Post by Matt Morrison
Last week, I began co-teaching one of our creative writi
ng courses with the playwright Ben Musgrave. And when Ben asked the class to write down something they believed in ‘as a writer’, I thought I’d take part in the exercise too. At first I was slightly surprised by what I wrote: ‘your writing needs to be true enough’. But as we started talking about our different answers, I realised I’d been thinking through versions of Ben’s question for a very long time.
The search for ‘authenticity’ and’ truth’ is a preoccupation for many writers. And at the same time, we’re often given advice like ‘write what you know’ – as if that will automatically confer some kind of truthfulness on our work. But writers are always champing at the bit to write what they don’t know, just as readers want to read what is new and unfamiliar. (Which reminds me of something similar I once heard a theatre director say: that an audience most wants an authentic voice from a world they’ve never been to.)
Writers quickly understand, therefore, that truth and truthfulness are very slippery ideas. What will happen to them both as our imaginations take flight, as characters drawn from our own experience develop lives of their own? And perhaps more worryingly, how can you be sure that your work speaks to your own wider sense of truth? Your feelings about the way the world is, or ought to be. Not all writers are motivated by such ‘moral’ concerns, but many of us worry about the ‘meaning’ of our work, and how that meaning translates onto our own values, our own beliefs about what is true.
The problem for me is that I always find it impossible to quite pinpoint meaning – at least, not without reducing what I’m writing to a banal platitude, or trivially obvious statement. It’s also impossible to ever say, once and for all, what I believe about something. Instead, I find myself constantly testing the things I feel most certain about, unable to avoid the possibility that I’m wrong, that things aren’t really that way at all. In other words, I never know what the whole truth is about what I’m writing, or about my own values, or what I think might need to change about the world.
Which is where true enough comes in – a strategy, maybe, to stop me becoming frozen in the headlights, confused and intimidated by the difficulty in achieving complete truthfulness or authenticity. I find that I can continue to have faith in something I’m working on as long as there is at least some truth – some moments of recognition, some details from my own life and experience which I feel, for now, I can stand by. Perhaps, for me, truth is like a single drop of dye in a pipette, with the power to colour an entire cup of water.
All this is why, when another writer comes to me and says that they are stuck with their idea – when they’ve lost interest, or belief in it – I suggest that they give the story, or one of its characters, a little bit of themselves. To hand over a detail from their own life. Because usually that tiny injection of the author’s real, lived experience is enough to re-vitalise the story, and rekindle the writer’s passion for telling it.
Matt Morrison, 5 October 2016
WRITE WESTMINSTER BLOG 
I think it’s important to stay open to inspiration. It comes from everywhere. Don’t rely too much on your self as the muse when you get stuck with a work.
Even if an author puts nothing directly from their own life into their writing and everything they write about is completely fabricated and fictional, it must contain truth, a reflection of who they are, their life experience, their ideas, fears, desires, imagination, the effects of their surroundings, their relation to the world, albeit perhaps an unconscious truth. Why the author has chosen to write about a particular subject, or what the meaning is – maybe they can’t explain it. But is that something to worry about? Does the extent to which an author has the ability to see meaning or truth in their own work make the work any less meaningful or truthful?
I would say don’t force it and try make it more truthful or meaningful or personal by glueing on some bits of yourself if your original idea doesn’t stand up to what you wanted it to be or you can’t connect with it. You’ll end up with some mutated Frankenstein-type monster, made out of dead body parts. Let inspiration come to you naturally and if it doesn’t then move on to something else that does or until it does.
Don’t be afraid to detach from your work and see it for what it is, to reduce it if you must. To locate it from another angle. To be comfortable with your uncertainty about what it is. The absence of what you perceive to be truth in a work may be revealing – it might tell you that you’re suppressing something deep down inside you that you aren’t ready to share with the world. Take that and learn from it. Maybe the material you put into a work of fiction is more truthful and honest than you know, more so than when you consciously attempt to be honest.
Sometimes we can fail in what we set out to do in terms of getting a message across or connecting our work to what we believe is truth, but that doesn’t make our writing a failure. It can stand alone as a work of art. It may contain the most beautiful prose, or a radical story, or memorable character, something unique and still work without being a self-portrait. Somebody else may be able to make much better sense of it than we can. It could be a rough, unpolished idea. A fragment of a vision. And it could still work. As the builders working in my house said when I made a joke about how narrow the newly constructed hallway is: ‘ it is what it is!’. Writers and artists often apply meaning to their work after its finished anyway. We’re trying to interpret and make sense of our writing as we go on.
Some songwriters don’t play old songs they wrote about their ex or overthrowing the government when they were young because they don’t feel that way anymore. They are too concerned about truth. Some songwriters are able to ‘act’ through a song, without changing it. Others sometimes go back to the original and change the lyrics, a line here or there, to give it a meaning that they can connect with now, to alter the words and meaning to fit with their present values. George Harrison changed the words to The Beatles songs while on tour in the mid-70s in order to reflect his new-found spirituality. It was enough for people to cry sacrilege!
If you must apply some new idea of authenticity, some self to your work, just so you can reconnect with it, to ignite the it, to make it ‘truth enough’, then you may lose its original essence – by polluting the idea that inspired you to begin writing in the first place.
Perhaps a writer has lost inspiration, they’ve lost their direction – they don’t know what their message is anymore. Or maybe they don’t feel the same way and have the values, attitude or emotion they had when they started. That’s OK. It’s something I’ve experienced and have got stuck on when I can’t connect with a song I’ve previously written. We as humans have ever changing moods and perspectives. Our perceptions of our own work change with time, just as our tastes in other things change. What you have written so far already stands, to paraphrase Satre’s definition of literature: an objective expression of subjectivity. You can learn from it once you can step outside of it. You can work with what you’ve got once you know what it is. But you don’t have to commit to it. You can move on from it or keep chipping away at the work, add more clay and raw materials from yourself until it becomes a more like image of yourself now, that you’re more comfortable with, but then its less of a representation of the idea and person you who had the idea when you first started. You could go on forever in that way, continually adding bits of yourself, in an attempt to get to the truth, or truth enough. All the while diluting the purity of the idea, the vision, the inspiration, with too much present and up-to-date meaningfulness.
Don’t think that by adding a conversation you overheard on the bus or a memory you had of your parents divorce when you were a kid is going to make your work suddenly explode! You could get even suspend the reader’s disbelief of the projected world you have created by making it too real, too honest. To quote Oscar Wilde “All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling”.
Authenticity is a subjective matter, a question of what one values. You may have an idea of authenticity as people would a pair of Levi’s – a sense, however superficial, of something genuine or close to genuine, ‘truth enough’, more ‘real’ than another brand of jeans. That’s excellent branding/marketing, that we can be sold on a product because it epitomizes authenticity. But what does authenticity mean to a writer? And isn’t the answer transient and likely to alter as our values change? And is it important?
To extend the abstract concept of authenticity to other forms of garments: if someone wears a jumper that they knitted themselves, gathers the wool from a sheep they reared, uses the needles their grandmother once owned, they may well feel more connected to it, sentimental even, and it may evoke a sense of authenticity. But does it make it any better as a jumper? Or any more comfortable to wear?
If they instead bought a jumper from the high-street or in a charity shop, a jumper which they had no direct involvement with during the labour process, to compare it to, could it be possible that the high-street jumper is more attractive, more durable, with brighter colours, softer materials, machine washable, better stitching (overall a slightly better jumper than the home-made one) without all of the blood, sweat and tears (let’s call it love) put into making it? Would they be being untruthful to themselves if they decided to wear that instead of the home-made one?
Regardless of where it comes from, isn’t the fact they are wearing a jumper of a particular variety still an external expression of themselves, a truth therein, a reflection of their personality, of their taste, of their uniqueness or conformity in relation to the surrounding world?
If they then add something of their own to the jumper, a badge, or an iron-on patch, that signifies something personal to them. Then I presume they have crossed over the boundaries of supposed inauthenticity, or untruth into truth enough.
Now, if I took a list at random, say the Top 10 most popular books of all time, rearranged the words in the titles to form a somewhat pleasing, if slightly incomprehensible cut-up poem with a vague narrative – I have not committed any words from my vocabulary, no articulated experience from my life. Other than the action / process of rearranging the words in an aesthetically pleasing way I am not involved in the material. Does that make the text inauthentic? Is it less of an expression or representation of myself than if I’d written a list of my top 10 favourite books and arranged them in a random order? Or if I’d thought about my childhood and written a list of 10 things that reminded me of childhood and then re-arranged it?
What I’m trying to say is that even if an idea for a conversation or situation comes from somewhere else that’s not directly a part of your life, if it’s still part of the imaginary world you’ve created, or from someone else’s life, or a bit of dialogue from the telly or a radio drama, other works of fiction, advertisements. It’s what you do with it that counts. And creating something original and powerful in art, literature, music does not necessitate you sprinkle some of your dandruff over the canvas, or spit at the crowd or chop off your ear on stage or share your tears with the world. We may lead dull, reclusive existences, with very little in the way of interaction with the outside world and yet still have the imagination to create great dialogue, adventures, characters and stories. Worry about how close or meaningful in relation to yourself the story is later when somebody is interviewing you about whether or not you’re for real, and to address the question of those concerned about the authenticity of your descriptions of working on a market stall in Sheffield, or being kidnapped by armed robbers, or being an immigrant, or waking up in deep space after a 5,000 year sleep, or being a Puerto Rican fisherman, or visiting a prostitute in Paris, or dying, or being a crocodile, or being a movie star, or flying a broomstick or being a smuggler in the 18th century.
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Fantastically interesting rejoinder, AJH – thanks so much for engaging. I agree with much of what you say – but not quite all. (And of course, the way we deal with dilemmas of truth must be entirely personal.) I do think that our writing cannot help but be autobiographical – to have an imprint of our ‘truth’ that doesn’t have to be sought after. But we also have to communicate that truth beyond ourselves, and that takes sculpting, and sculpting begins with self-awareness. That’s when we – or I at least – start to struggle with questions like truth and authenticity. I can’t quite bring myself to leave them to chance. Anyway, I shall be mulling over what you’ve said more in the next few days… (MM)
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