Recently I’ve been talking to Molly, a friend from college who now lives in Chicago. We share a lot of the same interests (writing, improv, reading, complaining about our jobs) and are in a similar place in our lives. She’s just re-started her blog, Bittersweet, and we thought to share some of our correspondence (this one’s about writing, non-fiction, and the internet), split between our two blogs. You can read the first half at Bittersweet and then come back over here for the second half.
Sarah, speaking of writers, over at Geek Buffet there was a post that quoted Milan Kundera as saying, “One morning (and it will be soon), when everyone wakes up as a writer, the age of universal deafness and incomprehension will have arrived.” How does the culture of blogging and social networking sites like Myspace and Facebook affect our generation of writers and thinkers? Has the age of universal deafness and incomprehension arrived?
Sarah: Since I moved to New York, everyone I’ve met has claimed to be a writer. Everyone’s working on a novel, everyone’s scribbling in a journal on the train, everyone either went to an MFA program or applied or is going to apply next year. To be honest, I was bothered by it — it doesn’t you feel very special.
But then I started to see past it. Everyone has this idealistic image of what a writer does: they don’t work, they go to book parties and readings and spend their huge advances and smoke cigarettes. But like I mentioned a few weeks ago, I went to a reading recently where a person in the audience said that they were a writer, except that they didn’t write. And she was being serious. It cleared a lot of things up for me.
There won’t be a day when everyone wakes up a writer. Just like there won’t be a day when we all wake up painters or politicians or Martians. I write all day and it isn’t fun, but it’s all I know to do. We don’t go to literary events and we don’t smoke cigarettes and we don’t talk about the novel we’re working on (after work, at lunch,
during work) because we’re embarrassed by this problem we have: writing.
As for being deafened by the sheer volume of people writing words these days, I’ll bring back the painter metaphor. Anyone can cover a canvas in paint, but I will never, ever be able to paint a picture that moves someone. I read an article recently in the New York Times about a woman who found a priceless painting leaning against a dumpster in New York. She said that when she saw it she didn’t want to carry it, didn’t have room for it in her apartment, and she knew it was worthless. But it spoke to her and she couldn’t help but carry that painting home, against all of her logic. We’ll always be able to hear the best, real writing over the din.
(the painting is pictured above, “Tres Personajes” by Rufino Tramayo)
Molly, I’ve just talked about the writing community in New York and how I find writing to ultimately be a solitary and lonely act. What parts of your writing life do you share with a community and which do you keep to yourself? Is being a writer something you can teach, or is it innate?
Molly: Writing is such a strange and contradictory practice, because it isolates you in the very act of reaching out to communicate. We write to share our stories, to add our voices to the global discussion, and yet to do so we must separate ourselves from the world. And not only are you physically apart from people as you sit with your notebook or your computer screen, but you’re also mentally apart; while the rest of your friends are laughing over beers together, you’re planning your next essay or story in your head. It can be incredibly lonely.
I’m currently taking a writing workshop through Story Studio Chicago, which has been a great experience simply for the opportunity to talk with other writers about all the boring writerly questions that don’t interest my friends and family very much. It’s been interesting, too, workshopping the first chapters of my new novel with them, when with my first novel maybe one person got to see it before I had a working second or third draft of the entire manuscript. Recently, I’ve been lucky enough to find a few fantastic people willing to read my work and give me incredibly thoughtful, detailed feedback about that. So I do feel that I’ve created a good little community of support and critique for myself, but it took me a long time to do so. I spent a lot of time writing in the dark, writing by and for myself, and I think that was just as critical as the community is now.
As for whether being a writer is something you can teach, yes and no. I think you can absolutely teach techniques and ways to focus your writing, ways to strengthen it, to sharpen it. In my writing group, I’m seeing a lot of manuscripts that could benefit from attention to some very simple elements: setting, dialogue, pacing… things easily covered in a class.
However, what can’t be taught, I think, is the sheer will - the need - to write. Can you be taught to keep going after a million rejections? Can you be taught to ignore the people who laugh at you or tell you to grow up and get a real job? Can you be taught to - after any success or failure, no matter how small or large - come home and set the pen once more to the page? Probably not. It’s a cliché, but I really can’t imagine anyone becoming a writer unless some deep, hidden part of them tells them that they have no choice. That they must.
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October 27, 2007 at 4:08 pm
Rachel L
I wonder also about the differences between writing with the intent/goal of publication and writing purely for one’s self and friends. Does it matter if one plans on sending things out to try to get published? Are you a different kind of writer if you want to publish versus if you don’t? Is the experience different? The identity?
October 27, 2007 at 4:47 pm
poetloverrebelspy
Glad to see the Geek Buffet post struck a cord with you!
I think you leave out an essential part of the Kundera argument.
“The irresistible proliferation of graphomania among politicians, taxi drivers, childbearers, lovers, murderers, thieves, prostitutes, officials, doctors and patients shows me that everyone without exception bears a potential writer within him, so that the entire human species has good reason to go down into the streets and shout: “We are all writers!”
“For everyone is pained by the thought of disappearing, unheard and unseen, into an indifferent universe, and because of that everyone wants, while there is still time, to turn himself into a universe of words.”
People are first defined by the sum of their experiences or by their career and believe that this therefore gives them something to write about. Something which is universal! and interesting to everyone! On top of that, Kundera argues that stability, affluence and isolation allow people the “leisure” necessary to devote themselves to writing these tales for public consumption — and perhaps more importantly, for others to read them.
I enjoy reading about Ripley’s diet and your relationships and your jobs and what have you on both of your blogs, but it nevertheless begs the question: why you? Why these stories? Why on a webpage and not in your diary? Why must we broadcast and be consumed? This points to the second part of the Kundera quotation above. What is universal is not so much how we miss someone, but how we fear that no one will miss us when we are no longer there.
In his novel (which you don’t have to have read to keep talking about these ideas), Kundera has a character — Bebe or Deedee or something — whose life is so boring till she gets the idea to write a novel about it. It was to be like Madame Bovary or something, to bore the audience with how boring a person can possibly be. She interviews a local author to get ideas, she talks about it all the time, and naturally never writes a word. That would be like the writers Sarah knows in NY apparently, who are infatuated with what they think a writer is but aren’t actually motivated to do the work.
But for every two Bebes there is someone who *does* write, and our modern world is in fact filled with more scribes than ever before. What sets your blogs apart as interesting is that you both write well. But there are lots of other people out there writing uninteresting blogs who feel compelled to keep it up for a few months or a year before something else takes up their time. There are a lot of popular blogs that are prolific and sometimes interesting but often formulaic. The writing of today’s bloggers is never going to float to the top, as Sarah suggests. Are none of these people writers, even in the Kundera sense?
And are the few sonorous moments in the blogosphere enough to dismiss the gigantic echo of garbage around them?
October 27, 2007 at 11:26 pm
Molly
Hilary, you say “it begs the question: why you? Why these stories?” Well, why not you? Why not these stories? Is there any reason that politicians, taxi drivers, childbearers, lovers, murderers, thieves, prostitutes, officials, doctors and patients shouldn’t write? Should we have cultural gatekeepers to silence the “echo of garbage” in the blogosphere?
The purpose of writing is to communicate with another human being. We write to seduce, to entertain, to convince, to soothe, to enflame, to anger, to enlighten, but above all, to share ourselves, to share our truths, with another human being. Why shouldn’t we go to the streets and cheer, “We are all writers!”
Why broadcast? I think that this age of technology can be a very lonely one. Blogs begin to take the place of town gossip. My grandmother used to meet her “girls” every morning at 5:00 am for coffee and talk; who has time anymore? More significantly, who makes time? Blogging and sites like myspace and plans help us to connect with the people with whom we once might have exchanged letters or gossip. In every generation, in every era, people have longed to touch and be touched, to hear and be heard. We long for someone to say, “I hear you. I understand you. You’re not alone.” At our core, human beings don’t change.
Faulkner said, “…when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of [man’s] puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.”
But he also said, “[Man] is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.”
Yes, we have puny inexhaustible voices. Yes, we will still be talking, still narrating to ourselves even as darkness falls on that last red evening, but our puny voices can be our pillars, too.
October 27, 2007 at 11:44 pm
Courtney Sherwood
This conversation got me thinking about my own writing, and inspired me to create my own blog post. I hope you don’t mind a double-comment to each of your sites, linking back to my own, where I pose these questions to both of you:
How much do you write for yourself? How much do you write for an audience? What is your relationship with that audience, what are your responsibilities to your readers and what do you expect from them in turn?
October 28, 2007 at 12:53 am
AmandaRenee
I think that part of why Milan Kundera seems to be against this universal writer-dom is because it waters down something that has the possibility to be an exceptional thing. I’ve been reading him for the past few months (having just finished “Immortality” and am now on “Unbearable Lightness of Being”) and while I don’t have the encyclopedic knowledge to give specific quotes, the overwhelming tide of the populism of the arts seems to be a pretty big source of fear for him. He seems to worry that what was once a small beautiful thing, worthy of admiration, and a moments pause will become so overwhelming and omnipresent that man will stop treasuring it, in part because he can find nothing to treasure.
At least, that’s what I’ve been getting. Personally, I’m a bit ambivalent on the issue, feeling that the internet has removed the limitations of our economic structure (needing money and therefore needing connections to get your art seen) has the potential to allow for a kind of Renaissance and more “just” system of success, but at the same time, the cacophony that results frustrates me as well. But it’s a feeling I get from walking into a bookstore as well, so I don’t really think it’s medium dependent.
But at the same time, I know I contribute to it. I have my journal that I write in on the bus and I have my travel, writing, private, and college blogs (I’m a big fan of compartmentalization). I have my stories that I like to take out and play with from time to time. But I still don’t call myself a writer, because it is not my passion. It is something I do, but it is more a hobby than a lifestyle. And while I fall on the side of free expression, I do think the distinction between one who writes and one who is a writer is greater than most define it.
October 28, 2007 at 7:17 am
poetloverrebelspy
Molly, I think the crux is that no one would argue you (and all the others) shouldn’t write, it is simply that all of this blathering has its own effect — what Kundera calls the age of universal deafness and incomprehension.
In response to your defense, he writes (all of these quotations are over at the original post, btw), General isolation breeds graphomania, and generalized graphomania in turn intensifies and worsens isolation. The invention of printing formerly enabled people to understand one another. In the era of universal graphomania, the writing of books has an opposite meaning: everyone surrounded by his own words as by a wall of mirrors, which allows no voice to filter through from outside.
It’s true — we’re isolated (as you yourself argue) and reach out to others over the internet to find connection. But, he writes, there will come a time when all of our writing leads to our inability to communicate rather than its facilitation. We’re not there yet, as there are plenty of pirates and doctors and waitresses who still haven’t woken up writers. But it may be coming.
Let’s say we were to invest the time we spent writing in the time our grandmother spent meeting friends. It may very well be around the same amount of time per day. We would feel less isolated, we could still tell our stories (albeit to a smaller audience, but one that cared about us more), and perhaps most importantly for all of us — we could learn when to shut up. Because to tell you the truth, I think the problem with what AmandaRenee smartly calls the “populism of the arts” is that we all think our stories are worthy of telling. While the previous system of publishing has its flaws (which AR outlines above), it did serve as a sort of filter on our diarrhea of the keyboard. Same goes for our friends, who tell us when our stories are boring or unnecessary. This lack of “censoring” contributes to the glut of storytelling which contributes to our ultimate incomprehension.
You don’t have to agree with Kundera, but I think his statements are compelling and prescient.
October 29, 2007 at 5:10 pm
seaswell
hm. poetlover - the thing is that i don’t think there’s a lack of censoring. if i’m reading something boring or badly written on the internet, i stop. and i think other people do, too. and, in the first place, i usually don’t read something on the internet unless it’s been reccomended to me through another source. audiences will tell us when writing is worthy or not.
and i’ll disagree with the basic fact that more people are spending more time writing these days. today’s blogs are yesterday’s letters - many people spent hours a day writing letters, and many of *those* people wrote letters with the future possibility of having those letters published on their minds. same with journals.
courtney - those are really interesting questions. i don’t think i can ever say that i just write for myself. i usually have someone specific in mind. it’s funny, though, since i started the blog, i know which subjects cause more hits (sex, basically) and which do not (books, basically) and i try not to let that knowledge affect me too much. i like the word you use — responsibility. i have a responsibility to my readers, and, to me, that responsibility is entertainment. how do i try and entertain? through interesting topics, good writing about the human condition, and humor. do i always accomplish this? oh no. but i try.