Late Last Night Books

Let’s face it: plenty of writers are rubbish. I’m afraid I despise, deplore, or simply detest quite a lot of them. They include:

Writers with no sense of humour;

Writers who think they mustn’t offend anyone;

Writers who believe the purpose of fiction is to edify their readers;

Smug, self-righteous, or sententious writers;

‘Woke’ writers;

Writers with an overt or covert political agenda (especially the latter);

Pretentious writers;

Writers who are toadies, lickspittles and arse-kissers;

Writers who admire (or pretend to admire) other writers because they are successful;

Writers who believe that an MFA or PhD in Creative Writing qualifies them to write;

Writers who believe that a writer’s colour, religion, sexual orientation, sex (or gender!) qualifies anyone to write;

Writers who whine about their white privilege;

Writers who don’t bother to learn the rules of English usage or spelling;

Writers who don’t think it’s important to read the canon;

Writers who think the canon needs to be decolonised;

Writers who think it’s necessarily important to read the latest literary prize winners;

Writers who are ignorant of history and philosophy;

Writers who think their drug experiences are interesting;

Writers who believe that their experiences as victims is fascinating and important;

Writers who despise other writers because they are not, or were not, morally pure;

Writers who follow the latest trends and write for the market;

Writers who think that their ‘platform’ is important;

Writers who believe that writers are essentially social engineers;

Writers who are certain that their values and views are correct;

Writers who can’t think for themselves (at the current time, the majority, sad to say);

Writers who watch more TV or movies than read books;

Writers who want the writer’s ‘lifestyle’;

Writers who think their job is always to be kind;

Writers with no imagination (a surprisingly large proportion);

Writers with no ear for language (incredibly, the majority, whether ‘literary’ or otherwise);

Writers who think literary agents know more about literature than they do;

Writers who believe that the world needs their novel;

To sum up: Writers who are not artists, but hacks or halfwits.

What major federal policy has every president from Lyndon Johnson to Barak Obama agreed on? Answer: Advancing educational opportunity as a path to societal equality. They may have differed on how to expand schooling, but not that it was a goal to be achieved in order to reduce social inequality. Why then have the results not lived up to the promise? The answer is simple according to Fredrik deBoer: schooling can never produce social equality––not because we don’t spend enough or because teachers aren’t good enough. It’s because not all people are academically talented.

Marshaling studies that expose the raw underbelly of schooling’s failures on top of insights from his personal experience as a teacher, and capping that off with a measure of behavioral genetics, deBoer concludes, “as long as our education system creates winners, it will also create losers.”

She didn’t do an MFA in Creative Writing, let alone a PhD. She didn’t even have a BA in it. Or in English. And yet Jane wrote the initial draft of Sense and Sensibility when she was 18, and had finished Pride and Prejudice by the time she was 20. Astonishing? Yes. So how did she do it? Did she follow the advice of the self-appointed writing gurus—who tell you that if you can’t do a degree in the subject, you need to attend expensive conferences, join writing groups, get professional editors? No, none of that. So how on earth did she learn her craft?

By reading and writing. I’m not an Austen scholar, but I know that in the late eighteenth century England’s public libraries had not yet been founded, so it’s fair to assume that most of her reading was done in her father’s library.

I recently read the book Words as Eggs by Jungian analyst Russell Lockhart. The idea for the work, and the chapter from which the title comes, originated in one of Lockhart’s dreams. A voice in his dream said, “Do you not know that words are eggs, that words carry life, that words give birth?” (92). Lockhart later points out that this dream revelation isn’t exactly new in the larger scheme of things. In the beginning, it’s rumored that God spoke the world into existence: “the word is seed and gives birth to life and living things” (92). As eggs, words are constantly delivering new ideas and thoughts, filling our minds with possibilities and worlds we otherwise wouldn’t have access to.

A writer, I’m fascinated with anything to do with words and how they inform, form, and reform our surroundings—and us.