People in Glass Houses!

There’s been an interesting discussion in several places on the blogosphere recently to do with something Carlo Gebler wrote about writing. The article is on www.contemporarywriters.com, I think. It bemoans the life of the jobbing writer in a way that has got some people thinking and disagreeing and wanting Gebler to just stop moaning and go do something else. Surely we all have the right to moan about what we do sometimes. But that’s not the really interesting bit.

Gebler says in the article: “I read primarily to steal. This attitude applies not just to books but to everything. In every situation ... there is another part of my personality that is scrutinizing my experiences and thinking two terrible things: What’s in this for me? And: Can I use this? Can I put it in a story? Can I put it in an article?”

This has caused some writers to tie themselves into crazy knots that reveal a want of logic in their thinking. One writer thought it a ‘ghastly admission’ that Gebler reads to steal; this same writer has borrowed from her own reading, admits to this, says such borrowings in her work are ‘legion’, so where’s the logic in her ‘ghastly’? ‘I was a bit sad to see a writer of his standing saying he ‘steals’ from others,’ says the same writer! Then she goes on to try and define ‘steal’ as inspiration to save Gebler. But that doesn’t hold water, so she then tries to say she was just shocked that Gebler was asserting that he reads in order to steal… seeming by this to be allowing that it is ok to ‘steal’ in some sense…. maybe that kind of stealing is what she calls ‘borrowing’! I borrow but everyone else steals!

Then on the matter of using other people’s lives to write one’s own fiction, this same writer says ‘I'm sure every writer finds inspiration in the work of other writers, and if not in noticing the lives of those around us, then where else?’

But then the same writer goes on to say this: ‘As for 'using' the experiences of vulnerable people who are suffering because of their vulnerabilities, and making a profit out of it for oneself, not them - is that OK? I'll leave that as a question. If one does it with their permission, and the results help them in some way - is that OK?’

The want of logic is, I think obvious, and the knotted hypocrisy, too.