June 25th, 2009 @ 06:30
Ten writers recieved their certificates from the Creative Writing Department of the School of Continuing Studies last night, and one was honoured with the Marina Nemat Award for excellence. I was asked to give a speech to the graduating class and because several people asked for the text, I decided to post it here:
Justifying Writing
©2009 Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer
A student asked me recently if I could grade her creative work so that she’d have a gauge toward justifying writing; she wanted to know if she could have numerical permission to take the time out of earning a living in order to write. I wanted to say, 87%! because that would have been easiest, and fastest. But it wouldn’t have been honest, and I’m not much good if I’m not honest. In fact, I’m dreadfully honest, which is likely what makes me a reasonably good writing instructor.
There is nothing about writing that is easy or fast. It is one of the hardest things to do — in large part because nothing about it is quantifiable. You can’t measure the worth of a well-wrought sentence. You can’t weigh the delight of remarkable, cheeky punctuation. You can’t put a price on the refined delivery of plot or structure, and you can’t sell an apt metaphor to save your ass. Wallets do not open for crackling dialogue, witty thematic underpinnings or pithy social commentary delivered via scintillating characterizations and banks do not loan to novelists, poets, creative non-fictionistas, playwrights, or even short story writers.
Writers are, by choice — and by avocation (in some cases) — outsiders. We are observers, who take our rightful place outside conversation and the normal goings on of society. This sometimes makes us moody, fragile people, and sometimes it makes us socially awkward. We are a sensitive, thoughtful lot. We carefully note the conversations of strangers, we read with an ear to stealing, we watch for beauty and revel in the complexity of humanity. It is a gift to be a writer, and no gift comes without a certain responsibility.
My student was right, of course, to wonder whether she could justify dropping out of ‘life’ to write. But what she had wrong was the perspective – and we all know how important perspective is to writing.
It isn’t something that writers talk about much – this responsibility thing, is it? I think it might be the hidden terrible secret within each writer, the one they only speak about in quiet whispers to other writers, as if it is a sacred code, as if it scares even us.
In the days following 9/11 it was broadcast loud and clear that the novel, that fiction, and that irony were all dead. There would be no room for fiction or poetry in a world made suddenly adult. There could only be truth and the pursuance of it. The world wanted Truth with a capital T. There could only be non-fiction – history, political analyses, hard news. Fiction, overly creative non-fiction, and any distortion of the hard cold facts were shunted into a dark corner, shunned and scolded for their apparent falseness, their mean lying ways.
There is a character in a children’s book entitled Frederick by Leo Lionni. While Frederick’s mice friends – from spring to autumn – are collecting stores for the winter, Frederick collects colours. The other mice find him unproductive, to say the least. It isn’t until the end of winter when the mice stores are used up and the mice are bored and cold and hungry that the full force of their resentment comes alive: What about your supplies, Frederick? they ask. They had done all this WORK while he had lazed about. And it is then that he recites his poem, the one he’d been building out of the seasons, and their vibrant life-giving colours. By giving them the visions inside his words, he gives the mice hope, and with this hope they have the courage to see the last of winter through.
This is how writers justify what they do. Writing isn’t a frivolous, dreamy past-time. It isn’t work avoidance. It is a special job, for writers are arbiters of humanity, of TRUTH whether the story happened to happen or not. Writers are the negotiators between language and communication, between the reader and the world. It is a responsibility to write, and the only real justification it requires is the silent contract made between the text and the writer.
Wallets may not open, but hearts do, and minds do. This is why in totalitarian regimes, the writers and intellectuals are the first to go. That is why in conservative societies, books are censored, or destroyed, often in purifying fires, while writers are incarcerated, abused, or murdered. The worth, the justification of the time and the work and the heartache of writing is hidden inside this power. 100%.