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| I Am Very Literally Making this up as I Go | 2008-11-19 | |
| Why I will never be employed by the Obama-stration. | ||
"Ad nullam consurgit opus, cum corpore languet. " | ||
| The oldest advice in writing is this: "write what you know."
The reason that this is the oldest advice in writing is that for as long as people have been writing, most of them have been afraid--deathly afraid--of appearing foolish. If you're not writing "what you know", then you must be fudging the details or (worse) straight up fabricating them. And when your writings find their way into the hands of someone who knows better, he will at once know you for a fool. Thus will you appear foolish. And, as I believe I just mentioned, the fear of appearing foolish has been held over the head of those who were considering writing fiction for as long as anyone can remember. And, for as long as anyone can remember, serious writers have been utterly unafflicted by any such anxieties. In fact, most of the All Star Team has made a point of drawing attention to the fact that writing "what you know" just makes you look, at best, like you're disingenously "playing it small" or, at worst, like a sanctimonious prick. In C20 Mad Ezra demonstrated that with enough force of personality, one could become an expert pianist in two weeks and enjoy the acclaim of friends, family and journalists without ever taking a lesson. In C19 the importance of being earnest--of playing well but lacking emotion--was skewered famously, frequently and to rave reviews. In C16 Polonius warbled stupidly about "to thine own self be true" and got big laughs from people whose idea of a good time was a public execution, who frequently died from bacterial infections and who lacked any dental technology more sophisticated than the ball-peen hammer. Back in C14 the so-called Gawain poet became the greatest poet that our humble language can boast by describing the exploits of a knight who managed to succeed at his incredibly difficult tasks because of the fact that he had no idea that his every action was being observed, considered and would eventually be held against him. And, all the way back in C12, Bernard of Clairvaux scored both hems and haws from ascetics, masochists and ancorites across Europe as he chided the Cluniacs for knowing more about Eggs Benedict than the Canticum Canticorum. The major players? They are--to a man--in favor of going out on a limb, of winging it: of playing it fast and loose. Not to put too fine a point on it, but when you blithely accept the advice of nine out of 10 writing teachers and stick to writing "what you know", you're doing so in defiance of thousands of years of great writers. Even Homer, who we credit with having written the greatest story yet written by a human man, was winging it: "Sing, goddess, of the anger of Achilles, son of Pelleus", he wrote, and essentially admitted (in the first line of the motherfucking Iliad!) that he hadn't the first idea about the offended thymos of that lion-hearted, strong running slayer of men or the outrage that went with it. It seems to me that the big idea behind the bad advice that is portioned out daily by composition instructors and well-intentioned creative mentors the world over is that if you write only "what you know", anyone who challenges the factual accuracy and (thereby) the sincerity of your writing will, if he sticks with it long enough, have to confront you as a person. Eventually, your critic will have to look you in the eye and call you a fraud to your face: if you are in fact not a fraud, you'll be able to prove that he is, in fact, the actual fraud and thereby vindicate yourself in the eyes of... ...anyone who actually cares one jot about your intellectual and artistic integrity. And that, my friends, is the approximate point at which the wheels fall off. It is also, not coincidentally, what those giants of literature (you know, the ones whose works I misrepresented above) all knew implicitly: they didn't care one way or the other what the next guy thought about them as a person. Ezra Pound wasn't up late at night fretting over whether anyone "got" the Cantos and understood how well he understood the Odyssey. Oscar Wilde's De Profundis is more than testament enough to the fact that he wasn't concerned with what anyone thought about who he was or how he lived his life. That Shakespeare stuffs the mouths of idiots with such idiotic commonplaces as the one that is the subject of this essay is good evidence that he didn't set much stock by them. The Gawain poet's synymous protagonist succeeds by virtue of his good intentions and not his thorough knowledge of who is plotting against him or why. And if Bernard believed that the Cluniac brothers would have best served God by writing what they knew, he wouldn't have mocked them for having wasted so much time and ink on their various gourmet preoccupations. When you write what you know, you might as well keep that writing to yourself: it does little or nothing for anyone other than its author. Finally, what I think this all boils down to is this: when someone tells you to "write what you know", what they're really saying is more like, "don't say anything that anyone will ever be able to hold up as proof that you're a drunk or a fag or a draft dodger or that maybe you're not as psychotically self-disciplined as they believe that you want them to believe that you are." And people take this advice because, for a perversely convoluted tangle of reasons that are well beyond the scope of this essay, they have allowed others to get the impression that they are tee-totaling, unhesitatingly and strictly heterosexual war heroes who sleep for four hours a night and live at a calorie defecit. And they desire desperately to prevent this belief that they have allowed to become inspired in others from being challenged. I have no such desires. But not because I am any great lover of the truth: I don't broadcast my personal meditations, ruminations and impressions because I believe in some kind of truth-imperative. I could honestly give or take total transparency as a way of life. As far as I am any kind of judge, those who confide their deepest, darkest secrets in me occupy the same spot on my personal moral hierarchy as those who tell me only what I need to know. I am no great lover of the truth. But I do hate lies. God, how I hate lies. | ||
| File under: Literature | ||
| A Shotglass of Lymph: |
| If there is a better movie than Blade Runner and y'all ain't telling me about it, then you guys are a bunch of dickheads and we are most definitely not friends anymore.
Date: 2008-11-17 | |||||||||||||||||||
 Uploaded: 2008-07-06
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