A propos of Vladimir Nabokov and his essay “Good readers and good writers”.
It is not an insult to call a story a true story, not an insult to art neither truth. The writer of fiction follows, as Nabokov says “Nature’s lead” but he also walks the paths of Imagination.
Every writer does not need to be a great deceiver. The true writer can tell a story that is imaginatively true. Here, the intention of deceit is not present. What the writer has to offer is his desire to share an imaginatively genuine world.
The boy who cried wolf was not an inventor and he wasn’t a little magician either. He was a liar who just made a small invention: he talked about a wolf that he did not see while pretending others to believe he had seen it. He knew that for sure, he didn’t believe his lie. He knew exactly where his lie was. He thought others would not be able to see the wolf that did not exist as he didn’t. He would create a wolf that wasn’t a wolf. He wanted to scare them and laugh at them for their fears and not to put the truth of reality in their faces. This boy is not a magician. He only plays one trick that too soon gets exposed. Not only did the readers, his readers, see the wolf he had created with his lie, but the lie that has predominated over him more than anything else.
A true inventor and a true writer would have seen that wolf in his imagination –before being jotted down— and would have fought it back with the courage imagination gives; the courage Don Quixote displayed when fighting the walking mills. Then, this inventor --as a true writer-- would have told the story about the wolf he saw –a real imaginary wolf— and how he defended himself at the expense of readers visualizing or not what he saw and experienced through the arrangement of his words.
To make some readers retort (willfully), I’m going to bring back a book that has been considered offensive by some literary critics and which has created so much controversy in regards to its literary value: Twilight.
Twilight is one of those books I immensely enjoyed reading for too many reasons; not only as a reader and as a writer, but as a woman. The way Stephenie Meyer shared her fantasy with us, in such transparency, showing no intention to deceive us but with the closeness and familiarity the characters, her characters, played in her mind.
Okay, there’s really no reason to worry, I’m done with this. If you jumped up to the top of the roof or the surface of the moon, you can sit down and get comfortable in your armchair again.
Some may argue that there is some level of imagination in telling lies. True. But those sorts of lies are non-genuine in the eyes of literature, nor in the eyes of the reader. Lies can be smelled as easily as sharks smell blood while most of readers will keep feeling betrayed in their silence. The silence of the reader that quite too frequently is non-eloquent.
Readers can smell lies and mechanisms of defense. Readers can see crystal clear how the writer was trying to hide infructuously behind a curtain of dishonesty.
As writers, we shouldn’t be surprised when true readers are so easily seduced in the face of authenticity.
“Let’s think of how I’m going to mislead my readers and make them believe something I don’t believe” is not only a bad trick but the words of a con, not the ones of a true writer.
“I’m going to share the worlds I’ve created or the worlds that have simply emerged in my mind, the worlds I have enjoyed when no one else has been watching,” a true writer would say.
There is no paradox and the thick line can be redrawn over the thin one to establish the ethical difference between the truth and a simple, bad lie (as all lies).
The boy who cried wolf was not a writer. The writer was the one who wrote the story about the boy who cried wolf to show us the truth he believed in: Lies backfire.
Literature was not born that day either. It was born before; when children populated the Earth and were kept alive by those who believed children within should be nourished and protected. Those writers have left their children as intact as possible so they can, once in a while play outside –in their writing.
A true writer is the one who keeps the storyteller, the teacher, and the enchanter in the proportion the story requires. The storyteller tells us how we live –we, the human beings—and what we do not only in the real world but in the imaginary ones; what we do in them, about them, with them.
The teacher brings a message, a perspective, and a way of seeing the rules of the game both in reality (even if they are not the rules by which everyone else is playing) and in the worlds of imagination.
The enchanter plays more than one magic trick. He plays many, and he knows it because he, as a storyteller, is also a witness.
A true reader is a free reader. He reads out of free volition and desire. He reads what he wants, when he wants, how he wants, for the reasons he wants.
A true reader is the one whose main motive to read is desire. It commits not only to his intellect and brains but to his intuition and emotions. It is something more transversal than aloof or detached or objective. It is about transversal reading and writing. It is co-operative. It is a dual function that allows the writer write when he or she reads, and read when he or she writes. The true reader is a human being “affected”, influenced, enriched by the experience.
Books have the property of changing his life. He crosses the worlds from one book to another. The writer reads the first page on the newspaper, gets the morning cup of coffee, goes back to writing his novel, watches an action film on TV, sits down again in his desk to read what he has written, polishes and edits, rethinks, types the last sentences, and writes until he can finally fall asleep.
Because he is an active reader, he is also an active writer. He can’t read without writing, he can’t write without reading. He gets the intersections and interceptions, and performs in a dynamic style. He places the bridge over the cliff between his reading and his writing ensuring he can come back whenever he wants.
A true reader reads how he is: Subjective. Any other intention is for the most part, in vain. He can think as a scientist and feel as an artist. The better he does both, the better reader he can become.
We, readers and writers, are in search of the integral, united, harmonious and complete being. And in that search we turn to the true writer to make a better sense of our worlds, real and imaginary, to find out the clues on how to solve complex equations and real operations.
The best teachers seduce us with their imaginations, when they dare to share them, when they go beyond them. We turn to them because we don’t only want knowledge, direct speech or verifiable data but because we want to know about other worlds; and know how to create them, how to keep going with our dreams and build them as our goals.
We don’t search only for morals in the teacher, we look for reasons to live, for Ethics, rules and values because in this way we know the games we play are fair.
We look as Nabokov has said, for magic, for the story, for lessons…. But mostly for what is TRUE.
It is not an insult to call a story a true story, not an insult to art neither truth. The writer of fiction follows, as Nabokov says “Nature’s lead” but he also walks the paths of Imagination.
Every writer does not need to be a great deceiver. The true writer can tell a story that is imaginatively true. Here, the intention of deceit is not present. What the writer has to offer is his desire to share an imaginatively genuine world.
The boy who cried wolf was not an inventor and he wasn’t a little magician either. He was a liar who just made a small invention: he talked about a wolf that he did not see while pretending others to believe he had seen it. He knew that for sure, he didn’t believe his lie. He knew exactly where his lie was. He thought others would not be able to see the wolf that did not exist as he didn’t. He would create a wolf that wasn’t a wolf. He wanted to scare them and laugh at them for their fears and not to put the truth of reality in their faces. This boy is not a magician. He only plays one trick that too soon gets exposed. Not only did the readers, his readers, see the wolf he had created with his lie, but the lie that has predominated over him more than anything else.
A true inventor and a true writer would have seen that wolf in his imagination –before being jotted down— and would have fought it back with the courage imagination gives; the courage Don Quixote displayed when fighting the walking mills. Then, this inventor --as a true writer-- would have told the story about the wolf he saw –a real imaginary wolf— and how he defended himself at the expense of readers visualizing or not what he saw and experienced through the arrangement of his words.
To make some readers retort (willfully), I’m going to bring back a book that has been considered offensive by some literary critics and which has created so much controversy in regards to its literary value: Twilight.
Twilight is one of those books I immensely enjoyed reading for too many reasons; not only as a reader and as a writer, but as a woman. The way Stephenie Meyer shared her fantasy with us, in such transparency, showing no intention to deceive us but with the closeness and familiarity the characters, her characters, played in her mind.
Okay, there’s really no reason to worry, I’m done with this. If you jumped up to the top of the roof or the surface of the moon, you can sit down and get comfortable in your armchair again.
Some may argue that there is some level of imagination in telling lies. True. But those sorts of lies are non-genuine in the eyes of literature, nor in the eyes of the reader. Lies can be smelled as easily as sharks smell blood while most of readers will keep feeling betrayed in their silence. The silence of the reader that quite too frequently is non-eloquent.
Readers can smell lies and mechanisms of defense. Readers can see crystal clear how the writer was trying to hide infructuously behind a curtain of dishonesty.
As writers, we shouldn’t be surprised when true readers are so easily seduced in the face of authenticity.
“Let’s think of how I’m going to mislead my readers and make them believe something I don’t believe” is not only a bad trick but the words of a con, not the ones of a true writer.
“I’m going to share the worlds I’ve created or the worlds that have simply emerged in my mind, the worlds I have enjoyed when no one else has been watching,” a true writer would say.
There is no paradox and the thick line can be redrawn over the thin one to establish the ethical difference between the truth and a simple, bad lie (as all lies).
The boy who cried wolf was not a writer. The writer was the one who wrote the story about the boy who cried wolf to show us the truth he believed in: Lies backfire.
Literature was not born that day either. It was born before; when children populated the Earth and were kept alive by those who believed children within should be nourished and protected. Those writers have left their children as intact as possible so they can, once in a while play outside –in their writing.
A true writer is the one who keeps the storyteller, the teacher, and the enchanter in the proportion the story requires. The storyteller tells us how we live –we, the human beings—and what we do not only in the real world but in the imaginary ones; what we do in them, about them, with them.
The teacher brings a message, a perspective, and a way of seeing the rules of the game both in reality (even if they are not the rules by which everyone else is playing) and in the worlds of imagination.
The enchanter plays more than one magic trick. He plays many, and he knows it because he, as a storyteller, is also a witness.
A true reader is a free reader. He reads out of free volition and desire. He reads what he wants, when he wants, how he wants, for the reasons he wants.
A true reader is the one whose main motive to read is desire. It commits not only to his intellect and brains but to his intuition and emotions. It is something more transversal than aloof or detached or objective. It is about transversal reading and writing. It is co-operative. It is a dual function that allows the writer write when he or she reads, and read when he or she writes. The true reader is a human being “affected”, influenced, enriched by the experience.
Books have the property of changing his life. He crosses the worlds from one book to another. The writer reads the first page on the newspaper, gets the morning cup of coffee, goes back to writing his novel, watches an action film on TV, sits down again in his desk to read what he has written, polishes and edits, rethinks, types the last sentences, and writes until he can finally fall asleep.
Because he is an active reader, he is also an active writer. He can’t read without writing, he can’t write without reading. He gets the intersections and interceptions, and performs in a dynamic style. He places the bridge over the cliff between his reading and his writing ensuring he can come back whenever he wants.
A true reader reads how he is: Subjective. Any other intention is for the most part, in vain. He can think as a scientist and feel as an artist. The better he does both, the better reader he can become.
We, readers and writers, are in search of the integral, united, harmonious and complete being. And in that search we turn to the true writer to make a better sense of our worlds, real and imaginary, to find out the clues on how to solve complex equations and real operations.
The best teachers seduce us with their imaginations, when they dare to share them, when they go beyond them. We turn to them because we don’t only want knowledge, direct speech or verifiable data but because we want to know about other worlds; and know how to create them, how to keep going with our dreams and build them as our goals.
We don’t search only for morals in the teacher, we look for reasons to live, for Ethics, rules and values because in this way we know the games we play are fair.
We look as Nabokov has said, for magic, for the story, for lessons…. But mostly for what is TRUE.
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