Anaïs Nin On Writing
"The role of the writer is not to say what we can all say but what we are unable to say." Anaïs Nin.
I had two main thoughts along this quote from Anaïs Nin - one ran along the train the rest of the devotional did, thinking about oppressed people who don't have a voice in the contemporary culture. One example Amy Peters gave was Harriet Beecher Stowe with Uncle Tom's Cabin. The other thought ran along the track of dealing with themes that for any number of social or psychological reasons we find ourselves unable to articulate.
Often when we think of "oppressed people" we might jump immediately to the hot-button issues of today - women, LGBQT, African Americans, refugees. But when I look at my own writing, I notice that none, or very little of it addresses these issues. Am I failing at my job as a writer, then? Am I not being the changing force I could be? If I'm published, will I be trivializing the pulpit I've been given? Should I turn and start writing stories that are a little bolder, more courageous?
I'll be honest: no, I don't think so. I think there are those that write those kind of stories, and they should, and we should encourage it. I'm not one of those people that think writing is the kind of art where we just throw paint at a canvas and leave it up to our readers to decipher their own meaning from it. To a degree that happens, but at some core level our stories are still meant to convey some intention by the author. Simply by resolving the conflict, we're saying something about the world - and it's something we believe, or believe that others believe, and thereby recognize it is "true" in the sense that it exists as a viable resolution to that conflict. This, I believe, is inescapable.
Where I think my writing comes in is more along the second track: that a book, especially one of 100,000+ words, is a means of taking one idea or thought that is difficult to convey in some sort of three-step logical process, and instead exploring all the nuances through characters, setting, and plot. The conflict, then, becomes that theme or idea: how the protagonist goes about resolving that conflict is to encounter in other characters, settings, and plot all the different possible solutions to that conflict; the resolution, whether we as writers know about it beforehand, or discover it along the way, is the "logical conclusion" based on our perception of how the world works, and thus what the story requires to make it work.
Some writers are cynical, and while they may not like the resolution, it is - to them - the unavoidable one. Others might engineer the story to prove their current belief. But every writer, by giving their world any sort of structure, is in fact imparting some idea of the structure of this world as they perceive it.
Ultimately, then, I whole-heartedly agree with Ms. Nin that writers and authors must and do say what it is we cannot say.
I had two main thoughts along this quote from Anaïs Nin - one ran along the train the rest of the devotional did, thinking about oppressed people who don't have a voice in the contemporary culture. One example Amy Peters gave was Harriet Beecher Stowe with Uncle Tom's Cabin. The other thought ran along the track of dealing with themes that for any number of social or psychological reasons we find ourselves unable to articulate.
Often when we think of "oppressed people" we might jump immediately to the hot-button issues of today - women, LGBQT, African Americans, refugees. But when I look at my own writing, I notice that none, or very little of it addresses these issues. Am I failing at my job as a writer, then? Am I not being the changing force I could be? If I'm published, will I be trivializing the pulpit I've been given? Should I turn and start writing stories that are a little bolder, more courageous?
I'll be honest: no, I don't think so. I think there are those that write those kind of stories, and they should, and we should encourage it. I'm not one of those people that think writing is the kind of art where we just throw paint at a canvas and leave it up to our readers to decipher their own meaning from it. To a degree that happens, but at some core level our stories are still meant to convey some intention by the author. Simply by resolving the conflict, we're saying something about the world - and it's something we believe, or believe that others believe, and thereby recognize it is "true" in the sense that it exists as a viable resolution to that conflict. This, I believe, is inescapable.
Where I think my writing comes in is more along the second track: that a book, especially one of 100,000+ words, is a means of taking one idea or thought that is difficult to convey in some sort of three-step logical process, and instead exploring all the nuances through characters, setting, and plot. The conflict, then, becomes that theme or idea: how the protagonist goes about resolving that conflict is to encounter in other characters, settings, and plot all the different possible solutions to that conflict; the resolution, whether we as writers know about it beforehand, or discover it along the way, is the "logical conclusion" based on our perception of how the world works, and thus what the story requires to make it work.
Some writers are cynical, and while they may not like the resolution, it is - to them - the unavoidable one. Others might engineer the story to prove their current belief. But every writer, by giving their world any sort of structure, is in fact imparting some idea of the structure of this world as they perceive it.
Ultimately, then, I whole-heartedly agree with Ms. Nin that writers and authors must and do say what it is we cannot say.
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