Speech to the Writer’s Program
Board of Cooperative Education Services
Saratoga Springs, May 1997
Remarks to Young Writers
There are a lot of reasons to want to become a professional writer. Some of them are better than others. It is not the best way to make a million bucks. Statistically, there are more millionaires among thoracic surgeons, professional basketball players, building contractors, and possibly even certified public accountants than you will find in the ranks of writers.
Personally I had a hard time making a living at it until I was forty years old. I had published eight novels with reputable commercial publishers and I was still waiting on tables in downtown Saratoga. That's what's known as a "character building" experience. If you don't commit suicide, it improves your character -- it's spiritually very fortifying to go through something like that. I would almost certainly be worse off if I had been an overnight sensation with my very first book.
Writing is a good vocation if you like to work on your own. But, of course, then you're left with the responsibility of making yourself get the work done. There's no boss around to tell you to what to do. I don't have a problem with self-discipline. I enjoy composing sentences and paragraphs. I enjoy the operations of my own mind. I don't suffer from writer's block. I have enough ideas for books, essays, and stories to last for the rest of my life. I couldn't imagine not having anything to say. The world we live in is very rich.
But most writers do not spring fullblown to the condition of functioning fully and freely, not to mention gainfully -- I sure didn't -- and so writing as a vocation becomes problematical. It requires development. You have to develop a point-of-view about the world, including especially about human behavior. One problem is that a person has to live for a while in order to understand anything about either the world or human behavior. As an adult, that is. Not everybody matures at the same speed. There's a lot about a child's point-of-view that is worthwile. You can also write for children or about children -- and make a living of it -- but that may require more than a child's point-of-view. So sooner or later you probably have to develop an adult point-of-view in order to function as any kind of writer.
At the same time, you have to develop a voice to deliver that point-of-view. Multitudes of people wish to express themselves, but only a small fraction will have the discipline to finish something, or an original attitude about the world, or a voice that it is engaging enough to get somebody else's attention.
One of the peculiar aspects of this vocation is that the world doesn't really ask us to write a particular book. Yet there are many books that we could hardly imagine being absent from our world -- try to imagine American history minus Moby Dick, or Huckleberry Finn or the poems of Emily Dickenson.
Walt Whitman wrote his poems, Leaves of Grass, in joyful defiance of a world that hadn't asked for his poems and wasn't especially grateful to receive them. Yet the sheer spirit displayed in Whitman's poems is so full of texture, color, emotion, and strength of character that it is now as impossible to imagine the 19th century without Walt Whitman and his poems as it would be without Abraham Lincoln and the Gettysburg Address.
The world didn't ask for these works, but they were freely and generously given to the world by individuals who had little more than a point-of-view about the world and faith in the authenticity of their own voices. And now they are inseparably part of our culture.
Writing is a self-informing process. A lot of people have asked me how do you write a book? The truth is, you find the fortitude to write the first sentence and that first sentence informs you what the next sentence will be. And the first paragraph informs you what the second ought to be. And the first chapter informs you what the second should be. And so on. If you understand and accept the elegant organic simplicity of this process, you will never have to be crippled by fear of having nothing to say or no way to say it. If you're fortunate, this process will thrill you and provide you with enough spiritual gratification to keep wanting to do it, regardless of whether people pay you a lot of money for doing it.
Sometimes a project doesn't work out. That happens. When it happens it is usually nature's way of telling you to turn to something else for a while. Some ideas are faulty and will defy your attempts to make something coherent of them. Some ideas are okay, but you may not be ready to handle them at a certain time in your life. When that happens, put it aside. Some troublesome projects you will return to and even finish. Some will be stillborn. It's important to recognize when to cut your losses. It's okay to fail. It's even more okay to fail when you’re young and resilient. There are few experiences more rewarding than recovering from failure.
My two most recent books have been about the mess that we have made of the American landscape and townscape in our time -- the strip malls, the parking lots, the housing developments, the whole demoralizing mess. I wrote about this subject because I was deeply interested in it. Nobody had asked me to look into the subject, or to write any books about it.
I've come to believe that the issues of how we actually live in this country are terribly important -- because after researching, and looking around, and thinking about these things for ten years, it's become painfully obvious to me that a land full of places that aren't worth caring about could eventually add up to a country that's no longer worth defending -- which is a very serious matter. It means that our civilization is in trouble.
The world is changing. In three years we will leave the 20th century and the second millenium behind. We may also be leaving behind many habits of mind and customary modes of human activity. We are evolving out of the industrial era into something else -- we're not sure what. At this point it seems to be about information, but that's a little vague.
There are some things we know about this era. We know that the equational math of the past 500 years is being replaced by parallel processing. We have an inkling that machines will performing activities that resemble thought, or possibly even thinking themselves. This has some terrifying implications. In his interesting new book After Thought, James Bailey says that this will remove human beings from the center of the action much the same way that Galileo's innovations in astronomy removed the earth itself from the center of the heavens. But, paradoxically, he also suggest that in this new era the word will once again gain supremecy over the number. Because numbers are extremely limited in their ability to describe reality. This should be good news to us.
The past century -- a century of numbers and of technicians devoted to the manipulation of numbers -- has been very demoralizing for the human race. A hundred years ago, our cultural, political, and economic leaders were predicting that the 20th century would usher in a golden age. They were especially optimistic about the wonders of technology. In short order, we got World War One, Stalin, Hitler, Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda, and Oklahoma City -- which brings us about up to date. We're not so innocent about technology anymore. Indeed, the entire culture of quantification -- of trying to understand our world by bean-counting and algebra -- begins to seem not just suspect but rather sinister. Material progress, as personified by Wal-Mart, has also proved to be sinsiter and disillusioning in its own special way.
I propose that whatever age we entering, we are going to need writers. People are not going to stop thinking or communicating with each other even if the human word-view shifts drastically. After all, it has happened before. Aristotle pre-dates Classical Rome, the rise of Christendom, the Rennaisance, the industrial revolution, yet we still find a lot to admire in his writings. Shakespeare is also about two paradigms behind us, and he is the busiest scriptwriter in Hollywood today. The world is going to need writers.
Writing is the way that the world hears itself thinking, and the way it remembers what it thought. I would include emotion in the realm of thought, too. Some ages are more thoughtful and feeling than others, and certainly more spiritual. I feel comfortable in saying that the spiritual impoverishment of the 20th century is almost without parallel in human history. It seems to me that we are beginning to recognize this, and to recognize our need for spiritual nourishment. We certainly need a body of rhetoric to restore the dimension of the spirit to our everyday lives.
I wish you good luck. Take yourselves seriously. Take your world seriously. Learn how to describe it. Record its thoughts. Have the generosity of spirit to offer something of yourself to the world, the fortitude to wait for an answer, and the grace to appreciate the silences in between.
The End
 
Copyright © 1997 James Howard Kunstler
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