WRITERS ARE SPECIAL

I read an article on a blog recently, about how writers are special. Here’s a response;

Writers are thought of as different. Seeing the world differently. Seeing the drama and the possibilities. Seeing specially. Seeing what only they see. They are a breed apart, observing the world about them and translating these observations into the magic of story and through story illustrating the finer nuances of what it is to be human, nuances that might be missed by the rest. Writers even think of themselves as different, maybe sometimes special and unique.

What a crock!

Have just read a book called ‘The Storytelling Animal’ by Jonathan Gottschall. It is quite an interesting read, full of plain-spoken sense. We are all of us examples of the ‘storytelling animal’. We are hotwired to be storytellers and story-consumers. It is a part of our make-up. In childhood it is evident through the games of pretend that children play, spinning narratives out of their smallest observance of life, creating whole worlds of possibility out of almost nothing. And this continues into the grown up life. We retell stories of our own experiences, but they are almost always a distance from truth, fashioned into something closer to fiction and having all the shape of story rather than experience. We also dream, and in our dreams the imagination plays, shaping fragments of experience into narrative. We all do this.

So what makes a writer so different?

Sometimes writers are individuals who have experienced being on the outside, spending time on their own and in their own heads. That’s being different. They read a lot. They learn words and story traditions and genres. And then, for sometimes no reason at all, they put pen to paper and a writer is born – or is it made? WE don’t all write our stories down and so this makes a writer different. But we can all do it, because at heart we are all disposed to be storytellers. You need to add other ingredients to make the writer, like perseverance and work ethic and the encouragement to continue and all manner of things.

But at the end of the day, a writer is not so special, not so different. Each of our perspectives on the world will be our own and quirky and different, the same for writers and non-writers. Writers are not blessed with greater insight, or greater intellect, or greater knowledge. They just put down in words what the rest of the world speaks or thinks or puts into pictures or performance or whatever.

Once, before I was a writer, I was talking to a class about mobile phones. This was back when mobile phones were as big as house bricks. We were studying Ray Bradbury and looking at his ‘predictions’ in his fictional vision of the future. I was illustrating how Bradbury looked around him (in the 1950’s) and, noting developments in his own world, technological developments, he ‘guessed’ where they might go and this gave him his ‘vision’ of the future. I told my class that anyone could do the same and I held up the mobile phone for them to see (I needed two hands it was so heavy!). I ‘predicted’ then and there (and I am no scientist) that technology would one day make mobile phones so small that they could be fitted into a person’s tooth and that they would then be voice activated and heard through the vibrations sent to the ear through the jawbone. Three weeks after this lesson there was an article in ‘The Scotsman’ newspaper covering a science fair in Edinburgh. In the article there was a photograph of a giant perspex model of a human tooth with all the gubbings for a mobile phone fitted into the tooth like an old fashioned filling. You don’t have to be a writer to have insight and vision… we all have it… it’s creative intelligence you need and writers do not have the monopoly on this. Indeed, we are blessed with it because it is part of what it is to be human.

Go read Gottschall’s book by the way… especially if you are worried about the demise of the novel and books and story… he will offer sensible reassurance to you as a writer.

(PS Of course what I really think is that writers ARE special, just no more special than people who are not writers.)