So It Goes

For no good reason at all, I'd like to talk about writing.

Virtually all the advice I was given about writing from the beginning was utterly useless.  I was told early on to "write what you know," which is horseshit, because no one anywhere "knows" enough to sustain a lifetime of writing.  Someone like Neil DeGrasse Tyson, who recently turned out a book, can occasionally draw up a collection of valuable details about his or her career, because the rest of the time they don't spend writing they'll spend doing their career.  Someone like Tyson might produce as many as a million words in his lifetime, scattered over a dozen books, magazine articles, science pieces or what not ... but a writer, a person who counts that as their profession, will write a million words in about eight to ten months.  Over a lifetime, they'll write between 60 and 100 million words, and no one has that much to say about a single subject in which they happen to be an expert.

Moreover, choosing to be a writer pretty much denies the possibility of becoming an expert in very much ... unless it is to be an expert in writing.  And for the record, even as I write this, writing about writing is a hideous recursive habit to get into.  Now and then, one has to indulge, but very little in the literary world is more sucky than a writer whose so out of idea that he decides to write a book, a television show or a movie about a writer who wants to be a successful writer, but is in fact an unsuccessful writer just now.  It's even worse when a successful writer creates a successful writer character who's miserable and unsatisfied with what being a successful writer has failed to do for him or her, oh me, oh my, it just sucks so much to be successful at something I always dreamed of being successful doing.

See?  Fucking recursive.

I want to believe that such works only appeal to people who don't know a fucking thing about writing, but alas, like the Dread Pirate Roberts, I've known too many Span ... er, writers.

I was told that if I wanted to be a writer, I should read a lot; and this is good advice, but only because it's good advice for everyone, whether you're a writer or not.  Reading is a self-destructive process in the long run.  In the short run, it's magnificent, especially if you're not a writer.  As a non-writer, you just want a good story ... and there are enough good stories out there to keep you satisfied for the rest of your life, that is an absolute fact.  There's this rather banal trope that floats around where the character working in a bookstore carefully picks out this special book for the customer, from the 10,000 books that are scattered through all the shelves ... and the one that's chosen is always one of the same ten books, which Hollywood, Hearst or Harvard Lit thinks deserves to be a book that will still be read by people in the year 2929.  And the customer, of course, has never read this book; and often hasn't heard of this book, and is therefore excited to read it.  The scene works, usually, because the reader or viewer hasn't actually read the book, and has no idea what an enormous piece of shit that it is.

If you've read a hundred books in your life, then you probably think that Huckleberry Finn is a pretty good book.  It might easily be your favourite.  If you've read a thousand books in your life, you probably feel that everyone ought to at least read Huckleberry Finn, because all in all, it's still a pretty good book.  And if you've read 10,000 books in your life, then you probably cling to Huckleberry Finn as a good book because you have read one hell of a lot of very crappy books.  And compared to all that you've read, Huck Finn looks good.  The way a trough of muddy, oily water looks good if you've thirsted long enough.

If all you've read for most of your life is fiction, then yes, Huck Finn looks like a good book.  If you like the idea of travelling, scheming your way out of trouble and foolin' bad guys without actually changing the culture in which the bad guys thrive, then yeah, Huckleberry Finn is for you.  If you've read five or six books about the actual culture of the south that Huck Finn purportedly lived in, it might give you just enough context to appreciate a few more jokes and raise the quality of book that you think Huck Finn is.

But if you're BLACK, probably not so much.  And if you've ever been legitimately persecuted in a way that you couldn't just shake off because you're a soft-liberal pampered middle class whose never had to fear for your life, daily, because of what you are, or what you do, then again, probably not so much.  Because Huckleberry Finn, for all it's cleverness, for all its precocious absurdity, amounts to a zero-sum-gain on what you know, or what you can do with it.  You may pretend that Huckleberry Finn gave you some sort of insight on racism or the South, but that's just bullshit invented out of your deep, deep ignorance about racism and the South.  Twain's goal was not to educate you, and he didn't.  Twain's goal was to entertain, and he did.  Anything else about the book is just pretense invented in your mind, because for all the reading you've done in your life, it's all just been recreation.

"Recreation" makes a very shitty writer.  I've met too many writers who suppose that all this recreation has given them something to say, and it really, really hasn't.  And while nearly every reader reading this now has no idea why I'd say that, or has already decided that I'm defacto "wrong," there are also a few here who know exactly why I say that.

My transformation as a writer did not come from the mixing of fancy words to make pretty sounds or paint pretty images.  I pursued that folly for more than a decade, at the behest of English teachers, writing teachers and books about writing, who waffled on about how writing was a form of music, that appealing to the reader was the thing, that enabling the emotionality of the reader was the best possible way to garner their attention and so to become respected and capable as a "wordsmith."  And to that end I dutifully read W.O. Mitchell and Chesterton and D.H. Lawrence, who would teach me this wonderful path.  But somehow, it never took.  No matter how hard I read Faulkner and Williams, or Atwood, or Anais Nin, I kept thinking and thinking, why don't they get to the point, and then, is that all?  That's what they think a "point" is???

Then, I took Latin as a language.  I had taken French, and I had taken Russian, but I always sucked at language.  I couldn't remember the vocabularies, declensions drove me nuts ... if I have an Achilles Heel, it's language.  Not sure what Montreal's going to be like; I'll be mired in the language of Quebec pretty much as soon as I get aboard the plaine francaise, where they hyphenate the English and write the French in regular font.

That said, Latin corrected twenty years of bad grammar construction in English in just four short months.  Like Paul, the scales fell from my eyes.  I stopped seeing the sentences and began to see the words; I stopped caring about the sounds of words and heard what they meant.  It took time to comprehend this revelation, about a decade ... but I can decisively say that I ceased to draw a line between fiction and non-fiction.  I steadily scrubbed away how something was said and concentrated instead on why is was being said.  In effect, I stepped away from the wallpaper that Huckleberry Finn is and found myself instead investigating the timbers, and the manner in which they distributed the novel's stress and strain.  It is woefully plain that Mark Twain was thrilled with the playfulness of language, character, opportunity for incident and the mockery of clever people outsmarting stupid people.  But Ol' Twain would have given a belly laugh to hear that his clever novel could, in any way, be called the "Great American Novel," as it has come to be called.  He'd have called it as big a con-job as the corruption of Hadleyburg.  The only thing truly "American" in Huckleberry Finn is how stupid the American literary elite is, who are so good at inventing meaning where no meaning exists.

No wonder Jesus Christ is American.

But ...

I digress.

Once the trees are visible, the forest loses much of it's mystery.  Reading for entertainment fades away into obscurity, so that reading becomes a tactic of understanding how other people put things, and why they put them there, and the rest becomes nearly irrelevant.  It's a waste of time, but I'll try to explain what I mean.

There are two generalised kinds of writing, which is hard to grasp because in both kinds, what's being said and why it's said is irrelevant.  The tendency is to think the dividing line is in the style, the purpose, the genre or the structure of the writing, and it's not.  Allow me to provide an example, as best I can.

Let's take a very simple form of writing, a news article.  Take as a given, if you will, that we can take as a given that the article needs to capture attention and get to the story in a very particular way, while constructing sentences and feeding quotes professionally where journalism is concerned.  If the reader wishes, there's quite a lot about this sort of thing.  It's not what I'm talking about here.

We open a website and find a story about a fire.  The particulars are provided, where it's happening, when it started, how it started, who it affects, what's being done about it and so on.  We read the article because we want to be informed, and that's important.  We need to be interested or we won't read it, so in addition to informing us it's got to matter to us.  That's understood also.  By and large, however, we read hundreds of like articles every year, assuming we're the sort who reads articles ... because as we know, many don't.  We read them because being informed is a long, progressive ambition that isn't managed by one story or a hundred, but by reading hundreds of thousands of bits and pieces of literature over the space of decades.  Most writing exists to inform us.  We expect it to, and we seek it out because it does so.  But any particular article, book, what have you, does it's job and then we move on to the next thing.

Unless, of course, we've just learned in the article that our friend Jack Yuers died in the fire.  This is VERY different.  Until reading this article, we thought Jack was fine.  This is how we've just found out.  And it's a shock.  Point in fact, the reason why the article includes the name of Jack in it is to expressly smash apart our world of complacency.  Suddenly, it's no longer just an informative article.  Suddenly, it's an article that shatters our belief system.

Journalism does this randomly.  It's a payoff they count on getting every time they publish the name of a dead person, or the building that a lot of live people live in now, or lived in at some point in their past.  Each time the journalist connects something horrid to a real event and place, someone, somewhere, feels that connection as acutely as our discovering suddenly that Jack is dead.  It's journalism's business model.

Let's call the first kind of writing informative and the second kind shock.  Informative writing comes in all shapes and sizes; in every form of density and airiness; and is able to equally please through giving you actual knowledge about things or explaining what sort of lawyer Atticus Finch happens to be, or what Scout's ideas are about Boo Radley.  A fiction is just a bunch of details about things that aren't real.  It's still fundamentally informative.

Shock writing, on the other hand, is hard to quantify.  Therefore please allow another example.

Informative comedy is the sort where the comedian basically expresses things you already believe, or would have believed anyway, if you had heard them before the comedian points the fact out.  George Carlin was the brilliant example of the informative comedian.  He seems like a shock comedian, and sometimes he is, because in his comedy he delved so far into places you might never have considered, but for the most part he merely presented things you already knew in ways you hadn't previously considered.  As an example:

"I don't know how you are, but I need a place to put my stuff.  I'm just trying to find a place for my stuff.  You know how important that is.  That's the whole meaning of life, isn't it?  Trying to find a place for your stuff.  That's all your house is; your house is just a place for your stuff.  If you didn't have so much goddamn stuff, you wouldn't need a house. You'd be just walking around all the time.  That's all you house is.  It's a pile of stuff with a cover on it.  You see that when you take off in an airplane and you look down, and you see that everybody's got a little pile of stuff."

Likely, you know it goes way past this, but the above is enough to make my point.  Carlin's genius is in describing something you already know in a way you never considered before.  Carlin is nothing like Robin Williams.

Williams comedy is based upon the principle that you didn't know what the fuck he was going to say next, or what voice he was going to say it in, or what whack thing he was going to do on stage.  When you walked away from that, you don't remember what he said, but you remember he said it fucking funny.  He caught us by surprise every damn time and watching him in the long haul was like driving 90 miles an hour down a highway with all four tires blowing simultaneously.

With Carlin, if you found him funny, and a lot of people on the "right" never did, you got the feeling that he'd be the best friend you ever had in the world.  And with Williams, you got the feeling that he'd be amazing to see at a party, but that he wasn't someone you'd want to take home.  Williams was off the rails, all the time.  It's really clear in his later interviews, where he's unable to put the clown down and be a human person.  There was something very wrong with him at the end ... which his friends and family described.  It came out that he suffered from Lewy body dementia.

Shock writing is a complicated thing.  For those not actually suffering from dementia, it hinges on the principle of wrestling with what the listener believes, attempting to force them to believe something they don't.  The comedian Lenny Bruce, a powerful influence on both Carlin and Williams, exploded on the scene in the 1950s with a violent sort of comedy that satirised, condemned and expatiated at length against the autocratic institutions in the United States using vulgarity, references to sex and violence and the channelling of pure, unbridled hate.  Bruce invented counter-culture comedy, changed the underlying principles of how free speech in America was practiced ... and then died at 40 from an overdose of morphine.  It's fair to argue that whatever Bruce believed, he wasn't a happy man.

Shock writing is informative ... but the goal is not to be merely informative.  It's an attempt to collect material from hundreds of sources to produce a gestalt that wrenches the listener or the reader away from their prejudices and onto a new path.  It strives to produce a moment of sudden realisation, comprehension or recognition that precipitates a major change in the listener's life.  It is a "Come to Jesus Moment," that commonly describes patients emerging from illness with a new perspective on death so sharp that it produces a violent shift in what they'll believe.

For a writer, the Come to Jesus Moment is the Holy Grail.  Those who don't define themselves as writers never feel the need to produce it.  Degrasse-Tyson just wants to tell you about astronomy.  Some will read his book at a young age and decide to ender astronomy as a field, just as Degrasse-Tyson has himself described his watching Carl Sagan.  Informative writing can be inspirational; it can change a person's life, although it's more likely to change the mind of a 9-y.o. chile than a 63 y.o. child.  As people progress beyond childhood, it gets harder and harder to change their minds ... especially if that change requires an adjustment in thinking that can result in a loss of privilege, entitlement and "stuff."  Those people usually have to be shocked.  Usually, any writing isn't good enough for that.  Writing, and film, and every other art form, is limited in that the listener has to be on the precipice first before there's any chance of changing their mind about anything.

That's how evangelism works so well.  You and I, in our comfortable homes, with our comfortable lives, don't need to come to Jesus.  We're either already there, or it's the last thing on our minds.  But when the Jehovah's Witnesses come knocking at my door, they're playing the same game as the news article did with Jack's death.  They knock on my door and they find a revulsed, righteous man restraining himself from launching into a tirade about the predation of religious zealots on unhappy people.  But I don't.  I close the door and know, inevitably, they will knock on a door where someone is at their last moment of despair; someone who has lost their spouse and child, and their job, and a parent, who desperately needs to hear a soft, gentle voice.  Someone who is ready for their Come to Jesus moment.  Someone who's ready to stretch out his or her neck for the vampires.

For me to change a mind, I need the same collection of circumstances working in my favour.  I can build those circumstances over time.  I can write a blog for 14 years and slowly, slowly, arrest someone's point of view with hordes of information and redirect them steadily onto a better path, until finally they get what I'm saying.  But I can also rely upon that small collection of Jack's friends who are reading my blog, who have just had a really bad running, on which maybe they've stormed out, only to find me writing about exactly the thing that produced the bad running.  By chance.  Randomly.

Each time I settle into write, I have to decide which course to take.  Do I write a long discussion about writing, to embed a few tiny shifts in people's perceptions, knowing that most such people won't read me consistently enough for that to do any good ... or do I pick a subject and scream at it steadily for a thousand words, putting off all the ordinary people who have unknowingly opened this blog page, while cutting that one reader to the proverbial quick, so adroitly that he or she becomes a permanent reader.

The art of writing isn't in doing either one ... or even being capable of doing both.  It's having the capacity to choose which it's going to be before starting to write.  It's preparing for the agenda ... and it's accepting the consequences of whichever decision was made.  Too often I find myself wanting to write a post that informs, only to find myself rushing into a post designed to shock and hurt.  Occasionally, I'm so angry that I've done it that the post gets deleted after the fact, sometimes two or three days after being written.  I get carried off by emotion ... and then I regret it.

Informative writing is far more accepted.  And it is better for the soul, as many artists who found themselves opposed to the "man," only to crash and burn later, discovered.  But informative writing is disappointing for the writer who wants to change anything.  I've read miles and miles of Mark Twain and what I like about the man was his indomitable ability to accept all the remarkable stupidity around him as something that didn't need fixing.  He's so wonderful complacent; so deliciously even-minded.  I've never possessed that bent of character.  If Twain were alive today, he'd write something terrifically insightful about red-lining or anti-abortionists that positively covered every jist and angle of the circumstance and condition, ending with everything being "okay" come the end of his story.  Whereas I want to seize all the agents of such beliefs and systematically curb-stomp them until the streets are dirty but the world is clean.  I want to be George Carlin but I am Lenny Bruce.

So it goes, as Vonnegut would say, who also managed to possess Twain's equanimity.  So it goes.  I've written a post, I feel I've expressed shed light on some of the darker corners in my soul and I'm the more disinfected for it.  That's as much a I can hope for.  I think I can guess what sort of writer I'll be ten years from now.  I'm ready to make my peace with that.