[Writing is] hostile in that you're trying to make somebody see something the way you see it, trying to impose your idea, your picture. It's hostile to try to wrench around someone else's mind that way. Quite often you want to tell somebody your dream, your nightmare. Well, nobody wants to hear about someone else's dream, good or bad; nobody wants to walk around with it. The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to the dream. [1]
I have not read Joan Didion, although a paperback copy of The White Album sits on my bookshelf and I will need to pick up another book soon.
Maybe I shall pick up another Henry James, whom I haven't visited for a while. What a high form of praise, to call his novels paralyzing.
INTERVIEWER
The first is the gesture, the second is the commitment.
DIDION
Yes, and the last sentence in a piece is another adventure. It should open the piece up. It should make you go back and start reading from page one. That's how it should be, but it doesn't always work. I think of writing anything at all as a kind of high-wire act. The minute you start putting words on paper you're eliminating possibilities. Unless you're Henry James.
This is adjacent to something I've been thinking about for a while:
All writing is advertising.
I even have a post I've drafted about it. I differ with Didion in that I'm not so convinced that it's hostile (at least it's not overtly so). Perhaps more like seduction. Not all seduction is hostile.
I'm closer to that last part: "tricking the reader into listening to the dream." Writers are tricksy people.
To stick with the analogy, tricks can be either hostile or good-natured, I think. I might prefer, when reading, to be in on the trick, but I cannot always have it that way. At least, I'd like to know the trick is being done in good spirit, even if I am not, and is not being made at my expense. Sometimes--I'd even say, often--advertising is done at the audience's expense.
I just finished reading a book whose tricks I didn't enjoy. I plan to write a review about it.
But if you are in on the trick, there aren't any surprises. and surprises are one lovely thing of stories. so there must be some amount of the reader still being willing to have the trick played on them.
Looking forward to your review.
It may be that the wanting to be in on the trick makes it keep your attention and makes the surprise worthwhile.
Anyway, I think you're onto something and it would be great to see your post get fleshed out.
Good writing provokes others to think differently by looking at things differently to how they are accustomed.
It does not tell them this is how it is but suggests it might be...
Good writing often leaves you an outcast, a scapegoat, but also might make some people think again about the biases and prejudices that we all carry and that blind us to the full truth that is just too bright and strong for many to even glimpse.
Write good shit and be damned.
Who are some of the writers who have done this for you?
Yuval Harari, Peter Hessler, John Steinbeck, Henry Thoreau, Charles Dickens, Saifedean Ammous, Alexandar Solzhenitzyn, The Existentialists and too many more to recall them all this morning before work.
Just time to drink a coffee and hang up my holster.
I just try to write things down in case I forget. Sometimes I get carried away and that's the best. When I read it back it doesn't always carry me away the same.
Please carry me away with your writing.
Ok I was lying. Oftentimes I have a Good Idea and think I should write more about that later so I make a note and later I do that. I have a ton of GIs in various states but little faith that they'll excite anyone. Maybe I'll get hacked and be discovered as some kind of super genius.
At least there's a record.
I like the 10 minute edit window. I've also recently been trying to make smaller more finished works by spending time with them. I'm talking about in other media but for writing I guess it means spending more time rereading and acting on my observations of the text.
3 minutes left.
Maybe put one of your GIs up here in this territory sometime. With any luck, there may be some half-a-dozen good writers here who might read it!