To have lived an ordinary life is to have existed insignificantly in this world. Put another way, my irrelevance is widely known. If this is your predicament, think about trying to write your way out of it. And the better trained you are the more likely you’ll succeed.
One writer who did succeed, a guy I’d never heard of until last week, in eloquent prose held forth on his Substack blog about a neat trick he believes can avoid the pathology of a xenophobic mind – Read. And not just any old thing. Compile a list of the great works of western culture, he said, and get started. (His post began with the strong encouragement to not die before reading Anna Karenina – “It’s not worth it,” he said. (Note to self: Better get going then!)) He seemed confident that by reading the great works of literature written in the western tradition by very smart and insightful people, that that would open the reader to a permanent transformation of her worldview. I believe this is true. I also believe it is true that regardless of the endeavor we set ourselves to, we stand on the shoulders of the giants who’ve preceded us. So if you want to write well, start by looking back, reading the works of the great writers who’ve come before you. My only caveat to that advice would be to look back, yes, but don’t stare.
What I mean by don’t stare is this (stay with me): In the language of mathematical modelling there’s a concept referred to as “over-training.” Say you’ve conceived a model to detect cancer based on genes. First, you’d “train” your model on all the genes measured in an independent set of samples (biopsies) taken from real cancer patients. You can think of this training phase as saying to your model, See here, this is what cancer looks like, got it? Roger that, your model replies, and it studies the samples very closely to produce a list (ideally small) of only those genes required to accurately sniff out cancer. Lastly, in order to find out if your model is any good – to see how well it’s learned – you’d challenge it with a new sample, one that was not in the training set, and then prompt it, Hey model, does this patient have cancer?
Over-trained models are notorious for getting the answer wrong. When a new cancer sample doesn’t reveal a gene pattern “mathematically close” to any of those it trained on, and it miscalls the sample – maybe it replies, nope that ain’t cancer (when it really was) – and it’s wrong too many times, then we’d say that model is likely over-trained. The most common cause of an over-trained model is “staring at the training data for too long.” By analogy, if you train your brain on the great works of literature, fine, but if your goal in reading is to gain a wider, more nuanced worldview (i.e. a better model of the world), and not have your worldview “over-trained” on only the great works in the western tradition, maybe put some modern works of literature on your list and/or in other ways read around more (i.e. expand your training set).
Days later, after considering that blogger’s advice, I streamed a discussion (podcast) with Ta-Nehisi Coates. Wherein he said a lot of things. There was one thing, though, that he was emphatic about that caught my attention – Write. More specifically, he paid forward the advice he’d gotten from a writing mentor shortly after he’d entered Brown University, which was that if you want to write well, then get out in the world and experience as many things as you can, directly, then write about those experiences, concisely. Or to quote George Orwell: the great enemy of clear language is insincerity. Right about then Chloe was tugging at the leash, eager to introduce herself to a passerby who’d snuck up behind me (I was streaming the podcast on my earbuds). Earlier in the walk, Chloe had done the very same thing to another woman who I’d spotted walking toward us. This time I permitted her enough leash to greet the woman, so it was all good, and as I had paused the podcast when I saw her approach, I was able to hear her say her name, and that she knew HW, and then…”I enjoy your blog.” And that just made my day.
Anyway, an interesting kind of yinyang thing that writing well and reading well are dependent on each other. Writing involves reading your own mind, and translating it to the page, whereas reading is just training your brain on the experiences of others, via their writing, which is nothing more than the result of them reading their own brains! Either way, the point is the more variety you admit to your training set, the better your model of the real world will be, and in turn the better your own writing will be? That sounds about right to me.