I did not unsub because I agree with the main thrust of what you write about and you have helped untangle a lot of my 'left brain' traits.
I was tempted to comment on some small things I thought were polarizing but not at all required to make your point. For example, the JK Rowling tweet was unnecessary (and wrong. Maybe it's coz I'm also not on Twitter, but the literary community on the platform I'm active on -Reddit- was united in denouncing Gaiman). JKR is a divisive character. Her reasoning on the Gaiman situation is motivated by his pro-transness.
So my advice, if welcome, would be to cut the frills especially the snides about 'wokeness'. It taints the message somewhat.
When I was in the literary scene, I worked with a lot of trans authors -- and my experience with them was generally very good, frankly. I think people on both sides of the argument are missing the forest for the trees they happen to be focussing on (bad metaphor, I need coffee). I was also one of the people responsible for the decision to include trans authors, including trans women, in the Carol Shields Women's Literary Prize.
Gah, it's early, and there was a mistake in the reply, which I've now edited. "I think they are straight-up wrong that transgenderism is purely or even mainly caused by a social contagion".
Thank you for this! That's what I get for not checking other platforms (I rarely go on reddit too). After I hit publish I actually thought that it was odd the literary community wouldn't call Gaiman out, and wondered if it was just burn out / compassion fatigue. Things were fresh when Weinstein happened, but honestly now it seems like someone famous in the arts scene is getting outed every other month or so.
Would you mind if I used this comment in the next post (and added it to the original to highlight the error)?
I probably hit publish too quick on the last one. I hadn't fully fleshed out the idea -- which is why I wrote this one and a part three is coming. The next part is going to be tricky -- I'm planning on both criticizing and defending JK Rowling -- but I think if I can figure out how to lay it out, my intentions will come off a bit clearer. Generally speaking, as much as I do think "wokeness" has become ideological, I also think they have some good points, which is why so many people find it appealing. I said this in another essay (the one criticizing Abigail Shrier), but I also think "anti-wokeness" is an ideology, and in some ways a more harmful one. It's ridiculous to me that some people seem to think everything fine and good in the West until the "woke" movement came along -- and I think they are straight-up wrong that transgenderism is purely or even mainly caused by a social contagion. I think there's a lot more going on, and that many of the people on the "anti-woke" side are absolving themselves and the Western world of responsibility for how things are spinning out.
I'm going to get into this in the next piece. I really have no idea how it'll go. I'm hoping I'll get through both to the JK haters and the JK worshippers (I was never a big Harry Potter fan, Animorphs were a million times better; also JK is also making several ideological errors), but there's a possibility I'll just piss off everybody with my take. Wish me luck :-p
Yes, I'm okay with you using this comment in the next post...and I fully understand publishing an essay that you haven't fully fleshed out in response to a really bad take. Sometimes it just needs to be done
The first point- true imo, and the main issue I had with your original essay was that it didn't take this into account, or that among writers there is a variety of talent levels, aptitudes and personality types, all of which manifest in the quality of the writing produced. Your caveat- that this phenotype is likely more common among the activist-influencer-writer types- is an important bit of nuance (altho that's not to say it's absent among "real" writers too!)
It's not only that writing good characters requires strong cognitive empathy (although this is very much the case), but also that regardless of genre or medium, if you want to write well, you must be able to accurately gauge how it will come off to your audience. This demands quite a strong Theory of Mind, and imo the lack of this aspect is responsible for a lot of the poor quality writing out there (esp in poetry- my main interest).
I've been involved for years on-and-off in various poetry critique groups, and often younger writers have to go through a process of training themselves to be aware of how a poem reads to others- a lot of bad writing is grounded in a blind commitment to "self expression", or "needing to get across an idea", even when it's detrimental to the art itself. I suppose you could frame that as it being necessary for writers to train the RH in relation to their work.
Overall tho, I agree that the notion that reading inherently increases empathy is wrong. Books are a means of disseminating ideas, that's all. The ideas may be bad, good, bad in one context and good in another, prone to being misinterpreted..... many things.
Yes, the original essay was much weaker than other essays on here :-/ It was incomplete, but I was putting a lot of pressure on myself to start getting new work out.
I actually think some writers with low theory of mind can still produce good writing, just autobiographical stuff. There's some excellent autobiographical writing out there.
Someone pointed out to me that the left / right hemisphere thing is slightly off conceptually, which I agree with (in other essays, I've compared it to Badcock's mechanism / mentalism, which is a little different), and maybe I should be looking at the corpus callosum a bit more -- communication and integration between the hemispheres.
Eh, that's what Substack is kinda great for. I like reading people's pages as an ongoing process, rather than judging each essay individually. It just makes for more material for future essays, fleshing your ideas out more :)
Re: autobiographical writing, agreed. I do know one or two excellent writers who do fit that description, and struggle with some of the issues you identify, but who are both verbally skilled enough and introspective enough to carve into their own psyche in a way that's relevant to others. And really, almost all writers have at least some autobiographical elements to their work- it's your first, easiest and deepest source of inspiration, after all. So it's not necessarily a strict dichotomy, either. I just read your Broken Mirror essay and the ending of that touches on another relevant point to all this- connection. There is absolutely a difference between art that is created with the intention of establishing a connection with the audience (which requires *work*)- and art that is merely a vehicle for the creator to soapbox/gain status/seek attention.
I've not read McGilchrist's work yet, but I've been seeing the whole LH/RH thing discussed lots on here, and it strikes me as an excellent metaphor for these kinds of dynamics, if nothing else.
> Similarly, I take issue with arguments that suggest that, for example, all “screen time” is unhealthy. Again, it depends on what kind of screen time and the content. There are many great movies and TV shows out there that can improve empathy too, and many wonderful podcasts.
Considered what people are watching 99% of the time, saying "all screen time is unhealthy" is a very good heuristic
Thank you for writing this series, these are bold arguments and I’m sure you’ll catch a lot of flak for them. But I appreciate you saying this.
I’ve spent the last few years highlighting the artistic and narrative value of video games, which hold great promise as a vehicle for storytelling on par with movies and novels. They’ve been highly impactful and influential in my life, giving me characters to relate to as a teenager and worlds to escape to in times of crisis (like when my daughter was hospitalized). I’m not exaggerating when I say they’ve saved my life on many occasions, and mainstream discourse never considers their upside (and yes, I read a lot of books growing up as well, and still do).
But the default response is still some variation of “put down the controller and read a good book instead.” As if the latter is inherently more valuable than the former, or somehow incapable of instilling excess or overindulgence.
Yes!! Guybrush was one of those characters that served as a lifeline to me growing up. Simply brilliant games.
(And forgive the shameless plug, but I actually wrote a whole series analyzing Monkey Island’s narrative. I can comp you a subscription if you’d like to read it!)
In my eyes, the written word is like mathematics not just because it has myriad applications but because it exists as multiple separate fundaments. Like, math is a language but it’s also a discipline, but also it’s an art medium. So fiction and non-fiction are both writing but they’re expressly not the same thing.
I similarly carry an early history of having a precocious young reading enjoyment, then head injuries, then hallucinogens, some alcoholism, recovery & rebirth & so forth. Story goes on and it’s long. I think I was supposed to have been an engineer by original providence. But I ended up with a journalism degree at age 29, and worked as a newspaper reporter for some years, then as a writer for industry trades and so on.
So I got really good at writing as utility—writing to communicate formidably and thoroughly. (Probably most people are relatively illiterate, and the literati are numbered, and it gets lonely and writers often struggle with the fact that most of their audience is dead or unborn, at best.) Eventually, working on the daily newspaper police beat in combination with my own misdemeanor experience with the legal system as a general fuckup in the ‘90s, and my yen for constitutional law, brought me to a crossroads where I began to dabble in fiction writing which naturally popped-out as pulp crime fiction.
Those books were definitely “caricatures of the writer” as you say. It’s not breathtaking prose I’m not any sort of literary giant. I don’t have any notable readership, and haven’t produced any fiction content since I went back to school and switched careers in 2017. I actually took a post-bacc math, which changed the partitioning of my head. Mathematics is definitely a different kind of writing (and a different type of reading among a distinct body of literature and specialists, depending upon level of purity).
Speaking just for myself, fiction writing for me is like throwing clay. (Although I’ve never thrown clay, but it does seem to reflect my process, minimal as it is.) Writing is as you imply, a plastic extension of the very plastic mind. My hackneyed writing as it may be judged does provide an excellent means of self reflection.
I’d come to understand that my writing was for me, primarily, and as I grow/grew as a writer, a readership would follow maybe to some extent but as an artist who is mainly a writer, one writes for the same reason one breathes, or similar reasons anyway. As one of my J professors said to me once, “don’t write to win awards.” And he was totally right and it’s pertinent beyond non-fiction writing. And anything can be capitalized but it usually kills its core spirit, or more certainly its novelty. People banging-on about how to write fiction that “sells” is ridiculous to me.
After the math post-bacc I took an M.Ed. and have taught ELA and now teaching math in a public middle school. I’m too exhausted to do anything artful, the hours are long, the few kids who shine can get by without me but most of them these days don’t give two shits about reading writing or math or really anything (it’s a difficult age to work with) so they’re hard on the help (that’s me), and many of my colleagues are sound asleep sheep, or just trapped and muted. There’s just the big “everybody who fits in” bus and it’s just as retarded as you might remember. I am realizing I can’t teach any of these people anything and I’m wearing myself out trying to do something that’s not possible insofar as you can’t help anyone who does not want help.
I’m 49 but not for long, and still more than a decade away from”retirement.” I’m seriously thinking about quitting and going back to just being a substitute, so I can get some of my time back for writing and just living. But crikey look at the cost of groceries!
On reading, I have trouble making time to read (or play the guitar) these days, and that needs to change too. At least I sleep in a pile of books next to several guitars. Reading about pure math, or quantum mechanics, activates different partitions of mind than if I’m reading in foreign languages, and different from what’s activated and what combinations are operating if I’m reading pop science fiction, or classics in English. But for me in any case maintaining a regular stream of text input to (or through) my own cognitive sieve is absolutely necessary to maintain and nourish what I’ve built up there. Also contemplative sitting practice is crucial for head maintenance,
I did not unsub because I agree with the main thrust of what you write about and you have helped untangle a lot of my 'left brain' traits.
I was tempted to comment on some small things I thought were polarizing but not at all required to make your point. For example, the JK Rowling tweet was unnecessary (and wrong. Maybe it's coz I'm also not on Twitter, but the literary community on the platform I'm active on -Reddit- was united in denouncing Gaiman). JKR is a divisive character. Her reasoning on the Gaiman situation is motivated by his pro-transness.
So my advice, if welcome, would be to cut the frills especially the snides about 'wokeness'. It taints the message somewhat.
When I was in the literary scene, I worked with a lot of trans authors -- and my experience with them was generally very good, frankly. I think people on both sides of the argument are missing the forest for the trees they happen to be focussing on (bad metaphor, I need coffee). I was also one of the people responsible for the decision to include trans authors, including trans women, in the Carol Shields Women's Literary Prize.
Gah, it's early, and there was a mistake in the reply, which I've now edited. "I think they are straight-up wrong that transgenderism is purely or even mainly caused by a social contagion".
Thank you for this! That's what I get for not checking other platforms (I rarely go on reddit too). After I hit publish I actually thought that it was odd the literary community wouldn't call Gaiman out, and wondered if it was just burn out / compassion fatigue. Things were fresh when Weinstein happened, but honestly now it seems like someone famous in the arts scene is getting outed every other month or so.
Would you mind if I used this comment in the next post (and added it to the original to highlight the error)?
I probably hit publish too quick on the last one. I hadn't fully fleshed out the idea -- which is why I wrote this one and a part three is coming. The next part is going to be tricky -- I'm planning on both criticizing and defending JK Rowling -- but I think if I can figure out how to lay it out, my intentions will come off a bit clearer. Generally speaking, as much as I do think "wokeness" has become ideological, I also think they have some good points, which is why so many people find it appealing. I said this in another essay (the one criticizing Abigail Shrier), but I also think "anti-wokeness" is an ideology, and in some ways a more harmful one. It's ridiculous to me that some people seem to think everything fine and good in the West until the "woke" movement came along -- and I think they are straight-up wrong that transgenderism is purely or even mainly caused by a social contagion. I think there's a lot more going on, and that many of the people on the "anti-woke" side are absolving themselves and the Western world of responsibility for how things are spinning out.
I'm going to get into this in the next piece. I really have no idea how it'll go. I'm hoping I'll get through both to the JK haters and the JK worshippers (I was never a big Harry Potter fan, Animorphs were a million times better; also JK is also making several ideological errors), but there's a possibility I'll just piss off everybody with my take. Wish me luck :-p
Yes, I'm okay with you using this comment in the next post...and I fully understand publishing an essay that you haven't fully fleshed out in response to a really bad take. Sometimes it just needs to be done
Hm. I think at this point in the game, wokeness deserves all the pokes it gets. And more.
You don't like it? Fix woke.
Okay,...
I was telling the author why she might have gotten unsubs on the previous post. Feel free to 'fix woke'!
Haha. It's not mine to fix. I don't wear that crazy hat.
The first point- true imo, and the main issue I had with your original essay was that it didn't take this into account, or that among writers there is a variety of talent levels, aptitudes and personality types, all of which manifest in the quality of the writing produced. Your caveat- that this phenotype is likely more common among the activist-influencer-writer types- is an important bit of nuance (altho that's not to say it's absent among "real" writers too!)
It's not only that writing good characters requires strong cognitive empathy (although this is very much the case), but also that regardless of genre or medium, if you want to write well, you must be able to accurately gauge how it will come off to your audience. This demands quite a strong Theory of Mind, and imo the lack of this aspect is responsible for a lot of the poor quality writing out there (esp in poetry- my main interest).
I've been involved for years on-and-off in various poetry critique groups, and often younger writers have to go through a process of training themselves to be aware of how a poem reads to others- a lot of bad writing is grounded in a blind commitment to "self expression", or "needing to get across an idea", even when it's detrimental to the art itself. I suppose you could frame that as it being necessary for writers to train the RH in relation to their work.
Overall tho, I agree that the notion that reading inherently increases empathy is wrong. Books are a means of disseminating ideas, that's all. The ideas may be bad, good, bad in one context and good in another, prone to being misinterpreted..... many things.
Yes, the original essay was much weaker than other essays on here :-/ It was incomplete, but I was putting a lot of pressure on myself to start getting new work out.
I actually think some writers with low theory of mind can still produce good writing, just autobiographical stuff. There's some excellent autobiographical writing out there.
Someone pointed out to me that the left / right hemisphere thing is slightly off conceptually, which I agree with (in other essays, I've compared it to Badcock's mechanism / mentalism, which is a little different), and maybe I should be looking at the corpus callosum a bit more -- communication and integration between the hemispheres.
Eh, that's what Substack is kinda great for. I like reading people's pages as an ongoing process, rather than judging each essay individually. It just makes for more material for future essays, fleshing your ideas out more :)
Re: autobiographical writing, agreed. I do know one or two excellent writers who do fit that description, and struggle with some of the issues you identify, but who are both verbally skilled enough and introspective enough to carve into their own psyche in a way that's relevant to others. And really, almost all writers have at least some autobiographical elements to their work- it's your first, easiest and deepest source of inspiration, after all. So it's not necessarily a strict dichotomy, either. I just read your Broken Mirror essay and the ending of that touches on another relevant point to all this- connection. There is absolutely a difference between art that is created with the intention of establishing a connection with the audience (which requires *work*)- and art that is merely a vehicle for the creator to soapbox/gain status/seek attention.
I've not read McGilchrist's work yet, but I've been seeing the whole LH/RH thing discussed lots on here, and it strikes me as an excellent metaphor for these kinds of dynamics, if nothing else.
> Similarly, I take issue with arguments that suggest that, for example, all “screen time” is unhealthy. Again, it depends on what kind of screen time and the content. There are many great movies and TV shows out there that can improve empathy too, and many wonderful podcasts.
Considered what people are watching 99% of the time, saying "all screen time is unhealthy" is a very good heuristic
Sigh. Sadly, you're right.
Thank you for writing this series, these are bold arguments and I’m sure you’ll catch a lot of flak for them. But I appreciate you saying this.
I’ve spent the last few years highlighting the artistic and narrative value of video games, which hold great promise as a vehicle for storytelling on par with movies and novels. They’ve been highly impactful and influential in my life, giving me characters to relate to as a teenager and worlds to escape to in times of crisis (like when my daughter was hospitalized). I’m not exaggerating when I say they’ve saved my life on many occasions, and mainstream discourse never considers their upside (and yes, I read a lot of books growing up as well, and still do).
But the default response is still some variation of “put down the controller and read a good book instead.” As if the latter is inherently more valuable than the former, or somehow incapable of instilling excess or overindulgence.
It’s infuriating.
Totally agree! I loved the Monkey Island series as a kid (and, uh, maybe as an adult). Zero regrets about the long hours I wiled away on those games.
Yes!! Guybrush was one of those characters that served as a lifeline to me growing up. Simply brilliant games.
(And forgive the shameless plug, but I actually wrote a whole series analyzing Monkey Island’s narrative. I can comp you a subscription if you’d like to read it!)
Haha PLEASE DO!
I have about a paragraph’s worth of reflection to offer , if I can find five extra minutes this weekend!
As always, I invite people to disagree with me or point out errors in my thinking in the comments.
In my eyes, the written word is like mathematics not just because it has myriad applications but because it exists as multiple separate fundaments. Like, math is a language but it’s also a discipline, but also it’s an art medium. So fiction and non-fiction are both writing but they’re expressly not the same thing.
I similarly carry an early history of having a precocious young reading enjoyment, then head injuries, then hallucinogens, some alcoholism, recovery & rebirth & so forth. Story goes on and it’s long. I think I was supposed to have been an engineer by original providence. But I ended up with a journalism degree at age 29, and worked as a newspaper reporter for some years, then as a writer for industry trades and so on.
So I got really good at writing as utility—writing to communicate formidably and thoroughly. (Probably most people are relatively illiterate, and the literati are numbered, and it gets lonely and writers often struggle with the fact that most of their audience is dead or unborn, at best.) Eventually, working on the daily newspaper police beat in combination with my own misdemeanor experience with the legal system as a general fuckup in the ‘90s, and my yen for constitutional law, brought me to a crossroads where I began to dabble in fiction writing which naturally popped-out as pulp crime fiction.
Those books were definitely “caricatures of the writer” as you say. It’s not breathtaking prose I’m not any sort of literary giant. I don’t have any notable readership, and haven’t produced any fiction content since I went back to school and switched careers in 2017. I actually took a post-bacc math, which changed the partitioning of my head. Mathematics is definitely a different kind of writing (and a different type of reading among a distinct body of literature and specialists, depending upon level of purity).
Speaking just for myself, fiction writing for me is like throwing clay. (Although I’ve never thrown clay, but it does seem to reflect my process, minimal as it is.) Writing is as you imply, a plastic extension of the very plastic mind. My hackneyed writing as it may be judged does provide an excellent means of self reflection.
I’d come to understand that my writing was for me, primarily, and as I grow/grew as a writer, a readership would follow maybe to some extent but as an artist who is mainly a writer, one writes for the same reason one breathes, or similar reasons anyway. As one of my J professors said to me once, “don’t write to win awards.” And he was totally right and it’s pertinent beyond non-fiction writing. And anything can be capitalized but it usually kills its core spirit, or more certainly its novelty. People banging-on about how to write fiction that “sells” is ridiculous to me.
After the math post-bacc I took an M.Ed. and have taught ELA and now teaching math in a public middle school. I’m too exhausted to do anything artful, the hours are long, the few kids who shine can get by without me but most of them these days don’t give two shits about reading writing or math or really anything (it’s a difficult age to work with) so they’re hard on the help (that’s me), and many of my colleagues are sound asleep sheep, or just trapped and muted. There’s just the big “everybody who fits in” bus and it’s just as retarded as you might remember. I am realizing I can’t teach any of these people anything and I’m wearing myself out trying to do something that’s not possible insofar as you can’t help anyone who does not want help.
I’m 49 but not for long, and still more than a decade away from”retirement.” I’m seriously thinking about quitting and going back to just being a substitute, so I can get some of my time back for writing and just living. But crikey look at the cost of groceries!
On reading, I have trouble making time to read (or play the guitar) these days, and that needs to change too. At least I sleep in a pile of books next to several guitars. Reading about pure math, or quantum mechanics, activates different partitions of mind than if I’m reading in foreign languages, and different from what’s activated and what combinations are operating if I’m reading pop science fiction, or classics in English. But for me in any case maintaining a regular stream of text input to (or through) my own cognitive sieve is absolutely necessary to maintain and nourish what I’ve built up there. Also contemplative sitting practice is crucial for head maintenance,
~C.G.
P.s. Nice couch !
It was an excellent essay, seems like a bizarre thing to lose subscribers over.
Thank you -- but I realize I write about several topics that are controversial and it's to be expected.