Tag: thoughts

My friend (and brother-in-law) Stanley Nelson has written a guest post discussing fear as a writer.  I am trying to live by his words.

GUEST POST:  Stanley Nelson

Don’t fear the elephant: Dante Alighieri, in his Inferno, imagined an injunction, “Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate,” etched over the dread gates of hell. It translates as, “All hope abandon, all ye who enter here.”

We writers should exchange “speranza,” Italian for “hope,” for “paura,” meaning “fear.”

Lasciate ogne paura, voi ch’intrate

A writer, whether to begin, to continue, or to finish, must live on hope and abandon fear. If you can’t leave fear behind, don’t write.

A writer must never write, an editor must never edit, and a publisher must never publish—or hesitate to do any of those—out of fear. Never be afraid to challenge the reader, especially to dare them to expand their thoughts or to take them where they might otherwise not go.

Never fear a challenge to yourself. Always reach for that next level, and the next, especially if that means breaking a barrier, whether real or conceptual. You may never be your best editor, but you always will be your best writing coach—if you abandon fear.

And most of all, never fear the reader, the literary culture or the market purported to represent either. There is far more than that at stake. And so, we arrive at the fear common to every writer. It is the ever-present elephant in the room. To begin our discussion of it, we offer another true story.

My brother-in-law writes mystery novels. Like so many writers trying to make their way in the mass market, Ted Clifton also writes a blog. In his installment for July 12, 2021, he wrote:

“I was at a gathering the other day in which there were a group of middle-age and older men. The conversation turned to my writing, and I discussed my latest projects and got nods of understanding accompanied by blank faces. Just for the hell of it, I directly asked this group if they had read any of my books—it was unanimous—NO!  Not one person admitted to reading any of my books. There wasn’t even one who would lie about it. Then I asked them, what they had read? NOTHING. It went from ‘haven’t read anything lately,’ to ‘haven’t read a book since high school’ (from someone who probably couldn’t remember high school). …

“I asked… why they had not read a book in so long. They all answered it took too much effort.”

Of course, our elephant is worse, and far bigger, than a handful of upper-middle-class wage and salary earners and retirees. Because no one really examines the matter, every description offered for it has thus far been wrong, and sometimes disingenuous. For one example, it is not electronic media in all their collective, if illusory, ascendance, and certainly not the patent supposition that they have replaced or will replace any other media, i.e., print. Human culture may create media, but never replaces or eliminates them. And let’s hear no blather about market “friction,” being the unprovable notion that real or imagined difficulty affects consumer choice toward options of least trouble. Convenience, as Amazon has proven, is quite beside the point.

Neither does the elephant have anything to do with competition for consumers’ time, one of so-called market capitalism’s plethora of half-baked urban legends. People have time to spend, and if the internet has proven anything, it is that time is also money.

The point, ironically, is “effort,” as the men Ted spoke with put it. The irony is they’re lying, even if they don’t realize it.

It isn’t that there’s no “effort” involved in reading a book. There is, however, minimal. It’s that they’re telling Ted, and us, a lie both implicit and obvious. They’re winking, and expecting us to wink back, and thereby perpetuate the popular conflation of the “effort” of reading any book with plowing through the turgid texts we dreaded in school. In this case, “effort” is a hollow talisman with a tissue-thin veneer of presumed commonality. We all know what a drudgery it is to read a book, because we all were once coerced to do so. Of course, that’s nonsense.

Further, the “effort”—our elephant—has little to nothing to do with books. The creature is far more vast. To rightly describe it, let’s consider another true story about another person close to me.

Some years ago, I attended the memorial service for my brother. One of my lasting memories of it is a table spread with mementoes of his favorite things, among them a great hardback copy of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. I knew my brother had read books, if only the tawdry paperback spy thrillers he kept hidden about the house when we were much younger. I believe he’d also read a self-improvement title or two, and perhaps at least one instructive in real estate, which was his vocation. I felt a twang of regret for discussions I could have had with him about Tolkien’s trilogy, which I had read four times, besides his other “Middle Earth” titles.

I asked his wife about it. She only shrugged, and explained he never read the books, although he certainly was a big fan of the movies.

Of course, one closes the conversation there, ignoring the elephant, which is neither the books or the movies. It is the culture in which both are made, and in which they, and we writers and readers and watchers, are made to suffer.

I’ve never been sure whether books should be adapted into movies, or vice versa, even if I agree the basic idea seems intuitive. My problem with it centers on more fundamental ideas about originality and honesty in the creative process. I might put it like this: let a book be a book, and a movie be a movie. As things are, all damage done by differences between literary text and “adaptation” on screen is not cosmetic, but fundamental, and it affects readers and watchers.

That damage compels watchers and readers to what seems a logical conclusion—although not a truth—that the gatekeepers and arbiters of creativity have cast aside originality as a necessary catalyst. It seems no longer worth striving for, having been exiled from its place as a driving cultural force. Although I claim no authoritative depth concerning cultural observation, I seem even to intuit a turning point wherein originality, and especially any claim to it, is held in suspicion.

While public sensibilities are generally burnished to numbness by that creeping cultural presumption, we are awash in products like the bafflingly popular series of interrelated and spectacular movies adapted from the comic books we discarded decades ago. Character origins and backgrounds were redone, but only as the gainsaying of people with ideas in the present against stories created by others in the past. It’s not to say that isn’t creativity. It is. But it’s only the creativity of difference, not originality. Different is only different, not better.

 Nevertheless, in our present culture, readers, and watchers, including Ted’s group, are thereby given a pass when they assume, however wrongly, that they have seen or heard or read it all before. To them, all stories are old and familiar, even, and often especially if they have been tweaked for any reason. They are therefore not worth the “effort” to read—or even watch, particularly with any level of critical attention.

Too, the literary industry has done itself, and even its most doggedly loyal customers, no favors, to put it mildly—really, sarcastically, considering the scale and effect of its many failures. The list thereof only begins with doing essentially nothing to valorize reading, let alone reading and thinking critically at the same time. As one of its most deleterious failures, it offers no significant resistance to the disastrous and pedestrian cultural error of conflating even basic literary acumen—e.g., the level of fundamental textual criticism available to anyone with a brain—and mere primal literacy. Thereby the ranks of non-readers and ineffective readers are multiplied and deepened, to become an insolent majority, deftly reshaping the culture, ever for the worse.

As for writers, the industry offers no meaningful help, either. It offers only an impertinently garish carnival of cynical, hold-your-nose-and-click-“buy” endorsements for how-to books, online courses and webinars, much of them absolute snake oil. Even its promotion of the core business presents a bewildering failure. Its prevailing marketing philosophy is remindful of a past witticism about the cable-television business, which went something like, “if they sold fried chicken, they’d market it as ‘hot, dead chickens.’” It’s unlikely the men in Ted’s group are aware of the literary industry’s historic idiocy. If any were made so, it’s fair to believe at least a few would quickly identify its vast business shortcomings, and shake their heads, comforted by what seems a reinforcement of a conviction that books are not worth the “effort” to read.