Academic scholarship succeeds brilliantly at times because it is disinterested: you need not know why a scientist, for example, is studying fruit flies. But I’m not interested in that kind of work. In my profession, one of the great failings of literary theory has been that the writing is not only impersonal, it also seeks mightily to be free of contradictions. How many university professors do you know who don’t present themselves as unimpeachable authorities? I have made a fairly conscious decision to produce writing that is honest. And even as I say that, I realize that one of the things I try to do is reveal the layers of honesty and dishonesty in what I’m writing.
Category Archives: Writing
A kind of ethical or spiritual discipline
I think sometimes about writing nonfiction as a kind of ethical or spiritual discipline. The true thing, told plainly, is not always the thing that makes the liveliest story. In real life, the bon mot wasn’t always uttered, the climax didn’t happen in a setting with an objective correlative handy, and the good guy didn’t always triumph. Life resists plot–at least on the surface. To entertain–or to “teach and delight,” in the classical formulation–it’s sometimes simpler to turn to another genre. But if we decide to pursue creative nonfiction, then the truth (our own remembered, subjective truth) functions as do the rhyme and meter requirements of a sonnet. It offers us boundaries, discipline. We are faithful to it. It pressures us into discovering the material’s own form, into making a new thing that is compelling.
Telling the truth as best you can
Nonfiction means you are telling the truth as best you can. You don’t make it up. The creativity is in the arrrangement of words, sentences, paragraphs. The creativity is in your metaphors, your description, the detail you bring to the page. The creativity is your choices as you structure the narrative.
Tolerance for uncertainty
“I think the single most defining characteristic of a writer” – I found myself saying to a friend the other day, when she asked my thoughts on the teaching of writing – “I mean the difference between a writer and someone who ‘wants to be a writer,’ is a high tolerance for uncertainty.”
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It’s hard to write well. But it may be even harder to simply keep writing; which, by the way, is the only way to write better.
A gift we as writers are trying to give to readers
I began to think of myself as trying to write a book that would matter to Helen. And, I have to tell you, it changed my writing. I’d seen, rather suddenly, that writing is not only an exercise in self-expression, it is also, more important, a gift we as writers are trying to give to readers. Writing a book for Helen, or for someone like Helen, is a manageable goal.
It also helped me to realize that the reader represents the final step in a book’s life of translation.
One of the more remarkable aspects of writing and publishing is that no two readers ever read the same book. We will all feel differently about a movie or a play or a painting or a song, but we have all undeniably seen or heard the same movie, play, painting or song. They are physical entities. …
WRITING, however, does not exist without an active, consenting reader. Writing requires a different level of participation. Words on paper are abstractions, and everyone who reads words on paper brings to them a different set of associations and images.
Architecture
So I have all these notes—actually, two sorts of notes that I take. The first happens during the writing, often in first year of writing a book, when I’m trying to figure out how the stories will dovetail and connect. I almost think of it as sort of architecture or woodwork, the way you lay pieces together and how the joints will kind of fit. Those notes are arrows with the character’s name. … These endless kind of pictorial descriptions of how these abstract ideas will relate.
The second form of note is a kind of mathematical calculation that happens later in the book, which is chronology. Because if you want two people meet on the boat, one of them can’t get on the boat in 1946 while the other one gets on the boat in 1947. But it doesn’t always work out that way when you first write it. So there are endless mathematical calculations—you know, 22 minus 13—and just desperately hoping that I didn’t make some massive plot mistake in all of my free association.
I really take great pleasure in that kind of architecture. I guess in life I have a very strong spatial sense. There’s something about how my mind works that has patience for the delicate complexity of how parts can fit together—and the great discovery of the whole, which you can only see as you walk away and look back on the whole thing. I don’t get a sense for the whole until very, very far into the writing.
Duty
A writer should concern himself with whatever absorbs his fancy, stirs his heart, and unlimbers his typewriter. I feel no obligation to deal with politics. I do feel a responsibility to society because of going into print: a writer has the duty to be good, not lousy; true, not false; lively, not dull; accurate, not full of error. He should tend to lift people up, not lower them down. Writers do not merely reflect and interpret life, they inform and shape life.
The next big narrative form
In the academic world, there’s a building consensus that video games are the next big narrative form; there are an increasing number of games studies programs. I’m not a gamer, and not particularly convinced of their artistic value; but the argument could certainly be made that one of the futures of the book — particularly the future of the desire for entertainment, which was first taken from the book by film and then by television — has moved on to the game world.
The inescapable miscellany of particulars
The recognition that literature promotes a special kind of perception illuminates the contrast between miscellany and integrity. Modern science generates a general intellectual tendency to subsume particular phenomena, under general laws. We acquire this disposition from an early age. When a child dissects a tadpole in a school laboratory, she is taught that the interest is not in that creature, but in coming to an understanding of the anatomy of tadpoles in general, of all tadpoles. Were she to rest with the thought that she has come to know something just about that particular tadpole, she would be seen to suffer from an intellectual defect.
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Literature has no such aspiration. A literary person, were she to find a tadpole alluring, would likely visit her attentions upon that one creature. Love, a theme more common than God (and not always unrelated) in literature, is typically the love of someone. A poet may have general opinions she presents about the nature of love and about which qualities are lovable and which not, but when she is not in this way being a philosopher manqué in passing, when she is most doing what a poet does, her work is expressing or conveying the expression of the love that someone has for another. That is the link between the expressive aspects of literature that I began with and the inescapable miscellany of particulars that litter a literary work, particulars that in science or philosophy would be viewed as confusion, clutter, failure.
About the world
I imagine autobiographical writers are writers who write about their own lives and their life stories. There’s a difference to me between your life and your memories. Of course I have memories about my own life, my own family, but a lot of memories I carry with me are about the world. And those are not—I don’t think those can be called—autobiographical. Those are really observations. I remember these things, but you have to make sense of these memories by writing other people’s stories, rather than your own stories.
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My inclination was not to write nonfiction, but what I got from nonfiction was that I can write nonfiction. Because I hate to write about myself and talk about myself, but I realized there are ways to write nonfiction that’s really not about yourself, but about the world. That makes me very happy.
The Remainder Table 