To paraphrase Wendell Berry, what are writers for? There are millions of them (us) staring into computer screens, scribbling into notebooks, jabbering into recorders and maybe still pecking away on some ancient typewriter, producing billions of words at all times of the day and night, day after day, night after night, year after year. What are they doing? What are they for? Each writer will offer slightly different answers to those questions, some more honest than others, some more clear than others, some with more command and graceful use of language, and some with more regard for the right instead of the almost right word.
Writers are people and, as such, cover the entire range of the human experience—nobility and depravity, tragedy and comedy, clarity and confusion, honesty and obfuscation, greed and generosity, ignorance and compassion, and personal ambition and service to society. Writers are the wordsmiths of mankind and they and their words can be as flawed and corrupt as the mind and intentions of your least favorite corrupt politician or as perfect and true as diamonds. Most are neither that corrupt nor are they perfect, just like most of humanity.
William Blake saw the world in a grain of sand and the world can see him in his words. It is the rare worker with words who can create the diamonds of William Blake, but the world can see any writer in his and her words, unless, of course, the word or words are written to deceive, in which case they are a con, a form of thievery, not worth the expense of their printing but potentially very costly.
One need not be a poet to use words to deliver gems to the world. A well-written news story illuminates that part of life it describes and gives the citizenry factual information necessary to make intelligent decisions. A poorly written one obscures. A news story of incorrect facts does worse than obscure. At its worst it persuades citizens to justify and support an unjustifiable war, thus sanctioning the resultant murder of tens of thousands of innocent men, women and children.
Words are both powerful and significant.
An opinion piece, like this column, is just that: opinion. It is not news. It is commentary, a personal perspective that does not pretend to be anything else.
A good novel enhances and informs the life of its reader. A bad one fills its reader with boredom or, in some cases, rapturous nonsense. Great novels and even novellas ("Don Quixote," "War and Peace," "The Old Man and the Sea," "Sometimes a Great Notion," among others) illuminate the human condition and act as milestones and signposts along its path. Novels and short stories are fiction and are read as such, as works of imagination and creativity. The writer of fiction has no obligation to the reader to write within the confines of reality, truth or even possibility.
On the other hand, the essayist, editorialist, historian, biographer and other writers of non-fiction, including and perhaps especially the writer of autobiography and the memoir, do have such an obligation. Even on the economic level—the least important aspect of the issue in the sense that it is addressed here—one does not buy a memoir to read fiction, and vice versa.
James Frey's recent best-selling "A Thousand Little Pieces," marketed as a memoir, turns out to contain significant amounts of fiction. As fiction, the egregiously poor writing of Frey's "memion/fictior" would never fly. As a memoir it is an engaging tale of a bad drunk cleaning up his very complex act, and it sold because we all like to be reminded that everyone who hits bottom doesn't have to stay there. Frey's book is neither articulate fiction nor believable memoir. It is, alas, an object lesson in the marketing (and buying) of a lie about a fictionalized tough-guy drunk who in real life isn't tough or straight enough to tell it like it is. It is wonderful that after Frey bottomed out he was able to get back up and become a working con man in the world of writing, but it's a shame (and revealing) that he left his ethics behind.
The larger and more interesting (and revealing) shame and phenomenon is how many people in America, including Frey's publisher whose very business and reputability are tied to the word, are not bothered by Frey's deception, do not insist on being defined by the distinction between fact and fiction and who do not mind a virtual reality life so long as it has a certain element of what one wag termed "truthiness." There are and always have been and presumably always will be people who lie. They include writers, world leaders, politicians at all levels of government, businessmen, religious leaders, gangsters, bureaucrats and press secretaries. Frey's lies are hardly of the magnitude or import of, for instance, George Bush's, but their acceptance in American society indicates, at the least, a dangerous lack of critical thinking.
To answer that question in the first sentence, at least in part, writers, it seems to me, are for honing the thinking of their readers. Lies won't do, and fiction as memoir or non-existent WMDs as fact dulls the mind and damages the soul and creates chaos out of the order of understanding, just the opposite of what writers are for.
Dick Dorworth
