I taught a writing workshop last week at which a student asked if I knew how to avoid appropriating the experiences of others while writing fiction. It’s a good question that comes up often and increasingly urgently as writers learn to fear the consequences of publishing stories about lives they haven’t lived. It’s become controversial to make money by recounting suffering if you have not yourself endured the suffering, as if readers are rewarding writers’ pain rather than purchasing their own reading pleasure.
Naturally I am sceptical about the principle here, I hope only partly because it is my vocation and my livelihood to imagine and recount experiences I have not had. I would defend everyone’s right and indeed obligation to try to see the world through others’ eyes whether we make art or not. Understanding that other people inhabit other norms and realities strikes me as a fairly basic part of human being, and fundamental to our ability to live together. If we say that acts of imagination are politically unacceptable, that no one may presume to understand any experience but their own, we isolate ourselves and each other, allege that others’ suffering is simply alien and incomprehensible. In times of great trouble, I have felt loneliest when well-meaning acquaintances said: “I can’t imagine what you’re going through.” You can, I wanted to say. You don’t want to. It’s exactly the way you’d imagine it.
Empathy is an act of imagination. So is mercy. Sometimes you have to work backwards from behaviour that seems unnatural or unreasonable: how would it have been in your head to reach a point where it seemed that violence towards yourself or another person was the best or only option? Sometimes people say that suicide and self-harm are despicable, selfish acts, but they are acts performed by people to whom it is self-evident that their own pain and death are to others’ benefit, just and right. If you can’t imagine how that might feel, try again: imagine a point so low that you believe your non-existence would be a gift to everyone else. That’s what it’s like.
Despite a widespread fascination for murder mysteries, many of us like to think that we can’t imagine killing another person, that killers are monstrous and alien. I have yet to ask someone who denies ever having felt a desire to murder. Very few of us act on that desire, because we know that the impulse will pass, that the consequences would be unbearable, perhaps that it is the idea of violence rather than the act itself that comes to mind, but the flicker of a murderous impulse comes to most of us on public transport, in meetings, in the car, reading the news, perhaps more shamefully and in fact more dangerously at the kitchen table or beside a screaming child. We know we must not act on the impulse, and we know how not to act, but we can and do imagine it.
If you’ve read the literary canon, you know how to think like a bourgeois white man
Sarah Moss: Until recently, I assumed everyone had infinite worlds of light, sound, scent, taste and touch in their heads
The problem isn’t me and my sourdough and my kale. Access to nourishing food should be a right
Sarah Moss: I find the phrase ‘first world problems’ deeply objectionable
[ I’ve always been suspicious of writers’ block. Nurses don’t get nurses’ blockOpens in new window ]
The question of imagining oppression and injustice is more difficult. It’s mostly easier to imagine up hierarchies than down them, because we survive by predicting and conforming to the expectations of people with power, and because their assumptions are writ large in culture and society. If you’ve read the literary canon, you know how to think like a bourgeois white man, and of course some bourgeois white men do the work of seeing differently. If you are not a bourgeois white man, you probably know how to think like one as well as from your own position.
If you want to write well from another position, you’ll have to work hard, and the further that point of view from your own, the greater the effort and research required. I would not want to say that it ever becomes impossible, that there is any experience by definition inaccessible to others, because part of the work of art is to allow us to glimpse worlds we don’t inhabit, or to see the worlds we inhabit through eyes other than our own. But these visions take serious work, and it’s that work, not personal suffering, that makes a better artist.