About Writing. Samuel R. Delany
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way or the other, directly or indirectly, good fiction tends to be about money.
Whether directly or indirectly, most fiction is about the effects of having it or of not having it, the tensions caused between people used to having more of it or less of it, or even, sometimes, the money it takes to write the fiction itself, if not to live it. Supremely, it’s about the delusions the having of it or the not having of it force us to assume in order to go on. Like Robert Graves’s famous and equally true statement about poetry, however (“All true poetry is about love, death, or the changing of the seasons”), the generality ends up undercutting its interest. Like Graves’s statement, one either recognizes its truth or one doesn’t. Both need to be acknowledged. Neither needs to be dwelled on.
Probably I am drawn to such overgeneralizations—“All true poetry is about love, death, and changing of the seasons,” “All good fiction is about money”—because I am not a poet, and not (primarily) a writer of realistic fiction. Thus I like statements that do a lot of critical housekeeping for me—possibly, certain poets or fiction writers might argue, too much to be useful.
“All good fiction is about money” probably appeals to me because, while I acknowledge the necessity of the economic register in the rich presentation of social life (like Forster’s necessity for some story if we are to recognize the text as fiction at all), the economic is, nevertheless, not the most interesting thing to me as a reader personally (in the same way that story is not the most interesting thing either to Forster or to me). But stories that never address money or the process by which we acquire it—if not directly then indirectly—are usually stillborn.
As far as all fiction being about money, the good news is that over the last three hundred years so many indirect strategies have been developed to indicate the money that controls the fiction that often the reader—sometimes even the writer—is not aware of the way the monetary grounding that functions to elicit the fictive “truth effect” is actually present in her or his tales. Still I think it’s better to know than to gamble on its happening. When the writer doesn’t know, and can’t provide such information directly or indirectly, allowing the reader to sense the economic underpinning of the tale through the representation of work or otherwise, the fiction usually registers on the reader as thin or lacking in staying power.
The better news is that, regardless of guidelines people writing about it lay down—guidelines that I or my students have from time to time found useful—they are only guidelines. There are no rules. The truth is, fiction can be about anything. I don’t believe the best of it changes the world directly—though many people felt that works such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851) and Les Misérables (1869) were pretty effective in their day. (When President Lincoln was introduced to Harriet Beecher Stowe, he reputedly met her with the words, “So this is the little lady who made this big war!” And the popularity of Hugo’s novel is often counted as influencing many people to support late 19th century welfare reforms.) One of New York’s historical public catastrophes, resulting in twenty-three deaths and over a hundred wounded, the Astor Place Riots of 1849 were sparked by two rival productions of Macbeth, playing in New York on the same night, in theaters half a dozen blocks apart, one starring the American Edwin Forest and the other featuring the English-man William Macready. Again, art no longer functions in the society the way it once did: it functions in different ways. And it can help people understand how those who live and think in ways different from themselves can manage to make sense of the world. The pleasures from writing fiction—and even more, the pleasures from reading it—easily become addictions. Some of the guidelines above may, I believe, have something to do with why our society continues to organize itself so that such addictions are not only common and continuous but often flower in such wonderful ways, ways that manifest themselves in provocative and satisfying stories and novels across the range of genres, literary and paraliterary.
—Buffalo, Philadelphia,
Boulder, and New York
July 2000–April 2005
Partial List of Works Cited
Artaud, Antonin. “No More Masterpieces.” In The Theater and Its Double. New York: Grove Press, 1958.
Barzun, Jacques. Simple and Direct: A Rhetoric for Writers. Rev. ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.
Borges, Jorge Luis. This Craft of Verse. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998.
Carver, Raymond. “On Writing.” In Fires. New York; Vintage Books, 1983.
Egri, Lajos. The Art of Dramatic Writing. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972.
Forster, E. M. Aspects of the Novel. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, 1927.
Hofmannsthal, Hugo von. The Lord Chandos Letter. Translated by Russell Stockman. 1902. Marlboro, Vt.: Marlboro Press, 1986.
Lacan, Jacques. “Of Structure as an Inmixing of an Otherness Prerequisite to Any Subject Whatsoever.” In The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Science of Man. Edited by Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972.
Orwell, George. “Politics and the English Language.” In In Front of Your Nose (1945–1950): The Collected Journalism, Essays, and Letters of George Orwell, vol. 4, edited by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, 127–40. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968.
Pound, Ezra. ABC of Reading. New York: New Directions, 1934.
Stein, Gertrude. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas: Selected Writing of Gertrude Stein. 1933. New York: Vintage Books, 1975.
———. Lectures in America. 1935. New York: Vintage Books, 1975.
_________
* At John Hopkins University, in October 1966, the French psychiatrist Jacques Lacan discussed this all-important signification process in a paper entitled “Of Structure as an Inmixing of an Otherness Prerequisite to Any Subject Whatsoever” (reprinted in The Structuralist Controversy). This “inmixing,” this “intertrusion,” this “conjoining,” is what allows scenes, sentences, and even words to signify.
* More recently translated as In Search of Lost Time.
Part I SEVEN ESSAYS
Teaching/Writing
The young painter who has set about learning to paint “realistically” is often surprised that the eye must do the learning; the hand more or less takes care of itself. “But I can already see what’s there! Tell me what I’m supposed to do to set it down.”
Keep your hand still and look more closely.
As “realistic” painting does not exhaust art, neither does the comparatively high resolution of narrative storytelling exhaust fiction. But the young writer who has decided to utilize his or her experience of the world at this comparatively high resolution, for like reasons, is always surprised when he or she is told to go back and reexamine his or her experience.
“But I want to know how to write an exciting piece of action!”
Examine your reactions when you are excited; as well, when you are bored.
“But how do I create a vivid character?”
Look closely at what individualizes people; explore those moments when you are vividly aware of a personality. Explore the others when you cannot fathom a given person’s actions at all.
“No, no! You don’t get the point. Tell me about style!”
Listen to the words that come out of your mouth; look at the words you put on paper. Decide with each whether or not you want it there.
But it will always be a paradox to the young artist of whatever medium that the only element of the imagination that can be consciously and conscientiously trained is the ability