not to tell him the story, but to write it down.  Then he died.  And that was the kick in the backside that got me to actually sit down and write the novel.  The characters became, and still are, very real to me.  It’s not that I don’t know the difference between fiction and reality, but, even with the novel completed, I can sit anywhere and have my characters wandering in my head in new adventures, and in conversations with each other which will play and replay with variations.

There are a number of short stories I’ve written that some people say should also be novels.  While I think these stories really are short stories, I also think to myself–well, I could make them into novels as well.  Then those characters start wandering about in my head, expanding their worlds, their histories, their adventures.  Somehow, I’ve moved from playing with ideas to creating universes and, in some odd sense, living in all of them as well as the real one, simultaneously.  And now, while I generally still do have some particular point I want to make with a story, and that desire to make the point sets me off, I suspect what keeps me at it is creating those worlds.  That’s why I write.  This year, anyway.

 

The Narrow World of V.S. Naipaul

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Recently, someone brought to my attention a 2011 Guardian article reporting on a Royal Geographic Society interview with Nobel Prize Winner Mr. V.S. Naipaul.  While the interview is a few years old now, Mr. Naipaul’s statements in it struck me as freshly as if the interview had been conducted yesterday.  According to the article, Mr. Naipaul stated the following views:

1. that no woman writer is his literary match;

2. of Jane Austen, that he “couldn’t possibly share her sentimental ambitions, her sentimental sense of the world;”

3. that women writers are “quite different,” that “I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not.  I think [it is] unequal to me;” and that this is because of women’s “sentimentality, the narrow view of the world;”

4. that “inevitably for a woman, she is not a complete master of a house, so that comes across in her writing, too;” and

5. that “my publisher, who was so good as a taster and editor, when she became a writer, lo and behold, it was all this feminine tosh.”

And of course, like any good bigot, in a preemptive non-apology apology, Mr. Naipaul apparently added:  “I don’t mean this in any unkind way.”

For a Nobel Prize winner for literature, Mr. Naipaul seems to have an extremely narrow knowledge of literature, as well as an extremely narrow view of life.  When he accuses all women writers of being sentimental or dismisses all women writers as writing sentimental tosh, one must first ask what he means by the terms “sentimentality” and “sentimental tosh.”  He does not define them, so I  take the liberty of assuming he means either that women write tear-jerkers (or, in American parlance, stories fit for the Lifetime channel’s made-for-T.V. movies), or that their themes are limited to women’s concerns.  Taking this as my premise, I must then ask, has Mr. Naipaul ever read anything by Pat Barker?  Muriel Spark?  Margaret Atwood? Doris Lessing? Nadine Gordimer?  Has he ever heard of them?  (And as for “sentimental” tosh, has he ever read Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections?  And if by “tosh” he means anything to do with what he considers women’s concerns or lot in society, is he familiar with the works of Tolstoy, Hardy, Dickens, Flaubert, or just about anything by D.H. Lawrence–all male writers?  Frankly, for toughness, theme, and absence of “sentimentality,” I would set Barbara Kingsolver’s short story, “Why I Am a Danger to the Public” in her book Homeland above any of the stories in Naipaul’s Miguel Street.)

When Naipaul says of Jane Austen, that he “couldn’t possibly share her sentimental ambitions, her sentimental sense of the world,” he is baring an incapacity to make an empathetic leap into anyone’s world but his own.  That is not the mark of a great writer, and certainly not of a great mind.  (It is no wonder that, in Naipaul’s Miguel Street, a book of short stories about people living in poverty on Miguel Street in Port of Spain, Trinidad, not only are the subject characters of all of the stories male, but to the extent women are mentioned in the stories, they are entirely stereotypical, one-dimensional asides.  The stories are quite entertaining, and Naipaul shows some sympathy for the men, but even the men are not given any depth to speak of.  This was an early work, and perhaps one should examine Naipaul’s later novels to see whether he developed greater insight over time, but his public statements suggest otherwise.)

When Naipaul says he can tell within a paragraph or two that something is written by a woman, and that “…inevitably for a woman, she is not a complete master of a house, so that comes over in her writing,” he sounds a bit like the pot calling the kettle metal.  In saying that a woman is not a complete master of a house, is Naipaul referring to women’s traditionally subservient position to the man of the house and to men in society?  If one is not master, is one then a servant or a slave or–dare one say–subject to some form of colonial rule?  On those terms, anyone–man or woman–who comes from an oppressed or colonized group or place and chooses that subject as a theme, and those people as characters–must have a narrow world view.  This, then, must apply to Mr. Naipaul’s choice of themes and characters as well.

Finally, to bolster his universal dismissal of female writers, Naipaul pulls out his anecdotal view that his female editor is a good editor but, when she wrote, sure enough–she wrote “all this feminine tosh.”  To that, I would say, first, that given his prejudices, Mr. Naipaul is hardly a reliable source for such an assessment.  But even if he is correct, editing and writing are two very different tasks.  Many people, male and female, can do one well and not the other.  Many people, male and female, want to write but find they do not really have something of consequence to write about.

This gentleman won the Nobel Prize for literature.  It is reported that some have dubbed him “the greatest living writer of English prose.”  I have not yet discovered who so-dubbed him, so I cannot vouch for whether those proclaiming that greatness are giving a sincere assessment or are part of the usual publicity campaign found in the publication industry.  But, considering that there are some other great writers, male and female, currently living, to dub any one of them the “greatest” seems a bit of puff.  Still, I wouldn’t begrudge him as much claim as anyone else to the title, but for his using his position, standing on these laurels, real and/or manufactured, to dismiss as inferior all literature written by a gender other than his own.

 

Travel Stimulates the Writer’s Eye

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Book Sculpture, British Library, London.

I have previously stated that my imagination is stimulated by that which is not familiar but strange, the stranger the better.  Accordingly, when I travel, the more unfamiliar the locale, the more it fuels my imagination.  I like best to wander, soak in foreign languages, and puzzle out other peoples’ cultures.  Italy has been wonderful for that.  And Prague in the Czech Republic.  The United Kingdom, where I spent two weeks this May, is a bit too similar to the United States in culture and language to provide quite the same effect.  But, still, a number of encounters have stirred my imagination.

With a writer friend who currently is living in the U.K., I took a number of tours and traveled the country.  By train, we traveled from London to Edinburgh to Dunbar to Bath to London to Brighton and back again.  Sharing little adventures.  Sherlock Holmes and Watson.  Prince Florizel and Colonel Geraldine.  Don’t ask me which of us was which.  Okay.  I concede.  We did nothing that these characters did besides travel a great deal on trains through England and Scotland.  But there is nothing like a train trip to make me live in my imagination.

In London, we took the Jack the Ripper tour, which allowed me to see some of the East End in evening, and though most of the landmark areas are now quite modern, there was one narrow alley that had kept some of the original atmosphere.  However, the thing that truly caught my imagination was waiting for me back at my safe little family-run Bloomsbury hotel.  The desk-man, a son of the owners, told me that, in the days of Jack the Ripper, one of the victims had lived and worked there.  At the time, the hotel had been a private residence.  The woman’s husband had been the butler and she the maid until her husband died and the family refused to keep her on alone.  With no place to go, she gravitated to White Chapel where she was murdered soon after.  To tell or retell the story of Jack the Ripper does not interest me.  But to tell a story in which this woman is the main character and in which her eventual murder by Jack the Ripper is only the horrible, luckless end would be interesting.  Even the few details noted here present possible themes of class, employment, the situation of women, the emotional despair that must accompany destitution, etc.  Her story has pathos.  And if my imagination can conjure it, my hotel provides a setting that would be interesting to use.

In Edinburgh, we toured the City of the Dead, a series of chambers under the city, where, in the late1700s, noxious businesses like tanneries were placed.  We were warned not to touch the walls (or wash our hands well if we did) because we would be touching several hundred years of excrement.  Meanwhile, stalactites of God-knows-what were dripping on our heads.  According to our guide, the poor often both worked and lived in these chambers which are, absent flashlight or candle, pitch-black.  The residents breathed in the fumes; they had to carry chamber pots through various chambers to empty them above ground; and they lived amongst illicit stills and in dark corners where murderers may have hidden bodies.  I thought to myself, never mind death; they were living in Hell.  Then the guide told of a great fire above ground, the smoke filtering down and killing hundreds from asphyxiation.  Horrific conditions.  But great atmosphere for a story of horror or mystery.  And I was there to catch the mood.

In Dunbar, we visited a John Muir museum.  Muir, a Scottish-born American naturalist, was an early advocate for the preservation of wilderness in the United States.  We were told that he convinced Teddy Roosevelt to protect wilderness areas against corporate encroachment.  But, what I found most interesting for my purposes was that Muir was in San Francisco at the same time as Robert Louis Stevenson.  We were told that Muir usually  tried to meet with any Scots who came his way.  Yet there is no record of him meeting with Stevenson.  What if one posited a story in which these two philanthropic world travelers had met?  An idea to play with.

Back in London, we went to the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons, where I learned about John Hunter who, in the 1700s, pioneered so much of what is now established protocol in modern surgery, but who also apparently hired men to follow Charles Byrne, “The Irish Giant,” around until he should drop dead, so he–Hunter–could swoop in to obtain the body for dissection.  Byrne did not want to be dissected after death, and it seems to me that even if dissection might have gained Hunter knowledge that could help mankind, your body is the one thing you should have a say about.  But despite Byrne’s wishes and precautions, Hunter did manage to obtain Byrne’s body after his death (probably because of the men Hunter had ghoulishly hounding the man).  It is speculated that Hunter’s residence was the model for that of Jekyl and Hyde.  I would not be surprised to find that the man was Stevenson’s model for the story as well.  Probably stories have already been written about the Irish Giant, but there’s something about the idea of him being tracked in anticipation of his death that intrigues me.  Perhaps one could play with it from a new angle.  In any case, I think I might like to try.

In sum, I can attest that, if one is open to it, travel does broaden the mind, feed the soul, and stir the imagination.

 

By Hook or Nook

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Okay.  So I broke down and bought a Nook.  And trying to get it to work properly has just about broken me.

I like to read paper books.  But, since the nature of book marketing is changing rapidly, I figured that it was time I tried to join the twenty-first century.  Given the number of people now reading books this way, as a writer, it behooves me to learn about how humanity now browses and shops for books.

Except for the screen’s visual blip that makes me blink when I tap the Nook to change pages (I’m not sure that’s good for the eyes, long-term), I rather like the actual reading on the Nook.  However, the technology involved in setting it up has been and still is DRIVING ME INSANE.  I’m sufficiently frustrated and angry that, if I weren’t so stubborn, I would have returned the device or stuffed it down someone’s throat.  Perhaps I’ll write more when I figure out to what degree the problem is the device and to what degree it is my problem with technology.  Suffice it to say that, between purchase and exchange, I’ve had to go back to Barnes and Noble four times in one week, and in that time charged the batteries of three difference devices.  The batteries in those devices do not work at all the way it is claimed. (Three or four hours to charge?  Try ten–or overnight. And then, the batteries of at least two of them drained ten percent the next day, without use.  Ten percent per day will not result in the ability to read for the claimed two months without recharging.)  Furthermore, I couldn’t buy and/or download books by connecting it to my computer (I assume that’s because you’ve got to have wifi–and if you are me and don’t happen to have wifi at home, you are stuck.–that of course, is assuming the lack of wifi is the problem, and it’s not the device itself.  One thing’s for sure, the instructions are not sufficient and the thing is NOT user-friendly, except for the reading itself).

The little I could tell about how one must shop or browse books on these devices, I actually rather hate.  You can download samples, but you can’t flip through them the way you can with paper.  You can’t look at a little of the beginning a little of the middle, a little of the end to see if it really interests you, only the first x-number of pages and, even if that’s a good number of pages, it is a marketing hook, not a browse.

I don’t like the intrusion of marketers doing my thinking for me; imposing their recommendations of “best sellers,” as if that’s what everyone wants to read.  I don’t like having books I have no interest in pushed on me by an automated medium that’s decided because I like one book, surely I want these others; that decides for me what books should be grouped together as my potential choices.  In addition to the annoying mediocrity of those choices (at least on my device thus far) there’s the limitation of it.  One is deprived of the chance to discover that unexpected book you can happen across when browsing along a shelf.

I need to master the Nook.  Or the Kindle.  Or some other reader–in order to understand how people are starting to find their books.  But I don’t have to like it.

 

 

Drawing out the Writer in You

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In If You Want to Write, Brenda Ueland suggests that beginning writers often write in a pretentious manner because they are anxious to impress.  She speaks of helping them to break through that not by pointing out what is bad or wrong in their efforts, but by helping them to write more freely.  She writes, “I found that many gifted people are so afraid of writing a poor story that they cannot summon the nerve to write a single sentence for months.”  To combat this, she dared her class to write something completely bad from beginning to end, claiming that it was impossible to do.  Then, in examining their “bad” compositions, she pointed out what was good in them, both freeing the students in their writing and steering them in the right direction.  In my own teaching experience, I have found Ueland’s insight accurate.

Some years ago, I was teaching a class called Playing with Style, in Georgetown University’s  Continuing Education Program.  The students were all adults with day jobs.

At first, some in the class took too literally the old injunction, “write what you know,” and it made their writing stilted and restrained.  I’d go home each week after class, read the new work, target where they were tight, and try to construct an assignment for the next week to force them to loosen up.

In one assignment, I had them write a story from alternating points of view:  that of the protagonist and that of the antagonist, the enemy or opponent.  This was done to get them to make the empathetic leap that allows one to truly see a situation through another’s eyes. One man, I remember, wrote of fishing from the point of view of the fisherman and the point of view of the fish.  I believe he actually got it published later in a fishing magazine.

There were two other students’ works that were most memorable.  One, a lawyer, was an avowed perfectionist and loathe to read her work aloud in class.  I told her I’d never pressure her to read aloud, but would always ask her–always give her another opportunity to do so.  The second was a military man who said he’d never written anything but short releases.

The assignment was to interview a deceased historical figure or a character from literature; or to write a story in the style of a particular writer.  I said, for the interviews, they could conduct them anywhere they liked, and that their subjects would probably try to evade or give facile answers, but don’t let them get away with it.  Make them answer the questions, and make them do so honestly.

On class night, the lawyer, in response to my general call for readers, volunteered to read her story aloud, and I was never more pleased with the leap in someone’s writing.  She had chosen to interview the two male characters from Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair.  The novel is the wartime story of a writer, a married woman with whom he has an affair, and her husband.  She breaks off the affair, and it is only after she is deceased that the writer discovers she made a bargain with God that if he survived the war, she wouldn’t see him again.  The writer is left embittered.  This student injected herself into the story.  With an assignment to interview the writer, she goes to his home, only to be greeted by the husband.  The two men, bound by their love for the deceased woman, are now sharing a house.  The student is ushered into the study, where she conducts the interview of the acerbic writer, interrupted by the husband’s small, mild interjections.  This student had imagined what could come next after the novel ended, and had captured Graham Greene’s style and the natures of the two men, while addressing some of the novel’s themes.  In my view, this particular exercise had permitted her to play in a way that freed her writing wonderfully.

The military man chose to interview Leo Tolstoy, and his story was lyrical and beautiful, as if he actually had been talking with Tolstoy.  Sadly, for whatever reason (possibly his work?  I’ll never know), he was not in class on the night when we examined these stories and did not turn up again.  I sincerely hope he didn’t stop writing, because this man, who said he’d only previously ever written short releases, had talent and insight.

There were many and varied exercises that preceded the ones referenced here that freed these particular writers.  So the “moral” of this post is that one never knows what writer will respond to what exercise, and it pays to experiment with many different techniques to find what will draw the best and freest writing from you.

 

My Grand Experiment?

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my cubicle

My little writing space

In a prior post, I noted that silence makes me restless; that I need a bit of noise, the strange–or at least the different–to stimulate my imagination when I write.  Lately, though, I’ve just been restless, plain and simple.  So I’ve decided, for at least the first three months of 2013, to embark on an “environmental” experiment.  I’ve started writing at The Writers Room D.C.

Created in the fall of 2012, and apparently modeled on the writers’ rooms they have in New York (quite a few in Brooklyn, I must say!),  the Writers Room D.C. is one large room, a wall of windows on one side, with 18 two-sided cubicles containing desks and lamps, in which serious writers (published or emerging) can have their own little writer’s space away from home and home’s distractions.  There’s a small open space where one can take a break to relax and read, and an anteroom with a little kitchenette (with a supply of coffee, tea, a small refrigerator, and a sink–restrooms are down the hall); lockers (where you can store your computer and/or work rather than carry them back and forth each day); a printer (for small jobs); and a small side room in which to make phone calls.  Oh–and you can bring coffee or tea into your writing space, but food must be consumed in the kitchenette.

For me, who usually needs the sense of freedom that wandering gives and the ambient noise of coffee shops–not to mention nibbling as I write–this is a new way of working.  The    immediate difficulty for me so far, of course, is the utter quiet in the work-area.  Though it may be a self-imposed reaction on my part, it feels like an enforced silence–like if I laugh at something I’m reading, I have violated it.  And sometimes, going feels like obligation, like I’d rather be out having an adventure.  But then again, who’s making me go? –Me.

On the plus side, going there does seem to be getting me to follow more of a regular work-schedule, and working side by side with others doing the same does alleviate that sense of isolation I feel when trying to work at home.  In addition, people will chat for a bit when they break to get coffee, and the founders are creating some small social events to help us to get to know each other.  Also, I don’t have to pack up my computer every time I need to go to the ladies room–a more important plus than one might think.

So how is the experiment working out for me?  It’s early days yet.  I’ve only been at it for about three weeks.  The proof will be in the pudding, as they used to say.  We’ll see how much I get written (of quality) in these three months.  So far, I have found that, although the silence is generally disturbing when I come in, once I get into the work, I can, to a degree, get engrossed in what I’m writing and forget that it is so quiet.  I do think that, for me, a writers’ room’s greatest strength is also its greatest weakness. That is, working side by side with other writers removes that sense of isolation, but when one is surrounded by other like-minded people, one is deprived of access to the unexpected encounter that provides new ideas.  Eventually, I will have to find some way to balance my time there with my need for the creative stimulation wandering gives.  I’m not used to bifurcating my time in that way.  But that doesn’t mean that I can’t learn to.

Welcome to My World–A First Manifesto

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For the adventurous writer, no subject is forbidden, no device or technique off-limits.  The only constraints are those of one’s imagination and, of course, whatever devices ultimately work to tell a particular story well.  There are some who will try to narrow a writer’s world to one set of subjects, one genre, one style, one story structure or form, and/or one small group of devices.  But while there are standard ideas about traditional story structure that generally work, there is no recipe for the telling of a good story.

The devices and techniques that many writers call the tools with which they work, I call the toys with which we play.  Admittedly, for a story to be successful, it must hang together; must keep the reader’s interest; and, ultimately, express something that satisfies the reader’s expectations.  But there is no one way to do that, and the adventurous writer will play with all the toys in the toy chest with a sense of freedom and abandon, stretching their limits to see what they can do.

I propose, in this blog, to write about different ways one can play with those toys, along with bits and pieces of my own philosophy about writing, thoughts about what I happen to be reading (reading always helps to provide one with new toys), a bit about the adventure of marketing one’s work, and a bit about writer’s rights, too.

All those writers who like to play–and all those readers who have been curious about how a writer does what he or she does, the writer’s life, inner and outer–Welcome.  Come on in.  Let’s Play!

posted by Jessie Seigel at 8:30 p.m.