A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?
—George Orwell
in “Politics and the English Language“
[A]lmost seven years after I landed in Shanghai, my novel has just been published. I know I’m supposed to celebrate, but the truth is that in letting go of it, I feel lost, even more lost than I felt in those first days in Shanghai. My primary consolation is that I’ve started writing a new novel. I’m still learning my way around, still learning the people who live there, but I’m all in. That, I’ve come to see, is the only way to write. Each story is where we live, unconditionally, as if for good—even knowing that, eventually, we’ll pack up and start again.
Writers are often motivated by something/someone that angers, irritates, or appalls them. Some people write to get even with a person who has hurt them, or to expose some sort of destructive force in their community. … If your story is going to be any good, you are going to have to get past this.
…
One thing I like to do is to write journal entries in the voices of other people, or even characters in my books. I sometimes do it for people who have hurt me deeply, so I can kind of get a grip on their behavior. The challenge is that you have to discover something new about the person or character. If your exercise reveals only what you came to the page with in the first place, then you have not tapped into the empathy you are going to need to write the story you want to write. The thing is that you are really going to have to want to understand that person, which means you may have to let go of that anger.
The message: You have to write the same way as others in your field. You must use multisyllabic words, complex phrasing, and sentences that go on for days, because that’s how you show you’re smart. If you’re too clear, if your sentences are too simple, your peers won’t take you seriously.
Many people—publishers of scholarly work, editors at higher-education publications, agents looking for academic authors capable of writing trade books—who think about the general quality of scholarly prose would admit that we’re in a sorry state, and most would say there isn’t much to do about it.
…
By writing prose that is nearly unintelligible not just to the general public, but also to graduate students and fellow academics in your discipline, you are not doing the work of advancing knowledge. And, honestly, you don’t really sound smart. I understand that there are ideas that are so difficult that their expression must be complex and dense. But I can tell you, after years of rejecting manuscripts submitted to university presses, most people’s ideas aren’t that brilliant.
I have a blog, but I don’t do it properly. Months go by, years even, without me writing. Then suddenly I write a lot. Other people … other people blog properly.
…
The reason I don’t blog every day is because I am slow. … [U]ntil I’ve figured things out, I’m lost. Life for me is leaves blowing backwards. If I try to blog about it, I’m just snatching from the air. I have to wait until I’m clear of the leaves. Then I can look back and see what pattern they’ve been making, and their colours, and the fineness of their outlines.
Other people are not lost at all. The precision of people who can blog all the time. It startles me, that clarity of leaves.
When I was growing up, one of my favourite writers was Madeleine L’Engle. And one of the reasons I loved her books was that they were so different. It seemed as if every bright idea she had, whether it was a contemporary teen novel or a time-travel sci-fi or a historical fiction or a spiritual memoir or whatever, she just wrote it.
Perhaps the quotidian is tedious to others only if tedious to oneself, only if it fails to enrich, deepen, and broaden the experience. It is a rare person and a rare book that can make us understand that nothing is tedious in itself no matter how quotidian, and that what stands between us and joy in everyday experience is our own mindless self.
I’ve been reading your blog since last fall. … It seems to me that it’s cathartic for you and maybe even necessary for you to process events in your life. (by the way: hi! hello! I’m Jennifer and I read you avidly but don’t comment much! I prefer the term ‘great silent majority’ to ‘lurker’ though because I don’t think of myself as creepy. You may disagree.) … I hate to see you take the trolls so seriously, especially the toxic ones.
—Jennifer
in comments to “Golden Rule Smashed“
I learned that the subject of one of my posts from last week wasn’t too happy I wrote about her.
I never intended for her to read it. I neglect this blog so badly that my readership has slipped from 5000 thousand readers a day to maybe 1000. In the grand scheme, 1000 is nothing. But one of you 1000 knew who I was talking about felt compelled to send her a note to tell her about that entry, to stir the pot I’d put on the stove.
I took it down. I probably shouldn’t have written it…
Given how sympathetic [Jean] Thompson’s characters are, and how tenderly she cares for them, I found it puzzling that after a while, I was anticipating the epiphanic, redemptive plot turns with something closer to apprehension than to the relief and satisfaction I assumed I was meant to feel. … I kept putting down the book to ponder how the greatest writers, the Chekhovs and the Alice Munros, can make the quotidian seem transcendent, while others (not that Thompson is necessarily among these) merely remind us of the claustrophobia-inducing banality of the everyday.
Part of the trouble with “Do Not Deny Me” may be that the structure of these stories can seem more formulaic than organic. … Too often, she seems more interested in finding something with which the reader can safely identify … than in risking the searing, disquieting honesty that makes us (as we do, reading Munro) see and admit something secret and previously hidden about ourselves, our behavior and the world in which we live. It’s the reader, not the character, whose epiphany can make a story memorable.
The Remainder Table 