I had a teacher I liked who used to say good fiction’s job was to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. I guess a big part of serious fiction’s purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves. Since an ineluctable part of being a human self is suffering, part of what we humans come to art for is an experience of suffering, necessarily a vicarious experience, more like a sort of “generalization” of suffering. Does this make sense? We all suffer alone in the real world; true empathy’s impossible. But if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with a character’s pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside. It might just be that simple. But now realize that TV and popular film and most kinds of “low” art—which just means art whose primary aim is to make money—is lucrative precisely because it recognizes that audiences prefer 100 percent pleasure to the reality that tends to be 49 percent pleasure and 51 percent pain. Whereas “serious” art, which is not primarily about getting money out of you, is more apt to make you uncomfortable, or to force you to work hard to access its pleasures, the same way that in real life true pleasure is usually a by-product of hard work and discomfort. So it’s hard for an art audience, especially a young one that’s been raised to expect art to be 100 percent pleasurable and to make that pleasure effortless, to read and appreciate serious fiction. That’s not good. The problem isn’t that today’s readership is “dumb,” I don’t think. Just that TV and the commercial-art culture’s trained it to be sort of lazy and childish in its expectations. But it makes trying to engage today’s readers both imaginatively and intellectually unprecedentedly hard.
Thanks largely to that spectacularly gluttonous synapse that has been stuck open and hyperventilating since the first time I got a glimpse of a battered Ladybird1, I am inordinately and often uncomfortably aware that I’m supposed to be a writer. That being a given, I never really made any more than a half-arsed attempt at that whole deal with scrabbling around trying to find a calling2, but nevertheless there are odd Saturday mornings where I’m stood around in a dressing gown drinking slightly rum-tinged water from a glass I’m much too high-powered to wash and it occurs to me that some big human thing passed me by somewhere back when I was in short pants3, and I can’t help but wonder how exactly it is that other people settle on what’s going to get them up for the next whatever hundred thousand-odd mornings. Which, by a commodious vicus of recirculation, leads me to the reason I’m writing this: it would appear that people find out through the ancient ritual of taking to the streets and bothering foreigners.
Which level of blind self-assurance plays its own brand of havoc when you’re an otherwise fairly rickety 17-year-old, but despite all appearances thus far this isn’t about me so let us shall we get back to the point. [↩]
Not terribly specific, seeing as I was forced to wear such things as late as my eldest brother’s wedding, when I was 12. Golden opportunity to wear a Tiny Tux ™ and I’m garbed up like a cabin boy. [↩]
I posted yesterday about an interview with Alan Moore (which is still terribly interesting and worth reading). It’s a long one – partially because it’s a direct transcript of what both parties said.
Now it seems to me that that’s not the usual way interviews are published. You open a newspaper and find some guy talking about how he’s going to meet some musician and he has certain preconceptions, and then he describes the hotel room/café/whatever he’s meeting him in and discusses whether this mildly reinforces or mildly challenges said preconceptions, and then you get something like this:
I asked him what he thought about the Irish weather.
He looked out the window. “Yeah,” he said, “it’s all right.”
There you go, you got your pull quote. Now, for the edification of the reader, you should summarise the guy’s career to date, mention what some people thought about the live show and point out that there’ll be a new album out soon. Job’s a good un.
Which is to say, there seems to be very little interviewing going on.
I love reading transcripts because there’s a real sense of the person’s character, and not just whatever aspect of said that the journalist wants to play up. Plus you get proper, thought-out answers.
On that note, I heartily recommend that anyone with an interest in writing read The Paris Review Interviews. They’re interesting, useful, inspiring and surprisingly funny, and demonstrate nicely why smart and enthusiastic people need more airtime.
Maybury has a post up about our recent interview with Radio 1 in which he tackles the claim that we, as writers, shouldn’t bother our heads with the business end of, uh, writing.
I will soundly second his assertion that
the business of writing is very much the business of the writer, literary fiction or otherwise. That includes the general administrative aspects of writing – how to make a submission, where to submit work, help with making contacts as much as the financial ends.
One of the panellists joked (was he joking? I don’t know, he laughed anyway) that writers would be scared off if they knew the truth about publishing. Well, having a half-arsed knowledge of the publishing industry, which you can pick up by wandering within ten feet of a bookshop, just makes writers paranoid, and I’m not sure how knowing what you’re getting into is supposed to be worse than getting a nasty surprise when you think you’ve finally made it.
I for one am much more comfortable now that I’ve built up a more detailed sense of how the business works. As I said in an unaired part of the interview, the single most useful piece of information I picked up on the writing course was how to do up a proposal to send to an agent or publisher. It seems immensely silly to suggest that writers shouldn’t pursue this kind of knowledge.
As part of the Dublin Book Festival, Maybury and I have recorded some inserts for tomorrow night’s edition of the abovenamed, in which we talk about our experiences on the UCD Creative Writing MA. You can listen to it on the show’s site. Sources tell me it may also be listened to on a device known as a radio.
While I have your attention: is this the stupidest film poster ever?
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