On Becoming an American Writer
theparisreview.org
theparisreview.org
Maybe I am being too harsh here...this is just a person who has written something they feel passionate about and that reflects their personal experience. The stories were touching, but what is the takeaway here? Raising awareness that writers and their craft are under attack? Helping writers to feel better about their self-worth? I'm curious to know what about this piece resonated with other readers.
You didn't seem to have the endurance to make it to the closing paragraph, so I've reproduced it here:
> I have new lessons in not stopping, after the election. If you are reading this, and you’re a writer, and you, like me, are gripped with despair, when you think you might stop: Speak to your dead. Write for your dead. Tell them a story. What are you doing with this life? Let them hold you accountable. Let them make you bolder or more modest or louder or more loving, whatever it is, but ask them in, listen, and then write. And when war comes—and make no mistake, it is already here—be sure you write for the living too. The ones you love and the ones who are coming for your life. What will you give them when they get there?
The author believes that writing, and especially writing in America, is devalued to such an extent that he personally feels a sense of loss and fear. His advice to himself and others is that writing and self-expression has real value outside of whatever the people around you ascribe to it.
Let me know if you want me to break it down any more.
I don't see why he would feel loss and fear. Do you think you could break it down for me? I mean, American culture is particularly toxic and anyways, one should not be influenced by it but rather think for himself. I would expect as a writer he would be aware that writing in itself is for the writer, first and foremost, then for anyone else. With that said, why would it matter if a particular culture devalues writing? A writer knows inwardly that words and words alone are beyond powerful. It just seems he is already aware of the falseness of American culture, so why feel loss and fear in regard to what it devalues? It's all gravy, just write.
Why would you expect writer to feel the same feelings then you?
People are influenced by culture around them, that is just how we are wired and that is what allowed us to build civilizations. The one "should not be influenced by culture" is not fully achievable goal. The the extend it is achievable, you start by realizing how it is influencing you, by thinking about it and that is what article is doing.
It's hard to make a living as a writer. Lots of people want to write, but nobody owes them a living, and they end up caught between their own inclinations and an indifferent market. Most of them end up teaching to pay the rent, like Chee. (That of course is pyramid scheme, like others in academia, where teachers teach would-be teachers even though there are not enough teaching roles to go around.)
Chee has written some pretty good things.[1] He has also written some self-indulgent things, which, in my opinion, includes the essay through the link above.
Self-indulgence is one hallmark of contemporary creative non-fiction in America. It's frequently soft autobiography and banal scenes ginned up with internal melodramas. Whether or not one enjoys that is a matter of taste that we won't settle here.
Those who are put off by the self-indulgence will be less likely to read Chee in the future, which makes his expressions of despair the trigger of a vicious circle.
But Chee is not writing for a general readership here. He says he is writing for other writers, and the general readers among us just stumbled on his letter to them. Maybe it's just what they needed.
[0] Jonathan Franzen "Perchance to Dream: In the Age of Images, a reason to write novels" (Paywall) https://archive.harpers.org/1996/04/pdf/HarpersMagazine-1996... [1] Annie Dillard and the Writing Life https://themorningnews.org/article/annie-dillard-and-the-wri...
After all, writing and the corresponding activity of reading diminish the skill of maintaining the Palace of the Mind.
If he's responding to Plato, then he's on a well-tread path that nearly ever writer has come to or answered en passant for the last two millennia. Welcome to the club.
Let's start with the line I find most telling:
>...a person who has written something they feel passionate about and that reflects their personal experience...what is the takeaway here?
The takeaway? You can't just read an essay and live through someone's qualia for a bit? No wonder writers are despairing.
At it's best, the author argues, writing is about:
>...mak[ing] something happen in a space barely larger than the span of your hand, behind your eyes, distilled out of all that I have carried, from friends, teachers, people met on planes, people I have seen only in my mind, all my mother and father ever did, every favorite book, until it meets and distills from you, the reader, something out of the everything it finds in you. All of this meets along the edge of a sentence like this one, as if the sentence is a fence, with you on one side and me on the other.
But nowadays everything has to be some kind of politicized appeal or self-help panacea for it to make sense (to you, Nelkins). On your substantive points about "unsupported hyperbole", I didn't see much hyperbole there, just a sad reflection on the work culture in this country and the sacrifices we all make to live the "American dream". It is not at all easy to support an arts career in this country, and it is getting more difficult every year. And that is lamentable. To wit:
>I have been to convenience stores where I see people working with untreated injuries, and when I leave, I get panhandled in the parking lot by someone in a chain-store uniform who is unable to afford the gas to get home on the last day before payday—someone with two jobs, three jobs. Until recently, I struggled to get by, and yet I am in the top twenty percent of earners in my country. I am currently saving up for dental implants—money I could as easily use for a down payment on a house. But I’m not entirely sure I’ll see the end of a mortgage or that any of us will.
I think he's right - there are clear decisions and policies that have created this dystopic state-of-affairs in this country. There was design, and there was intention, and this essay ends with a call to arms to save what may be as well as an elegy for what was.
>If you are reading this, and you’re a writer, and you, like me, are gripped with despair, when you think you might stop: Speak to your dead. Write for your dead. Tell them a story. What are you doing with this life? Let them hold you accountable. Let them make you bolder or more modest or louder or more loving, whatever it is, but ask them in, listen, and then write. And when war comes—and make no mistake, it is already here—be sure you write for the living too. The ones you love and the ones who are coming for your life. What will you give them when they get there?
This has been my recent joy in reading. I've spent more than enough time with my own thoughts.
step one, don't become wrapped up in the ideal of being "a writer". find something useful to say, then say it forcefully. or just churn out garbage to pay the bills. nobody else is looking at your work with the same perspective as you do.
step two, don't lament that readers might not read what you wrote. if you build it, they will come, so long as your marketing team does their job right.
step three, open palm slam any notions of "profundity" into the ground, immediately. profound things come in concise packages, and we call them data. i guess if you're interested in making some kind of flowery Literature, you might think that you could get a free pass out of this step, but no, you can't. you can make things sound pretty and contain real information without falling into the forced affectation of "Literature". it doesn't matter if you're telling a story about fantastical characters or telling a story about how there are four nitrogenous bases in DNA. don't aim for profound, aim for communication of insight.
step four, if you're concerned that you're not impacting the world as a writer, you're writing about the wrong stuff, or to the wrong people. the author complains that swords beat pens. but that's a cop out. swords are merely the continuation of the work of pens by other means. (shout out to clausewitz, a guy who understood this principle very well)
finally -- and this is really something that cannot be said enough -- history is a story of those who lived with both their feet on the ground and whose focus was on putting one foot in front of the other. the more you fixate on "living in the shadow of X" or "if only america valued Y, I'd Z" or "They don't understand Us because We're Enlightened" or "Our Generation Of Writers" the more you get lost in a fantasy world of thoughts which are disconnected from the physical reality of your fingers smashing the keys of your keyboard, which is the primary mode of productivity for writers. does any of the above stuff prevent you from smashing those keys? no, if you are sitting here and reading this, it does not.
think about stuff all the time, yeah. but don't talk yourself in circles when it comes to things that you can't relate back to the physical world at the moment. mental walls become real, but that doesn't mean that they bear any weight. live in the here and now, and manipulate information which you can prove or at least correlate to a physical phenomenon.