What Good is Writing?

 William Pierce of AGNI makes some interesting points in his  What Makes Writing Valuable? from Lit Hub.

...The urge of so many where art is concerned—mine too—is to defend a wall between its making—the fewer commercial concerns the better—and its dissemination, where the methods of business can widen the circle.

But a literary culture suffers, I think, if it avoids talking about value. Business and capital may define the word in exclusively financial terms, but in the land beyond, value remains an important dimension of meaning—it’s part of the why, and gives a different weight to the question “What is it worth?”

Philosophy talks of value, too. Excluding my own writing here, I think the value of writing is what I learn from it and the beauty of it. Learning how other people live and feel and think. There is enough ugliness in the world as it is, ugliness that undermines life, so anything mitigating that ugliness has value. I consider myself own writings as a form of witness; I am not sure if it is beautiful.

When someone talks about a “good writer,” the phrase suggests a way with words, an ear for rhythm, maybe even a structural vision. But often the phrase means more than that: the reader is compelled by the associative connections made; the landscape of the characters’ or speakers’ reactions, especially to people; the generosity or resistance suggested by a way with humor; the languor, rigor, focus, or musicality implied by the habit of flow, how stanzas, scenes, paragraphs move one to the next; and, bound up with all of that, the distinctiveness of the author’s seeing. They’re drawn to the cast of mind that reaches the page, something the writer has found within and learned to channel like a medium bringing spirits into the room.

That all remains aspirational to me. Probably too late in the day, too long fending off my youthful desire to write, to accomplish much. Doesn't mean I cannot try, but doesn't mean I can ignore the unlikelihood of success, either. 

Every narrative, even where a writer strives to see from a character’s or speaker’s point of view, carries something antecedent to perspective. It has to be one of the strangest features of both life and writing. We can spend ages trying to “find ourselves,” trying to catch up to the ever-changing gyrations inside; to understand. But from a close friend’s or deep reader’s vantage, the trace of a recognizable sensibility is rarely obscured. It emerges from a particular way with, or style of, inclusion and omission—a practically unbounded universe of words and details, but a person’s own universe, with its specifics of behavior, choice, observation, and language, what in daily life we might think of as personality.

A writer, journeying, arrives repeatedly at themselves, but not necessarily by looking inward; instead, by looking at—or for—their “material,” hewing to what activates them, and working through and past cliché to a rawer truth, past the received phrasings and reactions that we all carry inside us to a piece of writing that’s profoundly personal, no matter the subject, theme, or genre.

What I found amazing, even a little scary, is this passage:

 Around that time—a reading life is uncanny this way—I was in the middle of Antonio Tabucchi’s Pereira Declares and came across this description of an eighteenth-century “theory of the confederation of souls”:

It means that to believe in a “self ” as a distinct entity, quite distinct from the infinite variety of all the other “selves” that we have within us, is a fallacy. . . . What we think of as ourselves, our inward being, is only an effect, not a cause, and what’s more it is subject to the control of a ruling ego which has imposed its will on the confederation of our souls, so in the case of another ego arising, one stronger and pierce 5 more powerful, this ego overthrows the first ruling ego, takes its place and acquires the chieftainship of the cohort of souls, or rather the confederation, and remains in power until it is in turn overthrown by yet another ruling ego . . . [emphasis mine].

Tabucchi and his psychologist character make the “cohort of souls” sound like a back-stabbing Roman Senate. But the underlying metaphor—distinct selves within us, and rare occasions when one cedes dominance to another—illuminated a shift in me.

I recognize this in myself. It came to me after I chose not to kill myself and found myself without any escape from the mess I had made of myself. An older way of thinking came back to me, a way of thinking that certainly preceded January 1, 1985 at 12:35 am. But one which was informed by what had happened from that very early morning in Yorktown, Indiana. My PO persists in asking if I am suicidal during his monthly appearances. It is so relevant to 2009. So far, I refrain from explaining my suicide was successful, so why should I do it again? Yes, I keep breathing; that is a bad habit I cannot kick, so have given myself up to waiting for the lungs to stop rather than pushing the subject. Everything about my life was destroyed. What I have pieced together is what I think will work for me while I still persist in breathing, and getting rid of the stuff that led me down a self-destructive path. So far, the preceding quote explains better to me what I was doing than I have been able to put into words.

The following gives me hope and purpose, and also a criterion:

The democratizing beauty here is that we all carry this value inside us. Value becomes a measure of our ability to access our own truth, and deep reading becomes the skill of hearing the true notes that rise up from another person’s thoughtscape. For writers, mentorship can emphasize this spelunking as the goal. That can make all the difference. But exploration, especially when carried out through the indirect means that are the essence of imaginative writing, cannot be taught or even insisted on.

That the writer’s self must be profoundly engaged for the work to succeed—this seems to find expression in classrooms only rarely. Many teachers do hint at it, expecting, as my partner puts it, “not just that it coheres, but that it coheres into something meaningful, worthwhile.” And in that advice a philosophy is embedded: that unless the writer cares, the reader can’t; that a sense of need—at the magazine we use the word urgency—is so essential to the creation of the most compelling work that great writing, by definition, holds value within it, the way skyscrapers inevitably contain steel.

This kind of writing accomplishes a rare, necessary thing: it conveys—intimately, between two thinking minds—a nuanced mapping of how the writer constructs worth. This would be tautological, and might open us to being deceived, except that when you encounter lines that stir you to bursting—different ones for different readers, because our receptors, too, have a shape—you then recognize the kind of transmission you’re receiving. You feel the arrival, and can choose to open yourself to it.

Working on "Best of Intentions", I got on KH's nerves with some of my carelessness in line editing. The story came to be written to fill a spot in a series of stories. I think this rewrite I took more seriously as I went to work on it. I like to think I was smart enough to see there was more to the protagonist, not only to be the example of a do-gooder who sets in motion the rusting of a Midwestern city, but to be a human being. It is about frailty and the inability to distinguish one set of facts from another before applying what might be good action on one end that may not be good action on the other. Urgency, may be more front and center in this latest draft. I may also have an answer to what is wrong with "Colonel Tom". Not that I am willing to rewrite it, again. Well, not at this moment - I am awaiting one particular rejection before I do that !

Would be writers, please read the full essay. There is plenty more to think about and learn from.

sch 12/17/22