The Fears of the Old-School Writer
And why being controversial is key
On the first of January 2025, I gave my writing one look and was confronted with the fact that some people won’t like it. And that idea was, paradoxically, quite liberating.
This is not exactly what I wanted to think on the first day of the new year, but with this realisation came a sense of freedom. For long I had struggled with the idea of being cancelled, of having angry GoodReads reviewers damn my (future) book for being too old-fashioned, for including traditional themes and tropes that are only found in 19th century literature, for refusing to write graphic ‘spice’ scenes and explicit battle scenes.
At university, I discovered that I had to hide my old-school self. If I dared to claim that not everything could be literature, and that some literary genres were not as appealing to me as others, I was told to ‘withhold my opinion’. I remember that we had a professor who made us read highly explicit poems. Apparently, a graphic poem about a woman who wants to be ‘f*cked’ is just as worthy to study as a poem by Keats or Amanda Gorman. I’d like to digress.
Whilst those who prefer Hardy, Ishiguro (for I believe his writing to be literary, even if it is modern), and Sir Walter Scott still ‘exist’, our voices are drowned out by the championing of TikTok/Booktok reads, so-called feminist reads that are more akin to stream-of-conciousness ramblings about sexuality, and, on the flip side of that, toxic ‘steamy’ romances featuring a vapid heroine and a controlling patriarchal bro.
Political and societal fads aside, another fear is the cheapness of modern prose. Staccato, choppy prose, often beginning with ‘I’: I this, I that, I did this, I do that. Prose without soul, prose that is bent on describing emotions as vividly and cheaply as possible, devoid of poetry and literary mysticism. I prefer to write long sentences and experiment with different kinds of prose, flirting with unorthodox ways of writing as well as traditional ones.
Is the modern literary mindset still open to long sentences or experimentalist writing? Or do we, the smartphone generation, hanker for Morse code books? And with the onslaught of AI, which can imitate Tolkien and other forms of writing in a cheap, shallow way, is there room for long Dostoevsky-style prose, or detailed descriptions of Nature? I remember watching a YouTube video about a reader’s pet-peeves. She was sick of detailed descriptions of the countryside- Tolkien did it, so we don’t have to do it anymore. But isn’t Tolkien’s artistic evocations of forests, wastelands, and mountains the reason why he is so well-loved? What’s wrong with reading about Nature?
Rebel Against Modernity and Current Ideologies
Old-souls like myself may look at the state of contemporary literature and cringe. The problems that I have listed are serious threats to writing and to culture as a whole, and they can be severely demotivating.
However, problems make the writer, and rebellion is a literary tradition. Vasyl Stus was a Ukrainian poet and member of the Ukrainian dissident movement. He was arrested for ‘anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda’, and was posthumously awarded the national title ‘Hero of Ukraine’ title (he died in a Soviet work camp, most likely executed). The London Ukrainian review writes that:
‘Stus’s lyric work is never too far from his civic engagement. Even in his less overtly political poems — and the more introspective, philosophical texts constitute the majority of his corpus — he seamlessly weaves the values that are fundamental to human rights into his poetic tissue: individual and collective freedom, the ethical imperative, the power of the lyrical — and legal — subject, the search for the truth.’
The shards of our pain
keep calling us to battle.
-Vasyl Stus
I’d like to encourage aspiring writers with a love for literature- for real literature, not mass-produced Booktok bestsellers- to be inspired by Stus’ words. Yes, it is painful to see how cheap prose and toxic romances dominate the market. It is painful to see the degeneration of people’s reading habits, the swarms of poorly-written books clog up the market. But the greatest writers were not those who aimed for commercial success, they were the ones who fought back against the (dangerous) hypes and ideas of their day. Their pain called them to battle.
Greatness is never achieved by bending the knee to some pathetic idea. It is by being rebellious, by being an anarchist in the domain of literature. In fact, history is written by those who dared- Martin Luther, Baruch de Spinoza, Mary Wollstonecraft, Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks. So let that inform you. Success does not lie in pandering to the trend of the day. It lies in defying it.
I hope this post was of use to anyone who loves writing and doesn’t like what’s going on in the bookish world today. Please let me know what you think in the comments below.
Till next time,
Maryse.
SOURCES USED: Ukraine, the Forging of a Nation by Yaroslav Hrytsak
https://www.londonukrainianreview.org/posts/shards-of-our-pain-poems-by-stus