> Rushdie fears that writers no longer trust their imaginations, and that the classroom imperative to “write what you know” has led to dullness, angst and dead ends: cold and bony literary mumblecore.
Sounds like advice from someone who lives in a bubble.
There is an enormous number of aspiring anythings who are too afraid to start doing a thing. If you ask them to just "do what they know," these people would respond that what they know cannot possibly be worth doing.
The next obvious step is to get them to do that thing. Complaining about this obviously useful step is like criticizing Bobby Fischer for encouraging so many kids to use boring chess openings of moving a pawn. It's unwitting comedy.
I agree with you. At the same time, it seems like an interesting discussion to be had, but it started the wrong way.
I have to apply it to songwriting because that's an area I have more experience.
Most (if not all) of the songwriters I've ever admired tended to come from the same place (paraphrasing here): "the song chose me, I didn't choose the song—it came on the wind/from intuition/from somewhere else/I only channeled it".
Usually pointing to some sensitivity to the unconscious and imagination, collective unconscious, intuition, or even to the spiritual.
The best songs (my opinion, don't shoot) tend to come from songwriters who make those kinds of claims about their creative process. There's definitely nothing "bubbly" about how some of those songwriters got started. Many of them came from no means and even less education.
Ignoring automatic writing and similar techniques, more authors seem to assert more agency than songwriters on the same process. It's probably true in most cases.
Rushdie almost sounds more like a songwriter here, except that he hangs it all on something so concrete as a single philosophy. I kind of like his statement, but I don't think it's a complete thought. I don't know if that's due to Garner's interpretations or if it's really what Rushdie meant in total.
Then again, I've held similar opinions about classrooms when it comes to music; that learning to play music at the Royal Conservatory or at Berklee will provide you with all kinds of tools and industry knowledge, but don't really teach intuition. Can they? How many John Prine's has Berklee turned out?
Maybe he should have said something even more concrete: don't just end your education in the classroom, get out there and feel something and then put it all together. It's not enough to match the form, after all.
> the classroom imperative to “write what you know” has led to dullness, angst and dead ends: cold and bony literary mumblecore.
I agree with this, I think modern "serious" fiction has gone away from the idea that you should write an interesting story[1] and has turned into kind of a dull sludge. Though to contradict myself, I think when some modern writers do tip their toes into fantasy they do a dreadful job[2].
Still Rushdie may just be making excuses, his earliest novels were amazing but his last couple just seemed plain lazy. It's a bit snotty to blame some kind of literary zeitgeist.
[1] By comparison, I think Hemmingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner could all write interesting stories that were certainly literary.
Personally I blame the entire Iowa Writers' Workshop for this. The publishing game for a long time now has been you go to Iowa and get a six-figure advance from a major publisher, putting out a technically solid and utterly boring work of literature. Then a bunch of those graduates go and teach at all the MFA programs and here we are.
I'm always reminded of Toni Morrison:
"I tell my students; I tell everybody this. When I begin a creative writing class I say, 'I know you've heard all your life, "Write what you know." Well I am here to tell you, "You don't know nothing". So do not write what you know. Think up something else. Write about a young Mexican woman working in a restaurant and can't speak English. Or write about a famous mistress in Paris who's down on her luck."
Precisely. As Morrison said elsewhere, “Making a little life for oneself by scavenging other people’s lives is a big question, and it does have moral and ethical implications.”
Despite her advice, Morrison primarily wrote about black women. She often wrote about the past, but was able to build characters from knowing the circumstances extensively. She didn't appropriate cultures she didn't know. She wrote about cultures the reader didn't know, with a depth and humanity that readers felt they could know them, and that's what got her books such wide acclaim.
I haven't been able to find the full context of her quote, and I'd be curious to know if she drilled down into it to explain the difference. It really isn't a good idea to write about being a Mexican dishwasher who doesn't speak English when there is a world full of non-English-speaking dishwashers who will know when your book feels false.
What you need to be successful is to write the truth. That doesn't have to mean only writing about yourself, but it does mean not writing about real people in false ways. If you really do want to write about Mexican dishwashers you'd better learn a hell of a lot about Mexico and dishwashing.
I'm not sure that's true, although it ended up being the case for many of her readers. She always was very explicit in saying that she wrote for Black people, without thinking of the white gaze.
I think the problem is largely that people of color don't get to tell the stories in the first place. Or if they do, they end up writing about white people or have to write their ancestral traumas in order to get published. The outrage comes because some white guy got $500k for that story of a Mexican waitress, when actual Latinx people aren't getting published, not the actual "writing what you don't know". Although yes, of course, you better do your research if you're doing that. I recently read Tar Baby, one of the few of her books I hadn't gotten to, and I was never mad at her for embodying the white characters the way she did.
My partner is a writer here in NYC, a woman of color, on a "major label", and it's devastating to see white editors just say things like "I didn't know how to connect to these characters" because they've literally never thought about a Bangladeshi person before. There's a lot that needs to change, but from a purely artistic point of view I find nothing wrong with writing what you don't know.
That's truly a pity. At the risk of sounding insufferable, whenever I read a "modern" book I feel like I immediately can tell where it's going and how it ends. It's the reason I spend most of my time with my nose in golden-age scifi.
I suspect "We can't connect to Bangladeshi characters" is shorthand for "We only want plucky white women who overcome hardships". Ug.
I find that I can absolutely tell where golden-age sci-fi is going. I loved it when I was much younger, but today it feels "thin".
Partly it's because they invented the tropes; after all, Hamlet is just a string of cliches. But partly it's because I know the writers, even the ones I've never read. They come from a really narrow range of social backgrounds. The great stuff is still great, but that's mostly survivorship bias, and I've long since read all the survivors.
Finding good new books is still damn hard. Sturgeon's Law was, and remains, in full force. And the unpredictability is not always an advantage: the predictability of those sci-fi books is very comfortable. If I really didn't know what I was getting into I'd have to work a lot harder, and I often don't want to.
It requires both the writer and the reader to put in the work. No amount of effort by the writer will be able to bring around an editor who says, in effect, "This doesn't appeal to me and it won't sell to white audiences."
It's a business decision to only publish books for the majority of readers. The editor isn't obligated to take books they can't sell. But that editor has to take responsibility for recognizing that they might as well put a sign on the door that says "white writers (and/or people willing to cater to the prejudices of white audiences) only".
I don't mean this to just point at them and say "racist". That's too easy. It's a much more challenging situation where nobody has to be robes-and-torches racist but everything is harder for some people than others and it's never the fault of anybody you can point to.
One way out of it is for editors to put down that particular shield and say, "I don't always have to connect to the characters. There are other ways to appreciate the book, and sometimes audiences like it." Shakespeare is wildly successful despite having few characters you can actually connect to. "Connection" is overrated.
What's not overrated is good writing, which is harder to do and harder to pin down. We ultimately rely on editors to recognize it because they're the gatekeepers, and that puts responsibility on them.
I mean that has happened, a book that got critical acclaim was then basically cancelled. American Dirt is by all rights a fine novel and story, but all the contention around the publishers handling of it and cries of cultural appropriation gained critical mass and made a mess of things.
I think some of it was sincere criticism of a unpleasantly stereotypical main character. The novel was initially popular among mostly-white female book clubs, then as the Latino population started to read it there was a collective WTF.
Disclosure, I am a white female who occasionally participates in book clubs. I don't want this to sound like a cheap-shot, it's just that by their nature they tend to have a common reaction. I could say the same thing about articles targeted to mostly-male engineers which tend to get uniform feedback.
I found Morrison's quote a little odd, since she herself wrote almost exclusively about black women. Not about herself, but about her ancestors, or people who could have been her ancestors, in a culture that she knew a lot about. Following her advice just from that one sentence would almost certainly lead to cultural appropriation and unpleasant stereotypes.
Taking the advice to be imaginative is good. Writing stereotypes isn't imagination; it's lazy.
I always look forward to anything Salman Rushdie writes. Midnight's Children introduced me to reading and writing back in the day and literally changed my life.
I don't see how a writer has to or should be limited to the false dichotomy of what they know or only to magical realism and fantasy. Mix the two however you like.
Furthermore, I wrote a few almost "novella" drafts in the throes of COVID lockdown due to isolation, loneliness, and "cabin fever" where my mind began auto-generating fantastical stories in the imagination comprising different people, places, and nearly outlandish, but still plausible within the suspension of disbelief, plot-lines. One centered around Latinx polygynous (I would call that a sizable cultural taboo) tensions between two respectable families and criminal one.
PS: Currently rereading One Hundred Years of Solitude. Coincidentally, there are still Márquez banners up at UT about the archive exhibit.
When I come across old HN posts, some links are broken. If someone looks at this post 10 years from now he'll be thankful that someone bothered to post an Archive link.
Edit: Also, many articles are edited with no transparency about what's been changed. It's useful to have to have the state of the article at post time.
I could assert all kinds of qualifiers as to why I should get everything I want for free, too.
That doesn't mean I'm justified.
And this isn't a document of immense historical import we're discussing. It's a short (and if you ask me, incompletely considered) book review. Just the same, if it were my work and people wanted to read it but they didn't want to pay I'd be at minimum very hurt, and probably pretty angry if they just started helping themselves to it while trading nothing in return. I'm sure you would be, too.
It's a bit of a professional slap in the face that one's work should apparently be free for all, but software should be highly paid for. Especially in a forum where a large number of the participants are highly paid relative to the rest of the world.
Couldn't you use the exact same argument for software? It too gets taken down all the time
I never really understood how Archive.org operates. This is an honest question.. But they doesn't own this piece of writing, so what's the legal basis for them to redistribute it? Could they slap a few ads on their website and make some money as well? Can they host a copy of Harry Potter for instance?
If I made my income from writing I'd prolly be pretty pissed if some chumps scrapped and re-hosted it. Do authors have any legal way to defend themselves?
I cannot make a promise that it will not. With the current growth rate I am able to keep the archive free of ads. Well, I can promise it will have no ads at least till the end of 2014."
Archive.org operates on the same principle that libraries do. If you were an author, would you also be pissed that public libraries allowed anyone to read your books for free?
If you don't like it, just put up a robots.txt to ban the wayback machine from your site.
1) I assume b/c libraries purchase the book it's not equivalent. Do they purchase a subscription to the NYT and then lend it out to people? From what I gather on their website it doesn't seem like it
Because it is not a free-walking crawler, it saves only one page acting as a direct agent of the human user. Such services don't obey robots.txt (e.g. Google Feedfetcher, screenshot- or pdf-making services, isup.me, …)"
I think part of the confusion is that they were referring to archive.org, which is a service of the Internet Archive. Archive.is is a separate site run by someone else, operating under different guidelines. There is no need to be rude over a misunderstanding.
well I didn't mean to be rude. but it was an off the cuff remark that was wrong. People say things without posting a source and that's how disinformation starts...
first thing that came up in search suggests archive.org also is moving away from listening to robot.text files (granted this is an old blog post)
I couldn't find anything stating their policy clearly. but maybe I didn't search hard enough. I find it hard to believe news papers wouldn't block them if it was that easy
1) There doesn't seem to be much difference in terms of "lost sales" (a common metric in copyright disputes) when a library purchases 1 copy of a book and lends it out to 100 people, versus when the Internet Archive purchases 0 copies and lets 100 people view it.
Edit: Besides, the way the FAQ describes it ("acting as a direct agent of the human user"), we can't preclude the possibility that they're getting content through a paying subscriber's account. The Internet Archive used to collaborate with Alexa, which is known to have used browser plugins to collect data from users' browsers.
2) It used to work reliably a few years ago, but it seems that they changed their policies and my knowledge is outdated. Sorry about that.
In any case, the New York Times is perfectly capable of putting up a paywall on any subset of visitors they want, but chose to turn a blind eye on a broad set of crawlers -- presumably because they want the Google traffic. That could be seen as tacit consent to being crawled, so I'm not sure how much legal ground they're going to have if they later decide to sue the crawlers.
Yes, one could use the exact same argument for software, and many do. There is widespread criticism of DRM, online license checks, etc. for software for exactly this reason.
right. I think that was the parent's point. There is a bit of a double standard. You aren't allowed to link to a torrent of some software that's posted to hn. But if it's someone's writing then it's whatever. I'd personally lean more towards allowing torrents :)
I'd lean that way too, but I think that difference in standard is more about legality than philosophy. While archiving articles or using paywall workarounds might have some legal gray areas, it seems to be fairly well accepted. Distributing pirated commercial software, on the other hand, is pretty widely accepted to be illegal copyright infringement. There are cases even with software where it's not so clear: for example, there is some acceptance of distributing "pirated" software that is old, unsupported, and/or no longer for sale (often called "abandonware").
I care because they’re people as much as any of us are, and I don’t believe we should be sharing software keys or Netflix passwords on here, either, even (or especially) if everyone attending the forum is fully capable of acquiring free access for themselves.
All major publishers rely on multiple revenue streams to pay the bills.
I’m not waging any moral arguments about anything except that I’m just saying I don’t think it’s appropriate to share around those links in the forum. It’s about showing a modicum of professional respect.
Ah you may be right about that the paywall. There was none for me, only a “call to action”.
I understand why people use those links, but given we’re in a technical forum it probably stands that people know how to leverage those services themselves.
I could not have read the article without the provided link. At least I'm assuming I could not - I didn't want to risk using the data (the link took only one mb).
I thought it was clear I wasn't judging anyone's personal use of archive.is or any other internet archive or slimmed-down reader-view—just remarking on the sharing of those links on a professional forum.
The widespread sharing of those links shows a pretty great lack of regard for the work on the other end. It's highlighted when it's the only top-level comment on a submission on a forum like HN.
At the time of the Satanic Verses controversy, there was the irony that he wrote things that were anti-colonial and anti-Western... and his life was threatened by third-worlders with a religious philosophy that directly contradicts Western ideas about freedom of speech and religion, while the West had to protect him from those third-worlders.
Sounds like advice from someone who lives in a bubble.
There is an enormous number of aspiring anythings who are too afraid to start doing a thing. If you ask them to just "do what they know," these people would respond that what they know cannot possibly be worth doing.
The next obvious step is to get them to do that thing. Complaining about this obviously useful step is like criticizing Bobby Fischer for encouraging so many kids to use boring chess openings of moving a pawn. It's unwitting comedy.