"So what?!"
Surely what you write should matter...
There is a village in France which, during the Second World War, was obliterated by the Nazis. It has been left untouched since then and is now a museum, a reminder of how inhumane human-kind can be. You can wander through the shattered streets, look into the broken buildings, see the church into which they herded many of the villagers before setting fire to it and then shooting those who tried to escape. There are old sewing machines everywhere, modest symbols of a fractured innocence.
Perhaps above all things, Oradour-sur-Glane is eloquent. It tells its story, offers insight into history, acts as an immediate and imperative mirror in a way in which words never could. Never. And because of that (amongst other things) as a place, a testament, it really matters.
I like to think that, in our own small way, when we write we are also attempting testament; we are trying to capture something: a moment, a feeling, an insight. And (ignoring any purely commercial motivation for now) we make the effort because we believe - either for us or for our readers - that it is important to do so.
And because writing should ‘matter’.
However, this is a notion - along with my response to it - with which I increasingly struggle. On the one hand it feels as if I am reading more and more which ‘doesn’t matter’, and on the other - and far more significantly - I question whether what I am writing myself has any ‘worth’ or ‘merit’ at all.
Does it pass the ‘so what?’ test?
Here’s a recent example:
Autumn Announced
The door pulled open.
A sharp blast of cold air
the house breathes in.
The bird-feeder’s water tray
teetered toward frozen;
the seed-stack almost emptied
in yesterday’s frenzy
as if they knew what was coming
the chaffinches
the sparrows
as if they knew what was coming.
In yesterday’s frenzy
the seed-stack almost emptied;
teetered toward frozen
the bird-feeder’s water tray.
The house breathes in
a sharp blast of cold air;
the door pulled open;
autumn announced.An adequate poem about autumn. You might even think it a clever little piece. There was, I confess, some brief satisfaction in writing it. But regardless of that, the question remains: does it pass the ‘so what?’ test? And what if it fails my assessment but passes yours, what then?
As I age (as we all age!) my writing window inevitably starts to close, and it is perhaps because of this that the preoccupation with my writing actually standing for something comes increasingly into focus. Whether I have 100k words left in me or 500k or a million, the pressure to make them ‘good words’ can only grow. And along with the desire to make my output the best it can be - to ‘up the ante’ - comes an increasing intolerance with work that is insignificant, or lazy, or just plain gimmicky.
Yet how can you define that ‘significance’? Indeed, should you even attempt to say what and what does not ‘matter’?
Instinctively I think there are perhaps three broad measures:
Does the writing make a difference, change something?
Does it transmit or share knowledge?
Does it evoke emotion - either new emotion in the reader, or through exorcising emotion in the writer?
Does in work in any way like the museum at Oradour-sur-Glane?
And what about the commercial? If written purely for pecuniary gain, then - irrespective of it achieving any of the above - should we disqualify it? But this throws up the thorny issue of ‘entertainment’ and what ‘entertainment’ might be ‘worth’…
Making a difference
Or writing which changes something tangible. This could be universal and profound - such as Martin Luther’s Ninety-five Theses - or work which challenges us politically - Marx, perhaps - or how we think about writing itself - Joyce, Beckett, Eliot etc. Or writing which influences future thinking and which might contribute to things not happening; perhaps the War Poets? You get the picture.
Yet such work must surely be the most difficult to produce, requiring not only talent but originality, perceptiveness, new thinking, and so on. Even genius. We are in rarified company here!
I think many people would like to find themselves in such a camp - you only have to think about all the sincere words written about Ukraine or Gaza hoping to ‘make a difference’. And if you wrote about Oradour too, would any of that stop such atrocities happening again? Just watch the news on tv. Clearly not.
Writing that makes a difference - and in a good way - surely matters.
Sharing knowledge.
If, as a result of reading something, you are in possession of new knowledge - and that knowledge is accurate and positive - then such writing presumably has value too. [I include the word ‘positive’ because you could read an article which tells you how to make a bomb… Knowledge yes, but hardly of merit…]
I suppose this is primarily where good non-fiction resides - especially if it shares wisdom alongside knowledge and makes you think.
Evoking emotion
There are two strands here, something which makes this more subjective territory: the emotion experienced by the writer, and that evoked in the reader. In the latter case, if your words create empathy for a character you have created, sympathy for an experience you have been through, or offers helpful insight into a situation with which your readers are struggling (such as a divorce, unrequited love, challenges of sexuality, bereavement etc.) then such work must have merit. [We’ll leave the minefield of ‘quality’ for another time..!]
Yet if your writing allows you - and you alone - to process something, to work through an incident, experience etc. and thus validate, re-feel, or exorcise an emotion, does that make the writing worthwhile on some wider scale? To my mind some contemporary collections of poetry fall very self-indulgently into this category and their ‘worth’ to me, as reader, is almost non-existent.
I suspect a huge volume of work is self-centred in this way - even this post, who knows?! You see examples of it week in, week out, at creative writing groups, in those mono-themed collections of poetry; writers processing their lives, attempting to make sense of the world. Just think how many pieces were written relating to the experience of Covid-19. These surely changed nothing, and would rarely have shared new knowledge.
Yet does any intensely personal emotional - but isolated - journey immediately make the writing unimportant? And if it ‘matters’ for the writer alone, how do we process that?
Entertainment
Writing that is entertaining or written for entertainment falls into an even more challenging category. A book may change nothing, share no new knowledge, invoke no significant emotional response - but what if you simply enjoyed reading it..? And what if it was written for that sole purpose, or to titivate, or to make the author money? Fifty Shades of Grey anyone? Are these works of ‘merit’? Do they ‘matter’?
We’ll each have our individual notions of what is and what is not entertaining; as a result what we qualify ‘in’ or ‘out’ will be a matter of personal taste. I had a tutor at University who was an authority on Charles Dickens, yet he loved the flimsy ‘crime thrillers’ of Dick Francis…
Perhaps responding to writing prompts and exercises comes into this category too. Not about difference, knowledge or emotion, we’re talking about activities which largely drive writing for its own sake. For many people this writing clearly has worth in terms of production or execution of the craft, but does it ‘matter’?
So after all that, am I any clearer where I stand - not only in terms of my own writing, but in deciding if I should call out that which (in my view) succeeds in achieving none of the above? I confess to being a literary snob to some extent (perhaps thanks to my degree) so would always laud the first on the list above, and tend to dismiss the last.
But that gives me two problems: firstly, in the general sense of how to respond to others’ work, and secondly how to respond to my own. Take my sample poem, Autumn Announced. It changes nothing; it imparts no new knowledge. I’m not even sure it evokes any worthwhile emotion apart from the small ‘hit’ I received having written it. And entertainment? I can’t answer that one.
All of which - if I am being harsh - I would potentially disqualify it as a ‘worthwhile’ piece of writing. And that, in the context of my own efforts, makes the whole ‘so what?’ conundrum even more acute and immediate and challenging…
Where do you stand on writing that ‘matters’ - both in general terms and, if you write, in relation to your own work? There will be people who believe every morsel of writing matters - even Fifty Shades! - and those whose view is far more extreme than the one teased at here. This feels like an important question if you are a writer - if only to focus on your own ambition and what you’re actually trying to achieve.
If I ask you to leave a comment, or share this article, or subscribe to my site, I do so on the basis that such action might just help me believe that my efforts have been worthwhile, that I might occasionally pass the ‘so what?’ test…
I really agree with these questions, Ian. I guess writing is ALWAYS an attempt to respond to them, and our world. But answers? Hmmm... Finding a candle in the cave....?