advice/writing
Patricia Highsmith,
Ursula K. Le Guin,
Mary Karr,
Anne Lamott,
David Foster Wallace,
Martin Amis,
Vijay Prashad,
Annie Dillard,
Syd Field
tips
I think socialist writing has an important and very difficult challenge. One of the things that has become clear to me is that once human beings surrender to the present, the idea of the future wears thin. There is only a present. The present stretches on into infinity. When we say tomorrow, we mean only tomorrow in time, but not in epochal terms. Tomorrow will look like today. The sensation of an endless present greets us each day. Change is never going to come.
That feeling — of futility — is the greatest detriment to the socialist imagination. Socialist writing, to my mind, has to help break that fatalism and create what Arundhati Roy calls “a new imagination” — an imagination of a different kind of world, with different priorities and different sensibilities.
[...]
But more than anything else, the socialist should not write in a register of anguish or even merely anger. For gloom and doom does not help clarify the future, the possibility of the future.
I’ve been saying that the time of the present is over, and that the time of the future is at hand. What this means is not that we are on the threshold of a breakthrough, but that the managers of our world order are not capable of solving our problems. That means that the present has no solutions for us. We need to seek our solutions from the future, from a different way of ordering our needs and our luxuries, our excesses and our scarcities.
We don’t need texts of frustration and rage, but texts that suggest inevitability, the idea that we have in our marrow that this present of ours is simply not able to deal with our problems of inequality, climate catastrophes, war and so on, and that we not only need an alternative but that in our struggles an alternative is at hand. In other words, the time of the future exists in our struggles. Our writing has to capture that sensation.
Writing should be crisp, not for itself — because there is a new aestheticization of writing, a kind of writing for its own sake. I have many friends who say that V. S. Naipaul — forget his politics — is a great writer. I’m not keen on this kind of attitude.
Writing is a form of communication. The point of writing is to reach someone, to say something. What you say is relevant, of course. But I don’t want to get dogmatic. I like to read people I might not agree with, certainly, and I can judge them by the basis of their ability to tell me what they think. This is not clarity, but precision. Is the writing precise? Why should writing be spare or precise? Because it must be able to evoke something in a reader. The reader should not have to run for cover because the author has fired off clichés — a fusillade of dead words. Writers must pay special attention to evoking something in the reader. Even texts on development should attempt to reach the heart of the readers — not to manipulate them, but to interest them.
W. E. B Du Bois in Souls of Black Folk asked a question, “How does it feel to be a problem?” This was his detonator sentence. It carried the entire book with it. People of African descent in the United States had been made — through slavery and Jim Crow codes — to experience a subdued dignity. That was Du Bois’s point.
I came at it from a different place. In my second book, Karma of Brown Folk, I developed an argument about race in the United States, and why certain races stood for success while others stood for failure. This hierarchy of races allows white supremacy to make the claim that it is not after all racist.
South Asians in particular, but other Asian Americans as well, entered the United States after 1965 with advanced degrees. Their success story was written by immigration law, so that their “genius” was not through natural selection but by state selection. Nonetheless, South Asians were being positioned, against African Americans, as a success story. Drawing from Du Bois’s detonator sentence, I asked, “How does it feel to be a solution?” That question grounded the book.
One of my other books — The Darker Nations — is about the Third World Project, the political movement of the formerly colonized states on the world stage. The term “Third World” had become resonant with disparagement — state failure, corruption, violence. But this was a phenomenon of the 1980s, when the Third World Project had been, as I wrote, assassinated. From the 1920s to the 1980s, the term referred to that immense struggle to produce an alternative inter-state system. So the detonator sentence for that book — in fact the first sentence — ran, “The Third World is not a place, but a project.” In other words, the disparagement — which is about places in the world that had been reduced to penury and hopelessness — could not account for the political struggle — the project.
[...] I kept on pushing at my own limitations and at the limits of science fiction. That is what the practice of an art is, you keep looking for the outside edge. When you find it you make a whole, solid, real, and beautiful thing; anything less is incomplete. [...]
[...] Nothing is more personal, more unshareable, than pain; the worst thing about suffering is that you suffer alone. Yet those who have not suffered, or will not admit that they suffer, are those who are cut off in cold isolation from their fellow men. Pain, the loneliest experience, gives rise to sympathy, to love: the bridge between self and other, the means of communion. So with art. The artist who goes into himself most deeply - and it is a painful journey - is the artist who touches us most closely, speaks to us most clearly.
[...] It's one thing to sacrifice fulfilment in the service of an ideal; it's another to suppress clear thinking and honest feeling in the service of an ideology. An ideology is valuable only insofar as it is used to intensify clarity and honesty of thought and feeling.
We judge a work on its integrity. Often we examine a work’s integrity (or at least I do) by asking what it makes for itself and what it attempts to borrow from the world. Sentimental art, for instance, attempts to force preexistent emotions upon us. Instead of creating characters and events which will elicit special feelings unique to the text, sentimental art merely gestures toward stock characters and events whose accompanying emotions come on tap. Bad poetry is almost always bad because it attempts to claim for itself the real power of whatever it describes in ten lines: a sky full of stars, first love, or Niagara Falls. An honest work generates its own power; a dishonest work tries to rob power from the cataracts of the given. That is why scenes of high drama—suicide, rape, murder, incest—or scenes of great beauty are so difficult to do well in genuine literature. We already have strong feelings about these things, and literature does not operate on borrowed feelings.
As in the realm of feeling, so in the realm of intellect. Naming your characters Aristotle and Plato is not going to make their relationship interesting unless you make it so on the page; having your character shoot himself in the end does not mean that anyone has learned anything; and setting your novel in Buchenwald does not give it moral significance. Now: may a work of art borrow meaning by being itself meaningless? May it claim thereby to have criticized society? Or to have recreated our experience? May a work claim for itself whole hunks of other people’s thoughts on the flimsy grounds that the work itself, being so fragmented, typifies our experience of this century? Can a writer get away with this? I don’t think so.
There are several strategies which may ameliorate these difficulties. A writer may make his aesthetic surfaces very, very good and even appealing, in the hope that those surface excellences will impart to the work enough positive value, as it were, to overwhelm its negativity. Better, he may widen his final intention to include possibilities for meaning which illuminate, without relieving, suffering: but this solution, the writing of tragedy or of contemporary art whose intentions are wider than those posited, does not address the problem. The only real solution is this, which obtains in all art: the writer makes real artistic meaning of meaninglessness the usual way, the old way, by creating a self-relevant artistic whole. He produces a work whose parts cohere. He imposes a strict order upon chaos. And this is what most contemporary modernist fiction does. Art may imitate anything but disorder. The work of art may, like a magician’s act, pretend to any degree of spontaneity, randomality, or whimsy, so long as the effect of the whole is calculated and unified. No subject matter whatever prohibits a positive and unified handling. After all, who would say of “The Waste Land” that it is meaningless, or of Molloy, or Mrs. Bridge? We see in these works, and in traditional black works like Greene’s Brighton Rock and Lowry’s Under the Volcano, the unity which characterizes all art. In this structural unity lies integrity, and it is integrity which separates art from nonart.
Anyone with wit and training can search a work for sense. And sense is by no means an obsolete virtue: sense, and not the skill to dazzle, is the basal criterion for art. Surface obscurity is, of course, by no means a sign of its absence. On the contrary, such obscurity usually proves to be smoke from some wonderfully interesting fire. We simply must not mistake the smoke for the fire. I am certain that much, if not most, of today’s lasting fiction derives from contemporary modernist writers of integrity (writers like Nabokov, Borges, Beckett, Barth, Calvino). That other writers may produce fictional surfaces similar to theirs, but without their internal integrity, does not in any way dim their achievement. But someone must distinguish between art and mere glibness.
The writer—to continue pro hominem —is the world’s interpreter. The writer is certainly interested in the art of fiction, but perhaps less so than the critic is. The critic is interested in the novel; the novelist is interested in his neighbors. Perhaps even more than in his own techniques, then, the writer is interested in knowing the world in order to make real and honest sense of it. He worries the world and probes it; he collects the world and collates it. No part of it is outside his field. All the great world is his field. That is, the novel’s potential field is the whole world; any given novel’s actual field is only a small wedge of it. But that wedge may include anything: philology, genocide, childbirth, naval architecture, micro-physics, love, the dressing of game. The writer is interested in everything (which is why he is such good company)—in hockey and horseshoe crabs and baton twirling. His interest, I think, is genuine. It is not only that he plans to use these bits of world in his work; it is actually and wonderfully that he plans to learn them all, for starters, and then to understand them.
For his interpretations of the world to be as valuable and accurate as possible, they must include as much breadth and variety as possible. The aim of the interpretative, referential writer is to render as much of the world as he possibly can as coherent as he possibly can. To this end the writer studies the great world closely, and takes notes. The writer, then, approaches the world exactly as a critic approaches a text.