Tuesday 18 January 2011

Writers are not nice people

Well, after Linda’s excellent practical advice in the previous posting (which, quite rightly, got and continues to get far more responses than my own witterings), it’s back to useless, idle speculation. For those of you who seek true enlightenment, I suggest you direct a few judiciously worded pleas to brother Ron to get off his lazy butt and contribute.

Now, if I asked you to name some nice writers, i.e. writers who are nice people, I bet that, in the UK at least, Alan Bennett might be at or near the top of the list. And yet, a few years back, in an interview about his play The History Boys, he said ‘no writer's entirely nice, otherwise they wouldn't be writers. It's quite a sneaky profession really’. The remark was picked up and chewed over by members of an online group of writers to which I belonged. I’m reviving it here as a sort of follow-up to the blog I wrote about the difficulty/impossibility of basing characters on real people.

The implication in Bennett’s tongue-in-cheek remark was that we use people’s experiences as our raw materials, distorting or otherwise exaggerating them to suit our purposes. In other words, we exploit people. Well, we do, but I think our excuse is that we do so for a reason and, trying to follow one of Linda’s suggestions, I’ll use my own latest publication to illustrate my point.

Shadow Selves takes place mainly in a university and a hospital. At one point, as part of his investigation, my policeman goes to watch an operation. The description and details of that operation are all taken from a visit I made myself to an operating theatre to watch a thoracic operation at close range. The surgeons delved about inside a woman’s chest cavity, shoving lungs and other red and white bits out of the way, chopping lumps out of tubes, and, at the same time, chatting away about a concert one of them had been to the previous evening. The patient’s head was concealed by a suspended sheet and the surgeons’ entire focus was on the small area of flesh with its big hole, into which they were dipping their hands. In a way, they weren’t dealing with a person but with a sort of anatomical puzzle.

Despite the fact that their manipulation of the various organs that were in their way seemed a bit cavalier, no one would seriously suggest there was anything ‘inhuman’ about their actions. They just needed to be objective and think in terms of the mechanical aspects of what they were doing. So, while chatting about music as you grab a pulsing organ and push it aside may seem disrespectful, intrusive, it’s actually the reverse. The fact that they were prepared to take responsibility for such extreme interventions to improve the lot of a fellow human was an affirmation of their humanity. They cared. They were doing all that so that she’d survive. And she did.

You can see where I’m going with this, can’t you? Scalpels, pens – same thing, really. Except that very few of us use pens any more. Yes, we pick up news stories, snippets of conversation, fragments of real lives, aspects of real people, and we steal them and shape them to suit our subjective purposes. If you like, we don’t treat them with much respect. But usually, these purposes are positive, affirmative things – we want to add to people’s enjoyment, make them laugh, offer them new perspectives, enlighten them, highlight threats to their security/happiness/culture, and a host of other things aimed at lifting them out of the humdrum or the painful.

Of course there are writers who are definitely not nice – political apologists, religious propagandists, individuals with a personal vendetta against society or one of its groups. Such people thrive on distortion, reductionism, cynicism and a dedication to their own cause which shows little respect for those outside its concerns. But I prefer the glass to be half full and the writers I know and celebrate, famous and unknown, are those who write to make other people’s lives better. Like Mr Bennett, they’re nice.


18 comments:

  1. And I would add that most writers are readers and readers are the nicest people on the planet!

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  2. I am totally cut out for this, then! Only need to actually write something to start with. LOL

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  3. I like the analogy of scalpels and pens. With our "pens," we dissect human emotions, frailties, and strengths. Most of us put them all back together again at the end of the day so that the good guy wins. Others of us don't always create a happily-ever-after but, if we treat our "patients" with respect, we've done a good thing.

    We're nice, and we made our readers think and feel. Which is what it's all about, eh?

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  4. I think the interesting thing might be to find the 'niceness' in a writer such as the Marquis de Sade. I'm sure it's there but it would need some slick critical thinking to pinpoint it. And few would argue that he was actually a nice person.

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  5. Interesting post, Bill. I've long maintained that writers need to be ruthless, self-centred and perhaps even selfish to get ahead... now it looks as though I should add 'sneaky' to the list. :P

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  6. I don't know enough about De Sade beyond the lurid headlines, but I'm sure he had some redeeming qualities. No?

    Or. He might well be the exception that proves the rule (and no I have never understood that phrase either)

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  7. Fiona, I think the ruthlessness, etc. belongs with the marketing and promotional aspects of the job certainly. I suppose they also manifest themselves when a writer sets out deliberately to shock or titillate as an end in itself - although that's quite a complex process and I should examine it more closely before pontificating about it.

    Michael, the jury's quite often out on the Divine Marquis. Some say his extremes were simply vivid expressions of a genuine philosophy, but he certainly wasn't very nice to his servants. And a question, if you and I (for example) are an exception to the rule, what's the rule?

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  8. As the perpetually perky member of this coven, I think I need a bit of the Marquis if I'm going to pull off 'ruthless'. Sneaky? I can do.

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  9. 'Perky' is good. I like 'perky'. 'Ruthless' will follow - as soon as Michael gets that bloody hut ready.

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  10. Pert is also good. I like "pert". As for the hut, Bill the ruthless Michael is telling you to go and take a flying f.....

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  11. Typical, you seek to spread enlightenment, fulfilment, peace through Spiritual communion, and along comes a carpenter with his diabolical alternative and you're buggered.

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  12. I would suggest that most writers are less sneaky that people often think. Since we work with pits and pieces, most of our work is in vague composites and erstwhile universals. And, yet, for some reason people always insist on asking, "Who was that character based on?" Or sometimes even accusing, "Hey, I know you wrote that about me, jerk!"

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  13. Yes, C.N. that's what I was saying in the posting I did about the impossibility (for me at least) of using 'real' people. At least when people say the sort of things you mention, it proves that your characters are realistic.

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  14. Interesting post, Bill, as always. I think as writers we often exploit ourselves more than others. Surely, every piece of fiction we write contains something of our own past experiences, thoughts and attitudes. And everything else is absorbed from people we've known, met, read about or watched on TV/film. A melting pot of characters from which we forge our own.

    Or I've just written a load of rubbish!

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  15. On the contrary, Rosemary. As far as I'm concerned, we do supply most of our own material, either through regurgitating personal experiences or articulating dreams.

    Disturbingly, that reminds me that, when Her Indoors read Material Evidence, she picked on a passage where Carston is looking idly through his car windscreen at schoolgirls crossing in front of him and said to me 'Oh, so you fancy schoolgirls then'.

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  16. The famous and, well known as a very friendly person, Dutch writer Jan Wolkers once said that nice writers are cat owners. The ones with a dog had a less nice personality. Interestingly, W.F. Hermans, excellent writer, difficult personality and often unfriendly, was a cat lover.
    Anyway, this has nothing to do with your post. I'm just using this to cover the fact that I do feel somewhat guilty that I used a photo of innocent people, who don't know that I took the picture, who were just having a morning chat, for the story challenge. http://www.rammenas.nl/?page_id=96 People from all over the world are 'using' them now. I've been wondering what will happen if I ring the woman's doorbell one day, with a book in my hand, her photo on the cover. 'Hello, you don't know me, but....'

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  17. Anneke, you've probably doubled the potential comments traffic by introducing dogs and cats.

    As for the photo, since it was taken near where I live, I did think of taking it down to the house, knocking on her door and ... well, it's obviously out of the question. When you go to give her the book, take a lawyer with you.

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  18. I agree with Nevets. I think we're more creative and imaginative than sneaky. People with guilty consciences (or a lack of both) tend to put a nasty spin on it. I'm sure it's just a lack of confidence...

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