The Adding Machine (6 page)

So if I can’t do what I want as Commissioner of Sewers, still less can I do what I want as President of the United States. I will disband the Army and the Navy and channel the entire Defense budget into setting up sexual adjustment centers, will I? I’ll legalize marijuana? Annul the Oriental Exclusion Act? Abolish income tax for artists and put the burden of taxation onto the very rich? I should live so long.

I think that Richard Nixon will go down in history as a true folk hero, who struck a vital blow to the whole diseased concept of the revered image and gave the American virtue of irreverence and skepticism back to the people.

When Anthony Burgess was teaching his course in creative writing, a student asked him: ‘Why should you be up there teaching writing and not me?’ A good question; and I wish I could give as definite an answer as can be given in regard to other subjects where the technology is more clearly defined. No one, unless he is himself an experienced pilot, asks why the pilot of an airliner should be in the cockpit and not him. The answer is that he knows how to fly the plane and you don’t. Nor would a student of quantum mechanics, engineering, or mathematics ask such a question; the teacher is there because he knows more about the subject than the student. To say he knows more presupposes that there is something definite to know, that a technology exists and can be taught to qualified students.

How many writers have taken courses in creative writing? Some of them certainly. James Jones for one, who took a course with some literary lady who had her students imitate the styles of well-known writers... write Hemingway for a month, Graham Greene for a month, and so forth. A good exercise I think. But there are certainly, I think, more writers who have not taken courses in writing than writers who have. How many pilots have taken courses in flying? All of them, we hope. How many physicists have taken courses in physics? All of them. Which brings us to the question I intend to raise in this course and to hopefully arrive at some answers. Is there a technology of writing? Can writing be taught?

As soon as we ask the question we realize that there is no simple yes-or-no answer, since there are many technologies of writing and a technique that is useful for one writer may be of no use to another. There is no way to write. So we will begin looking for
answers,
not
the
answer. A pilot must possess certain qualifications before he starts flying lessons. A degree of coordination, steady nerves, a certain level of intelligence. A student of physics must have a considerable aptitude for mathematics. The qualifications for a writer are not so definable. The ability to sit at a typewriter for many hours without distraction is certainly useful The ability to endure solitude is useful but not essential. An ability to empathize with others, to see and hear what is in their minds, is useful — but some very great writers like Beckett have only one character and need no others.

In general, the more observant a writer is, the more he will find to write about. I recommend an exercise I have practiced for years: when walking down any street, try to
see
everyone on the street before he sees you. You will find that if you see others first they will
not
see you, and that gives you time to observe, or file for future use. I learned this exercise from an old Mafia don in Columbus, Ohio. If a writer is seen first he won’t necessarily get shot, but he may miss a set or a character. Someone glimpsed in passing may be used as a character years later; some doorway or shop front may serve as a set. An absent-minded writer closes the doors of perception.

Genet said of a French writer who shall here be nameless: He does not have the courage to be a writer. What courage does he refer to? The courage of the inner exploration, the cosmonaut of inner space. The writer cannot pull back from what he finds because it shocks or upsets him, or because he fears the disapproval of the reader. Allied to this courage are persistence and the ability to endure discouragement. Any writer must do a great deal of bad writing and he may not know how bad it is at the time. Writers are not always good critics of their own work. Sinclair Lewis said, ‘If you have just written something that you think is absolutely great and you can’t wait to show it to someone, tear it up, it’s terrible.’ I have certainly had the experience of writing something I thought was the greatest, and reading it over a few days later said, ‘My God tear it into very small pieces and put it in someone else’s garbage can.’ On the other hand, something that I did not think much of at the time may stand up very well on rereading. What I wish to point out is that the writer must be able to survive an uneven performance that would be disastrous in another profession. An actor or a musician must put on a certain level of performance, whereas a writer has time to edit and choose what he will eventually put out as the finished product.

I have never known a writer who was not at one time an avid reader. I believe it was T.S. Eliot who said that if a writer has a pretentious literary style, it is generally because he has not read enough books. Some knowledge of what
has
been done in writing is, I think, essential — just as a doctor or a lawyer must be conversant with the literature in his field. A full-time professional writer does not as a rule get much time to read, so it is well to get your reading in early.

To recapitulate qualifications which are useful but not essential: the ability to endure the physical discipline of writing, that is, to sit at a typewriter and write; the ability to persist and to absorb the discouragement of rejection and the even deadlier discouragement that comes from your own bad writing; insight into the motives of others; ability to think in concrete visual terms; a grounding in general reading. Now assume that the student has at least some of these qualifications. What can he be taught about writing?

It is of course easier to tell someone how not to write than how to write. Remember for example that a bad title can sink a good book or a good one sell a bad book. But it can sink a film faster and deeper, because a film has just one shot to make it. A book with a bad title or a slow beginning may make a come-back — a film just gets one chance. Here again there are no absolute rules; but there are guidelines. A good title gives the reader an
image
and arouses his interest in the image. Bad titles convey negative images, refer to images which the audience cannot understand until they see the film, or convey no image at all. Titles of more than three words are to be avoided — such turn-off titles as ‘The Marriage of a Young Stock Broker’. ‘The Conformist’ is a turn-off title. Those of you who have seen the film will know it is about a fascist who ends up denouncing his blind friend as a fascist when Mussolini falls. ‘The Survival Artist’ would have been a better title.

There is a definite technology for the negative use of words to cause confusion, to create and aggravate conflicts, and to discredit opponents. This is the opposite of what a writer does. Here, the more abstract words and meaningless statements there are, the better. This technology has been developed in the mass media by Hearst and others, refined in LIFE and TIME, and carried still further by the CIA in some subsidized literary periodicals. The technology for writing a turn-off review is so definite that one sentence will tell you when it is being used — and it is much more complicated than just saying derogatory things about the book. It is very important for any writer to be able to absorb unfair criticism calmly and, when given the opportunity, to reply to it. It is also good practice to write book reviews.

To return to the matter of technology, let us consider first the question of our materials: Words, Korzybski’s book.
Science and Sanity,
is a great timesaver. The fact that a word is
not
the object it represents — that this desk, whatever it may be, is not the label ‘desk’ — fully realized, will save the student a lot of pointless verbal arguments. Look at abstract words that have no definite referent — words like communism, materialism, civilization, fascism, reductivism, mysticism. There are as many definitions as there are users of these words. According to Korzybski, a word that has no referent is a word that should be dropped from the language, and I would say, certainly from the vocabulary of the writer. For example, take the word ‘fascism’: what does it mean? What is the referent? Consider the phenomenon of Nazi Germany — the military expansion of an industrialized country; now consider South Africa — oppression designed to maintain a status quo; are these both fascism?

In short, we have so many different phenomena lumped under this word that the use of the word can only lead to confusion. So we can drop the word altogether and simply describe the various and quite different political phenomena. I have been accused of being an arch materialist and a bourgeois mystic. What do these words mean? Virtually nothing. And because they mean nothing you can argue about them for all eternity. Any words that have referents cannot be argued about; there it is — call it a desk, a table, call it whatever you like, but no argument is possible. All arguments stem from confusion, and all arguments are a waste of time unless your purpose is to cause confusion and waste time.

I have learned as lot about writing by writing film scripts. As soon as a writer starts writing a film script — that is, writing in terms of what appears on screen — he is no longer omniscient. He cannot for example inform the reader that ‘It was a clear bright day in May of 1923 in St. Louis, Missouri.’ How does the film audience know that the month is May, the year 1923, the locale St. Louis? This information must be shown on the screen, unless the writer falls back on the dubious expedient of the offstage voice. Or:’As he left his house and turned onto Euclid Avenue that morning, he felt a chill of foreboding.’ Did he indeed — and how is this to be shown on screen? Some incident must be presented that gave him this chill; perhaps someone passing him on the street who mutters something that may or may not be directed towards him — or he intercepts a malignant expression as someone passes on a bicycle. And such phrases as ‘words cannot convey’, ‘indescribable’, unspeakable’, cannot be shown on screen. You cannot get away with an indescribable monster. The audience want to
see
the monster. That’s what they are paying for. The ability to think in concrete visual terms is almost essential to a writer. Generally speaking, if he can’t see it, hear it, feel it, smell it, he can’t write it.

The impact of the mass media is more directly felt in films than in books. In the 1920’s, gang war was box office year after year, but remember that there were no television pictures of gang war on screen. There were only still pictures and newspaper accounts. It was front-page news and people were interested because it was something going on which they could not see directly. Had they seen it day after day, like the terrorist activity in Belfast today, they would have lost interest. Image loses impact with use. Anyone like to try making a film about the IRA in Belfast? Or writing a book on the subject for that matter? People are fed up with the IRA in Belfast. Or how about the Arab terrorists? Call it ‘Death in Munich?’ World War II — there were of course films on location, but not all that many, and no TV cameras at the front. There have been a lot of successful films made since then, and at least two books:
From Here To Eternity
and
The Naked and the Dead.
But who has written a bestseller about the Vietnam War?

Dreams are a fertile source of material for writing. Years ago I read a book by John Dunne called
An
Experiment with Time.
(1924). Dunne was an English physicist, and he observed that his dreams referred not only to past but also to future events. However, the future material, since it often seems trivial and irrelevant, will not be remembered unless it is written down. This got me into the habit of writing dreams down, and I have done this for about thirty years. I began writing dreams down long before I started to write. I have, over a period of years, turned up a number of future references; but much more important is the number of characters and sets I have obtained directly from dreams, and at least forty percent of my material derives from dreams. When I contact a character, I start building up an identikit picture. For example, I meet a character in a dream; then I may find a photo in a magazine that looks like the character, or I may meet someone who looks like him in some respect. Usually my characters are composites of many people — from dreams, photos, people I know and quite frequently characters in other writing. Over a period of years I have filled a number of scrapbooks with these identikit pictures.

Finally, I will examine the connections between so-called occult phenomena and the creative process. Are not all writers, consciously or not, operating in these areas?

One more thing: Sinclair Lewis said: ‘If you want to be a writer, learn to type.’ This advice is scarcely necessary now. So then sit down at your typewriter and write.

Having given courses in creative writing, I have come to doubt whether writing can be taught. It is like trying to teach someone how to dream. So I now teach creative reading. A few comments or quotations can turn a receptive student onto a book, and learning to read with discrimination is a crucial step towards learning to write. Creative reading demands the active participation of the reader, and the first step is critical evaluation.

Matthew Arnold formulated three questions for a book critic to ask and answer:

So what is the writer trying to do? Many critics disparage a writer because they don’t like what he is trying to do, or because he is not trying to do something else.

Ask the second question and you are well on the way to creative reading and the useful exercise of putting what the book is about into one or two sentences. Take
Jaws:
Menace posed by great white shark eating the bathers and endangering the tourist trade.