Why We Write

As you know, we just voted for equal marriage in Ireland.

I posted and shared and liked a lot of stuff on my facebook page recently regarding that vote. I also wrote a blog post and even reposted it the day before the referendum.

As an author, perhaps I shouldn’t put such political or religious sensitive material things out there. I’ve been told to be careful. There can be a backlash against it, and it can hurt your career as an author. I learned this from the experience of another author who I follow on facebook. Someone didn’t like the author’s opinion in regarding the Irish vote for Equal Marriage. And they lowered themselves to dirty tricks.

Which is very sad.

Do we always have to care what people think to respect their work?

I mean, I don’t like Tom Cruise much as a personality, but I think he’s a great actor and I watch his movies – ditto for Mel Gibson.

Of course, in my own case, I believe I am on the right side of the arguments, and hope it will make people more receptive to my writing, in the end.

Because why do I write?

Let me say first, in answer to my own question, that I don’t care much about an author’s opinions.

I follow Anne Rice on facebook. I love that she’s cool, and that she replied to my email when I pointed out a typo in one of her books. But I read her books before I found out she was cool, and would have kept reading, despite her political views. I have rarely looked up information on the authors whose books I have read. I don’t think many people do. Even vegans read The Old Man and the Sea and see the quality of the book.

But many readers do care about the writers. They want to like the author.

I hope that these readers don’t hate my books (or pretend to hate them because they don’t like me).

I am sure, on the contrary, that if they hate what I say then they will hate what I write.

For what are my books if not attempts to tell a story at the same time as awaken consciousness, make the reader aware of a topic, make them think, change them a little, for the better, for having read them? (High aspirations, I know, but we must try. If we don’t try save the planet we are certainly doomed.)

As an example, a post I wrote about farmers illegally burning land in Ireland got much more coverage than most of my musings and was sent around facebook quite a bit (to my amazement). I looked through a few comments (Okay, all of them) and found nothing but agreement, even with my use of bad words.

Every author, I think, tries to change their reader.

And to a certain extent, we have a responsibility to do so. Just this week, George Monbiot took a children’s author to task for contributing to the whitewashing of the realities of intensive farming for food and milk production.

There are some who write just to thrill, to scare, for the enjoyment of making the reader have an emotion.

I do too. But I also want the reader to pause, to learn a little.

I know I’m not alone. Before the internet came about to let us connect to the daily musings of our favourite writers, everyone could get a sense of the writer’s opinions from their novels. I never knew anything about Rolling Stone Magazine until I read Stephen King’s Firestarter. But it gave me an insight into King that none of his shared postings on the internet have altered.

I know it’s not considered good writing to have the reader pause, to look up from the page to have to go and look up a word, or a reference. Perhaps.

But I love those kind of books. I like being immersed in a movie so much that I don’t notice two hours go by, but afterwards, I like to be able to talk about it, about the parts that I haven’t quite figured out. I love the same with books, though I can take a break in the middle rather than waiting till the end. I love spending two hours on wikipedia or youtube, filling in blanks and adding to my knowledge, like I did after I watched Pride last month.

If we writers really thought thinking was a bad thing, then why would be bother thinking up these stories?

And I have faith that thinking hasn’t gone completely out of fashion. Even though the thoughts are often depressing.

Can we Continue Voting to Make the Planet Green?

It’s a great feeling to see progress. To know that attitudes can change very quickly. For the better.
I watched the movie Pride a few weeks back. It’s thirty years since the UK Miner’s strike. GLBT rights were stagnant in Ireland during most of those years. Yet now they’ve been propelled forward very rapidly.
I watched a youtube video of Mark Ashton (the person the main character the movie is based on) talking about the Thatcher era. He said it was set up so the rich could get richer off the backs of the poor. And we are more than ever under the yoke of the 1%.
Thirty years ago, global warming was ringing alarm bells and elephant poaching was a huge problem. Now we are again looking at the extinction of the few remaining megafauna on the planet and the Antarctic ice sheet is melting while a bunch of politicians are more interested in stopping immigrants and sending them home to die than accepting the looming crisis of millions left on land that can not sustain them, or house them, because of desertification and flooding their economic policies cause.
There are glimmers of hope, though.
Despite a setback in Britain the other week, there is some movement forward. In Spain, the ruling right wing party suffered a big setback yesterday, losing the majority in most regions and municipalities.
The Pope will hopefully remind us on his “much-anticipated encyclical letter on the environment“,
that a religion aged in millennia must think of the long term survivability of the planet and its inhabitants, and anyone who considers himself a follower of that guy two thousand years ago should see past the financial reports of next quarter, and understand that a superrich Christian is a contradiction in terms.
The Yes vote is a giant leap forward for Ireland, but only a small step for mankind.
But after Friday we can smile that we’re still standing.