“You rarely know what you should be doing until you’ve done it,” explained Margaret Atwood during her visit. And for Atwood, that was becoming a writer.
Writers don’t write because they have to, Atwood went on during a student seminar at the Kenyon Review Literary Festival. There’s no gun to the writer’s head, “and by the way, there’s no pension plan.”
There are four ways to write, according to Atwood. You can write a good book that makes money, a good book that doesn’t make money, a bad book that makes money, or a bad book that makes no money. She advised students to aim for the first, or at least the second. Obviously she is in the first category. However, she began writing recreationally (“I had no idea I’d make any money at it”) and, after failing to become a romance novel writer, she became a journalist. Her first boss at the newspaper told her she could write obituaries and women’s pages because that’s what women did on his paper.
“My vision of writers was that they were living in other places and/or were dead,” Atwood said. There was no Canadian literary tradition that she felt connected to. Instead she pursued philosophy and English, especially logical positivism. But logic and poetry were diametrically opposed to each other; logic says A cannot be A and non-A at the same time, but poetry says just the opposite. So Atwood moved on to English proper, picturing for herself a Bohemian lifestyle and grad school. “I wasn’t good at drinking and I was notoriously bad at smoking, so it was clear [the Bohemian life] wasn’t going to work out for me.”
She took two years off to write her first novel, which she described as rightly unsuccessful. “It wasn’t that good.” She headed next to UVC, out west, and in 1969, her first novel was auctioned for movies. She found herself in France in 1970 with Tony Richardson, writing a “dark, deep, purpley, menacing, Hungarian script.” She rewrote the script with a new director, and it came out with a decidedly more British tone. Though the movie was never made, Atwood had made enough money not to have teaching jobs, which she described as preventing her from having to attend staff meetings (she hates meetings of any kind). Her speech is brisk and blunt, her wit dry.
A student asked her to talk more about books onscreen. Atwood believes some beautiful books become terrible movies because “intrinsic language doesn’t translate onto screen very well.” She gave the example of Inside the Volcano, saying onscreen, it’s about a drunk. She gave Bladerunner as an example of writing that was improved by its conversion to film. On the subject, she also recommended “Introducing The Book.”
When a student asked what The Writer had ought to be doing, Atwood interrupted. “You can’t tell The Writer, meaning all writers, what to do. First of all, they won’t do it. Secondly, you put yourself into the tradition of Stalin and Hitler… What you do is the answer to what you should be doing, if it’s good.” She described writing as malleable like clay, not rock like the Ten Commandments.
Another student asked when her characters begin to feel real. “I think it’s when you start dreaming about them, or when you’re looking something over that you’ve written and think, that’s not something the character would have said.” Anyone you know, Atwood continued, will sometimes say something that surprises you. Characters too “will defy you and say something you haven’t planned.”
Back to Atwood’s autobiography: she did, eventually, find a living community of writers. She described them as “very much a community, in that they were happy to meet anyone new who would then read their books.”
“Writing is like a musical score in that it’s black marks on a page… Writing is recreated every time somebody reads it. The reader is like the violin player… You cannot predict who the individual reader will be. You’re not always present when the reader is reading the book.” (Here she cited Pilgrim’s Progress part two, by John Bunyan.) Later in the seminar, Atwood pointed out that publishing affects writers just as downloading music affects musicians. She said that e-books were not aesthetically attractive, and it’s hard for someone like her, who often starts in the middle of the book and works toward the front and the back, to approach a book in the same way using a virtual device. She expressed a nostalgia for hand-setting type and the relation it established between the typesetter and the syllabic alphabet. Any new technology, she said, tends to affect the form it has superseded. The two things that may give rise to an era of electronic readers is the environmental factor (we’re running out of trees) and the issue of portability. Atwood added, “We will regret the loss of libraries.”
When pressed to talk more about technological progress and global warming, Atwood said, “I never use the word progress if I can help it. I use the word change.” She gave global warming as an example of change. A student asked what happens next. Atwood answered, “A review of the human race is what happens next.”
Perhaps the most interesting questions posed were on the subject of Atwood’s devoted fan base. Atwood said the opera of A Handmaid’s Tale attracted an entirely new crowd, who mostly had green hair. A student associate (Rob Kunzig) shared some illustrations he’d found on the internet for Oryx and Crake. Atwood was delighted. “Your work gets away from you and takes on a complete other life. People go to Halloween parties dressed as the Handmaid’s Tale. I am very much not against it.”
Atwood resisted any questions to analyze her work, or her body of work. “I leave that to other people,” she said. “And think of all the job creation I’m doing!” She cited The Margaret Atwood Society to make her point. A whole association just for her. “Does that ever make you feel dead!”
Students asked Atwood why she keeps writing. She says it’s because she “can see the end.” There’s a human desire to have stories out, she explained, and in reality, wrongful convictions happen because people “want an end to [their own crime] story.” She said that like Oscar Wilde, she can see where each story is going and she wants to see “how it comes out.”
We’ll be interested to see what this word composer writes next.