Which organ to appeal to?

In an earlier post I briefly mentioned that for the last six months or so, I’ve been attending a writers’ group that meets—or tries to meet— every week. On a Monday night we all gather in a cold sixteenth century church and read our latest work out loud to a group of strangers. Sounds awful, doesn’t it?

And that’s not meant to be a dig at the people involved. I think the inherent weirdness built into the structure of the thing might actually serve a valuable function in itself. Nonetheless, this doesn’t stop me from having my own internal debates about going every time Monday rolls around.

Some types of writing don’t lend themselves to a spoken-word format, sometimes the limited time you’ve got to speak forces you to stop reading before you’ve even made it past the setup. Throw in the obligatory small talk at the beginning of each session and yea, I can find plenty of reasons to drag my heels.  

But it’s worth it.

Just being able to witness the idiosyncrasies of writers —or people at least trying to be writers—on a regular basis, is worth its weight in gold. They are, I suppose we are, a weird breed. I’ve heard the most talented writers in the group confess that they were close to not turning up some nights based on self-doubt. Some don’t read for weeks on end because they don’t feel their latest work meets their own standards.  Another seriously talented natural writer seems to have dropped off the map completely.

 I’ve been through some version of each of these feelings at some point (and they were probably accurate at the time) but I’ve found the act of biting down and reading that piece of shit in front of the group seems to be the thing you have to go through in order to get to the next “good” bit of writing.

This is a long way of circling around to my topic for today, writing that speaks to the heart vs writing that speaks to the mind.

See, within this random sample group of varying ages, backgrounds and personality type, you not only get to see a range of writing styles, you get to see a range of reactions.

When you stand up and read, its impossible to ignore the natural feedback from the audience. Even if they’re too polite to show it overtly, you can almost always tell how engaged they are based on the attention they’re paying and how many questions they ask when you’ve finished. Last week I bombed pretty hard. People started cherry picking metaphors they “liked” having clearly locked in one a positive thing to comment on. Not good.

For self-preservation more than anything else, I’ve started paying close attention to what types of writing trigger the biggest response from the crowd. It’s almost always the dark stuff, the visceral explorations of human emotion, trauma and abuse that get people wide eyed and engaged.

This observation has me torn a little bit. Although, I’ve definitely got the capacity to dip into the darkness from time to time, my natural instinct is to reach for more premise heavy, philosophical topic matter—and before you write me off as pretentious, trust me, this isn’t by choice. I’m painfully conscious about how few people actually enjoy that stuff and actively try to reign it in whenever I catch myself doing it. But that’s just the direction my mind gravitates towards when I’m mapping out a story so I think I’m stuck with that style to an extent.

 It’s not a mystery to me why people react this way either. When you’re listening to a writer open up their heart and describe domestic abuse in an authentic way, you can’t help but be in the moment. When someone is feeding you a high concept plotline, you might nod your head a bit, say “that’s interesting” but it’s rarely causing you to feel things involuntarily.

I can intellectualize all this, I can empathize with why people prefer the former, but for me… when I consider the novels that have genuinely stuck with me over the years, it’s the ideas that continue to ring as most meaningful. A great example of this is the book I’m reading at the moment, “Island” by Aldous Huxley.

Whenever I sit down to read this book, it’s not with excitement. I know ahead of time that I’m not about to be sucked into a tunnel of tension and emotions. Huxley is a much stronger communicator of concepts than he is a dramatist. Yet, whenever I get a few pages into his work, I always find myself sucked in with much more immersion than any thriller could achieve. I think this is because with Huxley, I feel I’m in the presence of someone who has spent a lot of time thinking about the world independently from his writing and is using fiction as the tool to communicate it.

This raises a natural question: why not just write (and read) non-fiction then if it’s about the ideas? There’s some logic to that, but I think it misses the value of the delivery system. Fiction—even if not hanging it’s entire hat on emotion—allows you to tap into enough of your visceral faculties to deliver a message in ways that aren’t possible with non-fiction.

There’s too much implied author involved in your standard pop-sci book. Psychology is too bound up in it’s obligation to previous studies, and even at its best, it lacks the freedom to speculate. Sometimes a small suspension of disbelief is just the thing required to make us take an honest look at our world.

A more contemporary example of what I deem to be an “ideas” type writer is Cormac Mccarthy. He sits further towards the emotion side of the spectrum than Huxley does, but I would still place him in the “speaking to the head” camp.

 I recently read, All the Pretty Horses, which on the surface is a Western Love Story—it’s film adaptation starring Matt Damon and Penelope Cruise can attest to this—but the part of the plot that stuck out most to me, came in a monologue from one of the secondary characters. Without recapping the plot too much, this character was an elderly matriarch, the Grandmother of the protagonist’s love interest. What stood out to me was her world view. Very clear standards, a well thought through philosophy, which although acknowledged by the woman herself as imperfect, established a set of boundaries that she wasn’t willing to cross.

For me, that whole novel was a vessel, priming me here, steering me there. All with the aim to get me to the place where I was ready to swallow that very heavy point of view in a way that was more than academic.

To me, this marks a clear difference to non-fiction, but I’ll admit it’s not quite the same thing as your standard page-turner and it’s not the thing that most people open books for.

So, I’m in a strange place. I’m conscious that people prefer a type of writing that is different to the stuff I most naturally veer towards, but I equally don’t want to end up pandering to the crowd, literally: in the case of my writers’ group. There’s a middle ground there somewhere. I’m no Huxley, and definitely no Cormac McCarthy, but the success of both encourage me that there is a path to be followed. It’s likely going to be a trickier one though.