Do you remember that song? Do you remember who wrote it? If you do, you may be getting old. Here he is singing it. I like that video: we may be old, but we are still nonconformists. Take that.

Years ago, I wrote a paper for a course in graduate school. I didn't think the subject was very controversial, but my professor disagreed. It was a fairly boring review of riddles, and I tried to connect them with some of the sociobiological theories of Profs Tiger and Fox, who were all the rage back then. It was probably not a terribly insightful piece of writing, but the advice I got from my professor was useful, and it stuck with me. He said, in essence, that if you were going to write something that was counterintuitive to most people, you had to do more to sell the idea than you would if everybody was going to agree with you. That was a good point, I thought.

The problem, of course, is that you probably don't realise your ideas are potentially controversial when you write them. They seem normal to you. So it's a good idea to listen to feedback.

Half a dozen years before I wrote that (probably ill-conceived) paper, I was sitting in an English Lit class where we were discussing Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure. If memory serves – I haven't looked it up – there was a scene in that book where a child was watching monkeys in a zoo. The biggest monkey hit the next-biggest one, then that monkey hit a smaller one, down the line, until the second-to-smallest monkey hit the littlest one…who sat down and cried. The child laughed. I said I didn't understand why that would make anyone laugh rather than be sad.

My instructor, kindly, 'Not everyone is as nice as you, Dmitri.'

Friends, do people think your fictional characters are unrealistic because they are too kind, or patient, or understanding? Do you know people who read the gospels with a growing sense of incredulity, because the main character in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John is a little bit 'too good to be true'? Then you know what I'm talking about. Do people you know tend to laugh at Fred Rogers? Who find it risible when he says, as in that video, that 'It feels good to have made something'? I happen to agree with him. (And yes, I don't draw much better than that.)

What's so funny about peace, love, and understanding?

You have to work a lot harder to convince people that good things are possible, because for most people, experience runs counter to that proposition. Go look on Twitter and see if you don't agree. Thousands of people retweeting and 'like'-ing aggressive statements, versus a few hundred appreciating something clever, or fun, or just plain smile-inducing. Poking fun at politicians is a lot easier than discussing solutions to problems. Even the cat videos are more popular if they're more like Game of Thrones.

What does that have to do with your writing? If you're a convinced pessimist, and content to write like one? Nothing at all. Weitermachen, as the Germans say. But if you're not? If you're of the persuasion that it might actually be possible for humans to do better than they do? It means you have a lot of work to do.

Have you read Ian McEwan's Atonement? (Hand up.) Or watched the film? (Hand up: twice so far.) If you know the story, you know that it's about a writer. As a child, this writer – she already is one – makes a terrible mistake. As an old woman, she tries to come to terms with the mistake: to atone in whatever way she can. This is the problem of the story. But how could a story, even one as well-executed as Atonement, take a terrible set of events and make them better? Perhaps it couldn't, after all. It couldn't alter the reality of what happened. But in another sense, writing could alter the way people saw that reality. It could change the future, by redirecting human thinking.

McEwan writes:

A story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader's. It was a magical process, so commonplace that no one stopped to wonder at it.

So: if you can use this form of telepathy to complain about what's wrong, can you also use it to suggest what's right? Of course you can. The problem is that when you try to suggest better things, you're pushing upstream. Negative ideas are easily caught in the general flow of human misery, and rush down the river with all the others. You don't have to put an oar into the water to speed them along. But a happy thought? A suggestion that this, too, might be a reparable situation? You'd better have good rowing muscles, is what I'm saying.

I'll have more to say about this as time goes on. Like nuances, constructive thoughts are harder to write than the other kind. Today, I just invite you to reflect: what's so funny (or second-rate) about peace, love, and understanding? Can peace, love, and understanding get their message across with laughter as well as solemnity? I rather think they can. I'll let Fred Rogers have the last word on that. He certainly handled that interview with Mr Letterman well. Not so sure about that tent.

Writing Right with Dmitri Archive

Dmitri Gheorgheni

05.02.18 Front Page

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