John Dale, University of Technology Sydney
Clearing out my office in preparation for a faculty move, I am faced with the dilemma of what books to retain and what to discard. With non-fiction it is easy: keep any reference books that might prove useful in later life, such as the Oxford Guide to Philosophy or Primates of the World. But with fiction, particularly Australian fiction, it is harder to decide.
What lasts, I ask myself, what writing survives? The Guardian critic Jonathan Jones bemoaned in August that a middlebrow cult of the popular was holding literature to ransom. My colleague Ivor Indyk in the Sydney Review of Books added in September that it was in the giving of literary prizes that:
the cult of the middlebrow seems now to have established itself.
The academic Beth Driscoll entered the debate, with a recent, wide-ranging article on the middlebrow, with particular focus on three recent Australian novels, by Susan Johnson, Stephanie Bishop and Antonia Hayes. To which the authors in question last week published their responses, in part taking umbrage at the description of their work as middlebrow because, in Hayes’ words:
it implies an aesthetic pecking order, and is more often than not used in a derogatory way.
The distinctions between highbrow and middlebrow fiction are as old as literature itself.
In the 18th century, novel-reading was regarded as frivolous and morally suspicious. Real literature was to be found in religious tracts, epic poetry and mannered letters written by the nobility. It was the duty of learned men to uphold literary standards against the rising tide of middle-class tastes.
Even Dickens was considered by many of his contemporaries to be too middlebrow to be a serious writer, and Edmund Wilson wrote of Raymond Chandler that he “remained a long way below Graham Greene”.
“Literature is bunk,” Chandler replied, “written by fancy boys, clever-clever darlings, stream-of-consciousness ladies and gents and editorial novelists.”
Would I ever read Graham Greene again? Probably not, I decide – all that Catholic angst – but I keep two novels by Raymond Chandler. If we can’t trust our literary academics and critics, to whom, then, should we entrust the judgement of literary quality?
The only answer is the passage of time. What is valorised today might not be read in 50 years. Quintus Servinton (1830), the first novel published in Australia, was written by a convict in 1830, but no one would ever describe it as literature. It survives for its historical value alone.
Eugene Hsu
In a 2002 poll by the Norwegian Nobel Institute, 100 international authors, including Nobel prize-winners, chose Don Quixote (1605) as the most important book of all time, ahead of novels by Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. (No Australian writer made their list.)
In fact, Dostoevsky declared Cervantes book:
the final and the greatest expression of human thought, the bitterest irony that a human is capable of expressing …
And yet Don Quixote is neither highbrow nor middlebrow; if anything it is a satire on literary pretensions, on those genres — the epic and romance of chivalry — that preceded it. Yet for a long time Don Quixote was regarded as light literature and not worthy of serious study.
To talk about literature, therefore, we must ask what is literature? A common response is that it’s a force for change, or morally instructive, but these vague motherhood statements would exclude Rabelais, Henry Miller or the Marquis de Sade.
In a wonderful 2002 essay, Negotiating with the Dead, Margaret Atwood suggested there is only one question to be asked about any work — is it alive, or is it dead?
This is a far better measure of a novel or story’s worth than whether it is highbrow or lowbrow. The best fiction transcends brows. The playwright David Mamet suggested the purpose of literature is to delight.
“To create or endorse the Scholastic is a craven desire,” he wrote in 2000. “It may yield a low-level self-satisfaction, but how can this compare with our joy at great, generous writing.”
Great, generous writing that is alive. Now we are getting closer to answering the question: What lasts, what writing survives? And what books should I keep?
The only way a text can survive is through its interaction with a reader – “no matter how far away that reader may be from the writer in time and space,” Atwood wrote. Miguel Cervantes died in 1616 yet his creation Don Quixote de la Mancha lives on four centuries later, and no-one today reads a pastoral romance.
We all know what dead writing is, for we encounter it every day in managerial speak, in those densely-worded, multi-paged documents about course intended learning outcomes, quality assurance mechanisms and international benchmarking activities. All around us dead sentences are falling on the living.
But the writing that survives, great literature, reminds us of our existence in this world, and our connection with other living things.
Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1877) was written 140 years ago and yet most of it remains alive and vivid. There is something presumptuous, if not pretentious, about the term “literary fiction”. One can’t imagine Tolstoy telling Chekhov at his country estate that he was writing “literary fiction” or “highbrow literature”.
On the contrary, Tolstoy held an aesthetic that required fiction to be morally improving and accessible to the widest public. It is not the morally improving aspects of Tolstoy’s prose that we appreciate today; rather it is passages such as the scene of Konstanin Levin travelling through the Russian countryside, during which:
the tall grass softly twined around the wheels and the horse’s legs, leaving its seeds on the wet spokes and hubs.
This is what lasts, this is what survives, our joy of discovery at something simple and straightforward that connects us to the world. If the best fiction is a way of dealing with death, then it is also a way of learning about the inter-related nature of life.
That is the fiction worth keeping.
John Dale, Professor of Writing and Director – Centre for New Writing, University of Technology Sydney
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
The links below are to articles that look at the best software for authors.
For more visit:
– http://www.indiesunlimited.com/2015/11/05/which-software-program-is-best-for-authors-part-1/
–http://www.indiesunlimited.com/2015/11/12/which-software-is-best-for-authors-part-2/
Maya Sapiurka, University of California, San Diego
Richard Lee/flickr, CC BY-NC-ND
One of the most interesting and entertaining parts of following my favourite authors on Twitter is witnessing a little bit of the writing process.
Getting a peek into how my favourite books are written is like watching a real-time behind-the-scenes DVD featurette. But not every update is a positive one. There’s something that haunts all writers, be they professional or amateur: writer’s block.
Writer’s block can be difficult to define, because no two people share the same experience of it. Probably the simplest and most straightforward definition comes from Dr. Patricia Huston:
a distinctly uncomfortable inability to write.
But what could be the cause of this vaguely described problem? Has a writer’s Muse simply deserted them, or can we find an explanation hidden somewhere in the brain?
While there haven’t been any published scientific studies on people with writer’s block, we can take a few different avenues to try and determine what parts of the brain may be affected. One of those is looking at where words come from in the first place.
Language has traditionally been thought to be one of the few skills found in a very specific location in the brain: on the left side of the front part of the brain, fittingly called the frontal lobe.
This is called Broca’s area, named after the scientist who first reported that damage to this area led to the inability to form words, called aphasia. Since writer’s block is, fundamentally, an inability to write down words, this makes the frontal lobe an excellent place to start in researching the underpinnings of writer’s block.
Database Center for Life Science, CC BY-ND
We can also look at writer’s block as an inability to come up with a story, be it fiction, non-fiction, or the story of how to program your remote. Most who experience writer’s block aren’t having trouble producing words – they simply can’t figure out what should happen next.
A small number of studies have looked at the concept of “story creation” and what areas of the brain might be involved. In one study from 2005, participants were presented with a set of three words and asked to create a story based around them.
On some trials, they were asked to “be creative” and on others to “be uncreative”.
When this task was done in an fMRI scanner, which measures blood flow to different regions of the brain as an indicator of increased or decreased activity, there was a significant increase in activity in the prefrontal cortex.
Wikimedia Commons
This increased activity was seen not just on the left side, where Broca’s area is located, but also in the right prefrontal cortex. Some of these areas, such as the anterior cingulate cortex, that are associated with making associations between unrelated concepts – a critical skill for a great writer.
In another study, from 2013, participants were asked to actually write a story while in the fMRI scanner. They were given the first 30 words of a familiar text, asked to brainstorm a continuation of that text, and then given two minutes to physically write out their story. These stories were then scored based on creativity and measured against the brain activity data generated while in the scanner.
Both the “brainstorming” and “creative writing” portions of the experiment showed strong increases in brain activity in the frontal lobe, particularly in the language areas.
In the “brainstorming” condition, the subregions involved included those associated with planning and control, whereas many of those regions involved in the “creative writing” condition were involved with memory and the motor areas related to the physical act of writing.
So when we speak of writer’s block, we may actually be talking about a “creation block” – the inability to make the connections and the plans that allow creative writing to occur.
Nata Luna Sans/flickr, CC BY-NC
So we’ve got an idea of where writer’s block is happening – but what can you do to fight against it? There’s no pill you can take to make it go away, but there are some simple things that you can try to loosen up your frontal lobe, all recommended by Dr. Huston in 1998:
Read someone else’s writing. Studies have shown that people are more creative when they’re exposed to the creative ideas of others. Just make sure you’re only inspired by their writing and not copying from it.
Break the work down into pieces. If you can’t get the introduction to flow the way you want it to, try something in the middle. Check off each part as you finish so you can get an accurate sense of how much you’ve completed.
Write without stopping. Try writing a whole draft without going back and re-reading what you’ve written. Some of it may not be great, but I bet a lot of it will be usable. At the very least, it will give you a place to start.
Plan breaks into your writing schedule. Many swear by the pomodoro technique, but find a rhythm that works for you. Go for a walk or grab a meal with friends or watch that video of the puppy that can’t roll over (a personal favorite). Relaxing will make it easier to get back into the writing spirit.
Don’t procrastinate. The more you put off what you have to write, the more anxiety you’ll feel. This is always my stumbling block (and why I’ve watched half of the second season of Fringe while writing this).
Ultimately, be kind to yourself. You’re not the first to go through this and you’re not the last. Being stuck doesn’t make you a bad writer or a bad person. It makes you a human being with a flawed (but marvellous) brain.
Maya Sapiurka, Graduate Student, University of California, San Diego
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Alice Robinson, Melbourne Polytechnic
Author provided
In March 2015, when the days remained long and hot, so dry that the paddocks around my house were tinder, my debut novel Anchor Point was published.
The events of the novel occur under pressure from exponential environmental fragility and climate change.
As 2015 has worn on, cooling, growing bitter, as the rain failed to arrive, I’ve been invited to speak and write on the idea that “writing for good” – writing to enact positive social change – is a valid and important thing for fiction writers to do. A session at the upcoming National Young Writers’ Festival speaks to this topic.
I am deeply touched by the inherent optimism in this notion: that writers and artists who direct their work toward the prevailing issues of the time can somehow alter the real world, for the better.
Literature is constructive as well as reflective, and there is certain power in this.
Historian and literary critic David Masson, in British Novelists and Their Styles (1859), observed the development of novels written out of “contemporary earnest”:
We have to report, as characteristic of British novel-writing recently and at present, a great development of the Novel of Purpose.
This trend, of course, was not limited to Britain, but it certainly grew in strength across the nineteenth century.
Literary scholar Amanda Claybaugh, in her book The Novel of Purpose: Literature and Social Reform in the Anglo-American World (2007), finds that such nineteenth-century novels sometimes related to social reform movements and sometimes did not. Yet all took their “conception of purposefulness” from the desire to change society.
Fiction can underwrite understandings of what is deemed desirable and appropriate by a given culture; what is unacceptable, what is feared and abhorred. Novels rising from moments of conflict and hardship sharpen focus on the inequalities and struggles of those times.
In doing so, such narratives raise awareness of key social issues and potentially move the culture toward empathy, understanding, change – or else underscore unfortunate cultural resistance, the failure of those things to eventuate.
Many examples of this phenomenon already exist in literature across the world.
Keith Bedford/Reuters
The Colour Purple (1982), Alice Walker’s gruelling novel of gender inequality and racism in 1930s Georgia, was published in the early 1980s. It simultaneously showcases conditions for black women before the civil rights movement and draws attention, by comparison, to the shortcomings of contemporary race and gender relations in the movement’s wake.
More recently, Dave Eggars’ novel What is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng (2006) lays bare the heartbreaking difficulties and deep resilience of the refugee experience. It portrays the life of one Sudanese “Lost Boy” fleeing his nation’s civil war for the United States.
Glen Woodhead/AAP
In an entirely different kind of book, John Marsden addresses the refugee experience. His poignant and distressing illustrated work for children, Home and Away (2008), sits within the Australian context.
These texts exert complex cultural pressure around contemporary issues, inviting the reader to inhabit the terrible, but authentic, experiences they portray.
Such books write into the heart of historical and current difficulties with intrinsic hopefulness, spotlighting dark times so that they can be seen clearly for what they are.
In contrast, dystopian novels such as George Orwell’s 1984 (1949), Robert C. O’Brien’s Z for Zachariah (1974), Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), P.D. James’ The Children of Men (1992) and Meg Rosoff’s How I Live Now (2004), to name a few of my favourites, wrestle with the future.
Offering visions of frightening social, political and environmental breakdown, such novels convey the fear that our legacy will be danger and unrest, the future a terrifying context where humanities’ core qualities – capacity for kindness, compassion, cooperation – will be tested, even altogether razed.
So often these speculative narratives arise from periods of perceived genuine threat to our real-world way of life: slavery; industrialization; the spectre of nuclear obliteration; the AIDs epidemic; the digital revolution. By portraying perilous imagined futures, dystopian narratives help illuminate the cultural anxieties of the present day.
This is also true of the climate change novels currently surfacing in Australia and globally. According to UCLA Journalism and Media Fellow Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow, in her article Cli-Fi: Birth of a Genre (2013), the threat of climate change has become:
too pressing [for authors] to ignore, and less abstract, thanks to a nonstop succession of mega-storms and record-shattering temperatures.
Some novels, like Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003), Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), Jane Rawson’s A Wrong Turn at the Office of Unmade Lists (2013) and James Bradley’s Clade (2015) imagine grim social, political and humanitarian crises that could arise in response to profound degradation of the natural world.
Stephen Hird/Reuters
Others, like my own, are set in the early stages of environmental and systemic breakdown, when there remains a narrow possibility for turning things around.
Either way, just as the threat of nuclear war felt imminent in the 1950s, making way for the anxious cultural sense that bombs could drop at any moment, climate change is also imminent – and this is reflected in the stories we are telling.
But unlike the threat of life in a radioactive world, the impacts of climate change are now actual, and inevitable. While science can tell us what climate change is likely to look like in various regions from an ecological perspective, we just don’t know for sure what our lives will be like as significant change comes to pass.
A work of fiction is a guess, a possible response to a question we have no other way of answering.
As another hot summer looms, as I contemplate my little children who stand to inherit the issues we are now failing to adequately address, as I turn in disgust from the governmental inertia around climate change in Australia, it feels clearer now than ever before that fiction writing alone cannot alter the collision course with disaster we seem determined to create.
DFES WA/AAP
Whatever optimism there may be inherent in the ability of writing to enact meaningful change in the world, it seems both a heavy duty to bestow to individual practitioners, and too little too late.
When I think of writing for good in the context of writing about climate change, I see that there is power in fiction’s capacity to illuminate unknown futures for those living now, to show what life might be like in climatically altered circumstances, how they could be survived. I see that there is good, also, in recording our cultural despair in fiction as a message to those in the future.
We once imagined the perils of your experience, and we are sorry.
The National Young Writers’ Festival takes place in Newcastle, October 1-4. Details here.
Alice Robinson, Lecturer in Creative Writing, Melbourne Polytechnic
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Annie Coral Demosthenous, University of Western Australia
Last month in The Guardian, with a piece headlined Get Real. Terry Pratchett is not a Literary Genius, literary critic Jonathan Jones claimed Terry Pratchett’s books should not be read, because they are not literature:
Everyone reads trash sometimes, but why are we now pretending, as a culture, that it is the same thing as literature? The two are utterly different.
Jones informed us that he hadn’t read anything by Pratchett, because his time was better spent reading Jane Austen. In presenting Pratchett and Austen as polar opposites, Jones made certain lazy assumptions about both the nature and function literature, which deserve to be challenged.
Jones’ article irritated many, and has drawn criticism for reinforcing an elitist and exclusionary definition of culture, based on the assumption that there is a singular definition of “literary” fiction independent of the reader’s individual experience of either life or reading.
Yet the definition of “literature” is changeable, and inextricably linked with fashion. As the author Christopher Priest has pointed out, works now considered classics were not necessarily defined as high culture when they were written, and works considered literary when published do not always survive over time.
Priest also observes that many classics began life as popular publications – the story of Americans waiting at the wharf to discover the fate of Little Nell springs to mind. What is missing from this debate is direct engagement with Pratchett’s work and its relation to literary high culture.
So what is high culture? And what do we mean when we call something “literary”? According to Jones, “actual literature” is “harder to get to grips with than a Discworld novel, but it is more worth the effort”.
As this definition is not particularly helpful, let us consider some characteristics commonly considered “literary”: the elegant and adventurous use of language, engagement with themes of universal significance, inventiveness of style, defiance of genre classification.
Jones accuses Pratchett’s prose of being “very ordinary”, missing Pratchett’s delight in locating the extraordinary within the ordinary: his writing is simultaneously clear and complex, much like Austen’s. Both are masters of aphorism; compare for example:
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife (Austen, Pride and Prejudice).
To:
The presence of those seeking the truth is infinitely to be preferred to the presence of those who think they’ve found it (Pratchett, Monstrous Regiment).
Both are wry observations of human nature, and both make the reader stop and think.
Pratchett seldom allows language to exist unchallenged; words are stretched and twisted by new and surprising contexts, opening the reader’s eye to the arbitrary relation of signifier and signified, often eliciting surprised laughter.
The Truth (2000), the 25th Discworld novel, reflects on the meaning of “truth” and people’s propensity to look for it, structured around the aphorism that “a lie can run around the world before the truth has got its boots on”.
William, a compulsive truth-teller, sets up the first newspaper on the Discworld, and discovers that the truth is hard to find. He is horrified when readers assume everything printed in the paper is true, assuming “otherwise they wouldn’t let them put it in”.
The novel concludes with the statement that “nothing has to be true for ever. Just for long enough, to tell you the truth”. This challenges readers’ assumptions about objective truth, but positions it as ephemeral rather than non-existent.
Pratchett’s writing style is economical, elegant and adventurous. In The Truth, he takes the same approach to chapters as Joyce takes to punctuation in the final chapter of Ulysses (1918): he doesn’t use any. Instead, a multitude of episodic narratives fit together like scenes in a film, jumping between characters, location and time without losing the narrative thread.
The Truth begins by tracing a rumour flying through the city of Ankh-Morpork: “The dwarfs can turn lead into gold”. As different characters hear the rumour, (alchemists, wizards, thieves, the dwarfs themselves), the image of both city and world emerges. The rumour, like a panning camera, stops when it reaches William.
Pratchett’s work is often underestimated because it is classified as “genre fiction” rather than literary fiction. Yet Pratchett’s relationship with genre is complex and adversarial. He does not reproduce genre stereotypes, he sets them up to be deconstructed, or at least affectionately mocked.
Rincewind, the original Discworld hero, is represented as completely un-heroic: a cowardly wizard who cannot do magic, or, indeed, spell the word wizard. He is joined in his adventures by Cohen the Barbarian, now old, toothless and suffering from lumbago, who nevertheless is still a more successful hero than Rincewind.
Austen often flirts with genre in a similar way. Northanger Abbey (1817) is a mock-Gothic romance, which satirises the stereotypes of Gothic fiction by reproducing them and then allowing reality to intrude. The novel begins with a discourse on Catherine’s unsuitability as heroine, listing the characteristics one expects of heroines and locating their absence in Catherine.
When visiting Northanger Abbey, Catherine goes looking for manifestations of Gothic tropes, and is disappointed at every turn: the hidden papers she finds are laundry receipts, the old Abbey has been restored and redecorated, and her love-interest’s mother was not murdered, after all.
Austen’s novels are no harder or easier to read than Pratchett’s; both use wit and satire to carry out social critique, and in both cases people who don’t find them funny tend not to enjoy them.
Reading Pratchett, like reading Austen, requires commitment, and a willingness to look under the surface. It’s a shame Jonathan Jones was unable to do so before writing his follow-up article on Pratchett – for which he had, belatedly, read one book by the author – this past weekend.
Annie Coral Demosthenous, Honorary Research Fellow, European Languages and Studies, University of Western Australia
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Alexandra Smith, University of Sydney
What happens when novelists actively incorporate the idea of failure in their books?
We generally understand failure as a negative attribute, particularly when looking at politics, the economy – and, yes, art. As individuals, we are driven by thoughts of success and achievement, so it makes sense that failure might make us feel slightly uneasy.
Turning that unease into something aesthetically pleasing is no mean feat, and yet, that’s where we are with the work of several well-known contemporary authors.
In 2007, British novelist Tom McCarthy, with philosopher Simon Critchley, issued what they called a Joint Statement of Inauthenticity, in which they argued that:
the essence of poetry is […] of trying (and failing) to speak about the thing itself and not just ideas about the thing.
While this might not seem to relate to the novel, what they were setting up there was a relationship between “trying to speak” and “failing to speak”.
One of the pervading motifs in McCarthy’s novels is an emphasis on some form of failure. In his first novel, Remainder (2005), the narrator tries, and fails, to reenact a moment of perfection.
In Men in Space (2007), McCarthy’s character Ivan Manasek forges a stolen Byzantine painting in an attempt to perfectly recreate the original object. In McCarthy’s most recent novel, Satin Island (2015), the narrator, U, is tasked with writing The Great Report of our age.
Long-listed for this year’s Man Booker Prize, this novel is, at its core, about the failure to write. The Great Report’s essential function is one of identification, one that “name[s] what’s taking place right now”.
U’s boss, Peyman, asks him to “[s]peak its secret name”. For U, this is rather like trying to name “Rumpelstilskin”, but it seems that McCarthy is directly engaging with the enduring aim of poetry to “speak to the thing”, even if he fails.
We don’t always feel pleased with artistic expressions of failure. In an article in June for the London Review of Books, American poet and novelist Ben Lerner suggested that the reason that we might “dislike or despise or hate poems” is because, in some way, “they are – every single one of them – failures”.
In Lerner’s first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station (2011), the narrator, Adam, is obsessed with artistic and linguistic failures because they allow him to experience an almost transcendent ambiguity. While in 10:04 (2014), the narrator, Ben, often addresses the second person – “You have failed to reconcile the realism of my body with the ethereality of the trees” – despite never being heard.
For Lerner, the “you” occupies “a collective person who didn’t yet exist, a still-uninhabited second person plural to whom all the arts, even in their most intimate registers, were nevertheless addressed” – or, in other words, an audience that he will always fail to reach.
But it is Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six-part literary project, My Struggle, that is perhaps the most overt example of such an attention to failure. It offers a prosaic, not poetic, assessment of failure.
Indeed, it is a project that strives deliberately towards constructing “real” experience. In framing the work as a novel, Knausgaard has claimed that he was able to “use [him]self as a kind of raw material,” enacting “an existential search” of the self.
The “struggle” suggested in the title references, in part, the struggle to write without shame to create something of value.
Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai won the 2015 Man Booker International Prize. His most recent novel, Seiobo There Below (2013), introduces the reader to failure in slightly different terms, through the aesthetic of wabi-sabi.
Rooted in ancient Japanese tea ceremonies from the 15th century, wabi-sabi recognises beauty in imperfection, impermanence, and incompletion. To a Western eye, beauty is often equated with perfection, but for Krasznahorkai, fleeting moments are established as beautiful even if they go on to decay.
The novel’s first vignette describes the magnificent beauty of a white heron hunting, in contrast to industrial Kyoto.
But it is wabi-sabi’s focus on “the now” that makes it interesting when thinking about contemporary writing. What might be expected from a novel that reflects on its own inability to say things successfully? Or, more pressingly, that constructs failure as an aesthetically-pleasing subject?
By focusing on failure, contemporary novelists might find they can wield surprisingly equal critical, ethical, political, and aesthetic power.
Perhaps failure is not so bad after all.
Alexandra Smith is Sessional Lecturer and Tutor in English Literature and Rhetoric at University of Sydney
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
The link below is to an article that considers locations for writing.
For more visit:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/loretta-bolger-wish/finding-the-write-spot_b_7992380.html
The link below is to an article that takes a look at seven writing apps.
For more visit:
http://publishingperspectives.com/2015/08/7-apps-for-writers-to-boost-their-productivity/
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