Month: October 2022

Thinking Critically

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It is alarming to read in major, vetted news publications about the influence of social media on extremism. One can feel vindicated that the monstrous conspiracy theorist Alex Jones is being forced to pay nearly $1 billion to atone for his sins. But he is only one individual among millions in the US and perhaps even billions plural in the world who have fallen prey to going to extremes. It is not just conservatives–liberals and leftists can also be equally as unreasonable (think the communist bombers in Italy in the 70s, cancel culture, holistic-types who are antivaxxers.) The underlying common denominator is a lack of being able to think critically. To question one’s logic, way of thinking, organizations one belongs to, and regulating one’s emotions are paramount during this era.

We see the prominence of the right wing globally, from the US to Hungary to Brazil to Korea and everywhere in between. We see an unwillingness for people to talk to each other, but instead comment–and troll others–online. It’s easier to retweet or repost than to come up with original content, because the former only requires clicking a button. More than ever, our minds are at stake and up for grabs by algorithms, bots, and data miners. We are a culture that makes decisions based on emotion rather than careful thinking. And yet, we are a very emotionally repressed culture where people deal with difficulties through various addictions, denial, and negative behaviors.

Education can play a big role in helping kids to think for themselves when it comes to receiving information. It is also very crucial to teach them empathy. Unfortunately, these skills often get lost upon entering adulthood where one must navigate business culture, organizations, personal slights, and those who are lacking in emotional intelligence as well as plain old intelligence. It is up to us, then, as adults to remind ourselves to work on self-awareness, call out extremism in any form, and not get swayed by false rhetoric. Many people have a deep mistrust of institutions, which is quite often unjustified and fueled by our American mentality of individualism above all. In this country, we see the two poles of being brainwashed by groupthink, and the anti-establishment, anti-everything, don’t-tell-me-what-to-do anarchy.

None of this is meant to be dystopian or “us against them,” which is precisely the mentality extremists use. Rather, this is to draw attention to these sociological processes that are having very negative consequences on our world now in politics, media, freedom of speech, hatred, violence, etc. I have lost a friend to this; she has become very irrational and has taken positions on things that are frankly frightening. Consider this quote: “the mind acts like an enemy for those who do not control it.” Chomsky? A 30something ex-Silicon Valley social media strategist? A 20th century psychologist? No–it is the millennia-old wisdom of the Buddha that is still applicable today.

Revision

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I am currently revising a very long novel. I briefly discussed this as part of a post back in March (https://thewomenofletters.com/2022/03/11/%EF%BF%BCrandom-thoughts-reflections-and-musings/) but would like to take a little more time to discuss it.

The process of revision in fiction is endlessly complex and surprising, whether it be a story or a novel. Stories have to be more tightly written: things must fit together with fewer loose ends. In the novel, the challenge is that there is so much going on that the writer needs to remember everything, maintain the narrative tension, ensure that the protagonists have a narrative arc, etc. Both forms of fiction have their challenges. But mine right now is the novel, which I think is a harder undertaking when it comes to revision.

In revising my novel, I expected to have to cut a lot of material. The proverbial “kill your darlings” adage is imperative when working with a long text. I do believe we need to put down on the page whatever is our first impulse in our first draft; not doing so will shut us down, leave us subject to the crippling demon of perfectionism. The task of revision after this is to indeed kill our darlings. Why did we repeat something over and over? Why did we describe something in detail that is really a minor point? Why is there a scene that describes something not crucial to the thrust of the narrative? And do we really need that character? We ask ourselves if there is a briefer way to explain something that can be told within a shorter space. Why go on and on when something can be shown very easily in a few words? These are extremely difficult questions to implement when revising. It is very hard to kill our darlings sometimes, not only because we have a personal emotional attachment to it, but because we want the reader to feel as deeply as we do about a certain idea, scene, or character.

However, sometimes revising a long work such as a novel (or even a novella or long story) requires adding new material. Ironically, this can make the piece more “efficient”: putting in some key scenes early on can help cut material later. This really took me by surprise, especially since my manuscript is very long and my goal was to cut it down by a couple hundred pages. But just as we have cut a lot of unnecessary detail or scenes, we can add things that serve the purpose of the narrative and make for a richer or tighter or more engaging read. For example, what was a character’s backstory? Maybe a character’s narrative arc feels thin, but when we add the backstory, we understand his motivations even more. Maybe we want to understand a married couple’s dynamics through more than hearsay, not just what the wife is telling her sister, and so we need to insert a scene to see the couple interacting. Sometimes we need to create a new character, or give a character more time on the page, because that character is an agent in driving the narrative forward and increasing the stakes. These are all things I have had to do in my revision, because I felt a lack in certain areas.

The hardest thing about writing a novel is understanding the “architecture” as I call it. What is the underlying structure? What are the girders and beams and walls supporting it? Where is it weak? Do we need another beam in the opening chapters? What about that saggy middle where things seem to droop like the cables between the towers on a suspension bridge like the Golden Gate Bridge? Can we strengthen the foundation at the beginning of part three? It is a lot to keep in mind, and even for those who meticulously map out everything on paper or make drawings, creating the structure of a novel is not easy. One can find “lesser” works from the most decorated writers and Nobel laureates that lag, sag, and droop because there is no exact science to writing a literary fiction novel. As a side note, I think there is a lot literary fiction writers can learn from what are condescendingly called “potboiler” or “airport novel” (really, plot-driven) writers, because they know how to tell a damn good story and keep a reader’s attention for hundreds of pages with a juicy plot.

Countless books and theories and suggestions exist for revising, and it is up the writer to take what she needs from this plethora of information. At the end of the day, though, it is just you with the page on a laptop, trying to work everything out for yourself, a unique task which is both exasperating and marvelous.