August 8, 2022
Put Some Heart in your Writing
Today’s post – “Put Some Heart in Your Writing” – is authored by Igor da Silva Livramento. He’s a fellow academic from UFSC, fellow author, fellow creative-writing advisor, and overall a great fellow. He’s also a composer, music theorist, and producer. Check out his papers on Academia.edu, his music on Bandcamp, and his personal musings on his blog – in Portuguese, Spanish/Castilian, and English. You can also find him on LinkedIn.
Despite the title, I am not talking about the organ that pumps blood through the body. It is a metaphor. I am talking about injecting blood in your text – again I commit a metaphor. It is about writing something captivating, moving, instigating. “Captivating” is another metaphor – a literary text is not a kidnapper to hold someone captive.
Although language brings these metaphors to which the metaphorical status we remain deaf (call this forgetting catachresis), do not think that writing literature is all about making clever metaphors.
Putting Heart In Your Writing: an Example
Writing a paragraph of clean, straightforward, stark, naked prose can be much more poetic and difficult than fattening the thin plot of the text with voluminous spoonfuls of greasy metaphoricity.
Criton took me to the slum, where a labourer who was working on the Sphinx was dying. A slab escaped a crane’s claw and crushed half his body. The gangrenous slice of flesh was, on the white bed, a gasping accordion yoked to a sack of skin full of broken bones. That mass in agony throbbed in a ridiculous, brawny yearning to live.
OK, maybe that was blood in a more literal sense than we were thinking in the first place. But without much figurativity, the stark language fills the passage with the shocking force of this unjust and unmotivated death. Death, therefore, operates without meaning, without teleology, i.e. without purpose – this anonymous laborer died for no reason.
To this gratuitous death responds the gratuity of making literature itself: Literature no longer has a place in this world, but we keep on writing it in denial of such a fact. Why is that? Don’t look at me, I don’t know the answer either.
The Paradox of Having a Heart when Not Having One
Despite the revolting death of the anonymous worker, the passage possesses a lot of blood, that is to say, it possesses a lot of heart – not only literally; to say “blood” instead of “heart” is another figure of speech, that is, metonymy. The paragraph pulsates, vibrates, enchants, fascinates, moves both by moral revolt and by disgust at the brutality of the scene.
In contradictory words, but true when it comes to literature: The passage has heart by not having heart. The passage is not nice, suited to the rules of well-spokenness of our time, but, for that very reason, it is full of life, of intensity, it becomes unforgettable and moving (revolting even).
So put some heart into your writing.
Putting Heart in Your Writing: A Short Guide
“But how to do that?” you ask me. Let’s roll up our sleeves and get our hands dirty.
The first exercise I recommend: Write the opposite of what you believe, and only be satisfied when you have written with such impartiality that you have some conviction in what you do not believe. Notice: You won’t believe it still, but you’ll figure a spark of conviction out of the sheer quality of what you wrote. You can always tell yourself it’s just a writing exercise to soothe your aching, well-behaved, moral heart.
The second exercise I can recommend consists in not being afraid of anything that belongs to language and literature. Don’t be disgusted, don’t wear protective gloves when approaching texts, however strange or diverse they may be.
Beyond “More of the Same”
I am not talking about the abundance of “more of the same” in commercial literature, I am talking about real difference, extraordinary things in the etymological sense of that Latin term: things out of the order (and out of order). Read Kafka, read Beckett, read Joyce, read Lispector, read Heaney, read Cummings, read Mia Couto, read Fernando Pessoa, read Rimbaud, read Mallarmé… Read a lot, and read it well! Did I say a lot? Two lots! Three, even! Read!
Think: Why was it necessary to situate Robinson Crusoe in the Caribbean, among cannibals? Because, in order to produce the discourse that fed the imaginary of colonization and thus justified it, it was necessary to devour the other in its otherness before the other devoured it. This is the minimum reflection that the reading of Daniel Defoe’s novel demands.
Practice this. Read and think about what you read, don’t reduce literature to a mere ornament or prop in your life, a moment without meaning and power.
The industry demands that the word “novel” be put on the cover of all fictional books because it would be too dangerous to let people believe that those lives are possible, that their feelings have reasons and are valid. Indeed, that language can happen in the world in such a way, that people can say those things, that they can even write such words and come out of that process alive. Alive, but changed.
The Importance of Change for Heart in Writing
Because if writing doesn’t change you, if it doesn’t change language, if it doesn’t change literature, you’ll be writing heartlessly in the worst sense possible. Write what matters, Chris always repeats. So write what matters, damn it! May the last literary prize go to hell! May the reviewer of the big newspaper have a terrible diarrhea and shut up before the real literature, because it speaks more and better than him. May the database containing the sales site’s ratings undergo a fatal bug and never show up again.
I am not advocating any form of avant-gardism. I just call attention to the fact that we should treat literature for what it is. Enough of reducing it to social forces and the latest trends in identity politics; enough of treating it as commodity and commerce without any uniqueness; enough of imagining it as the genius invention of an impenetrable original spirit. Literature is something and whatever that something is in itself, it must be respected in its very being. The least we can know is that it is made by language.
Let us respect that.
2 Comments
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I write what matters, now, to me. The cost has been too high, but I didn’t have the choice not to take that path, not to pay full price.
So, in the spirit of through, not around, I created a character who is not me (that would be boring), but who might have been under different circumstances – and torture her so show where the fault lines are in her and the others in the story.
so you can live that kind of life without having to do it ‘for real,’ in person, and damaged in the same way.
But I do expect the world to sit up and take notice, preferably pre-humously, because it is an awful lot of work. And there is no energy for that, so it must come from the energy for necessities. Because I believe it matters.
Your reference to “preferably pre-humously” reminded me of something funny. Sometimes, for laughs, I wonder what if after I’m dead, for whatever inexplicable reason, people discover my writings and they start selling like hot cakes. And I come to the conclusion that it won’t make a difference to me, since I’ll have kicked the proverbial bucket. The only thing that matters is pre-humously. Thanks for your comment!