For a while, now, I have been thinking about “the act of writing”.
This, in my mind, is the process that unfolds without planning or a pre-conceived storyline where you know what you want to say, and simply follow a set method.
This conception of the act of writing is a process that takes over, so to speak, and emerges unscripted and serendipitous.
It is standard texts, which have a specific beginning, a middle and an ending, and all the writer has to do is slip the text into this (BME) matrix.
It is different, also from the way a reporter is taught to present a story in an inverted pyramid, where you place the most important facts at the top, and those that matter the least, at the bottom.
My guess is, that has to do with the immediacy required – to present the factual basis of the news timeously – and because of space limitations.
It becomes easy for editors who have limited space to “place” stories, to cut from the bottom, where the least important matters are presented.
The act of writing, as I understand it, is less formulaic even than Arthur Koestler’s The Act of Creation, in which he explained it, way back in 1964 (I read the book about 20 years after it was first published), as a process of discovery, invention, creativity and imagination.
The act of writing is when you sit down at a keyboard, and you don’t know where or how things will turn out, or end up. Of course, this works best with fiction writing – which I have not indulged in.
The genre that I do find most inspiration in, is literary non-fiction and, increasingly, essay writing.
The latter is a literary weave that runs in and out of the writer’s life (and subjectivity,) back into society, or the subject, and ends up in a place that was unknown at the start of the process.
This conjures the question whether the writer can, or ought to be, completely objective. The easy answer is, no. At least not when writing about the social world around us, or the social relations that constitute society.
This is, of course, completely different from writing about, say, the cosmic microwave background – the electromagnetic radiation leftovers of the Big Bang.
With physics you follow basic scientific processes, and report results.
Of course, when you set out to explore issues in physics, you need an imagination, and you can run in any direction, but you get a thrill when you’re proven wrong, and a greater thrill (I suspect), when you are proven right.
There are, of course, writers in the social sciences or the professions who would believe that theirs is a science, like physics, and would insist that “facts speak for themselves” – forgetting, conveniently, that facts can be hand-picked, selected and arranged to confirm one’s own biases or prejudices.
Traditional academic writing in the social sciences can be profoundly unimaginative and uninspiring.
The accepted standard is something like this: Introduce the argument, analyse the evidence or data, raise counter-arguments, and draw conclusions.The act of writing, in my mind, is like opening a can of red paint and pouring it over a blank canvas, then letting it flow and take its own course.
There is of course an element of anarchy in this act of writing. There are, also, realworld influences that shape one’s writing with or without any conscious thought.
For instance, the group of scholars and thinkers we know as Critical Theorists fled Nazi Germany, and much of their subsequent thinking and writing was shaped by their actual experiences.
For them, as it is for me, I can say with some confidence, the act of writing becomes a way of making sense of the world around us, and draws heavily on our own experiences and, well, the world around us.
If that were not true, then we might have to imagine ourselves as machines that simply type up texts. This is clearly fallacious.
Here are some of the other issues that come to the fore in the act of writing.
Can one be a good writer while being a bad person? Also, what is or should the role of the writer be?
There are probably no easy answers to any of these questions. What can be said, with some certainty, is that the writer is not like some electrical appliance that you plug in, that then prepares texts and is then unplugged and kept in storage.
Approaching the act of writing, I would put forward a couple of ideas.
First, things exist whether we know, or whether or not we can observe them through our senses.
Second, in some way, we give life or expression to things, but we do not do this independently of our experience of it – and each one of us may experience things (even the same things) differently.
Surely the slave will write a different story than the slave owner.
My guess is that many times, it is only when one sits down, in the act of writing, when things emerge.