Are modern writers too pampered and precious to write great stories? In a recent post on her blog, Kristen Lamb wondered aloud if writers – those of the Western or First World persuasion anyway – have become too domesticated to truly understand and write authentically about human cares and trauma.
In developed countries, most of us have our lowest-tier needs met. We have clean running water and indoor plumbing. We know where to find food. Speaking for the middle class, we generally have shelter and access to basic healthcare, if not better than basic. Most of us have not been in a fist fight since grade school. That leaves us the time and freedom to write, or engage in almost any activity within our means and skill.
Lamb wonders if modern living has dulled both our senses and our writing. If we don’t struggle, can we relate to those who do? Can we accurately depict the efforts of a character striving for a great achievement, if we’re happy sitting on our butts? Do we care enough about any topic to write about it with passion? Can we write with intensity or do our stories reflect our marshmallow fluff lives?
She got me wondering. Could a modern writer envision the ending of The Grapes of Wrath, when Rose of Sharon suckles a starving man at her breast? Could we even imagine the depth of deprivation and desperation that would drive them to this act? Would we dare create a character capable of offering such a sacrament, simultaneously holy and debased?
Lamb turns her conversation to a discussion of how writers can inhabit characters whose lives are dramatically different from their own, through a combination of experience, observation, and imagination, but I think her original point is worth pondering.
Q. Are we too domesticated to write great stories?
1. Who’s ‘we’, Kemosabe?
Though there’s no record Steinbeck ever experienced starvation-level poverty, he worked on ranches in his youth and with migrant laborers on a sugar beet farm. At one point in his adult life, he was reportedly poor enough to steal, if not suckle. While his life was different from the Joads’, he lived close enough to observe people like them. If he didn’t come from the Dust Bowl, he knew folks who did.
While I consider myself somewhat middle class today, I’ve been on the dole and lived paycheck to paycheck working dead-end wage slave jobs. I’ve never actually gone hungry – let’s define that as no food for a day or more, or regularly skipping meals due to poverty – but there have been plenty of times I didn’t have enough cash in the bank to get a twenty from the ATM, with payday a week away. My ex was disabled and if you want to witness some dehumanizing bullshit, hang out with someone who is both poor and chronically ill when they visit their doctor or a social worker. And as a gay guy who came of age in the middle of the AIDS crisis, I’m happy to have made it to a better time.
I’ll meet Kristen halfway on her thesis: Most of us don’t – and will never – know what it’s like to live in a literal war zone. The lives of people in Afghanistan, Kiev, or even pre-peace Belfast are far removed from our own. We don’t live under the daily threat of cartel violence. And despite fears (of some) that a military dictatorship or mass roundups are just around the corner, we aren’t there yet. Our fear is driven, in part, by the fact we haven’t lived this way. It’s the terror of the unknown.
But on the other hand, we’re only 2 generations removed from the Jim Crow south. Come to my Baltimore hometown and you’ll find clear evidence of crumbling infrastructure, generational poverty, and gun violence. While driving through western Maryland a few years ago, a friend gestured up a mountain road to show me where the homes had no indoor plumbing. We were no more than a 2-3 miles from the biggest local city. Ask any survivor of a mass shooting or ongoing domestic violence, or anyone who’s served in the military in the past 25 years, if they feel like they can’t understand someone else’s trauma. We’re lucky to live in America, but not all Americans are lucky.
Very few of us have lives so insulated we don’t bump up against poverty, serious illness, and loss. Even if you haven’t felt the rough end of the stick, chances are you know someone who has. In my experience, humans have all the suffering they can handle. Our task as writers is to remember it, draw on it, and turn it into art.
2. What is ‘suffering’?
Physical and financial comfort are no protection against suffering of other kinds. No one is immune from loss or illness. Maybe you’ve never met the Joads, but you might know someone suffering from poor health, mental illness, loneliness, rejection, or crushed dreams, like Holden Caulfield, Willy Loman, Blanche DuBois, Evan Hansen, Mildred Pierce, or Ove. You might know a closeted widower (A Single Man), an abused child (Bastard Out of Carolina), someone with a terminal illness (The Fault in Our Stars), or a family affected by 9/11 (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close) or suicide (Ordinary People).
It’s very possible you’ve experienced one of those events yourself, or something similar. You may have physical comfort and food on the table and still be in pain. And loathe though I be to say something generous about the über wealthy, even they have their heartache.
We are lucky to not live in a war zone, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we are soft or pampered. Grief hurts. Mental illness hurts. Going hungry hurts. Let’s not make the mistake of viewing suffering as a competition.
3. What is ‘great’?
Our foundational and safety needs – food, water, shelter, warmth – make for compelling fiction. Audiences love Man v. Nature stories like 127 Hours or Into the Wild, in which a protagonist of comfortable means must struggle for basic necessities. Even in The Martian, Mark Watney’s foundational challenge is not finding a way off Mars, but getting to shelter. Then he has to stitch a puncture wound in his side and figure out how to grow food. Getting back to Earth is literally the last item on his list of worries.
But food and shelter aren’t our only needs. As I wrote above, humans also suffer when we lack love, whether familial, intimate, platonic, or communal. If we are lucky enough to have these things, we grieve when we lose them, which can feel worse than never having them at all. Our need for companionship is secondary to basic survival, but equally important.
And, when we are fortunate enough to have our primary and secondary needs met, we are free to focus on our psychological health and balance and our desire for fulfillment and meaning.
The theme of a ‘great’ novel doesn’t have to arise from the red zone or a war zone. We can cast our gaze upward at intangible, existential needs. We can long for something more than base survival. Great novels can encompass the search for enlightenment (Siddhartha), identity (The Awakening), life’s meaning (On the Road), or redemption (Atonement).
And when do we have the luxury of pondering the abstract? When we are physically comfortable.
4. Who cares?
And there’s the rub.
Anytime I talk about writing, I come back to this foundational question: Do you want to?
It doesn’t matter where you sit on Maslow’s Pyramid. You have the choice of what to write. Do you want to write about a topic you care about passionately? Do you want to write about characters facing physical trials or seeking safety or mourning lost love or building community or chasing fame or craving purpose in life?
Do you want to write a ‘great’ novel? Yes or no.
Can you write a great novel? That’s a question for another day.
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