First off: it is impossible to typecast someone entirely accurately, because contradicting character traits and values are inherent in the human condition, as each passing second, each new experience, keeps our minds in a constant state of flux. At least they should, which is an idea I’ll get to by the end of this talk.
I have an aversion to generalisations about demographics or generations because they are, after all, comprised of minds that are in a constant state of flux. There is no way I could make some sort of all encompassing claim about any sort of trait that characterises all young writers.
Nonetheless I’ll get on with the job of talking about the most prevalent and corrosive exercise in typecasting I could think of: the ludicrous claim that a writer needs to have accrued a certain quota of life experience before they can hope to communicate anything of value to a readership. Hands up if you’ve heard this claim before. Leave your hands up if you think it’s bullshit.
Our class was actually told this during the short time I spent at creative-writing school, and was perhaps one of the reasons I dropped out. In the decade since then I have been fortunate to have the opportunity to edit Voiceworks for two years, during which time we published hundreds of writers and artists, and read the work of hundreds and hundreds more. Either side of that experience, at Wakefield Press, I have had the fortune to work with a wide range of older authors.
The resounding impression I can draw from this experience is that it’s much harder to edit older writers than it is to edit young writers. (I think it’s worth mentioning that most of the authors I currently work with don’t find out how young I am until they meet me at the launch, and they are invariably surprised. I guess they don’t know about Facebook stalking.)
The young writers I’ve worked with are generally far more liberal-minded, far more interested in learning new things (including how to behave in an author–editor relationship), perhaps because they’re still painting on a relatively blank slate. We also have an unprecedented level of access to information these days, which helps to combate our inherent tendency to embrace confirmation bias to support our fragile intellectual egos.
Older writers, especially those who have been published a lot before and received any sort of critical acclaim, are generally less open to having their work tampered with.
Of course this is not a one-size-fits-all cast. I’m going to hazard a generalisation for the sake of talking about this, and say about a quarter of the young writers I’ve worked with are as precious as three quarters of the older writers I’ve worked with.
But it’s not a matter of age that I’m talking about here, it’s a matter of attitude, of personality. The most talented writers I’ve worked with are aware of their own limitations as authors – they covet criticism because they still want to learn. The most talented writers I’ve worked with are those who are inherently interested in others, and therefore far more interested in actually communicating with them, rather than talking to them from above. That this inherent interest extends to me, their editor, renders them far more amenable to the idea of actually collaborating on their work.
Invariably it is the oldest, least talented writers who have had to bolster their own egos from within. As far as I can tell, the best way to do this is by sticking your head up your arse and shouting. [This is where the woman guffawed and I looked up, sheepishly, wanting to join in, forgetting I was supposed to presenting a speech, not having a chat at the pub.]
This has all gotten very specific to my exerience as an editor, but my experience as a general reader illuminates something else, I think.
Maybe 95% of the books on my shelves (by young writers, and old) are characterised by pinko-lefty themes. When I realised this I started soliciting recommendations of right-wing authors – novelists, in particular. My inquiries were often met with either the scornful suggestion that, ‘Dude, neo-cons don’t have imaginations, that’s why they’re neo-cons’, or, ‘Just read anything by Ayn Rand.’
The former reminded me of the t-shirt that Quadrant used to sell, which bore the slogan: ‘I’ve never read Quadrant because I don’t like it’. The latter leaves me quite concerned that the only suggestion I could find among my networks was for a novelist who was writing maybe seventy years ago, in America.
Look at me, though: I’m wearing a fucking costume. I wear skinny black jeans, and a self-referential, pop-culture t-shirt. I have a stupid ironic haircut, a question-mark knuckle tattoo, I ride a single-speed roadbike around the city wearing a messenger bag. I’ve become a fucking hipster. I like to think of myself as liberal-minded, but this doesn’t mean I’m a lefty.
[At this point Dan tapped his glass, which was the signal for five minutes: we had seven minutes; I wasn't going to make it. I skipped the italics below and got straight to the point. Meanwhile, consider this picture as an illustration of my last point.]
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But neither am I a righty, because, to bastardise one of my favourite high-school sayings, I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than the frontal lobotomy required to hold conservative views.
The friends who know me would consider it laughable to suggest that I make any sort of daily style choices, but I certainly have gathered about me an image based on those who share similar values, and this act of personal typecasting has been necessary for me to escape another image I had created for myself when I was in high school and thought gate crashing parties, listening to heavy metal, getting fuck eyed and ending fights was a cool thing to do.
We need to typecast ourselves in order to feel that we fit in somewhere, and making fashion statements facilitates our movement between social groups. Sometimes we need to do this to operate within and move between schools of thought, if that’s what we want to do. We need labels to understand who we are, and to express ourselves to others.
Young people, I think, are especially susceptible to typecasting because they are still forming their ideas about themselves, mingling with subcultures where their parentals don’t hang out. It is important that we take control of this process though, and as the foothold of mainstream media on public opinion continues to slip, we are increasingly able to grasp the power to do this.
Old people I know – friends and authors alike, as well as authors who have become friends – tend to have ‘grown out’ of subcultures. Perhaps as their sense of individual identity strengthens they feel they can happily exist among mainstream society without compromising their values.
This is doubtful, and as we age and develop as humans and writers and thinkers, I think one of the trickiest balances we need to affect is between how much of this sub-communal identity we should retain, and how much we should forgo in the interests of ‘growing up’, of assimilating with mainstream society.
Wouldn’t it be a shame if we spent our youthful creative years bemoaning that patronising claim that we need to grow up before we can write well, only to finally grow up and write and think just like our forebears?
It’s one thing to challenge our mainstream ancestors. It’s a whole other tricky task to challenge the prevailing mindset among our own subcultures.
I think the reason we don’t already find it easy to do this is that young creative types are usually typecast as lefties, and lefties are generally typecast as adherents of political correctness.
[Okay, the next bit in italics is what I ham-fisted on the day, and the roman text is where I resumed reading.]
Considering how my image reflects the company I keep, it’s not surprising I’ve found it difficult to squeeze right-wing fiction out of my networks, which is frustrating because I like to question beliefs, but it is politically incorrect to question certain beliefs held by the intellectual left: the human causes of climate change and the viability of representative democracy being the two most important that I could think of.
But it is essential that we do, lest we find ourselves cloistered in a niche of unquestioning adherence to political correctness that infuses so much of our stifled debate in this country.
So, if you asked the mirror, “Mirror mirror, on the wall, which is the worst typecast of them all?” it might say it is the self-perpetuating identity of the leftist elite who overpopulate Australia’s literary community. [This was where the silence increased.] By pedalling the same opinions to one another because we’re too timid to question our friends we are actually inhibiting the very progress of human thought we claim to advocate. [This was where I thought I heard the gasp.]
It is the young writers of Australia who are most well equipped to do this, for the same reason their detractors would say their writing has no value: they haven’t been around long enough to have become brow-beaten and bigoted; there is still hope they can turn their critical faculties on themselves and resolve to start thinking anew.
In the interests of publicly demonstrating my commitment to this new liberalism I was going to strip myself of my middle-class pinko-lefty costume and do the rest of this panel in my underwear. Instead I’m going to read this stanza from a Bukowski poem called ‘unemployed’:
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dear reader,
do you know something?
those who keep asking the same question
really don’t want to hear the answer.
