How do your inspirations affect your writing, and is their influence beneficial for a piece?

As an eleven year old I started writing short stories about a suave secret agent, sometimes explicitly Bond, sometimes with the name changed, and it was the sense of writing into a world that I was so enamoured by which sparked my initial excitement for writing. I can’t honestly say that I’ve written any Bond related stories/scripts in quite a number of years, and yet recently I noticed that I was able to trace the Bond influence through the scripts that I write now, even if it’s only in the tiniest of details.

This shouldn’t come as any great surprise. Of course our inspirations and influences affect our writing, it’s an inevitable fact, just as it is that the rest of our culture also shapes our work.  The question then is, is it a good thing to pick out the influences from a person’s work, or should it remain a detached and solitary piece? My answer is undoubtedly yes. All texts whether fictional or not are connected through Barthes’ tissue of quotations. Take Emily Dickinson for example, her references to Shakespeare in ‘Drama's Vitallest Expression is the Common Day’ only serve to enrich the text, connecting it and her other work to pre-existing stories and associations and allowing it to interact with a whole history of work and criticism. 

Not that it is possible, but if a writer managed to cut their piece off from any associated texts then it would only be a death knoll for their writing. A text lives and breathes through its interaction with other works, it’s what makes it exciting. Why would you deprive your writing of that?

A Writer Should be Invisible. Agree or Disagree?

No writer should be invisible. Every accessible detail about them is relevant to readings; whether that’s concerning their ideologies, where in the world they live, or simply how many cats they own. All of these details potentially can shape and even birth new ways to read a text. That’s not to say that I would advocate a New Critical approach and favour the author’s intended meaning above any others, but it is as relevant to readings as any other, and details of their lives are inevitably going to be useful when interpreting their work. Take Dickinson for example, the knowledge that she was often absent from society and spent a lot of her time alone has had an extraordinary effect on the way her work is now read. ‘Observational’ is a word that often turns up when Dickinson is discussed and it’s worth thinking about to what degree that word choice is influenced by the knowledge of her reclusive nature. 

No text suffers from knowledge about the author, time period, social/political situation etc. Every piece of information that is brought to bear on a text helps explore new avenues of investigation, or perhaps challenges existing ones. If a writer is invisible both within the words on the page and in the public/critical eye, then the result is always going to be a poorer understanding of the text.

Is it necessary for a writer to write about the social/political issues of their time?

The idea that it’s necessary for any writer to have to write on a certain topic or about certain ideals is ridiculous. It’s just as ridiculous as believing that someone can write something that isn’t steeped in the social/political issues of their day. There’s no feasible way to cut out those influences whether you write a science fiction novel set a thousand years in the future, or a biopic on Shakespeare. Every current belief is going to inform your story in a meaningful way, even if you aren’t directly challenging or upholding the status quo. Now, the idea that you have to write about certain things or in a specific way in order to get published is unfortunately very much a reality. But that’s a different question really. What is clear is that even if you write the most squeaky clean, publisher friendly, non ideological challenging text that you can, it is still very much a part of the time period’s cultural fabric. 

Emily Dickinson may have written about the American Civil War, her poetry often can be read to suggest that she did, but ultimately it doesn’t matter. That’s not to dismiss the work of critics such as Tyler Hoffman, I think that their work is extremely valuable. Instead I simply mean that knowing whether a writer consciously wrote about something shouldn’t restricted a reading of their work. No text stands alone, but is instead intertwined with all other documents from its time period, and those before, creating a complex whole that’s full of competing ideologies.

Is there any place for the truth in writing?

Dave Eggers plays with, and exploits the desire for truth in his memoir A Heart Breaking Work of Staggering Genius. Being postmodern to its core, the work has characters rejecting their position as metaphors within the novel, announcing the falsity of the text, and generally disturbing the reader’s assumptions of ‘truth’s’ place within memoir writing. The illusion of truth it seems then is a very useful important literary technique; some texts such as Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl rely almost exclusively on our belief that they report perceived events as honestly and integrally as possible. The respect given to ‘authentic writing’ can in turn be used to sell an idea that’s purely fictional and outlandish, gaining a certain suspension of disbelief when presented as true, such as the Coen brothers did with their crime film Fargo.

If the author is dead anyway, then what can their ‘truth’ possibly offer? The intentions of the writer, now having been thrown aside by Barthes, are in many respects irrelevant. Any other truth that can be found within a text is purely a product of the reader’s ideologies, their political bent etc, and is therefore only relevant as a truth, not the truth. So despite ‘the truth’ not actually existing, the suggestion of it certainly has a place within writing; whether you subvert it or use it to give credence to a situation. In the case of using writing to explore a truth about its author, such as John Cheever and his sexuality, then the search is valid, but it’s still a reading that’s being imposed upon the writing, and must never take precedence over any another interpretation.