A letter about writing: a correspondent argues against the mania for writing

Editor’s note: The following letter, printed below in its entirety, was written in response to an earlier post, Against Reading. The editorial staff does not typically sanction the placement of readers’ letters in the monthly Observations, yet found that the author’s candor and warmth merit this exception.

To the Editor:

I was jointly amused and appalled by the Observation from last month. The dialogue, Against Reading, was both slight and ambitious, puerile and sententious, in a way that more puzzled than informed the attentive reader. It helped precipitate in my mind a general and well-grounded aversion to writing as a whole, or should I say to those who practice writing and even seek renown under the name of “writer.” It is a malady that possesses too many people, that they presume to know how to write. Moreover, as if to insulate themselves from the thought of their anxious time-wasting, they insist that others write, too, and work at writing. I am happy to underscore, if not in your publication, first the motives of these writers, and then the reasons why writing is a craft that far fewer people should undertake, despite the prevailing sentiments of the times.

In my sixty-three years, I have associated with literati in their many guises, both in person and on the page. The first type of encounter has afforded me greater pleasure, as it is often over a pint, where words flow more freely and pretences diminish. My closest acquaintances privately agree with my point of view, even as popular opinion pulls them to promote writing, despite the deleterious results. Not being a professional writer myself, and liberated from the conventions of university and press, I am happy to record these observations without any thought of gain or reprisal.

The reasons for the mania of writing

The number of writers is legion. It is likely that at no time in human history were so many people engaged in writing. I speak not about literacy – the ability to read and write – but about the actual generation of written words. Never were there so many writers, and so little worth reading. If chatter is the distinctive quality of most of our spoken exchanges, so written chatter – idle verbiage – surrounds us, demands our attention, and impedes our thinking. What strikes the disinterested observer about this phenomenon is that this scribbled torrent of words flows on unrelentingly, with no sign of reversal. Rather than being hemmed and hindered by criticism, or moderated by measured counsel, it floods the plain of letters unchecked. Those who make a living from writing only want its course to broaden and deepen.

The professional writers see their writing as the prime means of their advancement. I do not speak of the tiny sum of creative authors, who are employed in an array of jobs to support their literary lucubrations, but of the two public engines of the writing industry: higher education and the fourth estate. Scholars hear the tolling bell of “publish or perish,” and as they are religious about their careers, pile up their written offerings, whereby the height of the pile is often mistaken for its depth. This is true in both cultures of the humanities and the sciences. Journalists, still more prolific, move between the fear of deadlines and the hope for publicity, and hearken, in proportion to their publications, to the siren song of popularity. Both groups, scholars and journalists (who are sometimes one and the same) aspire to gather ever-greater numbers of acolytes, and therefore conspire to promote writing as a key cultural criterion; they are the doyens and doyennes of this imperative.

The problem of writing

Yet the basic, ineluctable fact, the cliff on which all the literary skiffs, cruise ships, and tankers founder, is that writing is a very arduous task. Is it any wonder, at a time when thinking (unlike novelty) is hardly in request, and desire for attention outstrips patience and stamina (not to mention inspiration), that writing should be so carelessly undertaken? Our society supports a cacophony of voices and calls it communication. Cliques of writers celebrate their differences and wave flags to identify their different argots, attracting followers and intimidating their milder critics.

The greatest, or poorest, of these gatherings occurs among academicians. Their prose is so dense, replete with specialized terms, that one recent commentator [1] has simply accepted the position that scholars are, and will continue to be, feeble wordsmiths, even despite, or rather because of, the shrewd observation of Nietzsche that “to improve one’s style is nothing else than to improve one’s thinking.”

One can only assume, if one is kind, that a scholarly author’s readers can pierce through their literary obfuscations, since they belong to the same clique, whose rites of membership, like those of latter-day troubadours, involve arcane forms of expression known only to the initiated.

Academicians would see all their students write more, and more often, even as they lament the limited reach of their own productions, a reach inversely proportional to the cost of their books. A few of them have caught the updraft of publicity, and their names continue to be held aloft by multitudes of editors who simplify their language, and transform their weighty vocabulary into the lighter expression found in the better sort of magazines and journals. This is the métier to which all scholars secretly strive, only to find it very difficult to achieve on their own. As a consequence they promote, but do not teach, the craft of writing to any noticeable degree.

But should we should take our model of writing from the more popular group, the journalists? They jostle with one another for headlines, and, more and more, the prized role of commentator, in which reporting is exchanged for, or rather confused with, their cultural and social opinions. They imagine the public is hungry for their pronouncements, and perhaps there is some justification for this, since news websites are populated increasingly with editorials. Our digital age has elided print commentary with web-logging or blogging, so that anyone’s website (such as your own) cries out for readers. Opinions proliferate, seeking to agitate the enervated, in large measure by encouraging them to write more themselves, through comments, postings, and even their own journals. Now everyone has become a writer, grasping for the attention of others. The result is that much is written, but without imagination or clarity. We are at the exponential end of the witticism of Oscar Wilde, who said a century ago, “In old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody.” We might say that books and blogs are read to be forgotten, merely to pass the time; their sentences crowd our lives with added ephemera.

A proposal for the current circumstances

What is to be done? I have mixed with colleagues and students at the Long Hall, and think that schools and universities should launch a campaign to end writing. Dr. Swift famously called libraries cemeteries, which are haunted by the spirits of old books. My modest proposal is for universities to empty their shelves, and let these ghosts find other rooms. From the sale of their books (there will always be buyers, who cling to the old ways), libraries can refurbish themselves as workplaces for the arts and sciences, where no writing is allowed. Let the floors of the libraries echo with the sound of dramatic recitals, political debates, and film-making. They should permit mathematicians and scientists more room to ponder their problems together without wasting the time to write out their results. Our memories would be improved, and our society brightened. Higher education would raise itself above the academic literary cliques, and help journalists learn the truer, more meagre resonance of their editorializing. Rather than students migrating bleary-eyed from library to pub, let the pub come to the library, where music and good fellowship can rightly prevent would-be writers from pursuing the lower literary paths. Libraries would no longer groan under the cost of their collections, and the public, overall, would be better served. As for writing in the digital domain, there is no help for that just yet, but publishing letters like mine may be a force for good.

A.A. Munro, Dublin

[1] Editor’s note: I imagine the author is referring to this article.