WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE A WRITER?

In this essay I’d like to have a look at some of the qualities necessary to being a writer and then broaden the discussion to include literary authors and literature.

The Feeling Writer

It hardly seems necessary to mention that the dominant trait in a literary writer must be Feeling. Of course, someone who writes must use all their functions, but first and foremost, an author must naturally “get into the box” to be able to feel what her characters feel. This serves not only to get to know the characters but also to be able to predict what course of action they will most naturally take, and therefore through them, the author can discover the plot’s direction. In addition, the author must be able to feel what it is to live and breathe in her character’s “world”, so much so, that in some ways she becomes the character. It takes much practice to let go of yourself and fully enter into an imaginary being. And yet it is connected with Socrates’s advice, “know thyself”.

Writing characters involves finding parts of yourself that match the dominant trait in the character -- no matter if it is Sensing, Intuitive, Thinking, Feeling, Introverted, Extraverted, Judging or Perceiving. In the case of writing major characters, a writer must conceive of the four preferences together. She may do this by recalling real people she has known that exhibited certain personality traits or go into her own past to isolate, identify and confirm times when she responded in a Sensing manner instead of her typical Intuitive preference. And leading this activity is the Feeling function. She will test out actions and dialogues of different type by “feeling” if it is right or not. If her feelings tell her a character would not do or say something along those lines then she must return to her research to find what is not true about the character. In so doing, she comes to understand the character better and better. More than this, however, she is learning about real people, and ultimately about herself.

Often authors find they struggle with writing some characters, while others come more easily. As a writer, I believe this may be due to trying to capture an opposite personality. Authors aim at consistency in characters, and because it is more difficult to get into the heart and mind of an opposite type and stay there, they spend more time examining motives and histories of those more distant types. This is where studying typology may have a lot to offer the fiction writer.

The Feeling function in authors goes much further beyond writing characters, however. It also is intrinsic to the overall writing process. In beginning a story, it is especially important that the author have a deep emotional connection to the theme. The early stages of writing a story may involve trying different plotlines or premises but if the visceral feeling behind the central conflict does not hold up, then she will lose interest and not be able to complete the story. It is a truism that the writer must feel the story in her bones; that is, every part of it must be emotionally true and significant, or the story doesn’t have chance to reach the final draft.

This leads to plot. The author must stop at every shift in the story and ask, would this really happen? It is not so much the logistics she is examining, but the emotional truth of the characters’ actions and motivations. What is driving them to do this? How are they feeling in reaction to what preceded this act? This is where the author begins to see character and action as one. The unique actions a character takes will naturally grow out of who they are. In this way, the ending may take the reader by surprise at first read, but when she pauses a moment to reflect, it all makes perfect sense because she has come to know the character in the same way the author has conceived of her. If the author’s vision of the character in her world matches the vision the reader has formed during her experience with the book, and if this vision is in harmony with what the reader knows about real life, then the reader can say the book succeeds in presenting emotional truth.

Jung might propose that this ability to find common meaning in fiction is due to our shared collective unconscious. Plato called it “anamnesis”, the recollection of things we believed we were unaware of. In other words, there are concepts that we recognize to be true even though we have never consciously thought or expressed them before in words.

One way that literature does this is through language. The Feeling function leads the author’s choice of words, again, with the aim towards emotional veracity. The words we choose influence the way in which the reader understands meaning. Metaphor especially suggests great symbols and archetypes that the reader already has in place in her memory, and the right words awaken those deeper meanings.

In the next section I would like to explore some related ideas of other thinkers on the emotions in literature.

(Barber, Susan. April 2005).

THE IMPORTANCE OF DEVELOPING THE FEELING FUNCTION

How Literature Can Help

Coleridge says that deep thinking is attainable only by someone who possesses deep feeling. In literature I believe we have a natural balance between the emotional and the cognitive. Most people would agree that literature is accessed through feeling but the cognitive processes that are stirred by feeling are what have led to originality and creativity. One fine example of this is Plato’s reaction to what he perceived as the corruption in ancient Greek society, which resulted in his writing the Republic. It is impossible to say which came first, the thought or the emotion, but we may assume that his deep concern for the welfare and future of his countrymen spurred him on to exceptional writing.

One of the main ways that literature is unique, as Aristotle said, is that literature ushers us into a larger life; without it we have not lived enough to escape the confines of our parochial existence. (Nussbaum 47). What this means is not only that we may discover how people in China live, or what the lifestyle of a Roman emperor was, but also how it felt to be a young man in his first battle or what emotions arise when holding a newborn baby. Of course, in these examples the cognitive cannot be separated from the emotional without losing some of the effect. The novel is particularly adept at capturing complex and contradictory features of life while allowing the emotional texture to play a cognitive role in grasping truths about human lives. Proust tells us that truths about human psychology cannot be told through intellectual statements alone. Powerful emotions have an invaluable cognitive function in our understanding.

A second unique quality of literature is that it slows things down. One by one we can take kernels of ideas and hold them up to scrutiny, contemplate their significance and truth. For example, in real encounters we don’t always remember the exact words that were spoken, even the exact order of events, but we do recall what we were feeling at the moment. It is a process of registering visually the expression on someone’s face, in their eyes, the intensity of facial muscles, bearing of the mouth, skin tone as well as gestures, body language, quality of voice, effort of finding words, or a hesitancy that is added up to confirm our intuition. All of this information is coming at us in the heat of the moment and the words uttered may not even be heard fully. Stimuli build in degrees of emotion and we categorize accordingly in areas of our consciousness and subconsciousness. He was angry. He was furious. He was angry but more annoyed than anything. He laughed to cover his anger. His shoulders suddenly stiffened and his face went cold. In each of these we mark nuances that go on infinitely but we grasp the ideas through the emotions.

In literature, the reader is emotionally engaged with the character while being freed from the distortions of reality and the urgency of being required to think, feel and respond simultaneously. We can read first about the tension of the facial muscles and then hear what words are said. The vital details are isolated and we learn what the author wants to emphasize. We can get close enough and still retain our comfort level. Whether the character is a Russian aristocrat, a country publican or a Japanese geisha, we can be privy to their innermost secrets and desires. Proust says it is only in literature that we can fully identify with the other.

In real life as we have said there are too many obstacles to the objective examination of our lives. We may be willfully blind or obtuse. Jealousy or selfish interests create a “vulgar heat” as Nussbaum (162) calls it that prevents us from seeing our full situation. Because in fiction we read about other people, we have a cooler perception and can put ourselves in other people’s shoes. We feel love without feeling possessive, insecure or prejudiced. We hold no reservations because there are no consequences. Granted, we must have some experience of the emotion to take it further, but it is not an exaggeration to claim that we can understand, say, the conflict in filial love better in Henry James than we do in our own lives.

A third quality in literature that is unique to the form centers on imagination. The author and the reader tacitly agree to leave the world temporarily behind and begin a magical voyage together. If the author is able to exercise skill in shaping a picture, the reader willfully suspends his disbelief and goes for the ride.

Coleridge (202) accepts part of this as the process behind creation. There is much debate also going back to Plato, on whether the writer is divinely gifted with a “genius” that allows for special powers to pass through him, or whether it is a result of hard work and a long apprenticeship. Coleridge, on the genius side with Plato, believes that the poet has a primary imagination — a fundamental, non-voluntary, largely unconscious synthesizer of experience that receives information from the senses. This reiterates Kant’s take on things; that we do not adapt to the world, we order the world according to human ways of seeing it. More importantly, Coleridge states the poet also has a secondary imagination, which consciously creates imaginary worlds. In other words, it is a consciously controlled creativity. (Egan 23).

Why should people read literature? What makes it worthwhile? Why not just investigate life? One reason, as I’ve said, is that we have not lived enough. Also, that real life is too murky, too tangled up with other things. Nussbaum (46) tells us “good fiction makes the reader a participant and a friend”; a novel becomes a reflective tool in our lives. It makes an emotional appeal to lure us in, then chooses its particularity for study, and shows all its variety and indeterminacy before making a point. It encourages us to think and feel about subjects that might otherwise be too far from our experience. Morally, politically and socially this cannot be underestimated. Novels delineate some aspect of life that will reveal what the author has to say on the subject. As Nussbaum (46) observes, “all living is interpreting; all action requires seeing the world as something”. Too much of life would otherwise pass us by, and without its heightening affect on our awareness, we are not seeing and feeling with enough precision and keenness. Simply put, without literature we are not as alive as we could be. The effect is both horizontal and vertical; we live through literature more widely and more deeply.

Ethics and Feelings

It is difficult to speak about art without considering ethics. In experiencing a work aesthetically, we may find ourselves at odds with how we feel about the work morally. One example is Leni Riefenstahl’s artistically excellent film, Triumph of the Will, that happens to glorify the Nazis. I would like now to explore the idea that art will not make us more moral but suggest it does have the capability of nourishing our moral faculties and increasing our discernment. In this section I will take this aspect of literature into a deeper realm, to that of feeling, artistic creation and moral achievement.

In many novels the author endeavors to show us characters in order to bring us around to view other people as qualitatively unique beings. As readers, we get to know their individual traits and circumstances so that sympathetic, tender emotions arise, which in turn elicit feelings of impartial love for these characters as if they were genuine human beings. We could say they have our moral attention, and we perceive their particular lives with intellect and feeling. Our moral imagination reaches out to understanding. By identifying with them and allowing ourselves to participate vicariously in their emotional responses to events in the story, we become enlightened by more thoughts and more emotional experiences. Nussbaum (162) states that if we can carry this over into reality, we might be willing to see more and also be more willing to be touched by life.

For this transfer to occur, there must be a moral agency in the novelist. Since, as I have said, she is drawing from her own view of life, her values and therefore her own personal truths, writing is in the main a moral act and the writer must be responsible for her ideas. Morality, in the best literature, is presented with clear vision; it is precision rather than vagueness. Nussbaum (164) says the ideal moral stance aims for “norms of rightness” and ethical objectivity. At the same time it is internal and human. Each author will present an individual vision of life and how to live it but after we have read enough quality works, we begin to get a sense of what the norms are. There is a collective of norms presented in literature, and this is what we must learn from, as a guide to good living. The subject in each work is the raw, unvarnished splice of life that when taken as a body of work is the history of human social experience. No one view is fully “correct”; we latch onto parts that speak to us but reject others. In total, we begin to see that each life has its own story and that if one thing is changed we are veering off into another story. And that is true in reality, for every human life. Each is unique, with its own moral universe. We are reminded that there are no absolutes for “right living” or “right reason” and that no one rule fits all.

One of the vital roles of the novel is to lead us outside morality to test our ability to adapt. In the novel we are accomplices to lawlessness and irrationality at times; the point is to show us the limits of morality. (51). Thoughts and actions are connected not to rules but to contexts. We need to know not just simply what happens at a given moment but what people think and feel. Twain gives us Huck Finn in deep conflict. According to the law he should report a runaway slave but his affection for the man and his understanding of circumstances overrides what without discernment might be judged as the correct thing to do. (Elgin 194).

On another interesting level, works of literature echo between one another, acting as moral advisors. That is to say, literature can learn morally from itself. Because all serious literature is a critical act, what we learn from life and the benefit of historical hindsight is sometimes “corrected” by a newer work. Steiner (12) says, “aesthetic creation is intelligent in the highest degree.” How could it not critique itself? He gives examples, such as Virgil directing our interpretation of Homer; then Dante on Virgil, again Milton on Dante. As we read Joyce’s Ulysses we read Homer’s Odyssey along with him. It is a comparative act, and in this way the past lives on in the present. Just the same is James’s revision of George Eliot’s Middlemarch in his own Portrait of a Lady. Tolstoy wrote Anna Karenina in order to improve on Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. (14). Successively, each writer sends forth his new creation into the light of his own ambition. What is left out or altered in the more recent work is perceived as a deficiency in the older version.

Literature over the ages, because it can learn from itself, might be considered a morally self-evaluating system. To be successful at updating a work, an author must ingest the whole of previous works on the subject and make her own advanced judgments. This is what it means to be writing with the ghost of James Joyce looking over your shoulder. It is one of the most difficult hurdles new writers face. In the next section we will look at other challenges made by literature, challenges made to us as human beings.

The Challenge of Literature

If we travel back to Lascaux and the Cro-Magnon cave paintings, Steiner (137) reminds us that there is language, and art, because there is the “other”. Awareness of the other runs deep in our consciousness and we desire to announce our presence in order to guard our own experience from oblivion. We communicate in words, yearn to fulfil the dialogical nature of our existence that Taylor speaks of. A poem issues out from ourselves towards another person. The wonder of mimesis at Lascaux erases the inhuman “otherness” of existence and brute force. It is perhaps the earliest attempt to reduce the instability and estrangement of reality. At terrifying moments we are strangers to ourselves, lost in confusion within ourselves. We must leave ourselves and connect; try to take comfort in what is similar, not different. And yet what is worse, we can remain strangers to those who would know us best.

Shakespeare tells us that nothing could demonstrate to Othello the devotion of Desdemona; that Lear had to settle for filial loyalty, unable to be assured his daughter’s quiet love was sincere. We can never know for certain what other people are thinking; and Shakespeare shows us the penalty we pay for our mutual inscrutability. (Elgin 190). Without the arts we would remain unknown to ourselves and strange to one another. (Steiner 140).

Literature of significance says to us, “Change your life”. An intelligent voice appeals to our way of thinking and feeling and proposes a challenge. The author seems to be asking, What do you feel now? And now? How does this affect the possibilities in your life? Steiner (142) remarks on the indiscretion of serious art; it invades our last privacies and exposes our unknown motives and beliefs. The early Greeks associated the Muses with the wonder of persuasion. An encounter with the aesthetic is akin to waking, enrichment, complication, darkening and an unsettling of sensibility. (143). The immediacy of what happens to us when we read comes unbidden. How this penetration occurs is not wholly known. We’ve offered possibilities earlier when we spoke of how language, rhythm, patterns, appeals to memory and intuitive processes combine to work on our psyche. Freud places more weight on the subconscious; Jung on recognition of archetypal figures and situations. Steiner (180) describes it as a psychological wobble in our time-sense produced by the familiarity of the “coordinates” in a work of art. That literature draws upon and balances both cognitive and emotional elements is proffered as the reason for this immediacy. When we are emotionally engaged, our minds are more attentive and our opportunity for learning is heightened. Emotions code the information we are receiving and it enters more deeply into our awareness.

When we are moved by what we read, we respond, either in thinking, discussions with others, or sometimes in writing our own stories. Our interpretation is in itself a moral act. We find that our response to what is on the page is immediate, no matter how long ago the author laid down her words. With time and experience in reading, we form an intensity of sight, what we might call a literary intelligence.

That literature is immediate cannot be refuted, but there is still one further step. In the next section I would like to discuss how creative writing moves the reader from a passive state to a more active one, involving thinking and feeling and the shaping of life.

Using Feeling in Creative Writing

Creative writing is more immediate than literature because through the act of writing we must divulge who we are. Bloom (63) says characters in literature learn by overhearing themselves speak, and this could be said of real people as well, and what we reveal to ourselves when we listen to our conversations with others. In the act of writing, I feel this is taken to the extreme; the proof is on the page. There before us in black and white is the view we have of others, our moral values and an outlook on life; all of which we must take responsibility for in one way or another. It is often difficult, but one method is by facing ourselves head on. Is this how we want to be seen? If we are honest, we do not turn away from evidence of moral blind spots and shortcomings. In recognizing these, we have a wonderful opportunity. We can improve ourselves. The active learning that occurs through writing cannot be underestimated. The growth curve is too steep.

When a student first attempts to write, the struggle, both inner and outer, as person and writer, is so great that he must go to literature for guidance. Becoming aware of a narrow view might be ameliorated by having at look at how Austen, for example, handles the topic. It is a comparative method of learning where the beginning writer verifies his attitude about a situation through an admired writer. In fact, this will go on for as long as the student continues to write. Even advanced writers realize they are under continuous mentorship with the great writers, as we have mentioned. An author needs to understand Homer, Tolstoy and Joyce before he can say something generous and significant. With fledgling writers, a moral attitude will be absorbed along with the search for writing techniques. Raiding the short stories and novels of the masters for concepts, characters, plots and themes, is just the first stage; soon the student senses that the elements are impossible to separate from attitudes. Furthermore, the moral stance almost always comes first. (excerpted from Barber, Susan. The Immediacy of Writing. SFU: Master’s Thesis, 2004)

Conclusion

On the “J Page”, I will discuss the teaching of writing more in detail. Here it has been my intention to offer some ideas about how Feeling plays a central role in writing at every level. When we examine writing, characters and therefore ourselves through the lens of typology, we have at hand a tool for the greater understanding of human beings. We begin to see patterns and recognize why we identify strongly with some characters and “don’t get” others. But through writing and reading about people who are different from ourselves, we exercise our moral imagination and, when combined with an understanding of type, we are able to make great progress in comprehending differences in others.