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Showing posts with label writing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label writing. Show all posts
Thursday 22 November 2018
Wednesday 27 June 2018
Do Writers Care About the Curse of Knowledge?
Thomas Manuel in The Wire.In
In A Scandal in Bohemia, Sherlock Holmes, in typical Sherlock Holmes fashion, deduces something outrageous about Watson based on a few stray scratches on his shoes. Watson, in typical Watson fashion, is dumbfounded and asks Holmes to explain his logic. But after listening to Holmes’ explanation, Watson finds himself disappointed and can’t help but laugh. “When I hear you give your reasons,” says Watson, “the thing always appears to me to be so ridiculously simple that I could easily do it myself, though at each successive instance of your reasoning I am baffled until you explain your process.”
With those words, Arthur Conan Doyle might as well have been trying to define the cognitive phenomenon that has come to be called ‘the curse of knowledge’. Vera Tobin, a professor of cognitive science at Case Western Reserve University, Ohio, explains it thus: “the more information we have about something and the more experience we have with it, the harder it is to step outside that experience to appreciate the full implications of not having that privileged information.” Discovered in 1989, the curse of knowledge is now a part of growing family of psychological biases possessed by the human mind. The list includes crowd favourites like hindsight bias and survivor fallacy.
In her book, Elements of Surprise: Our Mental Limits and the Satisfactions of Plot, Tobin aims to illuminate how the purportedly detrimental effects of the curse of knowledge are essential for good storytelling. Just as magicians rely on the predictability of human attention, writers rely on the predictability of human memory or emotion. Writers use these unconscious habits of our minds to make us feel what they want – hope or suspense or edge-of-the-seat panic! These unconscious mental habits or heuristics are reliable enough that techniques to exploit them have existed since antiquity. For example, Bharata’s Natyasastra, which is about 2,000 years old, confidently provides aspiring artists with the ancient equivalent of tips and tricks to get their audience to the appropriate state of aesthetic rapture.
Of course, reading the Natyasastra for these tips and tricks might not be the most efficient use of your time; it’s primarily a book on aesthetic theory. Similarly, aspiring writers might not be the target audience of Tobin’s book. Writers don’t really need to know why their techniques work. They just need to know how to deploy them. Tobin’s book takes these various literary techniques and exhaustively cross-references them with psychological studies that explore their causes and effects.
Elements of Surprise
Vera Tobin
Harvard University Press, 2018
For example, in one section, Tobin connects the cognitive phenomenon of anchoring with the literary technique of “finessing misinformation”. Anchoring is the bias where the mind latches onto an initial piece of information and uses that to “anchor” subsequent discussion. For example, in one study by Dan Ariely, students were divided into two groups and offered money to listen to harsh grating music. One group was offered 10 cents and the other group was offered 90 cents. After playing the harsh music once, they were asked how much they would need to be paid to listen to the music again. The group given 10 cents originally asked for 33 and the group given 90 cents asked for 73. The initial number “anchored” their estimation for what was a fair price. (Think about this the next time you’re at a salary negotiation. The first number put on the table has an outsized effect on what passes for “reasonable”.)
Anchoring is typically studied with quantitative information for obvious reasons but there have been numerous studies showing it is applicable even in qualitative situations. Tobin argues that authors exploit the anchoring effect to slip plot-related misinformation past their audiences. She writes, “Once a possible interpretation of events is introduced at all, it has a degree of persuasive force that derives from a manifestation of the curse of knowledge.” So authors will finesse misinformation to their readers through, for example, the opinions of characters. Or even more subtly, by disguising whether certain statements belong to the narrator or to a character. The more effectively this is done, the more satisfying finally revealing the truth can be.
In another fruitful section, Tobin discusses the value of “presupposition”. In linguistics, presuppositions are apparent truths that are tacitly assumed by some statement or question. By having characters presuppose information, Tobin writes that authors let statements “enter the narrative without explicit comment.”
For example, in the evergreen classic Kung Fu Panda (2008), Po’s father, the goose, is a popular chef. Po dreams of being a warrior, sure, but he’s also genuinely excited about learning the secret ingredient in his father’s Secret Ingredient Soup. This is the presupposition – it presupposes that there’s an ingredient to learn. Of course, in the end, Po’s father reveals that – spoiler alert – there is no special ingredient. But Po’s obvious belief helps slip this information past the audience “without explicit comment” and then the revelation is free to become the cornerstone of Po’s climactic transformation.
But while the marriage of cognitive science and literature is interesting, there is always the lingering question of reproducibility and effect sizes around the studies that Tobin cites throughout the book. For example, in one chapter where she elaborates on the “curse of knowledge”, she cites a 2007 paper by Susan Birch and Paul Bloom on false-belief tasks. In her discussion, she doesn’t mention a 2013 study by Rachel Ryskin and Sarah Brown-Schmidt that reviewed the Birch and Bloom experiments and estimated that “the true effect size to be less than half of that reported in the original findings.”
To be fair, this probably doesn’t really matter a great deal in terms of the general thrust of Tobin’s argument. But it does point at an issue with the process of going from psychology experiments to statements around the truth of how minds actually work, which looms over the entire book.
In A Scandal in Bohemia, Sherlock Holmes, in typical Sherlock Holmes fashion, deduces something outrageous about Watson based on a few stray scratches on his shoes. Watson, in typical Watson fashion, is dumbfounded and asks Holmes to explain his logic. But after listening to Holmes’ explanation, Watson finds himself disappointed and can’t help but laugh. “When I hear you give your reasons,” says Watson, “the thing always appears to me to be so ridiculously simple that I could easily do it myself, though at each successive instance of your reasoning I am baffled until you explain your process.”
With those words, Arthur Conan Doyle might as well have been trying to define the cognitive phenomenon that has come to be called ‘the curse of knowledge’. Vera Tobin, a professor of cognitive science at Case Western Reserve University, Ohio, explains it thus: “the more information we have about something and the more experience we have with it, the harder it is to step outside that experience to appreciate the full implications of not having that privileged information.” Discovered in 1989, the curse of knowledge is now a part of growing family of psychological biases possessed by the human mind. The list includes crowd favourites like hindsight bias and survivor fallacy.
In her book, Elements of Surprise: Our Mental Limits and the Satisfactions of Plot, Tobin aims to illuminate how the purportedly detrimental effects of the curse of knowledge are essential for good storytelling. Just as magicians rely on the predictability of human attention, writers rely on the predictability of human memory or emotion. Writers use these unconscious habits of our minds to make us feel what they want – hope or suspense or edge-of-the-seat panic! These unconscious mental habits or heuristics are reliable enough that techniques to exploit them have existed since antiquity. For example, Bharata’s Natyasastra, which is about 2,000 years old, confidently provides aspiring artists with the ancient equivalent of tips and tricks to get their audience to the appropriate state of aesthetic rapture.
Of course, reading the Natyasastra for these tips and tricks might not be the most efficient use of your time; it’s primarily a book on aesthetic theory. Similarly, aspiring writers might not be the target audience of Tobin’s book. Writers don’t really need to know why their techniques work. They just need to know how to deploy them. Tobin’s book takes these various literary techniques and exhaustively cross-references them with psychological studies that explore their causes and effects.
Elements of Surprise
Vera Tobin
Harvard University Press, 2018
For example, in one section, Tobin connects the cognitive phenomenon of anchoring with the literary technique of “finessing misinformation”. Anchoring is the bias where the mind latches onto an initial piece of information and uses that to “anchor” subsequent discussion. For example, in one study by Dan Ariely, students were divided into two groups and offered money to listen to harsh grating music. One group was offered 10 cents and the other group was offered 90 cents. After playing the harsh music once, they were asked how much they would need to be paid to listen to the music again. The group given 10 cents originally asked for 33 and the group given 90 cents asked for 73. The initial number “anchored” their estimation for what was a fair price. (Think about this the next time you’re at a salary negotiation. The first number put on the table has an outsized effect on what passes for “reasonable”.)
Anchoring is typically studied with quantitative information for obvious reasons but there have been numerous studies showing it is applicable even in qualitative situations. Tobin argues that authors exploit the anchoring effect to slip plot-related misinformation past their audiences. She writes, “Once a possible interpretation of events is introduced at all, it has a degree of persuasive force that derives from a manifestation of the curse of knowledge.” So authors will finesse misinformation to their readers through, for example, the opinions of characters. Or even more subtly, by disguising whether certain statements belong to the narrator or to a character. The more effectively this is done, the more satisfying finally revealing the truth can be.
In another fruitful section, Tobin discusses the value of “presupposition”. In linguistics, presuppositions are apparent truths that are tacitly assumed by some statement or question. By having characters presuppose information, Tobin writes that authors let statements “enter the narrative without explicit comment.”
For example, in the evergreen classic Kung Fu Panda (2008), Po’s father, the goose, is a popular chef. Po dreams of being a warrior, sure, but he’s also genuinely excited about learning the secret ingredient in his father’s Secret Ingredient Soup. This is the presupposition – it presupposes that there’s an ingredient to learn. Of course, in the end, Po’s father reveals that – spoiler alert – there is no special ingredient. But Po’s obvious belief helps slip this information past the audience “without explicit comment” and then the revelation is free to become the cornerstone of Po’s climactic transformation.
But while the marriage of cognitive science and literature is interesting, there is always the lingering question of reproducibility and effect sizes around the studies that Tobin cites throughout the book. For example, in one chapter where she elaborates on the “curse of knowledge”, she cites a 2007 paper by Susan Birch and Paul Bloom on false-belief tasks. In her discussion, she doesn’t mention a 2013 study by Rachel Ryskin and Sarah Brown-Schmidt that reviewed the Birch and Bloom experiments and estimated that “the true effect size to be less than half of that reported in the original findings.”
To be fair, this probably doesn’t really matter a great deal in terms of the general thrust of Tobin’s argument. But it does point at an issue with the process of going from psychology experiments to statements around the truth of how minds actually work, which looms over the entire book.
Sunday 3 June 2018
I wrote a novel about my family. What could go wrong?
All writers are thieves but when it comes to stealing from your own flesh and blood — that way danger lies writes Francesca Jakobi in The Financial Times
In the wedding photograph my grandmother is not quite smiling. She is wearing white from top to toe — the only one to do so; the bride wore turquoise — and clutching a small glass of wine.
In the wedding photograph my grandmother is not quite smiling. She is wearing white from top to toe — the only one to do so; the bride wore turquoise — and clutching a small glass of wine.
The snapshot was taken on the day my parents married in 1964. Gerdi was the mother of the groom. It was a bright summer’s day and London was swinging, but my grandmother looks guarded and anxious.
It must have been hard for her, surrounded by her ex-husband’s relatives. She had had an affair during the second world war and lost custody of my father as a consequence. Their relationship never fully recovered, though it was plain to see that she adored him. She rang him most nights in the middle of supper, throughout my childhood. We’d chorus: “I wonder who that could be?”
I’ve always been fascinated by my German Jewish grandmother. She was someone I loved deeply but never quite understood. I’d grown up hearing one side of the story: that she was weak and selfish, and had paid a heavy price for it. I wanted to know what might have led to the decisions she made. How could a loving mother walk out on her son?
I used the black-and-white photograph as the basis of a story, imagining the wedding day from her point of view. The voice I wrote in was feisty and spiky, a million miles away from my shy, awkward grandmother. But it felt good to examine things from her perspective. It felt like I was giving her a hearing.
It was only months later, as it grew into a novel, that I started to worry I’d been reckless. What I’d written was fiction, yet the story behind it was real. I was scared that it might expose my family when my instinct is always to protect them. The dirty linen one mustn’t wash in public was strewn across 300 pages.
All writers are thieves. They steal material wherever they can find it: a grumpy exchange overheard on the bus, the spotty shoulders of a long-ago boyfriend. But stealing stories from your nearest and dearest — that way danger lies. The road is littered with feuds and disinheritances. If you loved your family, why would you risk it?
My shelves are packed with books by writers who have taken that gamble, from AA Milne to Andrea Levy, Hanif Kureishi and Isabel Allende. Some reimagined a relative’s life, others used their offspring as a springboard to a whole new world. There’s an emotional truth at the heart of these books that attracts me.
I have always wanted to write a novel. I had my first go when I was nine. It was four sheets of paper sewn together with crooked stitches. The title: When the Dead Cock Crowed. I don’t recall that much about the plot (it had something to do with time travel and poultry) but I remember the excitement of filling the pages with words, my vice-like grip on the felt-tip pen as I wrote in giant capitals “THE END”.
That was the feeling I sought to recapture aged 25, when I tried to write “chick-lit”. It was 1997 and Bridget Jones was all the rage. I’d just come back from teaching English in Turkey and was unsure what to do with my life. It seemed I’d found the answer as I tapped away on my Canon Starwriter. Research? Who needs it. Plot? Just keep writing. I was propelled by the arrogance of youth.
I hit 50,000 words before I ran out of steam. When I read the manuscript back, I was horrified by what I’d produced. First drafts are supposed to be rough, but this one was truly a stinker. I thank God that Turkish Delight never made it to the bookshops.
The experience taught me just how difficult it is to write a novel and that making characters and events sound plausible is harder still. If I was going to devote that time and effort again, it had to be for something I believed in.
I wanted an authentic tale, one that I felt qualified to tell. It took me until my late thirties to find what I was looking for.
Right from the start my novel Bitter was a murky mix of fact and fiction. The protagonist had my grandmother’s name and the same loveless childhood in Germany. She lived in the same smart Swiss Cottage flat I remembered from countless visits. Her favourite restaurant, Luigi’s off Finchley Road, was one I had been to with Gerdi.
But as I began to write, I realised I knew very little beyond the headline facts. My grandmother had been dead for almost a decade. In life, she rarely talked about the past and my father had been tucked away at boarding school.
At first it felt strange to be making things up — it reminded me of playing with Barbie dolls — but the more imaginative leaps I made, the more natural it became. I wrote instinctively, mixing anecdotes with half-truths. I changed the protagonist’s name to Gilda (it had to have the same feeling as Gerdi) and that one small change was like cutting a tether; she took on a life of her own.
Ambition is a peculiar thing: mine seemed to grow along with my word count. When I finally got to the end of the first draft, I thought I had something that could work. But along with that came my first serious doubts. I’d distorted the facts beyond recognition. My protagonist was an unlikeable woman with a life spinning out of control. Yet aspects of the story still belonged to my grandmother. I shuddered to think what she’d have made of it.
I wasn’t the only one struggling to distinguish the truth. Shortly after I’d shown her the first draft, my mother recounted an anecdote about Gerdi and I realised it had come from the book. I told her I had made the story up, but she insisted it had actually happened. Perhaps it did. Perhaps I’d heard it at some point. Neither of us has any way of knowing.
I returned to the manuscript and deleted several sections of it. I wrote the word “compassion” on a Post-it note and stuck it to my screen. The second draft was kinder, the characters more nuanced, the ending more hopeful. I added another layer of plot to push it further into fiction.
As I set about the long process of trying to find an agent, I wondered whether to mention the family link. In the end I did. I wanted to show why I was the right person to write this particular story. And also, if I’m honest, I hoped it might be a selling point.
When Lionel Shriver wrote her fifth novel, A Perfectly Good Family, she thought it might cause “a little aggro”. In fact, her brother refused to speak to her for two years. Writing more than a decade after the book’s publication, she warned: “Anyone considering writing fiction or a memoir that brushes even slightly against real-life family should take heed: think twice.”
This is good advice, clearly. Even the most sensitive writers can cause unintended harm. AA Milne’s son Christopher was badly bullied at boarding school for his role in Winnie-the-Pooh. Isabel Allende’s relatives didn’t speak to her for several years after recognising themselves in her debut House of the Spirits.
Some authors see such repercussions as part of the job description. Hanif Kureishi, whose 2003 film The Mother caused a serious rift with his sister, says his only regrets “are to do with quality”. Rachel Cusk, who was vilified for writing about motherhood and the breakdown of her marriage, has said “If you really care what people think of you . . . you’re never going to be a writer.”
Yet most of the authors I know agonise about the possibility of hurting loved ones. A friend scrapped an entire manuscript because she was worried what her children would one day make of it. Another changed a crucial death scene because it was too close to what had happened to a relative.
Andrea Levy shows that family stories need not be a source of conflict. Her novel Small Island came out of her father’s emigration to Britain from Jamaica on the Empire Windrush and her mother’s arrival six months later. The two main characters, Gilbert and Hortense, are named after her parents. In a piece for The Guardian, she said: “Small Island was a joy to write and those characters will stay with me forever. It became a work of fiction, but for me it still remains something of a family history too.”
I asked my parents’ permission to write about Gerdi early on and both were supportive. When I speak to my mother now, she says she wasn’t worried at all. As a retired psychoanalyst, she knows the importance of telling stories. She trusted that I was writing from a place of love. I wasn’t trying to settle any scores.
In fact, she rather wished that I was writing about her parents. She saw it as a way to somehow bring them back to life. I understand that. For a while it did feel like Gerdi was more present. I thought about her a great deal. We talked about her often at the dinner table.
My father, it seemed to me, was not hugely interested. His childhood years were unhappy and he had no wish to return to them. But, aged 80, he had just completed a Masters in creative writing and I thought he understood where I was coming from. I spoke to him a bit about his mum. Neither of us expected my novel would be published. I showed him some passages along the way but he didn’t want to read it until it was a “proper book”.
When I spoke to him for this article, he admits he’d had concerns about what I was doing. “I knew you didn’t know enough to write a decent memoir and I was worried you were going down the Hilary Mantel ‘faction’ route. I didn’t like the idea of you making things up to fill the gaps.”
Could I have written Bitter without my parents’ permission? Honestly, I don’t think so. It wasn’t just my grandmother’s archives I raided. The book is stuffed with family memories: my mother’s school dinners in the 1950s, my brother as a child learning chess with my dad, my nephew running as fast as he can through the autumn leaves, me hobbling across the stones to paddle in the sea at Brighton.
I was nervous when I finally handed Dad a hardback copy. At first he said he was enjoying it. But Mum told me later that he was finding it quite upsetting. She thought chapters that touched on his early life had reminded him of a time he would rather forget.
I rang him and he said it had captured something about his mother. It wasn’t Gerdi and yet somehow it was her — not the words, perhaps, but the underlying sadness. It was unsettling to see this period through the eyes of his daughter. I said he should stop reading it and he has.
He’s since explained that he could never quite see it as fiction. To him Gilda is an imposter, pretending to be his mum. When he heard the actress in the audio version had a German accent, his response was immediate. “No. That’s wrong. Mum lost most of her accent.”
I don’t doubt how proud he is, though. He took me out to lunch on publication day. As I got up to go to the ladies room, I saw him lean over to the strangers at the table next to us. Pointing in my direction, he said: “That’s my clever daughter.”
Both my parents came to the launch party and my father thoroughly enjoyed himself. One of my friends mentioned a scene from the book that revolved around a small boy and some coffee cups. Dad told her: “That was me, you know.”
Wednesday 16 August 2017
Why the Booker prize is bad for writers
Amit Chaudhuri in The Guardian
There are at least two reasons why almost every anglophone novelist feels compelled to get as near the Booker prize as they can. The first is because it looms over them and follows them around in the way Guy de Maupassant said the Eiffel Tower follows you everywhere when you’re in Paris. “To escape the Eiffel Tower,” Maupassant suggested, “you have to go inside it.” Similarly, the main reason for a novelist wanting to win the Booker prize is to no longer be under any obligation to win it, and to be able to get on with their job: writing, and thinking about writing.
Today, there’s little intellectual or material investment in writers: prizes and shortlists are meant to sell books
The other reason is that the Booker prize is most literary publishers’ primary marketing tool. There are relatively few Diana Athills (Athill was VS Naipaul’s editor) and Charles Monteiths (Monteith was William Golding’s) today: publishers who identify, and are loyal to, novelists in the long term because of commitment to literary merit. Publishing houses were once homes to writers; the former gave the latter the necessary leeway to create a body of work. Today there’s little intellectual or material investment in writers: literary prizes and shortlists are meant to sell books, and, although there’s a plethora of them, the Man Booker is the only one that has a real commercial impact.
The idea that a “book of the year” can be assessed annually by a bunch of people – judges who have to read almost a book a day – is absurd, as is the idea that this is any way of honouring a writer. A writer will be judged over time, by their oeuvre, and by readers and other writers who have continued to find new meaning in their writing. The Booker prize is disingenuous not only for excluding certain forms of fiction (short stories and novellas are out of the reckoning), but for not actually considering all the novels published that year, as it asks publishers to nominate a certain number of novels only. What it creates is not so much a form of attention but a midnight ball. The first marketing instrument is the longlist (this year’s was announced last month): 13 novels arrayed like Cinderellas waiting to catch the prince’s eye. (Those not on the longlist find they’ve suddenly turned into maidservants.)
When the shortlist is announced, the enchantment lifts from those among the 13 not on it: they become figments of the imagination. Then the announcement of the winner renders invisible, as if by a wave of the wand, the other shortlisted writers. The princess and the prince are united as if the outcome was always inevitable: at least such is, largely, the obedient response of the press. And the magic dust of the free market gives to the episode the fairytale-like inevitability Karl Popper said history-writing possesses: once history happens in a certain way, it’s unimaginable that any other outcome was possible.
What is astonishing is the acquiescence with which the value system I’ve just described is met with by most writers. Most will feel that it doesn’t speak to why they’re writers at all, but few will discuss this openly. Acceptance is one of the most dismaying political consequences of capitalism. It informs the literary too, and the way publishers and writers “go along” with things. The Booker now has a stranglehold on how people think of, read, and value books in Britain. It has no serious critics. Those who berate its decisions about individual awardees (James Kelman’s prize back in 1994 prompted one judge to say it was “frankly, crap”) ritually add to its allure. After all, the attractiveness of the free market has to do with its perverse system of rewards – unlike socialism, which said everyone should be moderately well off, the free market proposes that anyone can be rich.
The Booker’s randomness celebrates this; it confirms the market’s convulsive metamorphic powers, its ability to confer success unpredictably. In literature, it has redefined terms like “masterpiece” and “classic”.
‘Virginia Woolf didn’t wake up in the morning and think, ‘I wonder if Mrs Dalloway will be longlisted for the Booker?’’ Photograph: George C. Beresford/Getty Images
Few writers, though, display any prickliness. Instead, we end up with the acceptance characteristic of capitalism – which, lately in politics, has led to deep alienation and monstrous alternatives like Donald Trump. I was shocked to run into a novelist who used to regularly rant against the Booker soon after he’d finally won it. It seemed like a part of his personality had gone. Docilely, he was doing the promotional rounds, as if he had been administered a massive sedative. He was robbed of the crusading bitterness that once animated him, and had become a case study of the memory-erasing contentment that capitalism provides.
I’m not saying that the Booker shouldn’t exist. I’m saying that it requires an alternative, and the alternative isn’t another prize. It has to do instead with writers reclaiming agency. The meaning of a writer’s work must be created, and argued for, by writers themselves, and not by some extraneous source of endorsement. No original work is going to be welcomed with open arms by all, and the writer is not doing their job if they don’t make a case for their idea of writing through argumentation, debate, and fervour.
Virginia Woolf didn’t wake up in the morning and think, “I wonder if Mrs Dalloway will be longlisted for the Booker?” She wrote instead her essay, Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown, questioning prevailing forms of valuation in the establishment. Her reformulation of what the novel could be or do, its impact on the reader, and, crucially, the ways in which we value or ignore its possibilities, is as pressing – as political – now as it was then.
DH Lawrence, TS Eliot and Henry James too had to argue, in and outside their creative work, for their idea of the literary, because the question of why literature was important hadn’t been settled. It isn’t settled today.
But, as in other walks of life under capitalism, there has been a loss of initiative among writers: a readiness to let others decide why their work is significant while they busy themselves at literary festivals.
There has been, largely, an abjuring of the critical debates that should, at any given moment, define literature. In British academia, this loss of control over what constitutes value, especially in the humanities, has had its counterpart in what the UK government equivocally calls impact. “Impact” is judged not by gauging the importance of new scholarly work to other scholars, but to the market.
In emollient governmental language, impact is described as “an effect on, change or benefit to the economy, society, culture, public policy or services, health, the environment or quality of life, beyond academia”. As academics have discovered, “beyond academia” is, fundamentally, the market. In other words, the significance of scholarly work will not be judged by the impact it has on the field, but outside it.
The reason why very few question the Booker is, of course, that they will be accused of sour grapes or speaking inappropriately. That’s all right. Woolf was speaking inappropriately when she wrote against the grain of the prevailing decorousness; she suffered from sour grapes, on behalf of her gender and her craft. But her questions needed to be raised, and expressed with pertinence. Only rarely is silence a useful riposte.
There are at least two reasons why almost every anglophone novelist feels compelled to get as near the Booker prize as they can. The first is because it looms over them and follows them around in the way Guy de Maupassant said the Eiffel Tower follows you everywhere when you’re in Paris. “To escape the Eiffel Tower,” Maupassant suggested, “you have to go inside it.” Similarly, the main reason for a novelist wanting to win the Booker prize is to no longer be under any obligation to win it, and to be able to get on with their job: writing, and thinking about writing.
Today, there’s little intellectual or material investment in writers: prizes and shortlists are meant to sell books
The other reason is that the Booker prize is most literary publishers’ primary marketing tool. There are relatively few Diana Athills (Athill was VS Naipaul’s editor) and Charles Monteiths (Monteith was William Golding’s) today: publishers who identify, and are loyal to, novelists in the long term because of commitment to literary merit. Publishing houses were once homes to writers; the former gave the latter the necessary leeway to create a body of work. Today there’s little intellectual or material investment in writers: literary prizes and shortlists are meant to sell books, and, although there’s a plethora of them, the Man Booker is the only one that has a real commercial impact.
The idea that a “book of the year” can be assessed annually by a bunch of people – judges who have to read almost a book a day – is absurd, as is the idea that this is any way of honouring a writer. A writer will be judged over time, by their oeuvre, and by readers and other writers who have continued to find new meaning in their writing. The Booker prize is disingenuous not only for excluding certain forms of fiction (short stories and novellas are out of the reckoning), but for not actually considering all the novels published that year, as it asks publishers to nominate a certain number of novels only. What it creates is not so much a form of attention but a midnight ball. The first marketing instrument is the longlist (this year’s was announced last month): 13 novels arrayed like Cinderellas waiting to catch the prince’s eye. (Those not on the longlist find they’ve suddenly turned into maidservants.)
When the shortlist is announced, the enchantment lifts from those among the 13 not on it: they become figments of the imagination. Then the announcement of the winner renders invisible, as if by a wave of the wand, the other shortlisted writers. The princess and the prince are united as if the outcome was always inevitable: at least such is, largely, the obedient response of the press. And the magic dust of the free market gives to the episode the fairytale-like inevitability Karl Popper said history-writing possesses: once history happens in a certain way, it’s unimaginable that any other outcome was possible.
What is astonishing is the acquiescence with which the value system I’ve just described is met with by most writers. Most will feel that it doesn’t speak to why they’re writers at all, but few will discuss this openly. Acceptance is one of the most dismaying political consequences of capitalism. It informs the literary too, and the way publishers and writers “go along” with things. The Booker now has a stranglehold on how people think of, read, and value books in Britain. It has no serious critics. Those who berate its decisions about individual awardees (James Kelman’s prize back in 1994 prompted one judge to say it was “frankly, crap”) ritually add to its allure. After all, the attractiveness of the free market has to do with its perverse system of rewards – unlike socialism, which said everyone should be moderately well off, the free market proposes that anyone can be rich.
The Booker’s randomness celebrates this; it confirms the market’s convulsive metamorphic powers, its ability to confer success unpredictably. In literature, it has redefined terms like “masterpiece” and “classic”.
‘Virginia Woolf didn’t wake up in the morning and think, ‘I wonder if Mrs Dalloway will be longlisted for the Booker?’’ Photograph: George C. Beresford/Getty Images
Few writers, though, display any prickliness. Instead, we end up with the acceptance characteristic of capitalism – which, lately in politics, has led to deep alienation and monstrous alternatives like Donald Trump. I was shocked to run into a novelist who used to regularly rant against the Booker soon after he’d finally won it. It seemed like a part of his personality had gone. Docilely, he was doing the promotional rounds, as if he had been administered a massive sedative. He was robbed of the crusading bitterness that once animated him, and had become a case study of the memory-erasing contentment that capitalism provides.
I’m not saying that the Booker shouldn’t exist. I’m saying that it requires an alternative, and the alternative isn’t another prize. It has to do instead with writers reclaiming agency. The meaning of a writer’s work must be created, and argued for, by writers themselves, and not by some extraneous source of endorsement. No original work is going to be welcomed with open arms by all, and the writer is not doing their job if they don’t make a case for their idea of writing through argumentation, debate, and fervour.
Virginia Woolf didn’t wake up in the morning and think, “I wonder if Mrs Dalloway will be longlisted for the Booker?” She wrote instead her essay, Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown, questioning prevailing forms of valuation in the establishment. Her reformulation of what the novel could be or do, its impact on the reader, and, crucially, the ways in which we value or ignore its possibilities, is as pressing – as political – now as it was then.
DH Lawrence, TS Eliot and Henry James too had to argue, in and outside their creative work, for their idea of the literary, because the question of why literature was important hadn’t been settled. It isn’t settled today.
But, as in other walks of life under capitalism, there has been a loss of initiative among writers: a readiness to let others decide why their work is significant while they busy themselves at literary festivals.
There has been, largely, an abjuring of the critical debates that should, at any given moment, define literature. In British academia, this loss of control over what constitutes value, especially in the humanities, has had its counterpart in what the UK government equivocally calls impact. “Impact” is judged not by gauging the importance of new scholarly work to other scholars, but to the market.
In emollient governmental language, impact is described as “an effect on, change or benefit to the economy, society, culture, public policy or services, health, the environment or quality of life, beyond academia”. As academics have discovered, “beyond academia” is, fundamentally, the market. In other words, the significance of scholarly work will not be judged by the impact it has on the field, but outside it.
The reason why very few question the Booker is, of course, that they will be accused of sour grapes or speaking inappropriately. That’s all right. Woolf was speaking inappropriately when she wrote against the grain of the prevailing decorousness; she suffered from sour grapes, on behalf of her gender and her craft. But her questions needed to be raised, and expressed with pertinence. Only rarely is silence a useful riposte.
Friday 2 June 2017
Writing fiction is a prayer, a song: Arundhati Roy
Zac O'Yeah in The Hindu
Arundhati Roy opens her door and lets me in – into her kitchen. I wonder if I’ve knocked on the wrong door: the delivery entrance, perhaps? I quickly hand over the humble gift of fresh coffee beans I’ve brought her, on the assumption that all serious writers love coffee.
As we sit down around her solid wood kitchen table surrounded by funky chairs, I realize that the kitchen is the warm heart of her self-designed apartment in central New Delhi. Apart from long work counters, there’s a sofa, a bookshelf, a sit-out terrace with an antique-looking bench – altogether a place where one could spend a lifetime.
But right now she’s all over the world and is somewhat jet-lagged after having just flown in from New York. Following a bunch of interviews in town, she’s soon off again on a worldwide promotion tour for her new novel. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is her first in two decades since the globally bestselling, Booker Prize-winning, The God of Small Things. It appears to be the literary happening of the decade and according to her publishers ‘it reinvents what a novel can do and can be’. I’ve started reading it and can say that it is a ruthlessly probing and wide-ranging narrative on contemporary India, written with a linguistic felicity that reminds me of Salman Rushdie’s classic Midnight’s Children. On the whole, it makes interviewing her an intimidating prospect. While she makes coffee, I rig up my electronic defences consisting of three audio recorders (two of which conk out during the interview) and a backup video camera. She looks on bemusedly and seems used to a barrage of microphones. We embark on a three-hour interview session. Excerpts:
Generations of new Indian writers have seen you as an inspiration, as someone who allowed them to dream that one could sit in India and write and then be read all over the world. How does your iconic status feel to you? Do you ever think about it?
Not really, because I am equally balanced by the kind of rage and craziness that I evoke. For me, I live inside my work. Although I must say that I was thinking at some time about writers who like to remain anonymous – but I’ve never been that person. Because, in this country it is important, especially as a woman, to say: “Hey! Here I am! I am going to take you on! And this is what I think and I’m not going to hide.” So if I have helped to give courage to anybody… to experiment… to step out of line… That’s lovely, I think it is very important for us to say: “We can! And we will! And don’t f*** with us!” You know, come on.
I’ve noticed that you don’t often appear at literary festivals. There are more than a hundred in India these days, and I’ve been to quite a few myself, but never met you before. Do you keep away from other writers?
It’s not about other writers. I don’t know if you’ve read this essay I wrote called Capitalism – A Ghost Story and Walking with the Comrades? The thing is that the Jaipur Literature Festival is funded by a kind of notorious mining company that is silencing the voices of the Adivasis, kicking them out of their homes, and now it is also funded by Zee TV which is half the time baying for my blood. So in principle I won’t go. How can I? I’m writing against them. I mean, it’s not that I’m a pure person, like all of us I have contradictions and issues, I’m not like Gandhiji, you know, but in theory I abide by this. How can you be silencing and snuffing out the voices of the poorest people in the world, and then become this glittering platform for free speech and flying writers all around the place? I have a problem with that.
Do you read a lot of new Indian fiction or non-fiction?
When I’ve been writing this book, I haven’t been very up on current things. I’m not even on Facebook and all that. I don’t have any problem [with it], but as Edward Snowden told me, the CIA celebrated when Facebook was started, because they just got all the information without having to collect it. That aside, I think that when you’re writing, you tend to be a bit strange about reading: sometimes I’m not reading whole books, I’m dipping into things to check my own sanity. ’ (She waves her left hand in a kind of elegantly psychedelic mudra before her face.) ‘Am I on the same planet?
Is there any particular Indian writer who you admire?
I think that Naipaul is a very accomplished writer, although we are worlds apart in our worldviews. But I’m not really that influenced by anybody, you know. I have to say that I find it incredible that writers in India, or almost all Indian writers, or at least the well-known writers… Let’s not say writers, but there’s been a level of eliding of things that have been at the heart of the society, like caste. You see there is something very wrong here. It is like people in apartheid South Africa writing without mentioning that there is apartheid.
Your writing is hard-hitting and outspoken – have you experienced any adverse repercussions?
My God, that’s to put it mildly. Other than of course going to jail and all that. Even now, when the last book of essays was released in Delhi, called Broken Republic, a gang of vigilantes came on stage, smashed the stage up. The right wing, the mobs, vigilantes, they are there at every meeting, threatening violence, threatening all kinds of things. I still go to speak, to Punjab, in Orissa, wherever, I’m not really that writer who is sequestered somewhere and I live perhaps alone, but in the heart of the crowd.
It must have been a bit of a shock, after expressing a personal opinion, to suddenly find yourself behind bars in Tihar Jail?
Tihar. (She sighs deeply.) Yes, it is shocking, but at the same time look at how many thousands of people are behind bars, people who have no understanding of the language, who don’t even know what they’re charged with. So I can’t really be dramatic about what happened to me, because people are in jail for years for nothing – nothing! It’s crazy! I’m currently being tried for contempt of court again for an essay I wrote called Professor P.O.W. which you can read in Outlook Magazine.
Have you ever felt that you should leave India and live in a country where you don’t have to face such problems?
Everything that I know is here! Everyone that I know! And I’ve never really lived outside, abroad, so the idea of going to live all alone in some strange country is also terrifying. But right now I think India is poised in an extremely dangerous place, I don’t know what is going to happen to anybody – to me or to anybody. There are just these mobs that decide who should be killed, who should be shot, who should be lynched, you know? I think it is probably the first time that people in India, writers and other people, are facing the kind of trauma that people have faced in Chile and Latin America. There’s a kind of terror building up here which we have not fully got the measure of. You go through periods when you are feeling very worried, then angry, and then defiant. I think this story is still unfolding.
Do you anticipate upsetting people with the new book? Though the mobs don’t read anything sophisticated, do they?
It’s never about the book or what they read or don’t read, it is about some arbitrary rules they have made about what can be said, what can’t be said, who can say what, who can kill whom – all of that. Yeah, I mean I live here, and I write here, and this book is about here. But the situation here is out of control, from the bottom! It is not about just getting killed, but it is about: How do you even sit in a train or a bus now if you are a Muslim without risking your life? So what happens with me, I have no idea. I’ve written a book and it’s taken me ten years to write it, and there are thirty countries in the world where the biggest publishers are publishing it. I’m not going to allow some idiots to come and disrupt it and snatch all the headlines. Why should I? It is not about their little brains, it is about literature. It has to be protected and tactically done in this climate.
Let’s talk about the book. What was it that made you publish a new novel after spending twenty years being a public intellectual?
Well, this novel has been ten years in the writing, but I think in the twenty years between The God of Small Things and now, I have travelled and been involved with so many things that are happening and written about them at length. There was this huge sense of urgency when I was writing the political essays, each time you wanted to blow a space open, on any issue. But fiction takes its time and is layered. The insanity of what is going on in a place like Kashmir: how do you describe the terror in the air there? It is not just a human rights report about how many people have been killed and where. How do you describe the psychosis of what is going on? Except through fiction.
So that is why you chose…
But it is not that. I didn’t choose to write fiction because I wanted to say something about Kashmir, but fiction chooses you. I don’t think it is that simple that I had some information to impart and therefore I wanted to write a book. Not at all. It is a way of seeing. A way of thinking, it is a prayer, it is a song.
In the book you use a remarkably poetic language to talk about the harshest subjects.
Language is something so natural to you, you know, not something you can manufacture, not for me.
Having studied architecture, you must have at some point thought of that as your field, while today you are one of the most celebrated novelists on the planet. What does your interest in language stem from?
Actually, the idea of language was far before architecture, because in a way architecture came to me as a very pragmatic thing. I left home when I was seventeen and I needed somehow to…
(At this point one of her dogs climbs all over me. I’m more accustomed to dogs barking the moment they see me but, puzzlingly, this one appears to want to lick my face. Arundhati laughs.)
She’s flirting with you. They are both street dogs. She was born outside a drain. Then her mother was hit by a car. That other one I found tied to a lamppost, cruelly.
Do your dogs have names?
Yeah, her name is Begum Filthy Jaan and this one is Maati K. Lal. That means “beloved of the earth”. Both Lal and Jaan mean beloved.
So they make up your family?
Yes.
They’re very well behaved to be street dogs.
Street dogs are more civilized than other dogs. They’re the best. I’m also a bit of a street dog.
I see. So we were talking about your relationship with language and how you left home at 17.
The relationship with language was there from the time I was very, very young. The only thing is that it didn’t seem possible that I would ever be in a position to be a writer.
Why not?
No money… How are you going to earn a living? In the early years of my life my only ambition was to survive somehow, pay my rent. So it didn’t seem like there’d ever be that time where you could actually sit and write something but you’d be so busy earning. It was just a question of: How do you survive?
How did you survive then?
I used to work in this place called the National Institute of Urban Affairs where I earned almost nothing. I used to live in this little hole-in-the-wall near the Nizamuddin Dargah and hire a bicycle for one rupee a day to go to work. All my time I spent thinking about money. (She giggles.)
So at that point you were almost about to become a bureaucrat?
No, no, architect! I could never have become a bureaucrat.
But a government servant?
No, not even that. I was just a temporary, you know at the edges of it.
So then the writing really started with the film scripts?
Basically after Annie [In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones (1989)] – a film that just made its own secret little pathways into the world away from the big hit films – I wrote a second film called Electric Moon and then The God of Small Things. And after that, the essays.
And now you’re making a fiction comeback. Was there any particular idea or incident that triggered off the new book? It seems to be a meditation on the state of the nation.
(She takes a large sip of coffee and rubs her eyes.) ‘It’s a meditation, let’s say, just a meditation. Always, some things spark something and I think in my case I don’t think what sparks it is necessarily what it’s about. Obviously so many years of one’s life and thinking and encounters and all that… but I think one of those nights that I used to spend in front of Jantar Mantar with all these [protesters] who come there, a baby did appear and people were asking: “What to do?” Nobody was sure what to do. So that was one of the things.
I recall that sequence in the novel, and you also narrate many of the individual stories behind the characters you meet at Jantar Mantar?
That was one of the ideas for me that I would – experiment. As you can imagine with any writer who writes a “successful” book, then everybody wants to sign contracts and give you lots of money… and I didn’t want that. I wanted to experiment. I wanted to write a book in which I don’t walk past anyone, even the smallest child, or woman, but sit down, smoke a cigarette, have a chat. It is not a story with a beginning, middle and an end, as much as a map of a city or a building. Or like the structure of a classical raga, where you have these notes and you keep exploring them from different angles, in different ways, different ups, different downs.
About the first hundred pages of the book are set in Old Delhi. What is your relationship to that part of town?
I actually have a place there.
Near Jama Masjid?
Yes, a rented place, a small room, so I’ve been there for many years.
But why do you need that place when you have this apartment?
You sometimes feel under siege. It was not that I went there because I was going to write about it, but because I went there it became very much part [of the book]. I go there, wander around late at night.
All those rabid street dogs, they don’t chase you?
No. Not at all. Humans are rabid, dogs are okay.
The title is intriguing – The Ministry of Utmost Happiness – because inside the book there’s quite a lot of darkness.
But yeah, there’s also quite a lot of light. And the light is in the most unexpected places.
There’s also a character called Tilo, who seems to me very much like Radha in In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones. Is she a continuation of that character?
(She laughs.) She’s not actually like Radha when you carry on [reading]. Yeah, she’s in architecture school, but I think Tilo is a very different person actually.
But how much autobiographical detail do you use in your writing?
It is hard to say, because where does your imagination end and your experience begin? Your memories? It is all a soup. Like in The God of Small Things when Esthappen says, “If in a dream you’ve eaten fish, does it mean you’ve eaten fish?” Or if you’re happy in a dream, does it count? To me this book is not a thinly veiled political essay masquerading as a novel, it is a novel. And in novels, everything gets processed and sweated out on your skin, has to become part of your DNA and it is as complicated as anything that lives inside your body.
On that note, let me ask: in the years you worked on the novel, did you get tired of it at some point or were you happily engrossed in it for an entire decade?
When I write fiction I have a very easy relationship with it in the sense that I’m not in a hurry. Partly, I really want to see if it will live with me, you know, for long. If I got fed up with it, I would leave it and imagine the world would get fed up too. I need to develop a relationship with it almost like…(She goes quiet.)
Like with another human perhaps?
Or a group of humans. We all live together.
Nerdy question time – are there any rituals you have to go through like putting on a jazz record or uncorking a bottle of Old Monk before you start writing?
Let’s say when I was breaking the stones and really trying to understand what I was trying to do I would never be able to work for very long, just a few hours a day. There were two phases in writing this book, one was about generating the smoke, and then it’s like sculpting it, none of which is the same as writing and rewriting, or making drafts. But when you’re generating the smoke, it would be like – I could write three sentences and then just fall asleep out of exhaustion. But when the book was finally clear to me, I’d be working long hours. It was the same with The God of Small Things, there would be that single sentence which would send me to sleep. Like a strange trance almost.
Has your training as an architect been helpful to you?
Not just helped, it is central to the way I write.
How?
Because to me a story is like the map of a city or a map of a building, structured: the way you tell it, the way you enter it, exit it… None of it is simple, straightforward, time and chronology is like building material, so yeah, architecture to me is absolutely central.
I recall Vikram Chandra once telling me how he adapted a construction project management software, used by architects and builders to control the supply chains and all that, to plan and track all the elements in his novel Sacred Games. Do you – as an architect – plan your writing like that?
Oh God! There’s no algorithm involved in my writing, it is all instinctive… rhythm.
What’s a good writing day like then? You get up at five o’clock and take strong coffee or do you wake at three in the afternoon and pour yourself a glass of champagne before hitting the desk?
I don’t seem to have any rituals as such, it is just a very open encounter between me and myself and my writing. I don’t actually understand what we mean by “when you write” because I kind of wonder when am I not writing? I am always writing inside my head! But right now, I feel almost like if I weighed myself, I’d be half my weight, because the last ten years it’s just been in my head, all the time! At least now’ (she points at the book on the kitchen table) ‘it is with me, but it is not on the weighing scale. You know?
What do you do for inspiration?
You know, one of the reasons it would be so hard for me to leave this country, is that everywhere I turn there is something so deep going on. That way I’m lucky in terms of the worlds that I move through here whether it is in the Narmada Valley or in Kashmir. It is a very anarchic, unformatted world that I live in. To me, if anything it is an overload of every kind of stimulus. I suppose I’m not closed off in some family thing. There’s a porous border between me and the world and lots of things come and go. That’s the way I live. There are so many brilliant people doing things around me all the time, like even just in the process of making this book – if I want someone who is an insane … who’s actually not a human being, but a printing machine, I lean this way. If I want someone who is skulking around the city taking pictures, I lean that way. One is just surrounded by unorthodox brilliance all the time. And that’s my real inspiration. If I want really badly behaved dogs I have them too.(She laughs and hugs one of her dogs who is barking in the background, presumably impatient with our interviewing.)
Between writing fiction and non-fiction – which one gives you more pleasure or are they equally satisfactory?
No, there’s no comparison between them for me. Non-fiction is not about pleasure; non-fiction has a sort of urgency to it and another kind of intensity. But fiction is about pleasure. I know for some people it is very painful, but for me not.
What do you do then when you celebrate a good writing day or a well done story? Do you open a bottle of Old Monk?
(She bursts out laughing.)
You’re just stuck on your Old Monk! No, I… I think I just float around.
Arundhati Roy opens her door and lets me in – into her kitchen. I wonder if I’ve knocked on the wrong door: the delivery entrance, perhaps? I quickly hand over the humble gift of fresh coffee beans I’ve brought her, on the assumption that all serious writers love coffee.
As we sit down around her solid wood kitchen table surrounded by funky chairs, I realize that the kitchen is the warm heart of her self-designed apartment in central New Delhi. Apart from long work counters, there’s a sofa, a bookshelf, a sit-out terrace with an antique-looking bench – altogether a place where one could spend a lifetime.
But right now she’s all over the world and is somewhat jet-lagged after having just flown in from New York. Following a bunch of interviews in town, she’s soon off again on a worldwide promotion tour for her new novel. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is her first in two decades since the globally bestselling, Booker Prize-winning, The God of Small Things. It appears to be the literary happening of the decade and according to her publishers ‘it reinvents what a novel can do and can be’. I’ve started reading it and can say that it is a ruthlessly probing and wide-ranging narrative on contemporary India, written with a linguistic felicity that reminds me of Salman Rushdie’s classic Midnight’s Children. On the whole, it makes interviewing her an intimidating prospect. While she makes coffee, I rig up my electronic defences consisting of three audio recorders (two of which conk out during the interview) and a backup video camera. She looks on bemusedly and seems used to a barrage of microphones. We embark on a three-hour interview session. Excerpts:
Generations of new Indian writers have seen you as an inspiration, as someone who allowed them to dream that one could sit in India and write and then be read all over the world. How does your iconic status feel to you? Do you ever think about it?
Not really, because I am equally balanced by the kind of rage and craziness that I evoke. For me, I live inside my work. Although I must say that I was thinking at some time about writers who like to remain anonymous – but I’ve never been that person. Because, in this country it is important, especially as a woman, to say: “Hey! Here I am! I am going to take you on! And this is what I think and I’m not going to hide.” So if I have helped to give courage to anybody… to experiment… to step out of line… That’s lovely, I think it is very important for us to say: “We can! And we will! And don’t f*** with us!” You know, come on.
I’ve noticed that you don’t often appear at literary festivals. There are more than a hundred in India these days, and I’ve been to quite a few myself, but never met you before. Do you keep away from other writers?
It’s not about other writers. I don’t know if you’ve read this essay I wrote called Capitalism – A Ghost Story and Walking with the Comrades? The thing is that the Jaipur Literature Festival is funded by a kind of notorious mining company that is silencing the voices of the Adivasis, kicking them out of their homes, and now it is also funded by Zee TV which is half the time baying for my blood. So in principle I won’t go. How can I? I’m writing against them. I mean, it’s not that I’m a pure person, like all of us I have contradictions and issues, I’m not like Gandhiji, you know, but in theory I abide by this. How can you be silencing and snuffing out the voices of the poorest people in the world, and then become this glittering platform for free speech and flying writers all around the place? I have a problem with that.
Do you read a lot of new Indian fiction or non-fiction?
When I’ve been writing this book, I haven’t been very up on current things. I’m not even on Facebook and all that. I don’t have any problem [with it], but as Edward Snowden told me, the CIA celebrated when Facebook was started, because they just got all the information without having to collect it. That aside, I think that when you’re writing, you tend to be a bit strange about reading: sometimes I’m not reading whole books, I’m dipping into things to check my own sanity. ’ (She waves her left hand in a kind of elegantly psychedelic mudra before her face.) ‘Am I on the same planet?
Is there any particular Indian writer who you admire?
I think that Naipaul is a very accomplished writer, although we are worlds apart in our worldviews. But I’m not really that influenced by anybody, you know. I have to say that I find it incredible that writers in India, or almost all Indian writers, or at least the well-known writers… Let’s not say writers, but there’s been a level of eliding of things that have been at the heart of the society, like caste. You see there is something very wrong here. It is like people in apartheid South Africa writing without mentioning that there is apartheid.
Your writing is hard-hitting and outspoken – have you experienced any adverse repercussions?
My God, that’s to put it mildly. Other than of course going to jail and all that. Even now, when the last book of essays was released in Delhi, called Broken Republic, a gang of vigilantes came on stage, smashed the stage up. The right wing, the mobs, vigilantes, they are there at every meeting, threatening violence, threatening all kinds of things. I still go to speak, to Punjab, in Orissa, wherever, I’m not really that writer who is sequestered somewhere and I live perhaps alone, but in the heart of the crowd.
It must have been a bit of a shock, after expressing a personal opinion, to suddenly find yourself behind bars in Tihar Jail?
Tihar. (She sighs deeply.) Yes, it is shocking, but at the same time look at how many thousands of people are behind bars, people who have no understanding of the language, who don’t even know what they’re charged with. So I can’t really be dramatic about what happened to me, because people are in jail for years for nothing – nothing! It’s crazy! I’m currently being tried for contempt of court again for an essay I wrote called Professor P.O.W. which you can read in Outlook Magazine.
Have you ever felt that you should leave India and live in a country where you don’t have to face such problems?
Everything that I know is here! Everyone that I know! And I’ve never really lived outside, abroad, so the idea of going to live all alone in some strange country is also terrifying. But right now I think India is poised in an extremely dangerous place, I don’t know what is going to happen to anybody – to me or to anybody. There are just these mobs that decide who should be killed, who should be shot, who should be lynched, you know? I think it is probably the first time that people in India, writers and other people, are facing the kind of trauma that people have faced in Chile and Latin America. There’s a kind of terror building up here which we have not fully got the measure of. You go through periods when you are feeling very worried, then angry, and then defiant. I think this story is still unfolding.
Do you anticipate upsetting people with the new book? Though the mobs don’t read anything sophisticated, do they?
It’s never about the book or what they read or don’t read, it is about some arbitrary rules they have made about what can be said, what can’t be said, who can say what, who can kill whom – all of that. Yeah, I mean I live here, and I write here, and this book is about here. But the situation here is out of control, from the bottom! It is not about just getting killed, but it is about: How do you even sit in a train or a bus now if you are a Muslim without risking your life? So what happens with me, I have no idea. I’ve written a book and it’s taken me ten years to write it, and there are thirty countries in the world where the biggest publishers are publishing it. I’m not going to allow some idiots to come and disrupt it and snatch all the headlines. Why should I? It is not about their little brains, it is about literature. It has to be protected and tactically done in this climate.
Let’s talk about the book. What was it that made you publish a new novel after spending twenty years being a public intellectual?
Well, this novel has been ten years in the writing, but I think in the twenty years between The God of Small Things and now, I have travelled and been involved with so many things that are happening and written about them at length. There was this huge sense of urgency when I was writing the political essays, each time you wanted to blow a space open, on any issue. But fiction takes its time and is layered. The insanity of what is going on in a place like Kashmir: how do you describe the terror in the air there? It is not just a human rights report about how many people have been killed and where. How do you describe the psychosis of what is going on? Except through fiction.
So that is why you chose…
But it is not that. I didn’t choose to write fiction because I wanted to say something about Kashmir, but fiction chooses you. I don’t think it is that simple that I had some information to impart and therefore I wanted to write a book. Not at all. It is a way of seeing. A way of thinking, it is a prayer, it is a song.
In the book you use a remarkably poetic language to talk about the harshest subjects.
Language is something so natural to you, you know, not something you can manufacture, not for me.
Having studied architecture, you must have at some point thought of that as your field, while today you are one of the most celebrated novelists on the planet. What does your interest in language stem from?
Actually, the idea of language was far before architecture, because in a way architecture came to me as a very pragmatic thing. I left home when I was seventeen and I needed somehow to…
(At this point one of her dogs climbs all over me. I’m more accustomed to dogs barking the moment they see me but, puzzlingly, this one appears to want to lick my face. Arundhati laughs.)
She’s flirting with you. They are both street dogs. She was born outside a drain. Then her mother was hit by a car. That other one I found tied to a lamppost, cruelly.
Do your dogs have names?
Yeah, her name is Begum Filthy Jaan and this one is Maati K. Lal. That means “beloved of the earth”. Both Lal and Jaan mean beloved.
So they make up your family?
Yes.
They’re very well behaved to be street dogs.
Street dogs are more civilized than other dogs. They’re the best. I’m also a bit of a street dog.
I see. So we were talking about your relationship with language and how you left home at 17.
The relationship with language was there from the time I was very, very young. The only thing is that it didn’t seem possible that I would ever be in a position to be a writer.
Why not?
No money… How are you going to earn a living? In the early years of my life my only ambition was to survive somehow, pay my rent. So it didn’t seem like there’d ever be that time where you could actually sit and write something but you’d be so busy earning. It was just a question of: How do you survive?
How did you survive then?
I used to work in this place called the National Institute of Urban Affairs where I earned almost nothing. I used to live in this little hole-in-the-wall near the Nizamuddin Dargah and hire a bicycle for one rupee a day to go to work. All my time I spent thinking about money. (She giggles.)
So at that point you were almost about to become a bureaucrat?
No, no, architect! I could never have become a bureaucrat.
But a government servant?
No, not even that. I was just a temporary, you know at the edges of it.
So then the writing really started with the film scripts?
Basically after Annie [In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones (1989)] – a film that just made its own secret little pathways into the world away from the big hit films – I wrote a second film called Electric Moon and then The God of Small Things. And after that, the essays.
And now you’re making a fiction comeback. Was there any particular idea or incident that triggered off the new book? It seems to be a meditation on the state of the nation.
(She takes a large sip of coffee and rubs her eyes.) ‘It’s a meditation, let’s say, just a meditation. Always, some things spark something and I think in my case I don’t think what sparks it is necessarily what it’s about. Obviously so many years of one’s life and thinking and encounters and all that… but I think one of those nights that I used to spend in front of Jantar Mantar with all these [protesters] who come there, a baby did appear and people were asking: “What to do?” Nobody was sure what to do. So that was one of the things.
I recall that sequence in the novel, and you also narrate many of the individual stories behind the characters you meet at Jantar Mantar?
That was one of the ideas for me that I would – experiment. As you can imagine with any writer who writes a “successful” book, then everybody wants to sign contracts and give you lots of money… and I didn’t want that. I wanted to experiment. I wanted to write a book in which I don’t walk past anyone, even the smallest child, or woman, but sit down, smoke a cigarette, have a chat. It is not a story with a beginning, middle and an end, as much as a map of a city or a building. Or like the structure of a classical raga, where you have these notes and you keep exploring them from different angles, in different ways, different ups, different downs.
About the first hundred pages of the book are set in Old Delhi. What is your relationship to that part of town?
I actually have a place there.
Near Jama Masjid?
Yes, a rented place, a small room, so I’ve been there for many years.
But why do you need that place when you have this apartment?
You sometimes feel under siege. It was not that I went there because I was going to write about it, but because I went there it became very much part [of the book]. I go there, wander around late at night.
All those rabid street dogs, they don’t chase you?
No. Not at all. Humans are rabid, dogs are okay.
The title is intriguing – The Ministry of Utmost Happiness – because inside the book there’s quite a lot of darkness.
But yeah, there’s also quite a lot of light. And the light is in the most unexpected places.
There’s also a character called Tilo, who seems to me very much like Radha in In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones. Is she a continuation of that character?
(She laughs.) She’s not actually like Radha when you carry on [reading]. Yeah, she’s in architecture school, but I think Tilo is a very different person actually.
But how much autobiographical detail do you use in your writing?
It is hard to say, because where does your imagination end and your experience begin? Your memories? It is all a soup. Like in The God of Small Things when Esthappen says, “If in a dream you’ve eaten fish, does it mean you’ve eaten fish?” Or if you’re happy in a dream, does it count? To me this book is not a thinly veiled political essay masquerading as a novel, it is a novel. And in novels, everything gets processed and sweated out on your skin, has to become part of your DNA and it is as complicated as anything that lives inside your body.
On that note, let me ask: in the years you worked on the novel, did you get tired of it at some point or were you happily engrossed in it for an entire decade?
When I write fiction I have a very easy relationship with it in the sense that I’m not in a hurry. Partly, I really want to see if it will live with me, you know, for long. If I got fed up with it, I would leave it and imagine the world would get fed up too. I need to develop a relationship with it almost like…(She goes quiet.)
Like with another human perhaps?
Or a group of humans. We all live together.
Nerdy question time – are there any rituals you have to go through like putting on a jazz record or uncorking a bottle of Old Monk before you start writing?
Let’s say when I was breaking the stones and really trying to understand what I was trying to do I would never be able to work for very long, just a few hours a day. There were two phases in writing this book, one was about generating the smoke, and then it’s like sculpting it, none of which is the same as writing and rewriting, or making drafts. But when you’re generating the smoke, it would be like – I could write three sentences and then just fall asleep out of exhaustion. But when the book was finally clear to me, I’d be working long hours. It was the same with The God of Small Things, there would be that single sentence which would send me to sleep. Like a strange trance almost.
Has your training as an architect been helpful to you?
Not just helped, it is central to the way I write.
How?
Because to me a story is like the map of a city or a map of a building, structured: the way you tell it, the way you enter it, exit it… None of it is simple, straightforward, time and chronology is like building material, so yeah, architecture to me is absolutely central.
I recall Vikram Chandra once telling me how he adapted a construction project management software, used by architects and builders to control the supply chains and all that, to plan and track all the elements in his novel Sacred Games. Do you – as an architect – plan your writing like that?
Oh God! There’s no algorithm involved in my writing, it is all instinctive… rhythm.
What’s a good writing day like then? You get up at five o’clock and take strong coffee or do you wake at three in the afternoon and pour yourself a glass of champagne before hitting the desk?
I don’t seem to have any rituals as such, it is just a very open encounter between me and myself and my writing. I don’t actually understand what we mean by “when you write” because I kind of wonder when am I not writing? I am always writing inside my head! But right now, I feel almost like if I weighed myself, I’d be half my weight, because the last ten years it’s just been in my head, all the time! At least now’ (she points at the book on the kitchen table) ‘it is with me, but it is not on the weighing scale. You know?
What do you do for inspiration?
You know, one of the reasons it would be so hard for me to leave this country, is that everywhere I turn there is something so deep going on. That way I’m lucky in terms of the worlds that I move through here whether it is in the Narmada Valley or in Kashmir. It is a very anarchic, unformatted world that I live in. To me, if anything it is an overload of every kind of stimulus. I suppose I’m not closed off in some family thing. There’s a porous border between me and the world and lots of things come and go. That’s the way I live. There are so many brilliant people doing things around me all the time, like even just in the process of making this book – if I want someone who is an insane … who’s actually not a human being, but a printing machine, I lean this way. If I want someone who is skulking around the city taking pictures, I lean that way. One is just surrounded by unorthodox brilliance all the time. And that’s my real inspiration. If I want really badly behaved dogs I have them too.(She laughs and hugs one of her dogs who is barking in the background, presumably impatient with our interviewing.)
Between writing fiction and non-fiction – which one gives you more pleasure or are they equally satisfactory?
No, there’s no comparison between them for me. Non-fiction is not about pleasure; non-fiction has a sort of urgency to it and another kind of intensity. But fiction is about pleasure. I know for some people it is very painful, but for me not.
What do you do then when you celebrate a good writing day or a well done story? Do you open a bottle of Old Monk?
(She bursts out laughing.)
You’re just stuck on your Old Monk! No, I… I think I just float around.
Saturday 21 January 2017
Art of the one-liner: wit and grit for a deadly hit
Gary Nunn in The Guardian
For a while, I had the perfect tagline on my dating profile, and it was all thanks to the wit of Carrie Fisher: “Instant gratification takes too long.”
It alerted me to the dimmer bulbs in the chandelier. “Your tagline makes no sense. What could be quicker than instant?” Blocked!
But: “Great Postcards from the Edge quote there” = date request!
Alas, that led to little success so I’m again taking Fisher’s advice, as echoed by Meryl Streep this month: “Take your broken heart, make it into art.” The art I’ve decided to make is to discover the world’s best one-liner. This one’s for you, Carrie:
Some one-liners are so great, they’ve become their own cliches. Some characters deserve their own category for speaking almost exclusively in them - take a bow, Oscar Wilde, Dorothy Parker, Groucho Marx, Mae West, Mark Twain, Maya Angelou.
What makes a great one-liner? Certainly not an inspirational quote in an infuriatingly pretty font over an evocative filtered landscape. They are more likely to be bawdy, rambunctious and not always kind. The edge makes them memorable, although that’s not to say they can’t be profound.
Straight-up humour isn’t enough: the funniest one-liners have a sardonic, sarcastic or even bitchy undertone. The dreamier ones need a tinge of sadness or bitterness. Those offering guidance need to insinuate it’s advice the author of the phrase wistfully - or bitterly - wishes they’d taken themselves. Concision is essential.
Some wordplay will make the ‘inspirational’ one liner forgivable for its linguistic merit. Don’t state the bleeding obvious: tell us something counterintuitive, or something that reveals the grit of your struggle and how you’ve mastered words as your response.
Retorts are out; if you need someone to rack up a line for you to knock down, then strictly speaking that isn’t a one-liner. It should include all its wit, grit and tips in that standalone line. Metaphors, self-deprecation and genuine poignancy are in.
With those criteria in mind, here’s my - unapologetically subjective - stab at the shortlist of the world’s greatest one-liners of all time:
Self-deprecating
“It costs a lot of money to look this cheap” - Dolly Parton
“I used to be Snow White, but I drifted” - Mae West
“My face looks like a wedding cake left out in the rain” - WH Auden
“It costs a lot of money to look this cheap” - Dolly Parton
“I used to be Snow White, but I drifted” - Mae West
“My face looks like a wedding cake left out in the rain” - WH Auden
Wordplay
“I can resist everything, except temptation” - Oscar Wilde
“Better to be looked over than overlooked” - Mae West
“There are two kinds of people in the world: Those who believe there are two kinds of people in the world and those who don’t” - Robert Benchley
“I can resist everything, except temptation” - Oscar Wilde
“Better to be looked over than overlooked” - Mae West
“There are two kinds of people in the world: Those who believe there are two kinds of people in the world and those who don’t” - Robert Benchley
Perceptive
“If you can’t explain it to a six-year-old, you don’t understand it yourself” – Albert Einstein
“Faith: not wanting to know what is true” - Friedrich Nietzsche
“Anything that is too stupid to be spoken is sung” - Voltaire
“Copy from one, it’s plagiarism; copy from two, it’s research” - Wilson Mizner
“Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo” - HG Wells
“If you can’t explain it to a six-year-old, you don’t understand it yourself” – Albert Einstein
“Faith: not wanting to know what is true” - Friedrich Nietzsche
“Anything that is too stupid to be spoken is sung” - Voltaire
“Copy from one, it’s plagiarism; copy from two, it’s research” - Wilson Mizner
“Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo” - HG Wells
Sardonic
“I’ve had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn’t it” - Groucho Marx
“Every love’s the love before in a duller dress” - Dorothy Parker
“War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography” - Ambrose Bierce
“If you haven’t got anything nice to say about anybody, come sit next to me” - Alice Roosevelt Longworth (and Shirley MacLaine in Steel Magnolias, of course)
“I’ve had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn’t it” - Groucho Marx
“Every love’s the love before in a duller dress” - Dorothy Parker
“War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography” - Ambrose Bierce
“If you haven’t got anything nice to say about anybody, come sit next to me” - Alice Roosevelt Longworth (and Shirley MacLaine in Steel Magnolias, of course)
Underrated
“Happiness makes up in height what it lacks in length” - Robert Frost
“If you think education is expensive, try ignorance” - Derek Bok
“Happiness makes up in height what it lacks in length” - Robert Frost
“If you think education is expensive, try ignorance” - Derek Bok
Just brilliant
“You can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think” - Dorothy Parker
“There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about” - Oscar Wilde
“You can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think” - Dorothy Parker
“There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about” - Oscar Wilde
Advice
“When someone shows you who they are believe them; the first time” - Maya Angelou
“When you’re going through hell, keep going” - Winston Churchill
“Before you leave the house, look in the mirror and take one thing off” - Coco Chanel
“When someone shows you who they are believe them; the first time” - Maya Angelou
“When you’re going through hell, keep going” - Winston Churchill
“Before you leave the house, look in the mirror and take one thing off” - Coco Chanel
Poignant
“Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple” - Dr Seuss
“At 18 our convictions are hills from which we look; at 45 they are caves in which we hide” - F Scott Fitzgerald
“Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple” - Dr Seuss
“At 18 our convictions are hills from which we look; at 45 they are caves in which we hide” - F Scott Fitzgerald
Inspirational
“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars” - Oscar Wilde
“It is never too late to be what you might have been” - George Eliot
“No one can make you feel inferior without your consent” – Eleanor Roosevelt
“If everything is under control, you are going too slow” - Mario Andretti
“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars” - Oscar Wilde
“It is never too late to be what you might have been” - George Eliot
“No one can make you feel inferior without your consent” – Eleanor Roosevelt
“If everything is under control, you are going too slow” - Mario Andretti
I can relate
“Being a writer is like having homework every night for the rest of your life” - Lawrence Kasdan
“Being a writer is like having homework every night for the rest of your life” - Lawrence Kasdan
I’d best wrap this up because:
“He that uses many words for explaining any subject, doth, like the cuttlefish, hide himself for the most part in his own ink” - John Ray
“He that uses many words for explaining any subject, doth, like the cuttlefish, hide himself for the most part in his own ink” - John Ray
And finally, take all these with a pinch of salt because:
“The aphorism is a personal observation inflated into a universal truth, a private posing as a general” - Stefan Kanfer
“The aphorism is a personal observation inflated into a universal truth, a private posing as a general” - Stefan Kanfer
What do you think is the world’s best one-liner?
Thursday 6 October 2016
PG Wodehouse's creative writing lessons
Sam Jordison in The Guardian
Anyone wanting to learn about plotting, not to mention prose perfection, should look to Leave it to Psmith's lean, absurd genius
Anyone wanting to learn about plotting, not to mention prose perfection, should look to Leave it to Psmith's lean, absurd genius
'I always feel the thing to go for is speed' … PG Wodehouse at his typewriter at his Long Island home in 1971. Photograph: AP
"I have been wondering where you would take this reading group for the book, although very enjoyable, isn't particularly nuanced or layered. What you read is all you get."
So wrote Reading group contributor AlanWSkinner wrote last week. I've been wondering too – worrying even. Leave It To Psmith offers plenty of delights. I laughed all the way through this story of impostors, jewel thieves and poets at Blandings Castle. But it's true that most of the novel's pleasures lie on the surface. AlanWSkinner may be right that there isn't much more than meets the eye. That's not a problem. But what scope does it leave for literary inquisition?
The truth is that I'd feel like I was attacking a soufflé with a pickaxe if I were to start hacking around for deep themes, dark images and political implications. Maybe it's possible to make something of the hilarious moral qualities Wodehouse ascribes to clothing. Why does he present Lord Emsworth "mould-stained and wearing a deplorable old jacket"? When we first meet Psmith, is it important that we are treated to the sight of "a very tall, very thin, very solemn young man, gleaming in a speckless top hat and a morning coat of irreproachable fit"? If this were Shakespeare I'd be looking for great significance in the similar descriptions that run throughout the book. But in Wodehouse, it just seems too much like over-explaining the joke, like attaching too much weight to an admirably light book. I think it's probably safest to assume that the only thing that really matters is that these sartorial notes are funny and help conjure up that magical inter-war world. Safe not least because burrowing any deeper would put us firmly into the camp of the poets and poseurs that Lady Constance Keeble has started to inflict on her poor old brother at Blandings Castle. And who wouldn't sympathise with Lord Emsworth when he declares: "Look here Connie … You know I hate literary fellows. It's bad enough having them in the house, but when it comes to having to go to London to fetch 'em … "
Fortunately, although I don't want to go deep, there are still things to say about Leave It To Psmith. For a start, that surface is covered in gems:
"The door opened, and Beach the butler entered, a dignified procession of one."
"My son Frederick," said Lord Emsworth, rather in the voice with which he would have called attention to the presence of a slug among his flowers."
"It contained a table with a red cloth, a chair, three stuffed birds in a glass case on the wall, and a small horsehair sofa. A depressing musty scent pervaded the place, as if a cheese had recently died there in painful circumstances. Eve gave a little shiver of distaste."
As the erstwhile editor of a series of books about Crap Towns, I also can't resist quoting the following description of the fictional Wallingford Street, West Kensington, at length:
"When the great revolution against London's ugliness really starts and yelling hordes of artists and architects, maddened beyond endurance, finally take the law into their own hands and rage through the city burning and destroying, Wallingford Street, West Kensington, will surely not escape the torch … Situated in the middle of one of those districts where London breaks out into a sort of eczema of red brick, it consists of two parallel rows of semi-detached villas, all exactly alike, each guarded by a ragged evergreen hedge, each with coloured glass of an extremely regrettable nature let into the panels of the front door; and sensitive young impressionists from the artists' colony up Holland Park way may sometimes be seen stumbling through it with hands over their eyes, muttering between clenched teeth 'How long? How long?'"
How wonderful to be in the presence of a master.
Such writing cannot be equalled. I wouldn't recommend that anyone should try. I'd also attempt to conceal from budding authors the horrifying information that Wodehouse wrote 40,000 words of this quality in just three weeks in 1922 and wrapped up the entire novel in a matter of months.
Otherwise, Leave It To Psmith should be compulsory reading for creative writing classes around the world. Especially when backed up by PG Wodehouse's own generous suggestions for a wannabe writer in a Paris Review interview given two years before his death in 1975 (a mere half-century after he wrote this novel) :
"I'd give him practical advice, and that is always get to the dialogue as soon as possible. I always feel the thing to go for is speed. Nothing puts the reader off more than a great slab of prose at the start."
In Leave It To Psmith the younger Wodehouse does just what his 91-year-old incarnation recommends. He hits the dialogue within a page of opening, and although many beautiful descriptions follow, a quick flick through suggests that there is never any more than a single page without some conversation. No danger of getting lost in details here.
In the same interview, he said:
"For a humorous novel you've got to have a scenario, and you've got to test it so that you know where the comedy comes in, where the situations come in … splitting it up into scenes (you can make a scene of almost anything) and have as little stuff in between as possible."
Again, it's all but impossible to find anything "in between". All the action takes place in clear, discrete scenes and each one leads to the other naturally and easily and with remarkable precision. It's lean. It's heading somewhere.
It almost didn't surprise me to learn that the book was successfully adapted for the stage during Wodehouse's lifetime. Almost. Because although the scenes are laid out as neatly as moody Blandings gardener Angus McAllister's flowerbeds, there's still a fiendish complexity behind them. Wodehouse also told The Paris Review:
"I think the success of every novel – if it's a novel of action – depends on the high spots. The thing to do is to say to yourself, '"Which are my big scenes?'' and then get every drop of juice out of them. The principle I always go on in writing a novel is to think of the characters in terms of actors in a play. I say to myself, if a big name were playing this part, and if he found that after a strong first act he had practically nothing to do in the second act, he would walk out. Now, then, can I twist the story so as to give him plenty to do all the way through?"
Yes, he thought about how things might work on the stage. But the crucial phrase here is "twist". The practical exercise I'd give to those lucky creative writing students would be to try to draw a schematic diagram of the plot of Leave It To Psmith, using coloured pencils, and, if they want to get really fancy, algebraic symbols for each of the characters and their movements. The resulting equations would be of fiendish complexity, there would be rainbows and arrows all over the place, leading to increasingly thick clumps where, with exquisite timing, Wodehouse has managed to land everyone in the same place at the right time. To give one quick example, the way in which he gets Psmith to Blandings Castle depends on at least three incredible coincidences, four or five bravura pieces of scene shifting that ensure Psmith lands in a chair opposite Lord Emsworth (and recently vacated by the Canadian poet Ralston McRodd) – not to mention a quite brilliant sleight of hand to enable Psmith to convince the Earl that he is the "Singer of Saskatoon" and expected at Blandings … And that's before he meets the Honourable Freddie Threepwood on a train and the plot really gets moving.
It's a masterpiece of timing and technique and the beautiful thing is, as a reader, you hardly even hear this intricate mechanism that Wodehouse has set ticking, so wonderful is everything else. There's a famous quote from VS Pritchett about his fellow Dulwich college alumnus: "The strength of Wodehouse lies not in his almost incomprehensibly intricate plots –Restoration comedy again – but in his prose style and there, above all, in his command of mind-splitting metaphor. To describe a girl as 'the sand in civilisation's spinach' enlarges and decorates the imagination."
I don't entirely agree. I think his plots are extraordinary. Few writers are better at moving characters around the board, even if few make them do sillier things. Their complexity is part of their charm and it's no surprise that Wodehouse said:
"It's the plots that I find so hard to work out. It takes such a long time to work one out."
What is surprising is that he then added:
"I like to think of some scene, it doesn't matter how crazy, and work backward and forward from it until eventually it becomes quite plausible and fits neatly into the story."
Plausible! That's almost as funny as his intentional jokes. The other delight of the Wodehouse plot is that it is almost entirely, gloriously absurd. But still. If you want to know how to construct a story, there are definitely worse places to look than Leave It To Psmith.
Where Pritchett is right, is in saying that the real glory of Wodehouse's scenarios lies in providing a platform for all his other talents. For getting Freddie Threepwood into a situation where he might propose to Eve Halliday by stating: "I say, I do think that you might marry a chap." For getting us all wondering what Ralston McTodd means when he invites us to look "across the pale parabola of joy". For sending Baxter tumbling down some stairs in a "Lucifer-like descent". For making, in short, this work of genius possible.
"I have been wondering where you would take this reading group for the book, although very enjoyable, isn't particularly nuanced or layered. What you read is all you get."
So wrote Reading group contributor AlanWSkinner wrote last week. I've been wondering too – worrying even. Leave It To Psmith offers plenty of delights. I laughed all the way through this story of impostors, jewel thieves and poets at Blandings Castle. But it's true that most of the novel's pleasures lie on the surface. AlanWSkinner may be right that there isn't much more than meets the eye. That's not a problem. But what scope does it leave for literary inquisition?
The truth is that I'd feel like I was attacking a soufflé with a pickaxe if I were to start hacking around for deep themes, dark images and political implications. Maybe it's possible to make something of the hilarious moral qualities Wodehouse ascribes to clothing. Why does he present Lord Emsworth "mould-stained and wearing a deplorable old jacket"? When we first meet Psmith, is it important that we are treated to the sight of "a very tall, very thin, very solemn young man, gleaming in a speckless top hat and a morning coat of irreproachable fit"? If this were Shakespeare I'd be looking for great significance in the similar descriptions that run throughout the book. But in Wodehouse, it just seems too much like over-explaining the joke, like attaching too much weight to an admirably light book. I think it's probably safest to assume that the only thing that really matters is that these sartorial notes are funny and help conjure up that magical inter-war world. Safe not least because burrowing any deeper would put us firmly into the camp of the poets and poseurs that Lady Constance Keeble has started to inflict on her poor old brother at Blandings Castle. And who wouldn't sympathise with Lord Emsworth when he declares: "Look here Connie … You know I hate literary fellows. It's bad enough having them in the house, but when it comes to having to go to London to fetch 'em … "
Fortunately, although I don't want to go deep, there are still things to say about Leave It To Psmith. For a start, that surface is covered in gems:
"The door opened, and Beach the butler entered, a dignified procession of one."
"My son Frederick," said Lord Emsworth, rather in the voice with which he would have called attention to the presence of a slug among his flowers."
"It contained a table with a red cloth, a chair, three stuffed birds in a glass case on the wall, and a small horsehair sofa. A depressing musty scent pervaded the place, as if a cheese had recently died there in painful circumstances. Eve gave a little shiver of distaste."
As the erstwhile editor of a series of books about Crap Towns, I also can't resist quoting the following description of the fictional Wallingford Street, West Kensington, at length:
"When the great revolution against London's ugliness really starts and yelling hordes of artists and architects, maddened beyond endurance, finally take the law into their own hands and rage through the city burning and destroying, Wallingford Street, West Kensington, will surely not escape the torch … Situated in the middle of one of those districts where London breaks out into a sort of eczema of red brick, it consists of two parallel rows of semi-detached villas, all exactly alike, each guarded by a ragged evergreen hedge, each with coloured glass of an extremely regrettable nature let into the panels of the front door; and sensitive young impressionists from the artists' colony up Holland Park way may sometimes be seen stumbling through it with hands over their eyes, muttering between clenched teeth 'How long? How long?'"
How wonderful to be in the presence of a master.
Such writing cannot be equalled. I wouldn't recommend that anyone should try. I'd also attempt to conceal from budding authors the horrifying information that Wodehouse wrote 40,000 words of this quality in just three weeks in 1922 and wrapped up the entire novel in a matter of months.
Otherwise, Leave It To Psmith should be compulsory reading for creative writing classes around the world. Especially when backed up by PG Wodehouse's own generous suggestions for a wannabe writer in a Paris Review interview given two years before his death in 1975 (a mere half-century after he wrote this novel) :
"I'd give him practical advice, and that is always get to the dialogue as soon as possible. I always feel the thing to go for is speed. Nothing puts the reader off more than a great slab of prose at the start."
In Leave It To Psmith the younger Wodehouse does just what his 91-year-old incarnation recommends. He hits the dialogue within a page of opening, and although many beautiful descriptions follow, a quick flick through suggests that there is never any more than a single page without some conversation. No danger of getting lost in details here.
In the same interview, he said:
"For a humorous novel you've got to have a scenario, and you've got to test it so that you know where the comedy comes in, where the situations come in … splitting it up into scenes (you can make a scene of almost anything) and have as little stuff in between as possible."
Again, it's all but impossible to find anything "in between". All the action takes place in clear, discrete scenes and each one leads to the other naturally and easily and with remarkable precision. It's lean. It's heading somewhere.
It almost didn't surprise me to learn that the book was successfully adapted for the stage during Wodehouse's lifetime. Almost. Because although the scenes are laid out as neatly as moody Blandings gardener Angus McAllister's flowerbeds, there's still a fiendish complexity behind them. Wodehouse also told The Paris Review:
"I think the success of every novel – if it's a novel of action – depends on the high spots. The thing to do is to say to yourself, '"Which are my big scenes?'' and then get every drop of juice out of them. The principle I always go on in writing a novel is to think of the characters in terms of actors in a play. I say to myself, if a big name were playing this part, and if he found that after a strong first act he had practically nothing to do in the second act, he would walk out. Now, then, can I twist the story so as to give him plenty to do all the way through?"
Yes, he thought about how things might work on the stage. But the crucial phrase here is "twist". The practical exercise I'd give to those lucky creative writing students would be to try to draw a schematic diagram of the plot of Leave It To Psmith, using coloured pencils, and, if they want to get really fancy, algebraic symbols for each of the characters and their movements. The resulting equations would be of fiendish complexity, there would be rainbows and arrows all over the place, leading to increasingly thick clumps where, with exquisite timing, Wodehouse has managed to land everyone in the same place at the right time. To give one quick example, the way in which he gets Psmith to Blandings Castle depends on at least three incredible coincidences, four or five bravura pieces of scene shifting that ensure Psmith lands in a chair opposite Lord Emsworth (and recently vacated by the Canadian poet Ralston McRodd) – not to mention a quite brilliant sleight of hand to enable Psmith to convince the Earl that he is the "Singer of Saskatoon" and expected at Blandings … And that's before he meets the Honourable Freddie Threepwood on a train and the plot really gets moving.
It's a masterpiece of timing and technique and the beautiful thing is, as a reader, you hardly even hear this intricate mechanism that Wodehouse has set ticking, so wonderful is everything else. There's a famous quote from VS Pritchett about his fellow Dulwich college alumnus: "The strength of Wodehouse lies not in his almost incomprehensibly intricate plots –Restoration comedy again – but in his prose style and there, above all, in his command of mind-splitting metaphor. To describe a girl as 'the sand in civilisation's spinach' enlarges and decorates the imagination."
I don't entirely agree. I think his plots are extraordinary. Few writers are better at moving characters around the board, even if few make them do sillier things. Their complexity is part of their charm and it's no surprise that Wodehouse said:
"It's the plots that I find so hard to work out. It takes such a long time to work one out."
What is surprising is that he then added:
"I like to think of some scene, it doesn't matter how crazy, and work backward and forward from it until eventually it becomes quite plausible and fits neatly into the story."
Plausible! That's almost as funny as his intentional jokes. The other delight of the Wodehouse plot is that it is almost entirely, gloriously absurd. But still. If you want to know how to construct a story, there are definitely worse places to look than Leave It To Psmith.
Where Pritchett is right, is in saying that the real glory of Wodehouse's scenarios lies in providing a platform for all his other talents. For getting Freddie Threepwood into a situation where he might propose to Eve Halliday by stating: "I say, I do think that you might marry a chap." For getting us all wondering what Ralston McTodd means when he invites us to look "across the pale parabola of joy". For sending Baxter tumbling down some stairs in a "Lucifer-like descent". For making, in short, this work of genius possible.
Friday 24 June 2016
10 Tips on Writing from David Ogilvy
“Good writing is not a natural gift. You have to learn to write well. Here are 10 hints.”
The better you write, the higher you go in Ogilvy & Mather. People who think well, write well.
Woolly minded people write woolly memos, woolly letters and woolly speeches.
Good writing is not a natural gift. You have to learn to write well. Here are 10 hints:
- Read the Roman-Raphaelson book on writing. Read it three times.
- Write the way you talk. Naturally.
- Use short words, short sentences and short paragraphs.
- Never use jargon words like reconceptualize, demassification,attitudinally, judgmentally. They are hallmarks of a pretentious ass.
- Never write more than two pages on any subject.
- Check your quotations.
- Never send a letter or a memo on the day you write it. Read it aloud the next morning — and then edit it.
- If it is something important, get a colleague to improve it.
- Before you send your letter or your memo, make sure it is crystal clear what you want the recipient to do.
- If you want ACTION, don’t write. Go and tell the guy what you want.
Saturday 13 June 2015
Marking exam papers exposes the flaws in teaching
It is staggering how many teaching staff I know that do not read examiners’ reports or even the exam specification and so their class often misses out on marks. Photograph: Alamy
The Secret Teacher in The Guardian
A detailed but incorrect answer appears beside every question on an exam sheet. The answers are peppered with technical language but their ideas make little sense. This is one of the most frustrating errors I see as an exam marker.
I took the position up a few years ago after some persuasion from a colleague and the lure of some extra holiday money. I was told that it would be excellent training and help me to become a more effective classroom teacher as I would understand the demands of the exam boards more closely.
Yes it is true that I understand the application of mark schemes better than before, and it definitely looks good on my CV. But I don’t think I can do it much longer.
Each year, I clear my diary for June and plan my time carefully to ensure that I can mark to a strict timetable, giving the papers my highest level of focus. And every year I become more and more depressed by the standard of the responses and the restrictive nature of the mark schemes.
The most saddening answers are simply left blank, or there could be a crossed out sentence. This may be understandable at GCSE for a short answer, but I have seen full essay questions left blank in A-level exams. I cannot help but picture the student sat in the exam hall, pen in hand and nothing to write. I wonder how they feel; it makes me sad and angry that maybe they’ve not had all the help they deserve from their teacher.
On another occasion a GCSE student covered a whole page in calculations trying to work out a simple percentage change question. They drew a box and arrows pointing to their eventual (wrong) answer, but they must have spent at least 20 minutes on a question that should take no more than two.
The Secret Teacher in The Guardian
A detailed but incorrect answer appears beside every question on an exam sheet. The answers are peppered with technical language but their ideas make little sense. This is one of the most frustrating errors I see as an exam marker.
I took the position up a few years ago after some persuasion from a colleague and the lure of some extra holiday money. I was told that it would be excellent training and help me to become a more effective classroom teacher as I would understand the demands of the exam boards more closely.
Yes it is true that I understand the application of mark schemes better than before, and it definitely looks good on my CV. But I don’t think I can do it much longer.
Each year, I clear my diary for June and plan my time carefully to ensure that I can mark to a strict timetable, giving the papers my highest level of focus. And every year I become more and more depressed by the standard of the responses and the restrictive nature of the mark schemes.
The most saddening answers are simply left blank, or there could be a crossed out sentence. This may be understandable at GCSE for a short answer, but I have seen full essay questions left blank in A-level exams. I cannot help but picture the student sat in the exam hall, pen in hand and nothing to write. I wonder how they feel; it makes me sad and angry that maybe they’ve not had all the help they deserve from their teacher.
On another occasion a GCSE student covered a whole page in calculations trying to work out a simple percentage change question. They drew a box and arrows pointing to their eventual (wrong) answer, but they must have spent at least 20 minutes on a question that should take no more than two.
Some students miss out on recognition because they lack the simple skill of clear handwriting; we cannot award the marks if we can’t read the answer. If it is illegible, there is no choice but to only credit the parts I can read.
Then there’s the other side of the scale: some essays are magnificent and show understanding of a topic that goes far beyond the requirements of the course. These are beautifully written and include complex analysis worthy of an undergraduate. But many of these responses go uncredited if they do not fit the exacting standard of the mark scheme.
I have seen some students get marks “capped” because they haven’t included a certain phrase or diagram, even though their overall work was of a high standard. This is reflected in the classroom and I have students asking how many sentences of analysis they need, and how many evaluation points. Whatever happened to writing a good essay and answering the question to the best of your ability?
I understand that exams are necessary to be able to award qualifications to students, and that mark schemes can ensure that grades are fair and consistent – perhaps this is something that cannot be changed. But I just cannot stop picturing the students sat in the exam halls, some with nothing to write at all, some writing illegibly, and others writing brilliantly but not being rewarded.
It’s clear something isn’t working if a student is enrolled on a course, but ends up without anything to show for it.
Some students do not engage – perhaps because they are not supported emotionally at home and in school – and cannot cope with the demands of study. Others are simply not on the right course. Even more worryingly, too many students fail to achieve because of poor teaching.
It is staggering how many teaching staff I know that do not read examiners’ reports or even the exam specification and so their class often misses out on marks.
It all boils down to time. We don’t need another initiative or want the system to change again but teachers need support to deliver well-designed courses and give detailed feedback to students. This would happen if class sizes were more manageable, reducing the level of marking we have to get through. It really is that simple.
Education and exams should not be the final stage for young people, but the start of their life. Yet, too many are beginning this journey far behind their peers. Let’s not let students down. We are measured by their results for that one year; but they may be measured by these grades for life.
Friday 19 September 2014
10 Super Simple Ways to Be a Better Writer
The written word is king. Time to get more comfortable with it
Do you enjoy writing? Does it come naturally to you? Do colleagues praise you for your crisp, articulate, Nobel Laureate-worthy email updates?
Congratulations! Because if you work in an office or run your own business, you’re likely to spend about a quarter of your workdaydoing one thing:
Writing.
Oh, and that’s just the portion of your day that you’ll spend writing emails.
That figure doesn’t account for reports, proposals, best practice guidelines, blog posts, Facebook updates, tweets, texts, chapters of your forthcoming memoirs, that TED Talk script you’ve been tinkering with for the last 18 months, and the occasional hand-written “thank you” note.
We live in an era where the written word is King.
And if you’re going to write 40,000+ words this year—at minimum!—you might as well learn how to do your absolute best.
Here are 10 ways to become a better writer, right away.
(The kind of writer whose words get results.)
1. Get Clear
Before you sit down to write (anything), ask yourself: Why am I writing?
What’s the desired outcome that you want with this particular piece of writing?
Are you writing to brighten someone’s morning? Motivate your team to head back into the ring after a crushing defeat? Encourage folks to say “yes” to your new meeting time?
The best writing tends to have one clear, ringing intention. Choose it—and commit.
2. Get to the Point
In the business world, brevity is gold. (Related: Are Your Emails Too Long? Probably)
If you’re struggling to get to the point, take a moment to think about the person (or people) that you’re writing to, and create a roadmap for yourself by filling in the following statements:
The reason I am writing is:
What I want you to know is:
What I want you to do is:
Get those three points down pat. Then refer to them as you write to keep yourself on track.
3. Strip it Down
Albert Einstein once said, “If you can’t explain it to a six-year-old, you don’t understand it yourself.”
Imagine that you’re writing for an audience of little kids—impatient, easily distracted, with zero tolerance for jargon.
You can practice—out in the real world—by having actual conversations with kids. Try explaining to a toddler what you do for a living, for starters. You’ll see, very quickly, if your elevator pitch is clear and intriguing—or not. (If not? Here are my tips for how to tell people what you do—and be remembered.)
4. Write From Your Happy Place
Ever notice how when you’re stressed out and trying to “force” yourself to write something amazing, it almost never works?
Research shows that getting yourself into a happy, relaxed state—think: taking a shower—is the key to creativity-on-command. When your body is experiencing a rush of dopamine, that’s when those a-ha! moments (“Ooh! I’ve got the perfect title for my presentation!”) tend to happen.
Can’t take a shower at work? No worries. There are plenty of other ways to get into your happy place before you sit down to write. Play energizing music, light a scented candle, bounce on an exercise ball—whatever it takes to help you unclench and relax!
5. Give Yourself a Time Limit
For most people, the longer you fuss over a piece of writing, the worse it gets.
When you have a clear reason for writing and feel happy and relaxed (see tip #4), your first draft is usually best. There’s no need to endlessly chew it over.
Clearing out your inbox, for example? Give yourself a time limit—say, two minutes per email—to prevent yourself from slipping into analysis-paralysis.
(You can set up a “smart playlist” in iTunes comprised entirely of two-minute songs, to keep yourself rockin’ along. When the song changes—hit “send” and move on!)
6. Ask, “What Would My Hero Write?”
If you’re struggling with a sensitive piece of writing where hitting the right emotional tone is essential, try channeling one of your personal heroes.
“What would Mister Rogers write in this situation?” “What would the Dalai Lama say?” “How would Richard Branson handle this email chain?”
7. Close Strong
Lost in a sea of never-ending email threads? Questions building upon questions, never leading to decisive action?
Try taking a decisive stance, rather than wrapping up your writing with an open-ended prompt.
Think: “In my opinion, the following approach is the best choice. If you agree, write back to say ‘yes,’ and I’ll get started.”
Not: “So, what do you guys think? I’m open to everyone’s input!”
8. Use the 7 Magic Words
“All I need from you right now.”
Kick these words up to the top of your correspondence, as in:
“I’m so excited that you’re going to deliver a keynote at our annual conference.
All I need from you right now is the title of your talk, a headshot, and your bio.”
These seven magic words give your reader a clear assignment, and put them at ease. (“Ahhh—that’s all? No problem. Done.”)
You can always add more information down below, if necessary (“Here are a few other things to know—for later.”)
9. Say it Out Loud
Whenever possible, read your writing out loud.
Does it sound like it was written by a human being or a cyborg? Are you stumbling over excessively long sentences? Catch any typos or duplicate words? If so, tweak and read it out loud again.
If reading aloud isn’t possible—because you don’t want to disturb your colleagues—try lightly tapping a finger on your desk or thigh as you silently read each word in your head. (It’s bizarre, but it works almost as well as reading out loud.)
10. Be a Daymaker
David Wagner, CEO of Juut Salonspa, often speaks about being a “Daymaker”—not just going through the motions at work, but actively choosing to be a source of positivity and encouragement. Choosing to make someone’s day.
With everything you write—every email, every text, every tweet—you have an opportunity to make someone’s day. (Or not.)
Often, all it takes is a few words of kindness, a thoughtful compliment, or the kind of insightful reminder that leaves people thinking, “Yeah. I needed that.”
Set “Daymaker” as your barometer of success—for your writing, and for everything you do.
Whether your writing is “perfect” or not, your intent will shine through.
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