On writing

I write this in Paris, where I’ve come for a week’s change of scene and to catch up with work. I haven’t written on this Substack for longer than my advertised schedule, for which I apologise to any impatient subscribers. A lot of things in my life have changed in the last year, and one of them is that I’m now entirely in charge of my own routine, with a lot of competing demands on my time. This is liberating in many ways and in other ways disastrous, for easily imagined reasons.

I find that one of the slightly paralysing things about having a Substack is that you can write about anything you want.  Perhaps others find this an unmitigated joy but I do not. My mind gapes passively at the possibilities stretching endlessly before it. Occasionally ideas reach in and grab me, but not as often as I’d like. Unlike my other current writing gig (a fortnightly column for UnHerd), I don’t have an efficient editor feeding me new ideas, or nudging me to file by 5pm. My inner editor needs a decent managing editor, and my inner managing editor needs an editor-in-chief. There’s just no satisfactory chain of command in there.

 I also don’t yet have a clear sense of the game I’m playing here – what the rules are that I need to respect, or could deliberately break for effect. In other words, I don’t quite know what my genre is. Yes, I could endlessly mine the rich seam of total lunacy in queer culture (and don’t worry - I’ll be back at that coalface soon) but I don’t want to only do that. And nor do I want to turn into one of those culture warriors whose official persona has got too close to their subscriptions base. I have no acerbic take on critical race theory. Sorry to disappoint, but it’s true.

 In these circumstances, what else to do but to fall back on that old staple of the blocked writer and write about the practice of writing itself? I am in Paris, after all. A couple of nights ago, I drank too much with a real writer, a novelist and journalist (hello, Robert) – someone who takes writing very seriously and does it beautifully. We sat at his neighbourhood bar in the 10th, watching minor pavement dramas unfold, with various glamorous locals dropping by at our table intermittently to smoke, chat, and complain. I’ve never wanted to live in Paris more. In between, Robert did me the courtesy of talking to me about my writing, in a way hardly anyone has ever done: not about the content but about the form. It was a thrill.

From about the age of 11 til my twenties, I wanted to be a writer, by which I meant a novelist. In the piles of books I lugged home from the library to read at the weekend, the clever weirdo heroines of the stories I liked most would want to be novelists too. Jessica Vye in A Long Way From Verona; Cassandra Mortmain in I Capture The Castle, Jo March in the Little Women books, Joey from The Chalet School series. Being a teenager though, I didn’t do much about it, except to ask for a typewriter for my birthday, and keep an extremely boring diary. (“Got up. Rearranged the furniture in my room. Read some Hamlet”, I seem to remember one riveting entry going).

Fictional characters who wanted to be authors also tended to be readers, and through them I learnt what else I should be reading in order to be a fully rounded person, according to the various archaic 19th and early 20th century visions of their creators. Dickens, Bunyan, Chaucer, Defoe, Swift, Flaubert, Cervantes are some of the big names I remember struggling with in my early teens, probably way too early, because I assumed my development required it. I think it’s possible that the more of the greats I read, the less I felt able to ever see myself in the same profession. I then went to University and studied French literature, but with a view to taking it all apart not losing myself ecstatically in it. Fiction became work, and I disengaged emotionally. By the time I hit my mid-twenties I had abandoned the ambition of being a “proper” author by my own lights, and sublimated it into writing a philosophy PhD about imagination and film. In lieu of writing fiction, fiction became my philosophical topic and the focus of my academic career.

Writing philosophy is an art, in its own way. There are rules and you have to learn them – indeed, you have to work them out yourself because nobody will ever tell you what they are. After you’ve done that, you can satisfy some level of creativity by working ingeniously within the constraints already set: the canonical views about the topic in question, the existing objections made by others, the range of argumentative moves generally permitted, and so on. People pretend that the aim of academic philosophy is truth, but more often I think it’s to make an original and clever point that isn’t obviously false. Once you know the rules, you can occasionally break them too. Most academics do predictable things, or make tiny adjustments to existing bodies of thought. Truly brilliant philosophers pull off breathtakingly unexpected moves, or even change the rules for everyone after them.

With a few exceptions, though, most philosophers are uninterested in writing with an eye to aesthetics. I know I wasn’t. I was busy churning out the required quota of at least one article per year, aiming for (at least) an “internationally excellent” publication according to UK benchmarks, with a silent prayer that it didn’t suffer the abject humiliation of being “recognized nationally”. Writing well was not particularly a concern, though of course I didn’t want to do it badly. Nor was it a concern of many others I knew. Academic philosophy generally is the last place anyone sane would go to find mellifluous prose. Pretensions of authors in that direction are usually strangled, if not at birth then at least by the time of the second referee’s report.

The pseudo-technicality of the discipline is part of the problem, particularly in the branch of philosophy I was in (what’s known as “analytic” philosophy). People can’t just be told things; an audience A has to be told of proposition p on the basis of an informant I asserting sentence S. There’s also a general reticence to say anything straightforwardly. No philosopher has ever used a positive when a double negative would leave him less exposed to possible objection. For instance, you never say a particular intellectual position is plausible; you say it is “not implausible”.  As the double negatives mount up, so does an ugly congestion of sense.

Another problem is that you write with anonymous referees in mind – referees who, you are aware, could be anyone from superstar professors to pedantic graduate students. Writing for this ill-defined a hypothetical audience has the effect of making you spell out simple things in overly laboured ways, as if you can’t trust the mind of the reader to grasp them on their own. (Indeed, based on my experience of anonymous referees, quite often you can’t). Meanwhile there’s a simultaneous tendency, at least unconsciously, to gin up the obfuscation and impenetrability in other ways, in hope of an impression of depth and seriousness and the avoidance of devastating objections to your central thesis that will put back publication for at least another year. The former effect means that, for instance, you can’t use a demonstrative like “this” or “that” without spelling out what exactly it demonstrates. The latter means that you can read the same three pages in a mainstream journal in your research area approximately 46 times and still not have a clue what the hell it is saying. Even when you wrote it.

For whatever reason, most philosophers just don’t care much about form, caring only about content – even when their topic is the form-content distinction itself. What formal tropes they adopt tend to be nicked from other philosophers, not because it was good writing in the first place but only because it makes you look more sophisticated, or like part of an in-crowd. When I started out, I was reading a lot of Elizabeth Anscombe and Philippa Foot, which in practice meant my authorial voice sounded like it had just retired hurt from the hockey pitch at a 1930s girls’ boarding school. Others seem to prefer the atmosphere of a 18th Century parsonage, where people “utter” rather than speak, questions are “nice” in Jane Austen’s sense, problems are approached like maidens “at first blush”, certain assumptions are treated as “brute”, and people inexplicably say “thus-and-so” a lot. Each of these verbal tics then re-emerges incongruously in a thousand PhD theses written by hipster 20-somethings.

I’m not pretending I was immune to any of these habits. I was not. One strange feature of my current situation is that sales of my only academic monograph – a dry and technical book about imagination and fiction - have increased significantly, something fairly unusual with an academic book that’s several years old. I feel very sorry for the poor sods that joyfully crack that spine like they’ve discovered Material Girls: The Prequel. May I take this opportunity to apologise to any readers here to whom this applies.

When writing for academic audiences, it was always obvious to me that there were certain things I couldn’t say. Understandably, jokes and irreverence were out for nearly everybody, as was any reference to sex - though the latter tended to emerge unconsciously anyway. (I first realised this when re-reading an old article of mine about pornography in which - in an attempt to talk about the perceiving self-  I found I had talked about “the bare seat of experience”.)

But there were other more subtle boundaries too - so subtle that I was unaware of them consciously. In academia, for a long time, there were things I could not even think let alone write. What would have been the use to me of questioning the catechism of the modern progressive university ? My career progression depended on assent, as did my social status at work and an easy life. Indeed, one interesting thing I observed in my last days at Sussex was that uniformly, the very few colleagues prepared to stand up for me publicly were those already considered “difficult” by peers.

The most I could do, for most of my working life, was to “entertain” the falsehood of various progressive principles for short and focused periods, safe in the knowledge that my cognitive objective was really to find ways to see off objections to those principles and so further cement their status. What I couldn’t do was let myself genuinely acknowledge the open possibility that some established progressive principle was wrong. But then my university started telling me that transwomen were women. And I belatedly found that even I had my limits for epistemic sleepwalking.

Nowadays, as I say, I write exactly what I like. This freedom may be somewhat paralysing but it’s also the best thing ever. No obsessive grad student, or Gender Studies professor panicking about their career, can whip up a mob on social media or report what I publish to my superiors - because there are no superiors. No anonymous referee can defend their patch by finding disingenuous reasons to reject my submissions. No boss can haul me in for a frosty chat - or worse, a friendly one.

And I can write in whatever emotional register I feel like. Writing as an academic, I always did have trouble suppressing my contemptuous side. It would emerge, half-strangled but still perceptible, towards arguments or authors I found fatuous. Editors would patiently reign me in. Now I can be scathing - outright mocking, even. It’s glorious. And nor do I have to wait years between creation and publication. I press “send”, and thousands of people – you, even! - read me, within days. It can be scary, especially knowing that so many enemies stand ready to pore over every word, and extract bits in order to ridicule or defame me to audiences I’ll never see. But it’s still worth it.

Occasionally now, I get approaches from friendly faces working in Universities, inviting me to apply for full-time jobs there. I politely decline. I know that in leaving mainstream academia, I’ve inadvertently gained something incredibly precious, which enlivens my life immeasurably. I’ve gained a full-throated voice. How could I ever go back?

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