The Practice of Writing

In Against the World, Against Life, his biography of the writer, the French novelist Michel Houellebecq ascribes Lovecraft's racism to his relatively wealthy New England upbringing suddenly bumping up against two years of rougher living in multicultural New York. But fellow writer Nicole Cushing refuses to accept the oft-trotted out excuse that Lovecraft, born in 1890, was merely "a man of his time". She says Lovecraft seems "obsessed with the theme of white supremacy, taking opportunities to shoehorn it into stories even when it's totally unnecessary".

So why do we continue to fete Lovecraft instead of burying him quietly away? US author Elizabeth Bear, accepting that Lovecraft's views are "revolting", posits this answer: "Because authors are read, beloved, and remembered, not for what they do wrong, but for what they do right, and what Lovecraft does right is so incredibly effective. He's a master of mood, of sweeping blasted vistas of despair and the bone-soaking cold of space. He has at his command a worldview that the average human being, drunk on our own species-wide egocentrism, finds compelling for its sheer contrariness."

“This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary / The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.” That’s the Plath-world, freakishly bleak, exerting its tractor-beam fascination on American culture. Fifty years after she killed herself, we find her vital, nasty, invincible, red-and-white poetry sitting in a region of cultural near-­exhaustion. Her short life has been trampled and retrampled under the biographer’s hoof, her opus viewed and skewed through every conceivable lens of interpretation. A Massachusetts girlhood; a precocious literary ascent interrupted by an early nervous breakdown; a decampment to England; marriage to—and separation from—the poet Ted Hughes; suicide. In her lifetime, she published just one book of poetry (The Colossus and Other Poems), one novel (The Bell Jar), and a few stories in magazines. Upon her death, the bulk of her work—including the completed manuscript of Ariel—was still unknown to readers.

Notice how many celebrated minority writers of our time — Mr. Díaz, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Jhumpa Lahiri — tend to write inside their own communities. One explanation may well be the nature of realism, which is (for now) literary fiction’s dominant mode: the artistic need for observed detail, and the tendency of literary novelists to tweak their personal experiences into fiction.

Write what you know, young writers are taught. This may well reinforce, and be reinforced by, our sense of a writer’s being an authority only on his or her own community, his or her own people.

So, in a paradoxical way, the freedom to write about your own experience turns into a restriction on the subject matter permissible to you. Your selling point governs how you are perceived.

Brautigan’s early Frisco experience thus amounts to a classic underdog narrative. It was difficult to stand out as the genuine article: the North Beach community was replete with literary journals, some lasting only one issue, and raucous open-mic readings, in which we glimpse the regrettable birth of slam poetry. Eventually, Brautigan felt compelled to distance himself from poets altogether, although, Hjortsberg argues, “Everything he wrote remained essentially poetic, even when labeled short stories or novels”. It was only when he made the switch from verse to prose, declaring, “I don’t want to sit at the children’s table anymore”, that his career finally gained momentum.

The transition was not merely textual. Brautigan fastidiously controlled each novel’s jacket, typography, layout, and even promotional materials. Such powers, rarely bestowed on any author, resulted in the Brautigan brand, arguably more famous than anything in the books themselves. The cover photo for Trout Fishing in America is exemplary: in front of the Benjamin Franklin statue in San Francisco’s Washington Square Park, Brautigan appears like a Gold Rush prospector, his girlfriend at his side in style. For his friend Keith Abbott, the photo displays “His open, cheerful, confident expression . . . characteristic of his belief in his prospects, while his blue work shirt displays the uniform of artistic poverty”. The increasingly beautiful girlfriends, who always joined the author on his covers, were integral to his mystique.

When it came to creating characters on the page, Spark seems also to have taken something from Mary Shelley. Shelley, reports Spark, “was more interested in the type than in the individual, and if she did not attempt to depict the latter, her study of types of humanity is varied and sound”. This, of course, reads as a serviceable account of Spark’s own practice, which tended to steer clear of describing her characters’ interior lives in favour of reading their surfaces. Miss Brodie and the rest come to life as they barge and trip through the world, revealing their often monstrous personalities through what they do and say. In this they share more than a passing resemblance to Frankenstein’s benighted Creature.

Postwar Italian fiction offered an embarrassment of riches as substantial as that of any other European country, starting with Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s magisterial, posthumously published The Leopard (1958)—though it might arguably be considered the last great novel of the old school. Before the war, Elio Vittorini and Cesare Pavese had been greatly influenced by Hemingway and American realism; they were followed by a generation that included Giorgio Bassani, Alberto Moravia and his wife Elsa Morante, Carlo Emilio Gadda, Natalia Ginzburg, Leonardo Sciascia, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Primo Levi, to name only the most prominent—most of whom make appearances in this consistently absorbing and suggestive selection of Calvino’s letters, chosen by Michael Wood from the several thousand pages of his literary correspondence published in Italy.

These writers portrayed a still near-feudal society emerging into industrialization; their various achievements were inflected by cold war politics in an American client state with an independent, competent, and popular Communist Party in active opposition to the ruling Christian Democratic coalition, where left- and right-wing values competed day in and day out on every front. In his own way, Calvino exemplified these tensions in Italian cultural life, even perhaps in his nonideological response to them.

It is a Romantic delusion to suppose that writers are likely to have something of interest to say about race relations, nuclear weapons or economic crisis simply by virtue of being writers. There is no reason to assume that a pair of distinguished novelists such as Paul Auster and J. M. Coetzee should be any wiser about the state of the world than a physicist or a brain surgeon, as this exchange of letters between them depressingly confirms. In fact, there is no reason why authors should have anything particularly striking to say about writing, let alone about Kashmir or the Continuity IRA. Their comments on their own work can be even more obtuse than those of their critics. If T. S. Eliot really did believe that The Waste Land was merely a piece of rhythmical grumbling, as he once claimed, he should never have been awarded the Order of Merit.

What’s missing from our classrooms and our culture, Eagleton says, is discussion of the literariness of literature, of what makes a poem different from a stop sign, or a novel about grief different from the account of grief in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. As an English professor might say, we’re good on content, not so good on form. We go straight for what the play says, and ignore how it says it.

To become a writer, you have to follow a few rules: Show, don’t tell. Avoid clichés. Be specific. Try not to repeat yourself.

These rules work for me whether I’m writing an essay like this or an ad at the agency where I work as a writer and creative director. I’ve learned that people don’t love to be told things. But they don’t mind being shown things. When you demonstrate an idea for a reader or viewer, you let him participate in the process.

I try to teach this to the copywriters who work for me. Find the story. Make it matter. No one wants to be lectured to. And that’s true if you’re creating a mobile app, a TV spot or even a PowerPoint.

And the toughest lesson: learn to love doing the same assignment again and again. Writing, like building furniture or making jewelry, is “Groundhog Day.” How many ways can you write a headline that says, “Here’s a dollar off coupon”? The answer turns out to be almost infinite.

One retiree from New York state in the US has spent four years writing the entire Bible - all 788,000 words - out by hand on 2,400 pages of watercolour paper.

Phillip Patterson, 63, finished the final verses this weekend before reading from his finished manuscript at his church in the village of Philmont.

My writing draws sustenance from several sources – one of them being Hungarian folk tales – it follows the traces of memories, criss-crossing Central and Eastern Europe. In the best case my writing defines its own continent, one that cannot be easily pigeonholed. I write in German but never about Germany and even less about Switzerland where I have lived for several decades. I do not feel like a “Swiss woman writer” which is how I am classified in reference works. In practical terms, I am a woman who writes in German with eastern Central European roots. So why not call me a European woman writer in the first place? This is the designation I would prefer most, for instead of constraining it opens up a wide horizon. This is a space in which my writing and imagination can unfold so that the reader can clearly understand where my “coordinates” are located and what network they define.

On Wednesday a formal proposal appeared for discussion: “Propose Wikipedia is periodically accused of being a boys’ club. “Around 90 percent of Wikipedia editors are men, and it shows,” New Scientist said earlier this month. Many Wikipedians agree and would like to do something about it. A large majority of commenters voted “Merge.” Some deployed the terms “ghettoization” and “back of the bus.” Then again, a few are voting for ghettoization—or as they say, “Diffuse women but not men,” diffuse being the term for sending members of a parent category out into a subcategory. At least it’s arguable that “women novelists” is a category of cultural and sociological interest. It was noted that Wikipedia features an extensive article on Women’s Writing in English, as part of Wikiproject Gender Studies and Wikiproject Women’s History.

I’m currently writing a novel set 200 years from now and you know what? It’s hard. It occurs to me that someone writing a novel when the first steam locomotives were just appearing couldn’t possibly have imagined the chain of events that would lead to something like the Facebook phone — not even close. So how the hell can I create something convincing that far in our future? Wouldn’t it be easier to just drop an asteroid/global warming/zombie invasion/plague on everything and then write a novel about people struggling in a world gone to hell?

Sure, it would be easier. Just wreck the world, throw in a few mutated monkeys, and stir. But it’s intellectually lazy. We’ve been down that road a million times and we know what it’s like: dazed survivors wandering the ruins, gnawing the thigh bones of their former neighbours. A plucky few trying to rebuild civilization again in between shooting zombies and building Thunderdomes. Enough already!

2. Talk about what you have written, by all means, but do not read from it while the work is in progress. Every gratification procured in this way will slacken your tempo. If this regime is followed, the growing desire to communicate will become in the end a motor for completion.

My departure from the language, the loss of Russian murmuring in my ears, forced me to stop, to be silent. On the rare occasions when we meet, writers from Russia are amazed. “How can you write in this boring Switzerland? Without the language, without the tension?”

They are right – the atmospheric pressure in Russian letters is heightened. And the language is changing rapidly. My exit from Russian speech forced me to turn around and face it. Work on my text came to a halt. Just as there are rests in music, so are there silences in a text. Perhaps they are its most important part.

What is the language I left behind? What did I take with me? Where do the words go from here? A labour of silence. If I was to go further, I had to understand where the essence of writing in Russian actually lay. Being at once creator and creature of the fatherland’s reality, the Russian language is a form of existence, the body of a totalitarian consciousness. Daily life has always muddled through without words: with bellowing, interjections, and gag lines from film comedies. It is the state and literature that require coherent words.