Two words floated into my mind the other day: no judgement.
As I start a new novel, I often find myself nudging toward an internal manifesto, a kind of statement of intent for the book to come. Perhaps it’s a way of closing off options, calming the anxiety arising from the problem of too many possibilities. I also like to have a somewhat ‘technical’ puzzle – once it was how to write a book set in one day; another time, how to manage a loosely shifting point of view. These little jobs – aspects of craft or style that are not new, but new to me – are somehow a comfort, maybe a distraction from the alarming blankness of all that is yet unwritten.
So here I am at the start of a new book, and my tiny new manifesto appears to be this: subtract judgement.
By ‘judgement’ here I mean what some might call ‘judgmentalism’, rather than constructive discernment. I mean the casting of the critical, fault-seeking eye over my characters, perhaps especially the minor ones. I’m talking about the novelist’s impulse to seek out and hold up for inspection something foolish, unpleasant, deluded or cruel in a character’s behaviour. I mean the mocking, sneering impulse, those acerbic observations that can be very pleasurable to get down on the page. Writers are often praised for this by reviewers and readers – who doesn’t love a bit of ‘skewering’, some ‘merciless satire’? Who can resist the delicious spotlighting of the vanities and stupidities that abound in contemporary life?
I’ve always enjoyed splashing a little vinegar around in my fiction, though I’ve never felt I could pull it off as skilfully as others I’ve admired. Shirley Hazzard springs immediately to mind, with the Transit of Venus’s vile Dora, Tertia Thrice and other villains; or more recently, Gwendoline Riley’s ruthless portraits of bullying fathers and doormat mothers.
Why is it so enjoyable, to read and to write? If it’s done well, there might be the illumination of some trait or behaviour we have observed, but not been able to put into words before. It’s the pleasure of recognition. Many books ago I wrote a minor character who often prefaced her earnest declarations by saying, ‘As a mother...’, placing the flat of her hand against her chest. I enjoyed that particular bit of noticing I’d done in the world – the way some women think motherhood bestows them with special moral insight – and loved taking it into my book. It also provided a useful bonding moment for two other characters, who amused themselves by privately ridiculing the woman. I still like that particular bit of skewering – but the rest of that character, I think now, is too shallow. I could have done more with her, but I didn’t. She’s by no means the only secondary character I’ve written who has remained an outline, not a person.
Another pleasure in judging people on the page is the simple joy of rudeness, I think. There’s a cathartic release in giving expression to our lower selves. Sometimes, it’s just fun to be mean.
Then there’s something more interesting, to do with energy in the creative act. An acutely spiteful observation in a piece of fiction, it seems to me, has always been a reliable way of enlivening it. It animates the thing, as Bonnie Friedman writes in her essay ‘Your Mother’ Passions, Your Sister’s Woes: Writing About The Living’1:
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