Fear and Authority
I’d like to begin with an apology. I understand that my job, my contractual duty, is to meet you here, live, if not face to face then at least screen to screen, and to respond “in the moment,” as the saying goes, to whatever you might want to talk about. But instead, I’ve written what can only be called a script. And I’d like to highlight the only important part of this script right away, and this highlight doesn’t take the shape of an answer, but a question. And the question is: why did I write this script? Can someone answer this question? Can someone tell me why these words are on this page? (ask class)
Let me give you a hint. The answer is one word. And the answer is: fear. I am afraid of failing, ashamed in advance of the words that I’m going to say, and even more ashamed of the words that I will fail to say. And I don’t know about you, but when I am filled with fear, and I am asked to step on up to the front of the room and make a demonstration of that fear, to create a form for that fear that I can share with others, I, like many other people, like to take on the form of authority. As if I knew anything more than you did about the subject, as if I actually belonged here, which obviously I don’t.
Fear and authority. Authority and fear. There you have it. That’s the whole workshop. The takeaway. The Sparks Notes version.
Voice
This is the fantasy: that the act of writing can be talked about. Not just talked about, but actually taught. All over this country, and your countries, there are classes where people, writers mostly, teach other people how to write. Short stories, novels, poetry. What words do you need to hear, that will help you with the prospect, the goldmine, of your own writing?
I think in part we’re here to talk about, to raise the question of the voice. How do I have a voice? How do I find my voice? How do you find yours? I mean: in the movies. You go to see a movie, even a difficult artist-made movie, and it seems like it can’t stop talking to you. Where do these words come from?
Do I need to add that culture is designed to give voice to some groups of people? Sometimes I like to think of culture as a big slick ramp and all those voices come sliding down on top of you. And then on the other hand, on the other side of the ramp, culture is designed to silence certain voices. So the question: How do I find my voice? is also a political question. It couldn’t be more personal, and for that reason, it’s also and necessarily political. More on this in a moment.
Nicole Chung
Here are some words from Nicole Chung, an American writer. “When I launched this newsletter, I knew that I wanted to hold space for conversations about how we can pursue writing, publishing, and other creative goals without losing compassion for ourselves.” I think she’s saying that writing, the act of writing, might also include what she calls: compassion. Compassion for ourselves. I wonder what that looks like, I wonder how you might extend compassion for yourself?
(Anyone want to weigh in on this?)
She goes on: “In the years when any writing I wanted to do was relegated, by necessity, to the margins of my life, I often felt that I could do my best work only by sacrificing other things I needed—whether that meant sleep or meals, healing or recharging time. But the strain and grief of the last few years has forced a kind of recalibration, and I’ve been slowly learning that I can’t do the work I want to do if I approach it as though I’m a machine. The importance of treating yourself humanely has found its way into every class I teach, every writing talk I give; I think of it as an essential aspect of creative work, as important as any craft discussion. I know I’m not alone in this—when I talk with friends and fellow writers, we frequently find ourselves considering questions of care alongside those of craft.”
Care and craft. Most of what I’m interested in is how we do what we do. With craft. How we write. But Nicole is saying that you can’t think about craft, without opening your arms to care. And this question of care, what does care look like for you, is an individual question. It’s something only you can know, can answer, for yourself.
But I wonder if it might be possible to say some way that you take care of yourself.
Why?
Here’s another question I often ask about artist’s movies. Why? Why should we talk? Why should there be any language at all? I say this as someone raised in the forbidden silences of avant-garde film, where words were regarded with suspicion, even hostility, despite the fact that artist’s movies were, and largely remain, an oral culture.
Here is Jason Read on why:
Our desire, our loves and hates, are already shaped by narratives, by scripts inherited through movies, books and relationships. (Movies first!) We enter into a world already scripted, and, as Spinoza argues in his definition of the first kind of knowledge, our life is defined as much by signs and images as things experienced.
Why part 2: kpunk aka Mark Fischer
“It’s not that we believe everything we see on a screen, but that the fundamental elements of every narrative, the way we tell the story of what happened to us last weekend, becomes the way we make sense of who we are, of what happens in the world. In other words: fiction is documentary. (the way we tell something tells us something about the past, and about who we might be)
This is why the deep spread of capitalist technologies of reality management and libidinal engineering in the 1980s was not merely some happy coincidence for neoliberalism: neoliberalism’s success was inconceivable without these technologies. (what technologies is he talking about: the home computer, the phone. The relentless surveillance society. The internet which puts us to work for some of the biggest companies on the planet, and of course we work for free.)
It is also the reason that direct action (he means labour strikes, he means demonstrations, he means teach-ins and letter campaigns, he means: revolution), direct action is crucial, but we also need to act indirectly by generating new narratives, figures and conceptual frames.”
What I think he’s saying is that indirect action equals art. Or in this instance: artist’s movies. That indirect action, our movies, the movies we want to make, are necessary because they are places where we can create counter narratives, new narratives, narratives that will resist the charm and allure of the ruling class.
For me: this is an answer, or at least, one of the many answers, to the question: why? Why do I need to write? Or even: why bother making art at all?
Our technologies have made us more lonely than ever. More anxious, more precarious. But they can also be used to make people human again. Or human in a different way.
When I am very occasionally asked to step inside a university and teach a class, I’m stepping inside a place that most often began as a white-males-only institution. Because white men were people, and everyone else was not recognized as being a person. So the act of speaking, of standing up and speaking, in that frame, against that giant tide, is an act of resistance. And the people who can muster the courage, the will, to stand up and speak against the big mud slide, make it more and more possible for others to speak. This can mean that in our solitude, as the wonder that was Billie Holiday used to sing, in my solitude, I am connected to the past, and to the future.
But I’m getting ahead of things a bit, I really wanted to start at the beginning. Here’s a few thoughts about that dreaded moment. You have your half litre of coffee poured into the thermos, you’re in your favourite chair, the cursor is blinking and the computer humming. You’re about to start to once upon a time us. You’re about to lay out the welcome mat, the first words. And then what happens?
Beginning
I often hear people say: I don’t know where to begin. Or even: I don’t know how to begin. It’s always confusing when I hear this. In order to mask my confusion I might say to you: let’s go for a walk and have a chitchat about that. So you and I meet up, we head off to some of your favourite, to some of your unfavourite places, with the water dripping and the leaves falling, and what I hear you telling me is: how you can’t start writing. In fact, from the moment we meet, you’ve been talking non-stop about how you can’t start writing. My confusion meter is on overload. Because it’s pretty clear that there are a lot of words living inside you. And that you have access to those words. They spray out of you like a garden hose. How is it possible then that you can’t write?
I’m often struck when I very occasionally teach a class, that there’s a few strong and silent types, or like me when I was in a class, weak and silent, and then as soon as there is a so-called break, or lunchtime or whatever boom, everyone erupts into language. Words are my best friend again. Why are words so easy sometimes, and so hard other times? Why is it when I sit down to write nothing happens?
The fantasy is that when I’m starting a project, when I sit down to write, I’m at the beginning. But what I’m really hearing, when we’re out for a walk together, is that there are plenty of words, and they’re already there. You didn’t invent all those words on the walk, me neither. So what might look like the beginning is really the middle. This is a key. You’re not actually blocked, because the words are turning in every combination. They may not be hitting your computer screen, but they’re already there. There is no void, no absence, nothing is missing.
Archive
Let’s put it another way. Perhaps we could say that every movie is made out of an archive. An archive of pictures, an archive of sounds, an archive of words. Out of that archive you pick and choose, you made selections, then you take the risk of making an arrangement, you create some kind of order or structure. Right? We live in the era of the archive, it’s so central to our fragile sense of identity we carry our little archive machines around with us everywhere we go. Our musical delights, our friends, pictures, movies, restaurants, geographical locations, we have all this archived. And movies, it goes without saying, movies are the art of the archive. Movies mean digging back into that big pile and rearranging fragments. Making the past live again.
So the archive of words, that you’re going to create your voice-over out of, is already there, you’ve said all the words already, or someone else has said them, now it’s time to put them into some kind of order.
So: where do words come from? How do you find them? How do you get in touch with the archive?
Practice
I have two main practices as a movie maker. The first is about sound. I collect sounds. What kind of sounds? Fridges and stoves, the sound of wind rustling dry leaves, or snow falling, or rain on a metal roof, or shoppers in a mall, or a waiting room in a hospital. There is sound everywhere, and so much of it is so beautiful. I find sounds online, I buy sounds, my only social media is Soundcloud, where people post sounds – at least, the people that I follow – not music, just sounds. And I go out and record sounds. So when I start a movie I have this giant archive of sounds. It’s just a question of finding the ones the movie needs.
My second practice is reading. Why? Because I love reading. It gives me pleasure. And this feels so important. I know that artists are supposed to suffer, but I prefer to suffer in other parts of my life. For me, making movies is based on practises that feel good. While I’m reading I come across a sentence like this one from Ursula le Guin: “Our common nature (like: there might be one thing we have in common) is to be responsible to one another. And that responsibility is our freedom.” I don’t even need to know what the fuck it means it sounds so beautiful. So I type that into a word document. Or this line from Cathy Park Hong’s masterpiece on Asian racism in America: Minor Feelings.
“Like most writers and artists, Richard Pryor began his career trying to be someone else.” Actually, we are turning into each other all the time. Isn’t that how we find out who we are?
In other words: Pryor the artist begins by copying. In other words: he finds himself, by copying others. I dig words out of the word archive, in order to find out what I think. To find out who I am.
What’s Wrong With Writing?
The latest book by Dave Eggers is about Facebook, though it’s set in the future, and it’s fiction, so he calls Facebook “The Every.” Every meaning Everything. Yes, in this version of the future, Facebook has expanded to touch every part of your life.
The Every hires an English professor to find out what’s wrong with books. How can we write better books? Computers report that books like Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart masterpiece isn’t usually read all the way through. In the future everyone reads electronically, and your reader tracks your eye movement, so attention span data can be collected and aggregated. What seems to be the problem?
Roland Barthes liked to say: “My favourite books are the ones where I never skip the same passages twice.” In other words, even in the books he most cherishes, there are pages he never sees. So what the Every proposes, is that AI, that Artificial Intelligence, write the parts of a book that everybody skips. But of course, and I quote: “The favourite scenes, and the climactic parts and parts where there’s poetical-type writing, those would still be still written by humans.”
Merve Emre meets Leo Bersani: If desire is the pain of ignorance, then love is the pleasure of ignorance.
From Shanghai Baby by Wei Hui:
“I was hypnotized by my novel. To convey one torrid scene as authentically as possible, I tried writing naked. Many people believe that there’s a connection between the body and the mind. (American poet Theodore Roethke allegedly dressed and undressed repeatedly in front of a mirror to get a sense of what it was like to dance naked.) I certainly believe there’s a secret connection between writing and the body. When my body shape is relatively full, every sentence I write is pithy and poignant, whereas when I’m thinner, my writing is full of overlong sentences like dense clumps of silky-soft seaweed.”
Editor
I live in a city where some of the best writers in the world live. If only that rubbed off a little more on the rest of us. They are published by real presses, which means not only that there are sales reps and international book fairs and book catalogs, but that they work with an editor. Does it seem strange that one of the oldest arts – writing – should require the services of an editor, whereas, for instance, movie artists mostly do their own editing, it’s rare to meet a performance artist, or a painter that has an editor. When I met my first editor I felt they were corporate culture poured into a human form, their mission was to turn my precious words into money. What can I say, I was young. They were simply trying to help the book find the best version of itself. The best writers in the world have editors who tell them: this doesn’t work, not: this doesn’t sell, but these pages don’t sing with the rest, or else they sing too well, they’re too smooth and even, the flow needs to be interrupted here.
When I finish a movie, I send it to a few trusted comrades. Friends. I ask them for something that is rarely valued in human interactions. Total honesty. It’s an ugly thing, it doesn’t feel good, but I need to hear their merciless and uncensored reaction, and my job as an artist is not to defend myself. My job is to see the work from a fresh perspective, with new eyes. They are able to do something I will never be able to do: to see this movie for the first time, read these words for the first time. This feedback is a huge resource, I can’t emphasize it enough. Please, if you are strong enough, if you can take it, please try and find yourself an editor.
Here is Sheila Heti on feedback: “10 or 15 years ago it was much more overwhelming because I didn’t have as solid a core. I received a lot of feedback along the way that showed me that the book is not good enough. It’s great to be able to take that in without having it hurt your relationship with that person. But if you’re going to be upset at someone because they don’t think your book is ready, or because they don’t like your work, then the whole thing falls apart. There has to be trust. You trust them to tell you the truth, and they also have to trust that they can tell you, “This is not good enough,” and you’re not going to hate them. (Interview Magazine, March 2022)
Skinship
So when I start a movie, I have this long archive of amazing sentences. And I can draw pieces out of these archives, fragments, and lay them in when I need to. Here’s a small movie called Skinship. My YouTube algorithm demands that I watch the latest video by The Weeknd, wow, it’s so beautiful. I wanted to rescue these heavenly pictures from the obligation to sell records.
I start with the images, and they lead me to a sentence in the text archive. The image that I have reframes the archive, until this sentence comes into focus.
I started with these lines from XXXX. It sets up the themes of the movie: it’s going to be about bodies, about selling your body which is what every worker does. It also establishes a female voice, a female worker. So this is going to be the point of view, the speaker of the movie. And this is not a big text, it’s less than a sentence in the original book, but broken up here like poetry, it’s doing a lot of work with minimum effort.
Process
The way you make a movie, changes what the movie is. You want to shoot with your phone? Great. Wonderful. But it will affect how your movie looks, how it develops. You want to shoot with one of those Hercules cameras? You know, you need five strapping amazons to haul it across the room. Super. But it will change your movie. You each need to find a way, you need to find a method that works for you. Your method is also: your voice. Sometimes that means doing what feels easy and good. And sometimes that means doing the most difficult thing, because it’s time to sit in the hard place and face what you can’t face. You’ve been putting off the appointment for a long time, but now the appointment is due. Of course for some artists, the whole point of making work, is putting off the appointment. This is a very popular option for men.
Red Herring
I said a few words about my process. The two archives I am busy with day after day. Reading and collecting sounds. You know what a red herring is? If you read detective novels you’ll know. A red herring is a false clue. Aha, the person who committed the crime is… Sorry detective, you followed a red herring. You see, it doesn’t matter what my practice is because it’s not going to work for you.
The thing about process, about the way you make something, is that you can’t really teach it, or share it. What schools do is impose a timeline, a slate of gear, a theme, etc. And the result? Most people never make anything after they leave. The thing about process is: you need to find your own way of working. Your own way of writing, which also means: your own way of reading. I don’t know why anyone would think they can write, if they never read books. Could you imagine being a painter that never saw paintings, that didn’t know anything about paintings others were making? Of course, like everything, it’s a balance. But don’t expect to be like my ex-friend Max who only watches Hockey Night in Canada and makes avant-garde films. I just don’t think that works so well.
What to read?
But what should you read? I mean: as a writer. I go through Lithub everyday, it’s an online portal that features links to interviews, reviews, blogs, best of lists, etc.
I’m working on a long series of movies about capitalism. I loved the anthropologist’s book written after she took a job on Wall Street. I loved The Mushroom at the End of the World. The Autobiography of Malcolm X. I had a frame, and once you have a frame, the world keeps rushing in, because the world is always rushing in, only now I didn’t have time to binge watch Netflix anymore. By which I mean: I didn’t want to. I wasn’t trying to force myself, I’m not doing homework, or wearing a hair shirt and doing penance. I wanted to read Andrea Long Chu’s Women. I thrilled to Paul Preciado’s Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era. Each book leads me to the next, the nexus. At this moment there is an avalanche of incredible books being written. Much better than movies, much better than paintings or any other form of art. Books are the best. But the question again is: what is your process? How do you read, and how do you find the books you need to read? Or how about: what will give you pleasure? Especially undiscovered pleasures, or even the pleasures you don’t want to want.
Writing is Reading
I think what I’m saying is: writing is reading. My old English lit teacher Joyce Carol Oates said: there are only two kinds of serious readers. What? Serious readers? I’d never heard this term before. I was 18 years old. I didn’t know what a serious reader was, but I wanted to join the club. She said the first kind of serious reader makes notes in the margins of their books. The second makes notes on file cards. The next day I went out and bought a pack of file cards. On each one I put the author’s name, the book, the subject of the quote, and then the quotation. I gathered these for 25 years, created categories, laid them out in a fleet of boxes with coloured tabs marking out thematic sections. Then I threw them all away. Now I do it on computer.
The question is: how do you read? Or better: how do you let yourself be read. Reading, like making a picture, might appear to be a one-way street. I pick up my camera, I point it, I make a frame, I adjust the light settings, I decide: ok, now! I make a picture. A portrait. We all have so many pictures of ourselves that say almost nothing about who we are. But there are a few pictures, or perhaps only one, that shows something, that offers a hint of who we might be. And those pictures, accidental, glancing, or else purposeful and studied in their making, those special pictures are I think when something is happening on both sides of the camera. When the camera operator isn’t using the technology to hide, to enlarge their fear. Like I’m doing right now. Reading a book is the same thing. I’m not reading to escape the world, I’m allowing the world to touch me, I’m making myself vulnerable, I’m allowing myself to be read. This book isn’t just describing a world out there, but a world in here, AND out there. I think that’s what reading is, as opposed to this (mime act of reading) – where your face goes back and forth, as if all you can do, is say no. (mime act of reading) no. no. no. How do you read and say yes?
Where do ideas and words come from?
Descartes claimed it was all about “the second substance.” He said that everything you can touch, or anything that can touch you, whatever arrives through the sense doors of seeing, hearing and smelling – all that is made up of the first substance. But there is another substance, the second substance, which is made up of thought or language. The act of creative writing means bringing together these two substances, these two worlds.
And on a related note, here is Melissa Febos on the question of where do words come from. I think she’s saying that they come from her best friends, sometimes her frienemies, ex-lovers, family, whomever she happens to be around. “If I could write worthwhile books in such a way that it wouldn’t upset anyone, I would. Unfortunately, that kind of writing has mostly proved not worthwhile.”
Mistakes
Mental health doctors don’t get any better at their jobs. They might start at 25 or 30 and work until they retire. They don’t get smarter, they don’t make better decisions, exhaustive studies were done looking at the results of thousands of doctors. The question is: why? (ask the class: why?)
Researchers came up with my new favourite expression: Certainty bias. It’s when we’re quite certain about something we actually don’t know anything about. What does it mean to be so certain? I guess it means I’m the boss, and there’s no pushback on my decisions, there’s no back and forth. I make a decision: take Prozac, and then the next patient steps into my office and I tell them: take Prozac. I never ask anyone to help me. I never reach outside what I already know. I am a living library, a data bank, a god who has all the answers. No wonder I don’t get any smarter.
Here is journalist Michele Herman, talking about writing her first novel: “A novel is an exploration of character and place and themes but it’s also a thing you make, like any other craft, by doing it wrong a bunch of times first.”
As an artist, I am regularly cured of my certainty bias. I create a little scene, a frame. In that frame there are sounds and pictures, they belong to the outside world, that street corner, his face, that light. But this scene also comes from my inside world. It’s about my digestion, the electricity flowing between my fingers, the contractions of muscle that produce thought. It’s a portrait of outside and inside, and because I think the scene is finished, it has a wish embedded in it, the wish covers the whole scene in a thin film. It’s a wish, and a certainty. This coating is just like the doctor: it’s certain. So then I ask my best friend to have a look at the scene. And he tells me: I don’t get it. He asks me: what is this actually about? He says: there doesn’t really seem to be any structure here. And even though I want to ignore what he says, or at least hurt him for telling such lies, I know he’s telling me the truth. And inside the frame I so carefully built there is now a crack, a fissure, a rift. And that crack is what we like to call: a mistake. A mistake is precious, it’s a golden opportunity. I think of it as a golden door. It invites you to step inside that door, and learn something new about yourself and about the world. It is the door of reinvention. You used to be fixed and stable, hanging on with fear to your old ideas. But when the golden door appears you get to live in two worlds, the old world of your fears and certainties, and the new world that you don’t know much about yet. Of course, you feel shitty. Sorry, but that’s the price of admission. In order to walk through the door, in order to move towards your mistake with curiosity, you have to “sit with the trouble” as Rebecca Solnit puts it, you have to stay with the bad feeling. It is your guide, your path. That’s how you get better as a writer, as an artist. The question is: do you want to get better? Or do you want to stay the way you are? That is one of the hardest questions you’ll ever have to answer, but don’t worry, it’ll come up many many times.
The question of the editor is related to one of the oldest questions about writing. Who are you writing for? Here is notoriously reclusive old white guy American author Cormac McCarthy responding to questions from a couple of high school students for their creative writing assignment. “I’m not writing for a particular audience. The reader I have in mind is me. If someone else would write these books I could go play golf.”
Kpunk: The artist is a synthesizer and curator of forces and ideas.
Safe word
When I’m safe, how did the Beach Boy put it? When I’m “in my room.” We have this expression, we use this phrase: open up. I think it’s pretty clear what we mean when we use this phrase: open up – when we’re talking about a flower. But what does it mean when we apply it to a human? Anyone? Can anyone tell me? (discussion) (what is opening actually). What are the conditions for opening?
When you feel safe. When you have enough to eat. When the landlord isn’t going to kick you out tomorrow. When you haven’t let fear, or the need for numbing distraction, fill your life. That has to do with one of the first things we spoke about. Writing is also about caring, taking care of yourself, taking care of others.
Time poverty
We are all suffering from time poverty. I don’t even know how people smoke cigarettes anymore, you used to do that between things, but now there is no between. Everyone I know has become an expert in many things, hand-made shoes, shampoos that make your hair grow back, vegan Filipino dinners, we are busy stuffing ourselves with information night and day.
Kpunk: “Capitalist cyberspace demands a constant dispersion of attention, you’re always solicited to respond and to react, so it’s very difficult to be absorbed in anything.
Capitalism is a system that generates artificial scarcity in order to produce real scarcity. Actual scarcity: the scarcity of natural resources, now haunts capital. because capitalism means growth, expansion. So it produces an artificial scarcity – a scarcity of time. “This is necessary,” says Herbert Marcuse, “in order to distract us from the immanent possibility of freedom.” The availability of more consumer goods and devices in the global north has obscured the way those same goods have increasingly functioned to produce a scarcity of time.
Have you noticed how every time saving device takes more of our time?
What does this have to do with your writing? Well, writing – and reading as I mentioned before, is part of writing – writing and reading take time. And if you’re busy reading the New York Times front to back every morning, and running through your various social media obligations, you’ll be an expert in many things, but maybe not an expert in writing. There are a few people who are born with genius. They flow effortlessly through the world, or above the world, like angels. I’ve never actually met anyone like this, except maybe for Steve Reinke.
I am not one of those people. My work requires a lot of time, and as a result I’m not on Facebook or Instagram, I don’t own a mobile phone, I don’t read the New York Times. I’m not saying that my way is right and your way is wrong, OK? I’m saying: I have limitations. I’m saying: I need time. Margaret Atwood: “You can have a life or you can do some writing, but not both at once.” So for me, I’ve made deliberate choices about time. If you’re serious about being an artist, if you would rather not wash dishes for a living, I think you need time to make mistakes, lots of mistakes. You need to wander, to go down the wrong road, to read the wrong books, to discover and then rediscover. To get to know yourself without any of the excuses that usually pass for literature or conversation. And to be honest, most people just don’t want to do that. I get that. If I were better adjusted socially, if I had less anxiety and depression, I wouldn’t live the way I do either. But I don’t have a choice. My hope is not that you don’t have a choice. My hope is that you’ll make the choice, and vote for your voice. And vote for the possibility of inventing something, creating new worlds for us to live in, new sentences, new perspectives, new frames.
Last thought
The easiest answer to the question of: how do I become a better writer? You write. You keep writing. You write emails. You write diaries. You write poetry. Grocery lists. You write.