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A Snake Eating Its Own Tale
Feb. 17th, 2010 10:02 pmTed Genoways, the editor of The Virginia Quarterly Review has posted an editorial in Mother Jones that I mostly agree with, in the big picture, although I might quibble about the details.
His main thrust is that an awful lot of people are spending an awful lot of time writing things that are not necessarily interesting. There are easy ways to attack that idea, like the importance of feeling free to do a lot of bad writing so that you can become a good writer, and the fact that the right sort of perspective and insight can make something interesting which seemed banal before the right person wrote about it. Me and my sister arguing about who gets a quilt could be self-involved, or it could be Alice Walker's "Everyday Use."
This is an easy perspective to take if you read a lot of good stories, because good stories by good authors are, well, good. And that's just about the only thing they have in common - which is also, sort of, Genoways' point. I don't care how many times you tell someone to kill their darlings or use fewer adverbs; if the underlying story is ultimately boring and empty, and the writer is without special inventiveness or perspective, there is not anything to be done. During my occasional brief stints as a slush reader, I reject more than 99 out of 100 stories not because they lack craft (although many of them do), but because they are stultifyingly boring. I am somebody who reads even nutrition labels compulsively, and I can't make myself finish these stories.
Something that Alan always told us (Alan is the head of London Film School) is that to become a more interesting filmmaker you have to become a more interesting person - not necessarily by running with the bulls, but by paying attention to the things around you, by reading everything, by watching everything, by loving deeply, by developing and testing systems of philosophy and ethics, by having challenging conversations with people smarter than you are, by going places you haven't gone before and engaging with the world you find there. That's the kind of thing people are always saying with a lot of condescension, but Alan doesn't say it that way. And he's right: you become a better and more interesting artist by being a better and more interesting person. Craft is only half of that. It's the tool set, not the blueprint.
This isn't just an entry so that I can say "I agree with this successful person, within reason and with the understanding that everything I write is brilliant and interesting" but because I'm trying to work out what stories would matter, if you tried to approach writing from a perspective of "how do I express this facet of humanity" instead of "here is a story idea I had." Genoways wonders why more people aren't writing about the wars we're in, but I think it's terribly obvious the wars don't really matter to anyone in America who isn't in them. They might as well be science fiction.
We've been at war for 10 years or more, but I only know two people who have served, and both of them are kind of jolly about it when they bring it up, which happens rarely because it's rarely relevant. Gas prices have fluctuated, the national debt has increased significantly, and we've developed new treatments for head wounds and amputations, but the effects of all of these are so diffuse and multifarious that they might as well be caused by chaos theory. It's a war that's not a war. I can't even say that it's changed global terrorism one way or another; it must have, but I can't say how. I imagine my Muslim friends are getting hassled in ways they shouldn't be, but they mostly seem to shrug it off, or to want to seem to shrug it off, which I would understand completely. I have more connection to both Gaza and Iran than to Iraq or Afghanistan, and my connections there are to some extent an intellectual exercise mixed with cultural appropriation.
It does seem to me there are a lot of important other things. They run along simple lines: birth, death, morality coming into conflict, and relationship or lack of relationship to the community. Of these, it seems like the least has been written about birth, maybe because people in the thick of the experience tend not to have time to write about it. It seems you could write about those four subjects forever and not run out of stories or people who wanted to read them. If, of course, you were a good writer who wrote good stories.
His main thrust is that an awful lot of people are spending an awful lot of time writing things that are not necessarily interesting. There are easy ways to attack that idea, like the importance of feeling free to do a lot of bad writing so that you can become a good writer, and the fact that the right sort of perspective and insight can make something interesting which seemed banal before the right person wrote about it. Me and my sister arguing about who gets a quilt could be self-involved, or it could be Alice Walker's "Everyday Use."
This is an easy perspective to take if you read a lot of good stories, because good stories by good authors are, well, good. And that's just about the only thing they have in common - which is also, sort of, Genoways' point. I don't care how many times you tell someone to kill their darlings or use fewer adverbs; if the underlying story is ultimately boring and empty, and the writer is without special inventiveness or perspective, there is not anything to be done. During my occasional brief stints as a slush reader, I reject more than 99 out of 100 stories not because they lack craft (although many of them do), but because they are stultifyingly boring. I am somebody who reads even nutrition labels compulsively, and I can't make myself finish these stories.
Something that Alan always told us (Alan is the head of London Film School) is that to become a more interesting filmmaker you have to become a more interesting person - not necessarily by running with the bulls, but by paying attention to the things around you, by reading everything, by watching everything, by loving deeply, by developing and testing systems of philosophy and ethics, by having challenging conversations with people smarter than you are, by going places you haven't gone before and engaging with the world you find there. That's the kind of thing people are always saying with a lot of condescension, but Alan doesn't say it that way. And he's right: you become a better and more interesting artist by being a better and more interesting person. Craft is only half of that. It's the tool set, not the blueprint.
This isn't just an entry so that I can say "I agree with this successful person, within reason and with the understanding that everything I write is brilliant and interesting" but because I'm trying to work out what stories would matter, if you tried to approach writing from a perspective of "how do I express this facet of humanity" instead of "here is a story idea I had." Genoways wonders why more people aren't writing about the wars we're in, but I think it's terribly obvious the wars don't really matter to anyone in America who isn't in them. They might as well be science fiction.
We've been at war for 10 years or more, but I only know two people who have served, and both of them are kind of jolly about it when they bring it up, which happens rarely because it's rarely relevant. Gas prices have fluctuated, the national debt has increased significantly, and we've developed new treatments for head wounds and amputations, but the effects of all of these are so diffuse and multifarious that they might as well be caused by chaos theory. It's a war that's not a war. I can't even say that it's changed global terrorism one way or another; it must have, but I can't say how. I imagine my Muslim friends are getting hassled in ways they shouldn't be, but they mostly seem to shrug it off, or to want to seem to shrug it off, which I would understand completely. I have more connection to both Gaza and Iran than to Iraq or Afghanistan, and my connections there are to some extent an intellectual exercise mixed with cultural appropriation.
It does seem to me there are a lot of important other things. They run along simple lines: birth, death, morality coming into conflict, and relationship or lack of relationship to the community. Of these, it seems like the least has been written about birth, maybe because people in the thick of the experience tend not to have time to write about it. It seems you could write about those four subjects forever and not run out of stories or people who wanted to read them. If, of course, you were a good writer who wrote good stories.
