THE NATURE OF WRITING

Writing is a code, the making of marks that you then have to understand that these marks can be re-translated into speech; so written words are to speech as black and white musical notes on a page are to music.

Writing is a way of communicating with a lot of people at the same time at a distance. But it’s also a way of communicating with people over long stretches of time. So that when you’re reading a book that was written 200 years ago, you feel you’re hearing that writers voice and that that voice is still alive.

As far as we know, there were pictographs first, of course, and that was to tell stories and probably originally as a form of conjuring. They wanted to get in contact with an animal so that you could, essentially, eat it, and you might be able to conjure up this animal by drawing a picture of it, and enacting a dance about it, something like that. The writing that we know and love so much -- in Sumeria anyway -- it was originally used for keeping records; it was an accounting tool. And amongst the Incas, they had a form of knot writing that was done with thread. The first writing, therefore, was writing down; it wasn’t the creation of new things. It was the symbol form that was developed for keeping track of stuff; you know, how many barrels of corn, how many boxes of wheat. The Sumerians had an extensive system because people paying tribute to temples, and the temple people, kept track of who had given what and then how they distributed it.

So once you had a bureaucracy, you needed writing. And it seems to have been not until a bit later that people realized they could use this magic thing, because people did think it was magic at first - it could send messages over long distances; that was really magic. They used this magic thing for writing down poems and stories that already existed, so you could put them into written form.

How do you get from that to telling stories? I think you’ve seen this with the invention of any new technology. It starts as one thing. For instance, the internet started as something that scientists devised so that they could exchange scientific articles amongst themselves. They cooked up a way of sending this scientific stuff back and forth, and then other people realized you can use this for all kinds of things, and they got a hold of it and developed it into the technology that we see today.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF WRITING

First of all, you had a religious group of things in just about any culture - sacred texts if you like, the things that people thought had to do with the nature of the gods, the nature of human life in relation to the gods, the first things, the last things, who made the earth and what you should do to propitiate the gods, all of that kind of thing. But there was always a parallel tradition, and that tradition was jokes… I suppose the joke is the shortest form of story. Jokes, proverbs, aphorisms, cautionary tales, what happened to my uncle Henry last week; that kind of thing…

I think prose is, originally, written down conversation. Some of the first prose pieces we know are like that, but of course there was a long, long literary tradition before there was written down poetry or written down prose. It was the oral tradition, and it works in quite a different way from a written tradition because an oral tradition is dependant on an individual bard or storyteller person who is going to perform whatever it is. And that performance can either be in poetry or in prose, but the material is much the same.

It was interesting then, in the time of Homer, and immediately post Homer; you wouldn’t get the same story twice in each of the cities in which it was told. The person telling it would tailor the telling of that story to the audience. So if you were telling a story of the Trojan War for instance, in one city you would make sure you emphasize those characters that had to do with that city, and then you would go to a different city, and, because a lot of these guys were itinerant, you’d tell the story of the Trojan War, but you’d change it a bit so that the emphasis was different; you put other characters to the fore. And you can see that today with any standup comic doing a show, if they do the show in New York, they’ll do New York jokes; if they do it in San Francisco, they’ll bone up a bit on San Francisco and make some local jokes.

Plato warned us against poets - “makers” - because he thought they lied, and he thought they made up lying stories specifically about the gods, which had a bad influence on people’s morals. So when he was inventing his ideal republic, he says he would have sent them into exile, he wouldn’t have had them around. But you have to compare that to some of the other things he also would have done, and you wouldn’t have liked those either.

When he was talking about the poets, you have to interpret that as playwrights in his day. That was the major art form and it was communal; people went to see these plays, and in vast numbers. So it wasn’t just people writing down things in books he was worried about, he was worried about this whole activity which was very social and very central to Greek life. So he was proposing to take something that was really central, and he was proposing to exile it just for purposes of discussion, of course. The politicians, the politically minded, are always nervous about art, and they either want to control it as Stalin and Hitler did, or they want to banish, or do away with the artists they can’t control.

POETRY

I don’t think poetry came before prose because I think that people, when they spoke, didn’t speak in poetry. My theory, for what its worth, is that poetry and prose are connected to different parts of the brain. That if you wired a poet in the process of composition, although it would be very hard to do, you would see a different area light up, and that area would be closer to music and to mathematics.

I couldn’t tell you how it connects to mathematics. But people think that music and mathematics are connected, and one of the reasons they think that, is that if you teach children to play the piano, their math skills improve.

When you are writing poetry or composing poetry, rhythm comes before meaning because of the nature of poetry. You have to make it scan. So if you have a choice between a word such as “magic”, and another word such as “prestidigitation”, you are going to use magic if it fits the line better. You might even use “conjuring”, and each of those words has a somewhat different meaning. So to some extent, the structure of a language and the kinds of words that are in it dictate what sort of thing you are going to get when you are rhyming and scanning, and that’s why we always have love and dove, and moon and June.

THE NOVEL

Leon Adel, who was the biographer of Henry James, said on one occasion, “if it’s a novel there’s going to be a clock in it”, because novels are stories about people and events changing through time. So there’s always going to be a clock in it.

The novel as a form, by which we mean a prose narrative with lots of characters and events in it - there’s really two kinds of those narratives. One would be the prose romance, and the other would be the novel as it came to be in the 19th century with people like Flaubert, George Elliot, et cetera. The long prose narrative was practiced widely amongst the Romans – Petronius is who we think of there, but there were lots of others writing these long prose narratives usually with adventures in them; kidnapping, rescues, sometimes magic events, that kind of thing. Sort of Proto Harry Potter if you might…

But then after a long period of poetic romances, followed by a lot of playwriting, Don Quixote appears – he was contemporaneous with Shakespeare. So that gives you an idea of when the novel, another long prose form, came to being in what we now think of as modern Europe. Of course you could say that the Bible has a lot of mini novels in it, has a lot of narratives packed into this one structure which was originally not one structure at all; it was a collection of books. So a lot of these are prose narratives, exactly the kind we have been describing; that’s pretty early.

CALL ME ISHMAEL

This is the best, shortest first line in literature: “Call me Ishmael”. Okay let’s just think of these three words, “Call me Ishmael”; what does that mean? How much can you get out of that? First of all, somebody is being addressed; it’s an order or a suggestion. Second, his name isn’t really Ishmael. Call me Ishmael - maybe my name is Ishmael, maybe its not. If his name isn’t Ishmael, why did he choose that name as the name he wants you to call him? In order to know the answer to that, you have to know the Bible, and then you have to read the whole rest of the book.

DIALOGUE

Back in the days when I occasionally taught writing - what we call “creative writing” - I used to give the students an exercise to do. What I wanted them to do was go and sit in a bus station, or in a restaurant, or in a bar; any place where they could overhear people’s conversations, and I wanted them to write down exactly what they were hearing. And what you usually get when you do that is a rambling series of verbal bursts with a lot of interjections, pauses and repetitions.

People talking - say two people talking - there’s going to be a lot of non-verbal activity going on; and its going to depend a lot on who’s talking to whom, what the occasion is, is it a job interview? Is it a date? Or is it a gossip session? Is it an argument? But nonetheless, there’s going to be a lot of reaction going back and forth to people’s facial expressions and tones of voice. You can’t have that in a written form unless you describe it. You have to do a lot of explaining around when you’re writing down dialogue, although some people could just write the dialogue. I think of Hemingway, a very clever dialogue writer.

Dialogue in a novel, first of all, it’s going to be a lot shorter than what would happen on such an occasion in real life, and its also going to be like music in comparison to random sounds such as people mowing the lawn, birds singing, children singing, et cetera. In real life you get a whole mix of things, all art selects. It selects certain details, it selects them for effect, and then it arranges them. If you just wrote down what happened to you everyday, just one day of your life, every single thing that happened to you, you would never finish it. There would be too much description and way too much dialogue incidentally. So any art, including the art of the novel is very, very selective. You are going to have people saying to each other only those things that are important.

One of Charles Dickens’ early jobs was as a court reporter, a court stenographer, and it was his job to take down everything that people said. Because what they said when they were giving evidence in court was very important; you had to get it all down.

But you wouldn’t read that court reporting for purposes of pleasure; you would read it for the purposes of information. If you’re making a will on the other hand, its much better to have it written down because people will differ if they’re just listening to you say, “Well, Bob gets the grand piano, and I want Betty to have the candle sticks, and Suzie can have whatever’s underneath the sink”. People are going to differ in their memory of what was said. So when it’s a legal document, it’s much better to have it written down. It’s also better to have a lawyer who’s the exact opposite of a creative writer. A lawyer will want each word to mean one thing, and one thing, only. A creative writer will want to get as many meanings out of a word as that writer can possibly get.

BECOMING A WRITER

Why did I become a writer in the first place? It’s not really a question you can answer. Sometimes you can ask a person, why did you become a dentist? And they will say quite frankly that there is lots of money in it, or else they will say, more unusually, “because I just love poking around inside people’s mouths”. But if you ask a writer, why did you become a writer? They usually can’t answer that. They certainly are not going to say because of the money; that’s not a thing they say. They can tell you what their reading experience was, they can tell you the moment at which they became a writer, but they can’t tell you why.

I decided I was a writer when I was sixteen, and I started writing poetry. So I started writing the poetry before I decided that this was what I was, and was going to do. Now at that time, which was 1956 in Toronto, Canada, not a noted center of the arts at that time, there were no role models, so I couldn’t look at another writer and say I want to be like that person. The writers I knew about were dead and in other countries; two things to be overcome – dead and in other countries.

Anyone can start at anytime. In fact there are examples of people who haven’t started until they were quite old. Sometimes they have written when they were younger, given it up for decades, and then come back to it. Sometimes they’ve been writing alone and in a kind of pedestrian way, and they don’t hit their stride until their forties, fifties. And sometimes they just, for some reason, start at that age just as other people for other reasons finish at that age.

On the Dick and Jane level, a writer is a writer because a writer writes… Now, all small children will create; they’ll create pictures, they’ll create poems, they’ll sing to themselves, they all do it. So the real question is why do most people stop? And why do writers, singers, composers, painters -- why do they carry on with these activities, which are universal to children? So you might say that artists must have in them something that is still connected to their child self. Not that they’re childish or immature, but they still have a connection to that creative part of the self, which is so strong in childhood and which many people give up as adults, because it’s just not something they can make a living at.

ADVICE TO WRITERS

I never give advice to writers of the rule kind because as soon as you make some rules for writing, another writer is going to come along who breaks all of those rules and produces a brilliant piece of work. The only advice I give to writers is as follows, number one: read a lot. Number two: make judgments about what you read. I like this, I don’t like that, this I feels succeeds; that I feel doesn’t. Question yourself as to why. And third, I recommend that they read a book called The Gift, it’s by Louis Hyde. It’s not about how to write, it’s about the gift aspect of writing, which is why they will not necessarily make lots of money doing it. Why there is no pension plan.

WRITERS

Writers think about nothing except what's happening on the page, and that means that they're down at the level of the mud. You know the flowers grow out of the mud, but the writers are down at the mud level, they've got to get that mud right; otherwise no flowers. They are relating to their work the same way a potter relates to a lump of clay, they're getting their hands dirty.

They think about nothing except the part that they're writing right then. That is they're not thinking about the critics, they're not thinking about the entire book. They're thinking about that one word, one paragraph, one sentence, trying to get it right, which is why they so often tear out pages, crumple them up and throw them away.

It's important to get exactly the right word if you care about what you're doing. In the same way it’s important to get it right if you're doing anything and trying to do it well.

EDITING

Writing is work. You know what they say: one part inspiration, nine parts perspiration. So you're working with the material, you are trying to get the right word, the right sentence, the right paragraph. A lot of writing is re-writing, and for me, it's six re-writes minimum, unless I'm lucky, then it might be five.

I've been an editor. When you're an editor, you're working with somebody else's material, and just as you can tell another person “your hem’s down in the back,” - they can't see it - and they will either say “thank you very much”, or “mind your own business”. It's the same with editing; you can often see things in somebody else's work that they themselves can't see. But if you've done that a lot, you can step back from your own work and take a similar view of your work as if it were somebody else's. And that’s what you have to do at some stage; either that or you need a very, very good editor with a lot of patience.

The biggest fights I have with my editors are over punctuation because writers punctuate for the ear as if it were a musical score, and editors usually punctuate according to some house system. So they want consistency and writers want musicality.

GRAMMAR

The main thing to be asked about any kind of writing is, is it alive or is it dead? And if it's dead, it can be perfectly correct but it will be inert. If it’s alive, it can have flaws, but it will be moving and interesting. So one must say that first, but after that, you can say that rules of punctuation and grammar are a lot like table manners. They are what people have agreed on and if you violate those rules, it’s best to know that you’re violating them on purpose. If you suddenly want to pick up your steak with your fork and chug the whole thing into your mouth, it's best to know that that’s a statement of some kind and that’s not usually what people do.

There are certain kinds of correctness that are important because they're part of a code, and if you put the wrong symbol in the code what you're saying is going to be misinterpreted by whoever is reading it. And that does have to do with punctuation and grammar and you don't want to end up saying things like, “walking along the beach, a pair of shoes was seen”, because what that actually means is the shoes were walking along the beach all by themselves, which would be a very interesting thing to have in a story, but it's not what people who write sentences like that usually mean. So those kinds of code details are important to get right because otherwise your meaning is completely distorted and you end up saying things you didn't mean to say.

When I went to school many years ago we had to take grammar. In fact, we had to write a separate examination in grammar; one in literature, one in grammar. And I always got points off because I was a bad speller; I spelled for the ear, as a lot of writers do. English spelling is horrible, very inconsistent. I don't know what teachers are doing these days; I think that once students realize that it’s not just some kind of abstract thing that’s out there in the wild blue yonder, but it affects how other people understand what they're saying, then they pay more attention to it.

English spelling is complicated and infuriating, partly because English as a language came out of various other languages, including Anglo-Saxon, Medieval French, Latin and Greek, and then during the age of the Empire words came into English from all over the world. An English dictionary has the biggest vocabulary of any dictionary in the world and that means that there's no system. And of course, it's infuriating and difficult, but children are like sponges at a certain age, they absorb everything and if they're reading, a lot of spelling will be absorbed through their reading. You don't actually have to teach it to them. Kids do get stuck on things; I was always stuck on words like “weird”. I was never stuck on words like “prestidigitation” or “conglobulate”. It was always the “e”'s and “i's” that were bothersome to me.

Then you start learning other languages, and they'll tell you how regular they are, how many rules there are, and it's so much easier, and then you start learning and you realize that there are this many exceptions to all of these terrific rules that you have been learning. So they're not actually any easier, plus you have to inflect them. English is quite easy comparatively for a beginning speaker and reader because you don't have to put different endings on words, meaning his, hers, theirs, to him, to her, the way you do in other languages. We use much simpler units, which tend to remain stable.

READING

In terms of human history, reading is quite new, and vast numbers of people being able to read is very, very new. When reading first came in it was controlled by scribes. Ordinary people were not taught to read, that’s why magicians were always shown as these mysterious figures who had books, unlike ordinary people.

And when reading did start to be taught to larger numbers of people, children were not taught to read silently to themselves. They read out loud in a group, which they still do in lots of parts of the world. And when printed books became available it became possible for more people to have books, ordinary people to have books, this was viewed with great suspicion, because you could be reading a book silently to yourself and who knows what you were thinking. Whereas if you read out loud in a group, there wasn't room to think anything, you were just chanting the words from the text, all at once. Try doing that and thinking at the same time; it's very hard.

When people could own their own books, solitary reading became possible. And that’s when you get the image of young girls shutting themselves in their rooms and reading novels, a thing that was generally supposed by older people to be bad for them. It was hotly debated in the 18th and 19th centuries whether such people as young girls should be allowed to have novels and should be allowed to read by themselves because it might have a bad effect on their morals.

The control of reading and who has been allowed to read is a very old motif in human history. During slavery in the United States for instance, it was illegal for slaves to read. And those that learned to read and write had to do it in secret. When they did do it, of course, it was very liberating for them. Particularly as they were often flogged over the head with the Bible because the people reading the Bible to them would select only certain passages and not read them the more liberating and freeing kinds of texts. Once they could get their hands on the thing themselves that was a whole other world, just as it was during the Protestant reformation, when people translated the Bible into vernacular languages and people could read it for themselves.

Reading is a neutral thing. Reading is like electricity. Electricity is good when it’s turning on your light bulb and bad if you happen to stick your finger in the light socket. You can’t say that the mere fact of a thing being a book makes it good. That would be a very foolish thing to say, especially if you've read Mein Kampf and certain other works that we could go on to mention. There can be hateful books just as there can be hateful uses of electricity. I would say reading is another human tool, it’s another tool that human beings have invented that can be turned to many uses. I also happen to think that it's impossible to have a democracy without a reading public because reading is the only information spreading technology that allows you, and in fact demands, that you put time into reflective thinking. It's very hard to analyze and reflect upon an impassioned political speech that you hear on the radio or that you see on television. But on the page, for instance, in a newspaper, in a magazine, in a book, you can think it over, you can analyze it, you can see whether you think this is logical or not, whether it's reasonable, whether it accords with what you already know. So I think without that, without the ability to read, you're not going to have a democracy as we understand it, we are going to have demagoguery.

BOOKS

One of the things that’s good about writing is that they have found that if they change nothing else about a school, with the exception of the addition of a school library, if they do nothing but add a library, students marks go up by twenty percent.

There are always going to be too many books in the same way that there is always going to be too many people in the world for you to know personally. You are going to have to select according to your own tastes, and the kinds of people that you find pleasure in, find valuable in your life. Similarly with books, it’s going to be the kinds of books that you personally have chosen. It used to be said that one of the best ways to know a person was to look at his library.

We have many other forms of communication, but they interact differently with the brain. For instance, there’s a lot of emphasis on learning through computers these days, but unfortunately, the images on the computer, the ones that you’re looking at, don’t make as much impact on the brain, because of the nature of the image. And it was Marshall McLuhan who first started investigating the different ways different media interacted with you, the human being. So you are not going to learn as well, actually, from a text on a computer as you are going to learn the same text written on a page. The resolution is different.

Have you ever tried reading on the computer? Have you ever tried reading a long text on the computer? It's really quite irritating, and the other thing about it is the book is such a convenient form; you can skip back and forth, you can peek at the end a lot more easily that you can with a computer. A computer is very handy for ordering books, for doing word searches of texts; all of those kinds, of, shall we call them, office work? It's good for that. But for the actual reading experience, first of all, you cannot get into the bathtub with your computer. You're also unlikely to take it to bed unless you're quite odd.

Is the book going out of business because of the computer? We're finding the opposite; the computer will lead people to books. So you will look on the computer to research the book, order the book; Amazon for instance. Systems like that will get you the book very quickly; you can get other books that you might like. They've got sort of filtration systems to do that, so people are actually reading more books as a result of computers, contrary to what we thought. And in Canada, anyway, we find that sixteen to twenty -year olds are reading as many books as forty to fifty year olds, and that’s gone up since the computer. Television had more of an impact, a negative impact on books than computers. The other thing about computers is, of course, when you are doing your email you're writing. It's a writing activity, it's not talking on the phone, it's not a visual, it's not a television thing; you're actually writing.

The importance of reading is that if you are reading this on the page, the producer would not be saying to me, make it shorter...