I am reading The Sound and the Fury, by William Faulkner. What a novel! I’m intrigued by Faulkner’s evocation of character, memory and of the moral forces that drive them. And by the sheer courage and audacity of his writing! For all its difficulty it evokes a wonderfully rich portrait of a crumbling Southern family. Nothing is explained, no quarter is given. But if you want to get inside someone’s head, as he does his characters, why should you do so for nothing. The work you have o do is part of the experience.
I like this extract from his address on receiving the Nobel Prize in 1950:
“…Our tragedy today is a general and universal and physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the sprit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.
He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed – love and honour and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labours under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands…”
I’m not sure if writers today have “forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself.” But I think that some ideas stand out as somehow more ‘right’ than others, and that no amount of forcing the bad ones can make them good. My own limited experience of writing has shown me that the bits and pieces that work have drawn somehow on a memory or two of mine that is felt. The memory doesn’t have to be very significant in itself but it helps enormously if it resonates with emotion. I’ve often tried to work up ideas that seem topical or rational, and so far not one has worked. It could be something to do with my skill, but it could also be something to do with the sort of idea from which it emerges. The knack, of course if one is not to wait for inspiration all the time is to find a connection with people who might not seem at first to offer it. Quite apart from technical ability, the writer's gift is walk in their shoes.