OK. I confess. With that title I’m riffing a little on Jonathan Franzen’s 1996 Harper’s magazine essay entitled, “Perchance to Dream: In the Age of Images, a Reason to Write Novels,” which at some point got renamed, “Why Bother?” That became the preferred title. Although it does encapsulate what Franzen was writing about, I get the feeling that someone in Marketing, with no love of words, at some point said, “The title’s too long. Why don’t we call it Why Bother?”.

I first read that essay for PhD research and was happy to find something that gave me back some of the awe and wonder that twentysomething me once had about writing. It made me feel like I was in my twenties again, discovering new writing and new ideas. It read like something I should have picked up in 1996 when I started reading Douglas Coupland and Bret Easton Ellis. Franzen seemed linked to the “why bother” Nineties zeitgeist.

The Nihilistic take on the times is often overplayed. In reality, the slacker generation and the “why bother?” approach to life was far less passive than anyone gives it credit for and only existed as a response to society at that time. It wasn’t ever a case of not being bothered. It was a challenge to a way of thinking, a request, a demand, for any sort of reason to bother, asked because we knew there were no answers. We were happy to do whatever we did, battling the bullshit of all the reasons we were given for our existence. I can only applaud the moxie to carry on even after working out that there is no point.  Nothing will make a young Nineties slacker slack more than being told they’ll never amount to much. “Go to University or work in McDonalds” was the message. Maybe, if the message was, “Go to university and subsequently still work in McDonalds,” then the slacking would have been even more widespread. Arguably, a degree in humanities and social sciences provided the slacker with a home to slack, a place to belong, living life in a state somewhere between meaningful employment and forever lost in your own life. Could we have been Schrodinger's university slacker, neither lost nor found until graduation.

That might be the most Nineties thing you read today, It’s also totally self-indulgent.

“In the Age of Images, a Reason to Write Novels” seems like a different proposition to “Why bother?”. Although whichever title you go with can be seen as the same question, just coming at the issue of reasons to write from opposite angles. It’s not a case of throwing your hands in the air in despair and saying, “Why? Why do I even bother?” But still the essay walks a line between, “Why should I bother?” and “This is why I should bother!” There is a weighing up of why we should write, read, or even think. There’s no prediction of or advocation for the death of the novel in the essay. No one is saying that the novel is dead. Franzen’s essay can be seen as an update on how he reads the life signs of his literary world, as much as it is a debate of the worth of the written word.

Why bother? Why anything?

I had not intended to write a comparison of culture and literature across the decades. It’s a happy accident that I thought of Franzen asking similar questions. They’re questions that are forever present and not specific to any point in history. Time moves on.  There is no more mass slacker culture to ask, “Why bother?” I see no obvious provocation in current culture that inspires anyone to ask if there is any worth in the written word. It may be argued that there has never been a time when we felt safe about the survival of reading. Although now I’m not sure there’s much debate being made at all. Novels still exist. Universities still exist, although the culture seems to have turned to one of going to university to gain a skill or to make yourself more employable. It makes me wonder whether if being a philosopher was a high earning job, or a job at all (I genuinely don’t know and I’m not going to Google it), if students would be signing up in droves for Philosophy degrees.

Reasons to write? Try reasons to do anything? That’s where we’ve, largely unknowingly, moved on to. Why read? Why write? Why write for a non-reading population? Why is Hollywood recycling stories and re-making so many films? Why is there a mainstream novel about bondage in which the protagonist seems to come from a reality in which she’s reached adulthood and seemingly never heard of S&M? I’m just painting a scene here. Is this all just a recycled debate? (Except for the part about a bestselling novel about S&M that starts from the viewpoint that no one else in the world has heard of sex. That’s a unique modern-day dilemma.) And just as in the case with Franzen’s ”Why bother?”, I’m not advocating a nihilistic point of view that says we should all give up. “Why write? Why read? Why think? Give up now;” that’s never the message. Perhaps more accurately the question, as it comes to mind right now, should be and always was: “Why do we need a reason?”

Was there ever a good time to bother?

Why Bother? If it’s a question at all, then who is it a question to? Ourselves? Readers? Publishers? Marketing departments of publishers?  It’s for all of the above, but mostly for anyone who asks “why?” And the first questioning voice in your head to be argued with is your own.

I say it’s your own, but it’s really a mish-mash of things you’ve heard over the years that rattle around in your head, occasionally making noise to remind you that you need to look for a reason to do anything. My aborted PhD was one long argument and that seems to be a mainstay of academia. Your final assessment, the Viva, is where you present your research and then defend it against scrutiny from a panel of academic experts. Sadly, this is not done with a sword and shield, which would be preferable for many. If I’d reached the Viva stage I’d have gone into it thinking, “Well, I’ve argued for years now. Why not have one last go at it to sign off with?”

A while after leaving my PhD I was reading Descartes. I won’t claim that I understood half of what I was reading.  What I remember most is that my Penguin classics copy of Meditations and Other Metaphysical Writings had a chapter at the end that was purely Descartes’ letters to and from various Royalty and Scholars, in which Descartes, the man considered to be the father of modern philosophy, had to argue with others to get his point understood. I get the idea of theories and ideas standing up to rigorous testing and questioning, but the default through history always seems to be denial. The culture that I’ve always known is based on opposition to new ideas, until they become the norm and then everyone seems to pretend that these new ideas were never in doubt. I’m imagining Rene Descartes giving a big ole Gallic Shrug to the world, saying, “Why bother? Whatever. Go live in a world without ‘I think therefore I am’.”

And that’s just when we think we’re being clever in an academic setting. Just wait till you get an idea of what it’s like in day-to-day interactions. Try and be too clever and you run the risk of being seen as some sort of liberal intellectual elitist or pretentiously regurgitating someone else’s philosophy. You can come up with some great idea and find yourself being told, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Immanuel Kant came up with that in the Eighteenth century. Well done, you’ve read some philosophy.” There’s no point in arguing that you’ve never heard of Kant and you’re sure that you alone came up with the idea of how we can only have knowledge of things we can experience and as a result we can never have any true knowledge of God. To those who know stuff, you’re a fraud and those that don’t know stuff, they have no idea what you’re on about and couldn’t care less. There is a possibility now that I’m ripping off my favourite speech from Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya.

Just consider this. A man spends precisely twenty five years reading and writing about Art when he understands precisely nothing about it. For twenty five years he chews over other men’s thoughts about realism and naturalism and every other kind of rubbish. For twenty five years he reads and writes about things that clever people have known for years already, and that stupid people don’t care about anyway. For twenty five years, in other words, he’s been shovelling a lot of nothing from here to nowhere. And yet what an opinion he has of himself! What pretensions! He’s reached retiring age, and not a soul has ever heard of him. He’s completely unknown. So for twenty five years he’s been usurping another’s rightful place. Yet lo and behold- he paces the earth like a demi-god!

Why bother indeed?

It would be easy to say, “The world isn’t like this. It’s a world you’ve imagined. Everyone loves a good literary reference. Nobody accuses anyone of being a liberal literary elitist just because they know a line of Chekhov.” I can only respond by saying that I’ve seen it and it does exist.

The heightened stakes of, “Why even think?”

More accurately I’d say that we’re pre-occupied with finding ways of not only “not reading” and “not writing” but also “not thinking”. How much of film, TV, theatre, novels and any other form of storytelling can be seen as entertainment only and not open to discussion, there to be enjoyed, no questions asked, and that’s all? I personally think it’s hard to tell a story and it only be entertaining. There has to be something more. Nothing encapsulates this clash of ideologies better than this one time where I started a conversation about a film I’d seen with some complete sociopath and didn’t manage to get very far into explaining how the film broke at least ten basic rules of storytelling, when I was told, “Hey, I didn’t ask for a film review.” I’m still confused as to what he expected. Was he after a thumbs up or thumbs down? Perhaps he carries around printed thumbs up and thumbs down emojis stuck to paddles and produces them at times he deems appropriate. The same person also once said that he’s never cried at a film because it isn’t real and even if it was real it wasn’t happening to him. That goes way beyond not thinking about a film. I could go on, digging for anecdotal evidence of anti-intellectual reactions to art and culture, but I don’t think I can top that one.

The reality of writing in a time of mass failure to communicate.

Was this the same for Franzen in 96? Was he less cynical? Did he find more positive life signs than I’m expecting to?  How deep did anti-intellectual feelings run? Has being an avid reader always been tagged with the label of being part of some liberal elite? Is the study of Literature in decline? More now than ever? Arguably, Universities can be seen to be pitching literature degrees to students as an option for those who want to earn money from it. What can you do with a degree in Humanities and social sciences? Ironically, in a world where everyone texts one another and communication is a struggle because of it, the one thing that a degree in social sciences and humanities can do for you is make you a better communicator. To that end we should be encouraging more literary studies and employers should go head hunting for young people who can write great essays.

I don’t feel like I’m in a position to be reading the life signs of a world of literature. Right now I’m outside the operating theatre, in the waiting room, waiting to hear any news about the patient, reading David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest for the second time, hoping that this time around it will all make sense, but always knowing that the online version where someone re-told the story using Lego characters is about my level. And I’m listening to the sounds of the doctor’s and surgeon’s voices, trying to work out how much of a chance the patient has.

It would be easy to see this all as pessimism to be the work of naysaying doom merchants (we so badly need a good band called The Naysaying Doom Merchants). My intention is never to declare a cultural nosedive into oblivion or to see the cultural landscape as one of doom and gloom. You would only write about this if you cared and I do care. Any ten-thousand word long dissertation on why we shouldn’t read automatically negates itself by its very existence. There is no need for a written rallying cry to not read. Any writing about writing is surely a call to read and write more.

The irony is that people prefer to write messages rather than speaking to each other but then don’t like reading.

In the age of texting, a reason to write anything at all? Why, “in an age of texting?” It isn’t because all debates about reading in an age of television have been done to death and I want to move the conversation on to include mobile phones. The main reason for thinking about “an age of texting” is that many people choose the written word as their main way of communicating and yet, if I gave this article to most of my friends to read, they just wouldn’t, citing their aversion to words as their reason. Texting appears to exist to convey something with as few words as possible. Texts can be funny, interesting, clever, emotive, but not long. People see a solid wall of writing and give up. Not very inspiring for anyone who loves words. Not a good sign if you want to write novels. Some of them are really long.

Why bother? The question was never mine in the first place. It was the one that society put to me. The one to throw back in the face of anyone asking.

My aborted PhD was research looking into why general fiction, non-genre fiction, struggles to find a male readership. There were academics that could see no worth in this. There was no point in researching why blokes don’t read. One academic went so far as to ask if I felt that hawking some more books to men was worthy of study. I would have thought that the societal and cultural implications should be of interest but apparently not. I think that it should be worrying that there are people deciding that our reasons for research simply don’t matter. At least people questioned Descartes after and not before reading his work.

What reasons are there?

Reasons to write? We don’t need to have a reason. To think there’s a reason, when we rarely hear one that makes sense, is bonkers. If we could hook the whole publishing industry up to a lie detector test and ask for “reasons to write,” then there would be one answer: Money. And the polygraph wouldn’t skip a beat. Publishers want to know who the reader is, as though readers only read one type of fiction. Without delving into age old discussions about art and commerce, what I will say is that these days we, as a society, don’t even seem to hide that it’s all about money. We live in a world of, “How marketable is this work?” and not, “How good is this work?” And then we try to awe people with big numbers by saying, “It sold this many copies.” If a publisher were to ask, “Why read this?” then I’d really want to say, “What reasons are there? What reasons are there to read or write anything? What’re my options here?”

My Wordsworth Classics copy of Anna Karenina has this blurb on the back of the book:

Anna Karenina is one of the most loved and memorable heroines of literature. Her overwhelming charm dominates a novel of unparalleled richness and density. Tolstoy considered this book to be his first real attempt at a novel form, and it addresses the very nature of society at all levels – of destiny, death, human relationships and the irreconcilable contradictions of existence. It ends tragically, and there is much that invokes despair, yet set beside this is an abounding joy in life’s many ephemeral pleasures, and a profusion of comic relief.

How about that for a reason to read? I doubt that there was an academic or a publisher on Tolstoy’s case, asking, “But is addressing the nature of society at all levels really a reason to write?” If you’re one of those that often gets told that you’re overthinking things, then, after asking for a definition of what the exact amount of thinking is the right amount, you might want to reply that you enjoy thinking about “stuff,” and Leo Tolstoy also probably enjoyed thinking about “stuff.” Please make sure to use the word “stuff” though. Cutting through the bullshit, realising that you are free from reasons to write, realising that thinking leads to writing, and if we were to look for real reasons to read, write and think and to publish, it is because we can do nothing else. It isn’t even a choice. Your writing is what you want to write about and you never considered that the existence of your writing needed justification.

We look for reasons when we should just accept that we can’t avoid our desire for stories.

Do we need to understand life, human relationships, and destiny? Is this a reason to read or write? Is it worthy of thought or study and does anyone really want to do it in their spare time and for fun? Our lives are fiction. We tell stories every day. What is life without memories? What are memories other than the stories that make up our lives? Surely, it is not possible to live that fiction and never think on it. It can’t be healthy. Would a world free of thought, free of writing that you had to think about, free of TV you can debate, free of wonder, wouldn’t that be a world of automatons? I think we need a reason to do anything. No. Forget that. We are dependent on reasons, addicted to them. Universities spend a lot of time and money convincing people to study Social Sciences and Humanities and yet the prevailing message is that a degree in such subjects as Literature gets you nowhere in life, other than a career as an academic. I am now imagining students asking Literature teachers what they can do with a degree in literature and the teacher’s response is, “You can be me.” Alternatively, if it were me giving the advice it would be something like this: “Study literature to create a self-perpetuating world of literature. There is no reason beyond that.” Watch as my class gets zero students to sign up, stating that my course just isn’t a good money maker.

Do I have to go with the book that’s assigned to my demographic?

Maybe all of communication, before texting and before emails and text speak and emojis, has always been about getting a message across in the simplest way possible. Tabloid headlines have always sold more than Broadsheet Op-Eds. Even though it seems too easy to blame the format for everything that is written, you can’t help but think this all starts with marketing types out there who all agreed in a meeting one day that “Everyone seems to like texting in short punchy sentences. That must be where the money’s at.” That is my main issue with the way marketing has gone and it’s a marketing world we live in. It’s reactive to the Nth degree now. Why “blokes don’t read general fiction” was never going to garner enough interest because no one was asking it on social media and it's too hard to figure out anyway. Those things will just happen when they happen. Male readership will pick up or it won’t. In the meantime, it won’t hurt if we keep pandering to readers who would like more of the same. It's not unreasonable for anyone to expect the next question after “who’s it for?” to be, “what’s it about?” It’s as though the two are tied together and although the latter is something we’re always going to want to know, there is no reason that genre, plot and subject matter should be linked to any one specific demographic.

You may not understand what you want but you get what you need.

I used to insist that all the best fiction is not dependent on a gripping plot. I’ve always been an advocate of stories with no plot at all. See Crime and Punishment or American Psycho for the best examples. They’re the kind of stories where there is little point in asking, “What do you think will happen?” Often, stories are a walk in another world for me and when that world is taken away, when the story is done, I miss that world and there’s a sadness that you can never see it again for the first time.

In most cases where you’re guessing what might happen, there are a number of ways the plot can go, and you know them all. Whether you realise it or not, you do know them. It’s very rare that something happens that you would never in a million years have thought of. Giving the reader what they want, but in a way that they hadn’t expected, is tried and tested as a writing technique and brings the reader/viewer to the ending they need, even if they didn’t know it’s what they needed.

As an example of delivering what a story needs, the last line of dialogue we hear from Hamlet are the words “The rest is silence.” There’s Shakespeare being very Meta long before we had a word for it. Shakespeare is saying that there is nothing left to say. The story is over. Hamlet’s life is over. All that’s left is for Fortinbras to enter and officially close the play. The silence that Hamlet, the character himself, refers to is for what comes next for him. The viewer leaves with a sense of relief, even if they don’t know why. I can’t imagine what kind of empty head has no thoughts at all when they hear, “The rest is silence.” You’ve sat through hours of watching this character suffer and struggle and all that’s going through your head is, “So, Hamlet kills his uncle. I knew it was going to happen.” Really? It’s not a whodunit. The pay-off is not when you work out what happens.  We know Hamlet has to die. We do. We want it. We need it, even if we don’t realise that we need it.

What we don’t need is a version where Hamlet wins. He kills both Laertes and Claudius and just as it looks like he’s done for, Horatio rushes in with an antidote to the poison that’s killing Hamlet. The drama ramps up when Hamlet heroically leaps atop his dying mother Gertrude and performs CPR. Gertrude lurches back to life and all applaud. The play ends with Hamlet rallying the troops against the invading Norwegians, yelling, “In the name of Denmark! Death to Fortinbras.” There’s got to be a mini-series in that. I look forward to further investigation into Hamlet’s state of mind. Start the miniseries with a soliloquy where Hamlet tells the audience, “I am no longer mad North by Northwest. But, as you have wondered, am I mad at all? Perhaps I am now mad North by Northeast. Nothing a bit of therapy can’t help with.”  

You might laugh, until you realise that there are stories that are told in such a way, that give the reader what the writer thinks they want but not what they need. Anything other than Hamlet’s death would undo the entire play. If you’ve watched Hamlet kill Laertes (although Laertes started it), drive Ophelia mad (I’m not letting Hamlet take all the blame here), kill Polonius (even if by mistake) and kill his uncle (even if he did deserve it), and you feel that Hamlet should be rewarded in any way without any consequences for his actions, then you’re probably reading the play as a “How to manual” rather than any kind of cautionary tale. I wouldn’t suggest that those cheering for my Hamlet’s “victorious comeback of the century” story can’t tell right from wrong in real life. Murdering your uncle? That part alone is not something to be considered as a good option in real life, even if you think he did kill your dad. And if you ever feel you’re responsible for driving a woman who is in love with you to the point of suicide, then you really are a nasty piece of work if you don’t feel awful about it afterwards. I do know that people understand the difference between real life and fiction. In this work of fiction, if the play were nothing other than escapism, it would be nice if Hamlet got away with it. He wasn’t a bad sort. He didn’t deserve to die. But it wouldn’t feel right. It would feel hollow and empty. It would feel like a long struggle with an unsatisfactory resolution.

What’s the point if you feel nothing? 

So, what’s the harm in it only being entertainment, something to pass the time, an opiate of the masses? (Putting aside whether or not a population in need of opiates to get by is a good or bad thing). I can’t suggest that people would commit avunculicide because they saw Hamlet do it, but that’s not the issue here. (I love that there is a term for murdering your own uncle.) The issue I see is when we start normalising a response in fictions where the reader or viewer feels nothing. If you feel no empathy, if you go, “Well he wasn’t real anyway. The actor took a bow at the end and all is ok with the world”, if it has not stirred some thought and more importantly stirred some feelings in you, if you’re just racing to the end to find out “how it all ends,” then……….. Well, “Why bother?”

 If we pander to what we think any readers want, if we create fiction for the idea of a market that we have targeted as our reader, then we are no longer writing. We’re letting the marketplace write for us. The Hamlet scenario, where he doesn’t die and he wins the day is what you’d write if you were thinking only of what you think the reader wants. The problem there is that most people aren’t thinking like story tellers. Or are they thinking as themselves, and therefore thinking what story they would like to tell of themselves? I’ve often heard people saying, “That is so unrealistic because I’d never have done that. If that was me, I’d have done this …” There’s that lack of empathy again. To be more positive, we can think of it as a lack of understanding of fiction.

Back to Hamlet again: More precisely, Act Two, Scene Two. Having spoken to the troupe of actors who have arrived on scene and witnessed a performance in which one of the players, in monologue, tells the story from Greek Mythology of Hecuba’s grief after the death of her husband King Priam, Hamlet is struck by how the player can be reduced to tears by the story he is telling. I must have seen and read Hamlet, in various forms (including Manga) a tonne of times before I ever gave the following line the respect it deserves:

 “What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, That he should weep for her?”

I want that on a T-Shirt. Indeed, why feel anything for Hecuba or any character? Arguably (everything in Shakespeare is argued) Shakespeare places the player and his story of Hecuba as the model for our emotional state of being. The writer’s job is to get us to respond emotionally, to feel something. I’m not suggesting that anyone, not authors, not publishers, although maybe marketing departments, would advocate not feeling anything when you see a play or read a novel. The very real risk, however, is normalising a type of ending in which the reader or viewer has felt nothing. If we give our audience an easy time, if come the end of our story they are left saying to themselves, “Phew, I thought it was going to end in a way I wouldn’t want it to, if that were me in that story…” then I can’t help but feel that the writer has failed. The reader, the audience, has failed to care, failed to get involved, failed to live through the characters in front of them. They have failed to think about anything other than themselves. Normalising an audience or readership that is relieved to feel nothing come the end of your tale, to have them no less empty than when your story began, I can only see that as having a negative impact on society. Society? Who brought society into this?! We were talking about novels and plays, huh? I have said for many years that literature is one of the most important things you can study but at the same time, due to how we are defined by how we earn our living, also one of the most useless.  

I only meant to write something mildly entertaining and accidentally added to the shaping of society.

What is a society without culture? What is a society without stories to tell? I’m not referring solely to societies that exist within the borders of any given country; rather more any grouping of people with shared ideas. And even if the words we read are to inspire individuals, they are equally an ideology for all and in the following case an inspiration.

Doesn’t matter what the press says. Doesn’t matter what the politicians or the mobs say. Doesn’t matter if the whole country decides that something wrong is something right. This nation was founded on one principle above all else: the requirement that we stand up for what we believe, no matter the odds or the consequences. When the mob and the press and the whole world tell you to move, your job is to plant yourself like a tree beside the river of truth, and tell the whole world — “No, you move.”

If I were held to writing academically, I’d be spouting on about how Mark Twain originally wrote that. They are indeed his words, but I first came across them being quoted by Captain America in the first Civil War run of Marvel comics. If ever you want a sense of the USA being built on words and ideas, think Mark Twain’s words spoken by Captain America. Up until that point I had thought that Captain America was such a dork. I had no idea that his character represents an ideology that when expressed in the right way sends shivers down my spine.

As an aside, I’d rather be referencing Captain America (don’t try to tell me he’s a fictional character) than Twain. I have a lot of time for Twain but there’s a different kind of impact when you see the words used as dialogue in a story. It moves from being an ideal to a rallying cry for a situation that needs it. Metaphors seem to hit harder than essays. Most importantly, it is good to see this sort of idea overflow into popular culture. Words and ideas should be accessible to all. So many of the “literary” references I have in my head are there because I first found them in popular culture. Fictional characters, mythical characters, get the kind of dialogue that neither you nor I get a chance to say in real life. There just aren’t enough moments where “Once more unto the breach,” seems to fit the occasion. The beauty of it all is that as readers we are blessed that we don’t have to say those lines. We are blessed that we can be inspired. We are blessed and free to apply the ideas to our lives. I may not ever stand up in the workplace and announce how I intend to plant myself like a tree beside the river of truth (there is nothing in my job that I feel that strongly about) but I certainly advocate applying that attitude to life.

Perhaps I should amend my thinking here. Perhaps it should be: One of the most important things in life is to be well versed in storytelling. But it’s hard to get rich through knowing a lot about literature.  It’s difficult to get rich quick by quoting Dostoevsky. So, the importance of being well versed in storytelling isn’t obvious and usually not widely emphasised. But whether we know it or not, stories are at the centre of everything we do. Aside from the importance they have with regards to creating any society’s culture, stories influence and guide us and through them we understand more about us as human beings.

This is why one of the most pointless criticisms that can be aimed at any fiction is when people say that they have no interest in stories set in outer space and that they are only interested in stories of people. There is no story that is not about people. Whatever you are writing about you are writing as a human being about the state of being human. No matter what they look like or which planet they’re from, your protagonist is going to have human issues, even if they are disguised in metaphor and analogy. Spoiler alert: Animal Farm isn’t really about pigs. Or, if it is about pigs, then they’re Communist and/or Stalinist pigs.

These stories are about us. These stories are about everything. And they’re going to make your brain do some work, even if you don’t want it to.

I would even go so far as to say that, as much as we think we are reading or watching stories about individuals, we aren’t. Well, we are, and we aren’t. We often read and watch stories about characters who are able to express what we fail to express in our own lives. Society may shun the outliers in real life, the odd kid in the class, the awkward co-worker, the general oddballs, but in fiction it is the outlier who we are drawn to. And we give our protagonists situations where they can say things that we admire, things that fit the world we want to live in.  Which reminds me of this from Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground:

“Why, we’ve reached a point where we almost regard “real life” as hard work, as a job, and we’ve all agreed in private that it’s really better in books."

Even when our setting is the most humdrum of realities, we are still experiencing that world through someone else’s eyes. We have no say where to look. We are along for the ride. We may relate, we may not, but we can’t take that ride with our eyes shut and we will think about what it means to be these characters and, as human beings, what it means to be in that time and place. We want to understand us as human beings and that urge is even greater when we see things happening that we don’t understand.

Society needs writing. As surely as people have thoughts, ideas and philosophies then they will find a way to let those words and ideas trickle into society. Or I could be totally wrong. For example, Romeo and Juliet could be nothing more than a story about two young lovers. Those thinking that it’s about love immortalised as a tale of star-crossed lovers, in which we question ideas of love and fate, are way off the mark. If we could go back in time and ask Shakespeare about it, he’d probably say “You know, I think you’re over thinking it. It’s just a bit of a distraction to keep your mind off the plague rats doing the rounds, spreading ye olde black death.” After writing that I realised that during Covid lockdown we actually were doing just that: watching stories to take our minds off the plague outside. Although, I would wager that even hours of Netflix shows were never intended to be “something to fill the time whilst we can’t go out.” Was there anyone out there thinking, “It’s binge-watching series indoors or death outside?” And should the TV stop working and people were faced with a choice of reading a book or going out, then life would get interesting. Literally, the choice would be: Read a book or risk death?

Words or images? It’s all story to me.

I’ve never set out to argue that no one reads. I know that isn’t true. I’ve seen people doing it, particularly on trains and I don’t think they’re faking it. What I am saying is that it feels like we’ve reached new levels of anti-reading. Not even anti-intellectualism, but anti-reading anything at all, leaving me with the feeling that no one’s going to be interested in my ideas of how fiction creates a culture, encourages thought and change, yadda, yadda, yadda, blah, blah, blah.

Full disclosure. I’ve never ever wanted to join a book club but if I were I’d run this advert for it:

Readers wanted for Book Club! Join my book club! Read books! Understand the nature of society and human relationships, ponder existence and death, plumb the depths of joy and despair and any and all emotions in between, and beyond, and of course, be entertained and distracted from our everyday lives.”

Is anyone really going to respond telling us that they have no interest in those things? “Human relationships? Existence? Death? Joy? Emotions? No thank you.”

That it seems very unlikely that anyone has even thought of pondering or writing about a world without television is, in itself, indicative of how television is a constant in almost everybody’s life in Western society. There always seems to be a drive to get people reading. We are nowhere near having to entice people into watching TV, in the same way. The way things are going, cinema is more endangered than TV. Without much debate, acknowledgement or thought, TV provides a backdrop to our lives. It’s a world in which we can have the TV on and eat dinner at the same time. And therein lies the start of a very complicated issue of how much effort anyone wants to put into the entertainment that they choose to fill their lives with.

The path of least resistance?

The initial argument in my head was that if I were to follow the line that says storytelling is innate to us all, then our addiction to television would make a lot more sense. This comes with a caveat, a denial of the idea that you’d think about it much. Watching TV can be seen as a passive activity, even though it requires a certain amount of concentration.

In thinking about how I wouldn’t like to try and argue from a point of view that says reading requires no effort, it occurred me, “What’s wrong with effort?” I’ve put more effort and swearing and frustration into computer games over the years than anything else and yet it’s never occurred to me that anyone would say that gaming is too much hard work. Shooting zombies is way more effort than reading a novel. Exception to this is if that novel is Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. That was hard work.

Thinking is perhaps the issue. When people say they don’t like reading, does it really mean that they don’t like thinking? Press a button and get an instant story streamed right to you and maybe you’re satisfying an urge you didn’t even know you had. You won’t even question a thing. Take the time and effort to read and it’s a different matter. Somehow people take the time to realise that it’s too much effort.

It would prove a difficult line of research. “We asked two hundred people why they didn’t like reading. One hundred and two responded saying that they never thought about it. Fifteen said, ‘I dunno,’ and the remaining eighty three said, ‘Why read when you can watch TV?” (A nod to Bill Hicks there).

How to sell the Gloaming (Thank you Radiohead for introducing me to that word).

There’s a certain reactive approach when it comes to choosing novels. Often, the first thing we look for is a point of reference. “What’s it like?” Which really means, “Which novels that I’ve read before is it most like?” Or from a marketing point of view the question becomes, “Who can we sell this to?” This is an approach that makes it hard to break new ground and may explain why there is a notion that “people don’t want to read.” What’s possibly really happening is that people don’t want to read what is available. Instead of trying different content, taking more risks, it is easier to blame the format. People don’t want to read? No, they just might not want to read what you want them to.

The issue I have is that the starting point for any such views is that the format is what people like or dislike, as though saying, “I like films” means that you like all films. Surely there aren’t people out there that like every film. I’m a connoisseur, a real film buff (I like to think so) and I even like some bad films. I recognise that they are bad but still like them. I feel I get something out of a film, even if it is God-damned awful. But I’m not going to claim that when I say, “I like film” that it means I like every single one of them.  “I don’t like books” or “I don’t like theatre” seems to be used as a blanket statement to reject the whole format.

If we consider the statement, “I don’t like reading,” perhaps, when you consider how much time people spend online, we can say that the aversion is not to reading but specifically to reading books. People read online every day. It’s where we get our news, where we read about the world, even if it is only the gossip pages of who’s dating who. Does this mean that there’s a majority out there to whom, when reading, all that matters is facts? A world in which TV is entertainment and reading a way to gather information? Hhhhmmm. If you truly believe that, then that is depressing and it’s time to embrace that Gloaming, the cultural death of society.

What we read v How we read.

In all the research I’ve been aware of, much has been made of changing the “how we read” and not changing “what we read”. In the early 2000s I went to see Douglas Coupland give a talk in London. In that talk he floated the idea that in the future we’d all be reading novels that are best read on your phone. They’d be purpose built, and I think “built” is a better fit here than “written,” in this case. Novels would be short and punchy and cool again. Of course, they wouldn’t really be novels as we know them. We all laughed at the idea, thinking of how society could never take that turn. Twitter was just around the corner. Those there at that talk would have had little doubt that a novel made to be read on a mobile phone would be a different kind of novel. Phones back then were not like mini tablets or e-readers, as they are now. But still, the format doesn’t have to dictate the content. There is no reason that we can’t read pages and pages of text on a phone. Except for the reasoning that – people don’t like reading.

Does anyone know what a reader looks like anyway?

If we first ask, “who can I write for?” and “How can I write for them?” then we are stymied by the limitations of our readers. We are limited when trying to replicate what we think others want. Creativity does not fit into a populist world. I think we’re screwed when we try to guess what people want and doubly screwed when we pander to those wants. It may be taken for granted that you write to be read, and that means being published; and that desire to be published makes sense to me, but my reason to write, THE reason to write (if you want to argue THE reason, write your own article) is not “to get published.” Being published should be something that happens as a result of writing, not the reason to write in the first place. We need to get a big crowbar in there to prise apart questions about writing and publishing.

“Why write?”

“Why publish?”

These two questions should be so far apart that they don’t even deserve to be mentioned in the same line of text. “Why publish?” could be answered with “Because people online seem to like this sort of thing.”  Which really means, “People are buying that, so if I publish something similar, they might buy it from me instead.”

Copying anyone else’s style because we like it is a whole different deal to reproducing similar work in hope that it gets published, which seems a horrible hollow pursuit. (I realised some time ago that I can never be Hunter S Thompson and there’s no point trying to replicate what he did, largely because I’m nowhere near as mental! Be inspired but choose your own brand of mental!) There seems to be a twenty first century premeditated dismissive attitude towards what I’d call the real reasons anyone tells stories and instead we ask what we can write that stands the best chance of getting published.

If we don’t stop to ask, “Why write? Why bother?” then one day we might take time to notice that no one is writing fiction but instead producing product. I get why so many people are fixated on Artificial Intelligence right now.  It doesn’t matter if it’s computers or people, there’s a desire to rehash what has gone before, to make Frankenstein stories, with bits that look like bits from stories before. But now no one recognises where those bits originally came from. It’s jaw-dropping that AI can write a story in seconds but all it’s done is take elements of what people have done before. It’s not thinking any more than an automated bot on an assembly line, writing only what it’s asked to. It's only a machine. Asked why it does anything it will always fall back on “because I was programmed to.” What excuse have we humans got? I know why I write, why I tell stories (more on that in a moment). I’m sure that it’s the same reason that most writers write. I can only see one reason publishers publish. To make money. And here comes the Gloaming, the cultural death, brought on by those who think that the aim is to produce as many books as they can, if only they could find the content that everyone would buy. If we knew that a novel of blank pages would sell in the millions and everyone would be talking about it as the next great thing, would any publisher do it? Would they flood the market with a book of nothing, the emperor’s new novel?

Read, forget, repeat.

If you want to call any of the above conjecture, then thank you. You’ve just vindicated my whole reasons for writing. It’s the working it out that is all that matters. It is the reason we tell stories. My life seems to be an endless to-do list. I even have a reading pile and a to-watch list. Getting through the list isn’t the aim because the list is forever being added to. I sometimes feel we are conditioned to get to the end of whatever we’re doing.

Even in Non-Fiction it can’t be all facts, facts, facts and more facts. You can read anything and take in all the facts the book has to offer. And still, unsurprisingly, you will stumble across a story – and it will be the story that will do something to your emotions.

Why write? Why tell stories? Why publish?

The last one I can’t answer. Ask someone in publishing and look ‘em directly in the eye when they answer. Western society is addicted to fiction. Netflix and Prime, soap operas, news stories, celebrity tales of who’s dating who. Story gives us meaning, even if we don’t want it to, even if we struggle with what that meaning is. When it comes to stories, we bother because we can’t not bother. It is, however, easier to turn on the TV than it is to read a book. I’m skirting dangerously close to hackneyed territory of “television killed the novelist star” type arguments. It is unintentional. What I really wanted to do was remind myself that stories are integral to our lives. And that makes the whole “why bother writing for a non-reading society?” attitude even harder to swallow.

What’s it for?

I’m not writing to get facts into someone else’s head. I’m not writing to entertain or distract. I’m not writing for a million meaningless clicks (any genuine show of interest is a good day). I write anything for the same reason I’m writing this. It is always a form of exploration. It’s a meandering path full of think-y thoughts, and each word chosen to evoke something. Even “think-y thoughts” takes your emotions in a different direction to the one you’d have taken if I’d written, “meandering path full of thoughts.”  The meandering is what we sign up for. It’s the very thing that Hamlet sees in us when he says “In apprehension how like a god.”

You can debate all you like about what Shakespeare meant by “apprehension.” You can choose to see it as a simple case of Hamlet being apprehensive regarding what the character has to do in avenging his father’s murder. Or, as some Shakespearean scholars will tell you, you can see the usage of apprehension as it was used in Shakespeare’s time, referring to a grasp for understanding. Either way, I see it to be that in thought, in confusion, in trying to work things out, we are everything we can be. We are our best selves.  This is why we tell stories. It’s hardwired into us, and maybe that has something to do with the unique human condition of us all knowing how our own stories end.  It's the choices, the process that gets us to the end, not the final answers that matter. Or, as Anton Chekhov put it, “You are confusing two notions, ‘the solution of a problem’ and ‘the correct posing of the question’. Only the second is essential for the artist.”

There is no “Why?”

I’m sorry to ruin all of storytelling for you but we already know the answers. We’ve seen enough films, maybe read enough books and heard enough stories, to know all possible endings. There is very little that is new to storytelling. Only the specifics change, the details, the individual journey. Working along these lines, it’s easy to see that in books there is far more scope to delve deeper into the inner workings of our characters. We can read their thoughts – literally. In this way the reader is drawn, willingly or not, into stopping and smelling the roses. You can tune out whilst watching a scene in a film. Your brain is able to make that unconscious decision. The cinematographer is spitting teeth over the thought of you ignoring their beautiful establishing shots but never you mind that. Reading usually requires more thinking, or it at least precipitates being aware that you’re having to think. You don’t skip pages ahead in a novel because there is no quiet moment to do so.

However you choose to tell your stories, the choice to tell them seems like no choice at all. With that in mind, I think I can say that it’s more a case of, “Why did I do this? Why did I write it?” Where does this compulsion to write come from when we all accept that we will have to write for an audience that needs a lot of convincing before they invest time and thought in what you want to say. You can find yourself running in circles, thinking you know that “stories are integral to our lives,” but that nobody wants to read them. I may have long since passed a point where I feel that we feed people stories via television and cinema in much the same way we might sneak vegetables into our diets.

And we keep writing and doing so to the backdrop of a culture that does not encourage it, when what we want is culture where we have a sense that everyone is waiting for someone to say something, anything, just something we want to read, something that will fill a void that maybe we didn’t even know we had. Perhaps there is a mythical past that I once knew, where I had a sense of a desperate need to say something and it shone through in everyday culture, where no cultural reference was lost and everyone felt connected because of this. Or, it’s society’s default position to fly in the face of “story” being integral to our lives. It would explain the amount of times in my life I’ve heard people say, “What do you do with a degree in Literature?”

I keep coming back to “in apprehension how like a god.” How magnificent we are when we ponder, when we question and when our protagonists are hopelessly lost and looking for answers. Life and reading and thinking and creating, telling a story, telling a joke, singing a song, these are all the elements that make us us.  I think of Mark Twain and the inspiration that can be found in his telling us to “…plant yourself like a tree beside the river of truth, and tell the whole world — No, you move.”  I think of that description of Anna Karenina and how anything in this world could addresses destiny, death, human relationships, the irreconcilable contradictions of existence, life’s many ephemeral pleasures and the very nature of society at all levels. Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novels are riddled with ideas of existential psychology, portraying a nihilistic world, with a lack of a higher power to be answerable to. In Crime and Punishment, the protagonist Raskolnikov, with no belief in God, has no problem axe murdering an old woman to prove a point to himself regarding the ideas of right and wrong, good and evil. The old woman is a nasty piece of work anyway and because of this he can justify his actions. But then he has to kill an innocent bystander who witnessed the murder and that becomes a much harder issue for Raskolnikov, as he discovers it is not easy playing God and deciding what is right and wrong. Spirituality aside and religion definitely aside, Dostoyevsky had identified a need in us for something else, something we knowingly or unwittingly look for in stories. Sometimes it’s even better if we don’t understand why we need what we’re looking for, or even understand what it is we’re looking for. Arguably, the search is us. The story is God, or at least something more than us. It is something we do not understand. I’d happily argue that our creative endeavours are nothing more than a desire to understand the un-understandable that sits within us. More than anything, that which we don’t understand is a wonder, and what are we without that? Reading is a delve into that sense of wonder. It’s about as immersive as it gets, if it’s done right and for the right reasons.

It seems almost trite to say that the reason to write is to “create a sense of wonder.” But I don’t mean that everything written should be done to wow readers.  It’s not a case that every scene should blow you away. There’s an ebb and flow to what we read. It can’t be fireworks all the time. Also, the reader is exploring an unrealised yearning for something more than themselves. It doesn’t mean that the characters themselves are. In most cases the characters have no idea what’s so special about them, their words or their actions. Experiencing other people, other worlds, crawling into someone else’s head and living there for a while, even in the most ordinary lives, is what is special, wonderous even, about reading.

The message is not, “Read a book. They now come with extra wonder!” I’m not in advertising and looking for a cheap gimmick to sell books. I’m telling you or reminding you, and I’m definitely reminding myself, about all the reasons why we read and why I write.

A long time ago, when I was plotting and planning a trip across the US, I showed a friend of mine a brochure with a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge, as we were planning on meeting up in San Francisco. He said, “Wow, that looks amazing. But what do we do when we get there?” I told him, “You just take it all in and go, ‘Wow that looks amazing,’ for a whole lot longer.” What do we do when we get there? We think about where we are and when we come home, we tell stories of where we’ve been. We pass it on. We convey the sense of wonder that we experienced. We share our thoughts and feelings. Some do it with pictures. Some do so with moving images. I write about it. I can’t help myself.

There is no exit. Once you’re in there is no out:

I’ve thought about this, and I wonder what thoughts my brain would be filled with if I were to have a medical procedure that meant I'd never want to write again. And then I think, “What if every writer had the same procedure?” Then I imagine if we were to extend the project and everyone on the planet had that same procedure and were cured of wanting to read or write. We’d be free from these desires, leaving you with no need to look for reason or meaning. Every story could be taken at face value only. And then there would be no grasping at something greater than ourselves, something that we don’t understand. There would be no looking for that “something” in stories. There would be no need to ask, “why bother?” It wouldn’t even occur to us to ask. Would we be blissfully happy? I suppose we wouldn’t know any better. But if you were told now that that was what was going to happen, you’d surely feel like it’s the world’s loss, that we were something less for not having that itch you can never quite reach to scratch. It’s the stuff of sci-fi to think that in that world without writing you’d have this nagging feeling somewhere in the back of your mind that something was missing. Maybe we’d find another way. Maybe something else would fill the void. Maybe we find something, anything, something new to convey to one another that there’s something we want to say but we’re just not sure what it is.  

Why bother? In an era of emojis, abbreviated chat speak, hilarious atomic typos and confusing half sentences, why write? To all writers: Embrace that the question is there. And then ignore it and write because you can’t stop yourself. You need no reason, or at least you don’t have to understand the reason. Why read? Readers: Embrace the urge, the confusion, and understand you don’t even need to know why you’re reading or what you’re getting out of it.  I wonder if this is a rallying cry for myself more than anyone else. This whole exercise has been an exploration, ending in me thinking that even if writing didn’t exist, we’d end up inventing it anyway.