Advice is in italics.
Sarcastic advice is in bold italics.
A is for Ancestors
All writers, even semi-literate ones, have them — those predecessors, grandfathers and great-grandmothers, who once upon a time made a tone or technique or subject area possible.
Your ancestors may already be in plain view or may remain forever invisible to you. The important thing is to venerate them enough so the power of their distinctiveness (also known as their might) doesn’t destroy you, but also to find ways of sneaking round behind them, of existing in their shadow, of undermining their foundations.
Some writers entire trajectory is to escape another writer. Beckett was, most of all, not-Joyce.
I have discovered that the easiest way for me to make writing difficult for myself is intensively to read certain of my ancestors. I will name only a few of the most terrifying. These are The Great Shutter-Uppers: Franz Kafka, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett.
These are the writers I wish I could be — or I wish I had been. You’ll see they are all male, all self-torturing. They are also (as I know to my cost) not worth imitating. They can be learned from but not closely approached.
Facing off against them, high on the opposite wall of the temple, are The Great Openers-Out: Walt Whitman, D.H.Lawrence, Virginia Woolf. These are writers who make my own writing seem more possible. I don’t wish to be them — I wish to pass through some of the doors they opened. Doors of generosity, passion, perception, sentence structure. And so I say, praises to my ancestors.
Advice: Although you may not be able to choose your own Ancestors, you can choose when and how to approach them – during which festivals, with which gifts. In other words, you can read them pragmatically or self-destructively. I have found that Whitman is the most generous of all Ancestors.
Sarcastic advice: Immerse yourself for hours in your most fearsome Ancestor, then turn immediately to your own page.
Further Reading: Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, Oxford University Press.
Beginnings
Extreme beginnings make for extreme difficulties. (See Prose.) The easiest solution is to stop making beginnings.
By far the hardest part of any fiction writing is the middle, particularly the second half of the middle — when all the introducing has been done and none of the climaxing has begun. Beginnings, contrastingly and illusorily, seem wonderfully free and easy.
Beginnings are when writers are at their most vain; when they think extreme success might be possible.
As a writer, you need the intelligence to begin and the stupidity to finish.
Get past the beginning as soon as you can. Acknowledge that with the end of the first burst, the honeymoon period ends. If you don’t want to deal with the grind of the middle, don’t write.
Make nothing but beginnings. Never get to the second half of the middle of anything. Dwell always in the honeymoon suite.
Further Reading: There will only Further Reading when it seems essential.
Capitalism
It’s where we live, and we have no choice in the matter — unless we collectively choose to change it.
If you remove the unnecessary ‘American’ from the following sentence, Jonathan Franzen speaks truly: ‘The American writer today faces a cultural totalitarianism analogous to the political totalitarianism with which two generations of Eastern bloc writers had to contend. To ignore it is to court nostalgia. To engage with it, however, is to risk writing fiction that makes the same point over and over: technological consumerism is an infernal machine, technological consumerism is an infernal machine...’ (See Satire and United States.)
Finding a way to afford to be a writer without selling out is hard.
Believe that you will never be able to write your work unless you do it on the latest computer, using the best software. Purchase apps. Take part in NaNoWriMo, annually. Go onto discussion forums and try to second guess what gets certain editors at certain publishers hot. Self-publicize furiously. If there’s a game, play it.
Further Reading: Jonathan Franzen, ‘Why Bother: The Harper’s Essay’ in How To Be Alone, Fourth Estate, 2002
Death
Cuts both ways. You can either think, ‘I am going to die and all human endeavour will ultimately fail, therefore why write.’
Or you can think, ‘I am going to die and all human endeavour will ultimately fail, therefore I better get a shift on.’
Treat Death as your greatest ancestor.
Ignore Death – it’ll go away.
Further Reading: The Letters of John Keats.
More tomorrow.
Last week I bought Fay Weldon's 'Why Will No-one Publish My Novel - A Handbook for the Rejected Writer' (after first finding it in the local library). I doubt I'll feel dejected about writing ever again.
Thank you for returning me to Jonathan Franzen!