CONCEPT
A few thoughts on writing that I recently shared with a friend:
I’m not putting this forth as a critic but as a writer, and that is that I am always aware of certain kinds of tension when I read and write. One of the most prevalent, and in some ways straightforward, is the divide between thought and emotion.
There are some writers, many, whose highest priority is to engage your mind: to provide a catalog of paradox and ambiguity and commentary, and so to supply an immense puzzle or algorithm that must be dissected: when I think of this sort of writing I think of Stine and Nabokov and Joyce and so on.
There are other writers, many, whose highest priority is to engage the gut: to arrest you with sensations that cannot be analyzed, not because they are not rational, but because an over-vigorous rationalization deprives them of their beauty. Which alone is enough to account for this distinction, if we allow sufficiently broad definitions of the word “beauty.” When I think of this sort of writing I think of Barnes and Artaud and Faulkner and Hurston and so on.
Of course, the best writing does both: engages our minds and our guts. But I still feel most writers make a bedrock assumption of trust or mistrust of emotion, and that this assumption either precludes or forestalls the importance of empathy.
Anyway, I am definitely of the second group.
END OF POST.