Writers have often been ready to give each other advice. I remember reading some a year or two back in a Fairfax paper – an Australian writer who sternly and virtuously exhorted the neophytes among us to eliminate all adverbs. That’s a big call, suddenly burning all the adverbs in the English language. Put your darlings to death, nuke all adverbs sounds a bit extreme. But O Great Writer, aren’t there any good adverbs or any darlings that deserve life? No. Kill them all. Purify the page. Destroy all monsters. God will know his own.

It’s as if writers secretly hate each other, or maintain themselves with dreams of fascist grandiosity. After all a novel can function as a kind of personal fiefdom where its creator has omnipotent control, and hatches, matches and despatches exactly as he or she wills. The novelist as Vladimir Putin: discuss.

When writers get together they often form hierarchies, set up gatekeepers and, not unusually, establish journals or competitions as a way of settling their differences. Or festivals. Which makes them sound remarkably like Kenneth Grahame’s Rat. We might dream about reconfiguring the narratives of the world, but really we’d rather have hyper-organised picnics – with admission fees. And no you can’t share my sandwiches. I copied them from a recipe by Arthur Quiller-Couch and they’re special. So get your own, you greedy ink-stained amateur. And remember not to use adverbs when you speak to me.

As I say an Edwardian aesthetic isn’t really my thing. What Quiller-Couch seemed to be arguing for was a masculine simplicity, the simplicity of the smoking room after dinner, something neat and spare with nothing left over, like a parquet floor. Ornamentation, I’m guessing, was regarded as feminine, decadent (‘Persian’) without the clean lines so pleasing to the masculine eye. It’s curious that Quiller-Couch used the noun ‘darlings’ a term then reserved for those masculine possessions: wives and children. England was at that time also host to a group of newly famous darlings, Wendy Darling and her two brothers Michael and Peter, in JM Barrie’s children’s story Peter Pan first published in 1911 after the earlier success of Barrie’s play. It was re-printed in a popular new edition in 1915, the year before the publication of Quiller-Couch’s lectures.

For writers to endorse the process of rewriting prose as an act of ruthless violence is extremely odd. It’s as though when one writer gives another their work to read, the knife comes out, which is a very strange response to a gift. I’ve been thinking that perhaps writers just don’t know how to listen to each other. It’s probably a difficult skill for people who prefer to spend their time talking to themselves, having omnipotent fantasies and mercilessly putting their darlings to death. Perhaps it’s worth asking what kinds of listening writers could discover if they tried. Special super-sensitive writers’ ears would not be required to do this either. Jacques Lacan criticised those psychotherapists who advocated for the cultivation of a ‘third ear’ in clinical practice. What’s the point of a third ear, said Lacan, when the two ears we have are already too many? Maybe, he said, we just need to become less deaf with the ears we already have.

Listening isn’t an act of intrusion. Nothing needs to be killed. Listening isn’t a search and destroy mission or a way of practising our literary topiary skills. What listening has the potential to be is a structural openness to the other, as we try to hear what is already there, not what we want to be there. It’s kind of dangerous, too. After all, if we let others speak with their own words ­– instead of with ours – who knows what they might come out with. Most likely it will be something we don’t want to hear, but critical to their way of being, something dear to them – a darling in fact. Listening to prose has nothing to do with what some writers think of as the craft or the wordsmithing. That can come later. It’s not brain surgery. It’s more like mucking about in the sandpit. Listening requires antenna, not knives.

It is the making of his or her own mind the writer engages in, which is why the process of writing can be so painful, building out of debris and found objects something contingent, and why every work of fiction verges on collapse. The work of imaginative prose you may be offered to read is the ruins of someone’s imagination, a heap of flotsam, of bones, of weird animal sounds snatched up and glued together any which way, stuck together as though they could make sense, like a song played backwards in which you think you can hear a secret message encased in a random collation of syllables.

In a long and fairly boring piece at the London Review of Books, the writer Iain Sinclair describes a recent meeting with the poet Gary Snyder. Sinclair says:

When I try to bring the practicalities of composition, the gossip of craft, into the conversation, Snyder misreads my questions or veers sharply away.

I met Gary Snyder once, and he woudn’t talk to me much either. But I suspect, in this case, it has more to do with the fact that Sinclair, who we learn can’t hear the difference between a frog and a bird, is making a lot of assumptions about what it means to be a writer. The ‘craft’ of writing seems like a topic for those who think writing prose has no political or ethical import. There isn’t any craft, sitting out there like a set of blueprints for an Edwardian escritoire. It’s not carpentry or leadlighting. There’s a lot of made up rules and assumptions and a lot of self-appointed experts who writers flock to like flies to jam, as well as a truckload of unexamined politics and ethical dilemmas that writers avoid like a contagion. The ‘craft’, about which Sinclair says he loves to gossip, is informed, shaped and completely saturated by a context of political and ethical choices.

(Source: jlvwrites)