Popular criticism
I condemn much online criticism for unnecessary inclusions that cheapen the work, and the popular expectation of long-windedness. Putting aside the uselessness of plot summaries in an analytic context I’m dissatisfied with the opinion widely held by online commentators that the time a work took to produce justifies the time spent on its critique. Effort must be allowed to remain invisible. It’s rude to comment on invisible effort in a professional context. There’s a reason ‘behind the scenes’ footage isn’t in the film. Let sprezzatura go unremarked, or you tarnish its beauty.
The fact is, many people can run a 10k twice as fast as me, but we go the same distance. That it was more difficult for me to run perhaps makes the background of my run more apt for dramatic purposes, but noting such doesn’t increase the profundity of the eventual critique, assuming the audience only gets to know the metric of distance.
It’s not merely a confusion of detail for profundity (hence the long summaries of basic information about the product video essays too often contain) but of context with profundity.
Artistic novelty
The less I know about a work the more alien and interesting it is. When I first read Victor Pelevin’s Helmet of Horror I was impressed at how new it managed to feel despite drawing on history and ideas with which I was familiar. It managed that by explaining nothing, by being absurd and irreverent, and by retaining a clean style despite drawing on obviously very deep ideas. At the end of the book I felt as if I’d been confronted by something actually novel. That feeling is the key to escaping the weight of history.
How to create something new when nihil sub sole novum is itself not a new question. And the more history you learn the harder it becomes. But if I may put forth a putative method…
This is, as a prelude, not a question of newness in technique. Newness in technique without justification is boring. Please excuse the following digression:
In prose, I hate tricks and post-modern gimmicks when they come at the expense of fundamental skills. As a writer you shouldn’t need to revert to stupid little strategies like text spacing or metatexts or unreliable narrators or endless streams of puns just to create interest. Unless you can back them up with pure technique and unique insight, use of such things indicates lack of training in the fundamentals – in the use of your eyes. Vladimir Nabokov’s best moments are his descriptions of things like armpit hair and train cables because they’re based on pure observation, not on some wanky opinion he has or some irritating ‘clever’ trick he’s employing to distract you from his own work.
Long-form perspective study
Here’s an example of the actual work of writing novels from which technique distracts.
Janet Morris is an author who wrote about the ancient Hittite king Suppiluliumas in her book I, the Sun. This book is written in the first person, as the king, and remains in character – a character totally foreign to any modern mind – for several hundred pages. Morris seems to me to have tapped into thoughts nobody could have sincerely thought and emotions and sensations that hadn’t been justified by human application for at least three thousand years.
As for human application, I’ll return to that below.
At the same time the novel communicates context seamlessly to a modern reader. At one point, the king talks with a spy, who mentions ‘the Two Kingdoms’ – an ancient name for Egypt which hadn’t previously appeared in the book and which most modern audiences probably wouldn’t know.
Throughout their conversation, Morris takes advantage of the vague nature of the conversation (the vagueness of a spy talking to a king) to allow Suppiluliumas to independently interpret several of the spy’s statements. This allows her to include exposition when necessary. So, when the spy mentions the Two Kingdoms, all that’s required to explain it to the reader while remaining in character is a single three-word sentence: “He meant Egypt.”
A small thing, natural for her to do, but seamless, perfectly characterful in context, and edifying.
This quality elevates the novel beyond many others. It can be difficult to remain in character, especially if that character is a fairly brutal Bronze Age king.
Slight digression:
A narrator is always a separate entity from an author, because the narrator exists only within the text, and the author exists outside of it. Even the most candid of authors is forced to create a narrator and use their services, because the narrator is the only agent through which the author can effect the world in the text. An author stripping himself down and becoming a narrator is equivalent to a three-dimensional object sinking into a piece of paper, becoming a mere illustration, losing a dimension. See Abbott’s Flatland. An author doesn’t put all of himself into a narration: he ignores parts of himself, emphasises other parts, takes traits from others, and thereby narrates through character.
I believe art requires…
I’m not here to watch someone get in the way of his own art. I’m here to see the world as it is filtered through a unique vision. I don’t want to see John of Patmos; I want the Revelations. (Unless the revelation is about John.) Make your style unobtrusive and let yourself disappear into it, and your work will be unmistakable.
To be a good writer you don’t necessarily have to write that much.
I don’t trust or like the American creative writing class where everyone with nothing to say agonises over the placement of adjectives. Read enough and your style will improve and you will develop your own without this kind of training. Some instructor who doesn’t know you or your influences or what you’re trying to do can’t help you. You have to instruct yourself.
The first typical piece of writing advice people dish out is that you need to practice writing in the academic method, working on pointless pieces for their own sake. The second (delivered derisively by people who don’t respect books) is that you need to do a lot of things in your life and write about your life. Writing that’s too divorced from ‘life’ as they see it is inferior (read: writing which is too bookish or abstract for their taste). This statement is frequently misunderstood, especially by its speakers.
“Life” isn’t to be understood as ‘more or less lived’ by the commission or abstinence from any particular act. You die at the end no matter how hard you party along the way. Everything in life is life. Its interpretation is just a matter of how much you’ve grown to meet it, to understand the life in it.
Everything must be accepted, because everything is.
To be a real, proper, good writer, you don’t need classes and you don’t need some idiot’s idea of ‘real life’. You just need good eyes. What does this mean?
The person who provided the coal fuelling this train of thought, has good eyes. Literally – but figuratively, also.
Empathy is a necessary quality – and if not empathy, the capacity to imagine that which isn’t immediately apparent to you. To grow to meet others, and to grow past them, through psychological insight, and insight into character and context. And this empathy must be applied not only to humans, but to the world – you must be able to inhabit another’s mental state, and imagine a set of scenarios/locations/ideas you’ve never seen, or that you’re not currently exposed to…
Imagination is only such when you’re not told to imagine something. To only think what you are told doesn’t match the meaning of the term. You must naturally analogise, naturally think away from where you are, and about things that have nothing to do with where you are except to those initiated into your vision of life. Ideally, this far-thought should be near-constant. A writer must be, or must have the capacity to be, ‘not quite present’ wherever they might be. Telemialos (far-minded).
These thoughts are not mine but I agree with them: a writer must have both masculine and feminine aspects. You must be receptive to the world’s nuances and sensitive to others, but also willing to assert your interpretation over it and them. Not to mention one should understand the major differences between men and women in the most obvious senses.
Tangent:
A leader’s individual power is inversely proportional to the amount of personal time they’re allowed to possess. Autocrats, with all possible control over every aspect of their nation, can afford to have no self as such; elected ministers are able to retain a personality separate from the state. (When forced to resign Malcolm Tucker complains his job wears him as a skin). Writers must have an excess of personality. A writer, therefore, must be powerless, subject to higher forces, at least at some point and at least in part, to internalise the world they can later reflect.
Return:
Here, then, is our list of necessary qualities for a writer, and the meaning of having good eyes. One must be observant; be empathetic and have some part of the mind capable of travelling far away; and one must be in a sense hermaphroditic.
Novelty and application
To return to our topic, newness in technique does not necessarily impress me alone. The goal is newness in the thing in itself. That’s because the goal isn’t actually newness, or novelty. Novelty, new things, are a modern obsession. The medieval period was content with repetition. Before you try making something new, it’s not a bad idea to ask yourself why you aren’t content with what already exists. My wish as an artist is to express myself in a medium others can understand, in which I can achieve depth they might understand, but in a unique style. I wish to achieve a mastery only I can achieve, and this presupposes originality. I suspect many will share this motivation.
I suspect I have already written this more than once, but another perspective on the problem follows.
All knowledge, all theories, are worthless until applied in reality. You have thought nothing, you have solved nothing, until something has happened in your life to demonstrate the true effect of the vision. This applies in all fields, every abstract thing is only realised (note the careful use of that word) when it begins to exist in such a form that two or more people can see it.
Earlier I condoned wisdom and said wisdom is the application of philosophy to your life. Now, I still believe wisdom is the most important quality, but I think it’s something else. Wisdom is the ability to understand your life, or someone else’s life, such that you can apply the right ideas to it to succeed at whatever ambition that life has. And the quality of your life, the humanity of it, is determined by the degree of wisdom you bring to it; by how much you grow to meet your circumstances and what (or how much) you can apply to them to get wherever you want.
And to bring this irritatingly motivational tangent back to the point about writing: novelty is achieved by any proper ‘application’, irrespective of techniques or gimmicks.
The world is obviously in permanent flux, so any application of any theory is bound to create a new set of ideas. We will never run out of laws to make, books to write, and different permutations of the same problems.
Annoyingly, I sense in these essays I’m starting to repeat myself, and I’m not sure if that’s due to age or just lack of time to read anything new.
I have also realised, as a counterpart to an earlier point I made about losing everything as you age: you lose convictions and gain misty wisdoms ready to be applied to life. But at the same time – at least in my experience – you end up with a huge amount of crap!
verso folio 