My last two posts have been on Sheila Heti’s Pale Colour. There is a piece of hers in The Paris Review that I adore. It’s about writing advice. Or more aptly, advice about writing advice. She writes:
I think what confuses me so much about those who have prescriptions for how to write is that they assume all humans experience the world the same way. For instance, that we all think “conflict” is the most interesting and gripping part of life, and so we should all make conflict the heart of our fiction. Or that when we think of other people, we all think of what they look like. Or that we all believe things happen due to identifiable causes. Shouldn’t a writer be trained to pay attention to what they notice about life, what they think life is, and come up with ways of highlighting those things?
There is, as Heti puts it, an inherent “absurdity” in the practice of teaching writing.
Tolstoy opened Anna Karenina with the famous lines: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” If, for some reason, we wanted to extrapolate advice from these lines in isolation it could be that happiness is flat, and thus boring, while misery is complicated, and thus more interesting. Then you have Toni Morrison who counters that actually “goodness is more interesting,” adding:
Evil is constant. You can think of different ways to murder people, but you can do that at age five. But you have to be an adult to consciously, deliberately be good – and that’s complicated.
Across both these examples, there’s a common thread — that is, complicatedness is hinted at as the proper object of literature. But what if I’m more interested in writing about simplicity? Go for it, then! Here’s what I understand Heti’s advice on advice to be saying: sure, learn from others; above all, however, recognize what intrigues you, what perplexes you, what unsettles you. Your curiosity alone makes whatever is on its receiving end worthy of literary exploration.
When William Kennedy won the prestigious MacArthur Award in 1983, the same year he published the Pulitzer Prize-winning Ironweed, he was asked if the awards might change how he wrote. Here’s what he had to say about that in an interview with The Paris Review:
People ask will I change the way I write, and I don’t believe I will. The work is based on what I see in the world, what’s around me and what I take home from that. It’s a superficial response if you change your writing because of a temporary change in your personal condition.
What I’m left with, and what I hope you leave with too — write from within. Ok, take cues from what others do and what they say it is that you should do. But never stray from attending to and cultivating the “things” (in the broadest possible sense of the word) that stir within you that strange desire to write.
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