Fear, Freedom and Banned Books Week)

Banned Books Week.

Celebrating the works of fiction and non-fiction that have drawn the ire of censors, Banned Books Week looks at a huge swathe of young adult titles as well as now recognised classics like James Joyce’s Ulysses and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.

It’s a pretty impressive though not particularly exclusive club.

The reasons for banning books are supposedly for sexually explicit content, cultural insensitivity, unsuitability for the cited age group, religious or political view points, violence, or offensive language.  But ultimately, beneath all the complaints, what we really see when a book is challenged – or even banned – for its content, is fear.

Fear of the ideas a book contains. Fear of the ideas that inspired it. Fear of the ideas it might inspire.

I believe fear plays a crucial role in our relationship with books, one writers and readers must all be aware of even on some subconscious level. There’s fear in the writing, and in the act of writing, and in choosing a book, and in the act of reading, and in reacting to reading.

FOR ONE WEEK ONLY: Read all the lascivious literature you desire! Wishing everyone a scandalous #BannedBooksWeek. pic.twitter.com/V1J9vcwu6k

— Huffington Post (@HuffingtonPost) September 29, 2015

Engines. Wings. Windows. Wheels. Oxygen. Decompression. Bombs. Terrorism. Human error. Computer error. Impact.

It’s early morning. The sun is low but rising. The plane engines are a loud, featureless roar. I’m sitting in the window seat behind the left wing, counting off the myriad ways we could all die.

Engines. A fireball of burning fuel bursts through the seal of the doors. It melts the plastic of the table that a woman braces her head against.

Wings. The hydraulics have gone. We won't slow down.

Oxygen. We’re all sleepy, so slow and so sleepy as the tip of the plane noses downwards.

My brain on overdrive: echoes of stories reverberate in my head. German Airwings. The Hudson River. That writerly imagination  making the possibility of flying in peace impossible. Oh sure there are other things I find scary or threatening. But the horrors of flying are always the same; fear burning away as ferociously as the images.

As foolish as it feels when my chest squeezes tight in the journey from terminal to malodorous tincan, I've used that same fear to develop tension and terror in my writing.

How does my protagonist feel when she steps into her lover’s house, hears the wrong music playing, sees his shadow dance beneath his feet? How does my reader feel as they discover each new clue to his predicament? Do they hang, tremulous as my protagonist? Can they feel the cord draw tight as they realise something is about to happen and it’s going to be terrible?

I’ve turned my almost risible fear into something useable.

Yet some of my other fears do precisely the opposite. They’re detrimental in the extreme and some of them I don’t even notice. Why? Because it’s not the sort of fear that inspires nightmares.

Just the kind that stops me from writing.

Now I understand your raised eyebrows but I’m talking the niggle in your head when you put pen to paper and you decide hmmm maybe not to include that scene or not to write that chapter because you think someone won't like it or it might cause offence. I'm talking about burying the kernel of a great idea for a novel because you know high elves and gargoyles are less popular than the strappings of a conventional mystery. Or deciding to couch a controversial issue behind a listicle or avoid writing about a subject because you're worried about the repercussions.

The same sort of fear that makes eighteen year olds feel self-conscious about picking books out of the young adult section or the majority of young fantasy and sci-fi readers more circumspect as they grow older, moving from speculative to more acceptable genres.

 

It’s self-censorship curated by a general understanding of convention.

We do it all the time, from not putting up that facebook status to not telling that joke.

Of course, some conventions are there for a reason. You don't throw a gratuitous f-word into Babbity Rabbit. And you don't stick sixty pages of explicit sex into a novel like Harry Potter (especially when the fandom will do it for you). And if dealing with religious or political material, maybe a cursory proof read would be good to ensure you're at least representing a valid concern.

But freedom of expression and speech are two things we should not take for granted. Not when there are writers being publicly flogged for their words or even being killed for them.

As Salman Rushdie said, “What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.”

Stories have a special ability to allow divergence of thought, to challenge the everyday, to illuminate an issue and propose new answers. Books have exquisite power because of those stories. They address fear - react to and transform it. And not creepypasta stuff. What does Joyce do if not highlight the fears of his contemporaries? Or Junot Diaz in Drown? Or Irvine Welsh with well... everything? Sure obscenities abound in all the above, but it's fear that antagonises certain readers.

Plus, just because you don't like it doesn't make it 'bad'. Fiction you do not like is a route to books you may prefer. And not everyone has the same taste as you. We need to be aware of our fears and the things that make us stutter over the things we want to say or pause before we pick up a book or silence us when we should speak. Until we're aware of our fear we cannot truly understand what we are afraid of.

I struggle with fear sometimes. There are blogs I've scrapped because of what people might think. But I can't think that way and write what I want to write. I'm trying not to shy away anymore.

I know freedom of speech is one of those dark and twisty super slippery slopes. There's a time and place for self-censorship - even a time and place where we wish people would use it (ie. She Who Shall Not Be Named) - but it should be a choice made out of taste not fear, belief not ignorance. So you don't enjoy Frankie Boyle, or loathe Karin Slaughter's attention to gore. Don't read or watch them. But similarly, try not to label and moralise it for other people.

Oscar Wilde said “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”

And if that means we must accept Fifty Shades of Grey has every right to be on bookshelves, so be it.

The pink illustrations and the featured image are by the supremely talented Ambivalently Yours (check out the tumblr page for more kick ass feminism in pink). Thank you for letting me use them in this blog!

And for a great article on the importance of reading and libraries check out Neil Gaiman's keynote speech on Why Our Future Depends on Libraries, Reading and Daydreaming.

Je serai poète et toi poésie,

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Of Characters & Coffee (or what starts writers writing)

Different writers have different styles of writing. That’s a given. Starting from the very basics of narrative voice to the inspirations behind the story, what makes up a writer’s style is a question of influence, taste, and personal voice. It’s their literary fingerprint. It’s why even the best ghostwriters will always be slightly paler imitations of their author’s voice (regardless of how well the chameleon blends into the background, he’s still not part of it right?).

Yet one element that has always fascinated me but readers and aspiring writers don’t necessarily ever see is the writer’s style of creation.

Oh we’ve all heard about the peculiar ones, the quirky habits: the hoarding of postcards, the walls of notes, the lucky chair that squeaks, the writer who, like some method actor, cloisters himself away in order to experience the same crippling isolation as his protagonist. I’m not focusing there today.

I’m focusing on the stories and how they begin, where they come from, what makes a person pick up their pen and write. It’s the initial spark that I’m curious about and thought I’d discuss.

The human brain contains about 100 billion neurons. 

All together, those neurons contain about enough electrical energy to power a small lightbulb when you’re awake. In fact, our human brains are so fast that it takes the world’s most powerful super-computers 43minutes to process what we do in a second. So with a ton of information flooding the brain at any given moment, it’s no wonder it has to organise everything somehow nor that it does so in story form.

Stories are how we make sense of the world.

Implying all humans are innate storytellers, why then doesn’t everyone tell stories? Why don’t all humans fill up the hours by writing down their ideas? After all, doesn’t the saying go something like: ‘everyone has a story inside of them, waiting to be writ?’

For one, it’s a matter of interest – not everyone cares enough to write and others not enough to finish. More importantly, in this sense, writing isn’t about solipsism and the grand tangle of ganglion cells passing information neuron to neuron. Writing is an opening of one person to another person, a door from one mind to another.

Human language didn’t develop just so we could think in more complex ways, but so we could develop socially. Through ‘social development’ we learn about ‘self’ and ‘other’, and through understanding those things we develop stories because they help us comprehend the barriers, links and blended spaces between persons.

Ok, moving away from my degree in neuroscience, if not everyone has the interest or the determination to be storytellers in the commercial sense, then the writers that succeed, the ones that write and write and regardless of monetary achievement keep writing, must have something that triggers their ideas, that sparks them into action.

Talking to writers you’ll hear about all their different methods. One of the best writers I know (and who I mention frequently – check her and her writing partner out on Nerd Cactus) is a ‘world-builder’. More often than not her inner historian creates a ‘what if’ situation, a world that is transformed by a single decision, and then she comes up with characters to populate it, a theme that drives it, a plot that underpins each sequence of (often unfortunate) events.

My purpose as a writer is to loot my life to the very walls. THOMAS WOLFE #amwriting #writing pic.twitter.com/GPgv79kWO6

— Jon Winokur (@AdviceToWriters) August 21, 2015

On the other hand, despite working really well together on literary projects (our best is Renegade Earth, the trilogy) I almost always come from a completely different angle. I start with a character. Often just one, who I ‘hear’ in my head. They become part of a scene. That scene develops. We have a discussion: what’s their story, who are they, why should I care. If they fall down in any of these areas, I then investigate whether there’s another person I can talk to instead. I build up from the people, figure out their world, then start on the actual plot and idea.

The way we work together might seem strange. We start in such completely different spaces at times. But it functions because where she can become bogged down in the background, I can pull it back to the people; where I can find myself stuck in one character’s head, she’ll drag me back to the story we’re telling. As part of our development as writers, we’ve learnt from each other and so whilst my ‘initial spark’ is a character and hers more a question, the process is beautifully balanced.

When I put the question to some of the folk on Writer Unboxed, the answers came back with similarly disparate ‘starting points’ for writers. For some it’s when ‘an image blows up’ in their mind – a scene, a moment, complete with words and concepts. For others its all about concepts – they see a thing, remember it; read something, discover a new angle to develop. Some might prefer working with a relationship or a situation.

Most of the writers I spoke to, however, also mentioned that it’s far from being ‘kissed on the ear’ by the muses.

Inspiration might fall into an empty mind, or one that’s so full the idea of fitting more in hurts.

It also can shift. Whilst characters might instigate eight out of ten ideas, later finding an interesting idea in a book of conspiracies or in someone else’s writing is hardly unusual. No two stories are completely the same and no two writers seem to have identical processes.

Seeing the world in different ways is crucial. So whilst we may all claim a coffee habit, or a need for a nicotine fix (this is actually neuroscientifically explicable due to the dopamine dependencies curated by writerly minds that also link to the deficit disorders, depression and creativity associated with them), how we create ideas or start stories is almost entirely distinct from story to story, person to person.

So yes, writers work in different ways and have unique starting points that are as individual to a writer as their literary voice. It also means that if you're writing one way and your favourite writer works another - don't panic. No one really works the same way.

Your artist antenna can be trusted even if it’s not receiving the same signal as everyone else. In fact, that’s probably the best news you can hear.

Je serai poète et toi poésie,
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