Tabish Khair: The Technicians of Writing

It is time to rescue writing from the technicians.

No, I don’t mean the bureaucrats: the bureaucrats wax and wane, but they are always there in some form. There is always the editor who is more busy collating publishing figures than polishing his reading skills. He is a bureaucrat. There is always the publicity agent and the publishing executive, who believes in what ‘sells’ and does what ‘needs to be done’. There are critics and academics who have made mental tables of what ‘works’: they have all answers slotted, and labelled. They are bureaucrats.

The bureaucrats can never be eradicated, and sometimes they can even be useful. True writing survives despite them in the beginning, and because of them once it has become ‘established’. No, it is the technicians we have to watch out for. It is the technicians who are taking over writing today. Some suggest that there is an incestuous relationship between the bureaucrats and the technicians of writing. I suspect there is more than a grain of truth in this supposition, but I will not dwell on it. Instead, I want to talk about the technicians of writing and their rise over the past few decades.

As someone who has never done a creative writing program but finds such programs useful – in the sense of providing established writers with a livelihood and aspiring ones with companionship and advice in a lonely profession – I hesitate to point a figure of accusation at degrees in creative writing. But they do seem to share the blame. Too often, in a bid to ‘teach’ young people how to write, such courses formulate rules that reduce writing to technique. This is not bad per se. Technique is required in any field. But the point of art is that technique comes with the creation; creativity does not come with technique. Hence, the best creative writing courses are those that tell their students that they cannot turn them into writers; at best, they can help them become what they can. It is for this that they teach them the ‘techniques’ of writing.

Michael Schmidt, Carcanet's Editorial Director and Editor of
PN Review, took part in a debate on the role of the
editor in today's world. Click here to read a write-up.

Unfortunately, in a world that privileges technique over knowledge – it is not just literature and philosophy but also theoretical physics and field biology that fetch much less in the ‘job market’ than such technical skills as business management and computer programming – this can be a recipe for disaster. The technicians of writing, sometimes nurtured in such courses, slip out and occupy powerful places as editors, publishers and academics. Many of these places are already suffused with bureaucrats who can more easily spot a technique than talent. What they can do, what they can ‘tell’, is technique. Real literature starts drowning in jargon, whether nurtured in academia or the market. Reviews are written that miss the wood for the trees. Genres decay into pulp. Literary writing becomes the exercise of minds that had their last creative thoughts three generations ago, and have since lived on the interest. Prizes are given to what is ‘accomplished’ – which means ‘technically efficient’ – and comfortable – which means ‘intellectually acceptable to the reader’.

It is from these technicians of writing that literature needs to be rescued. And the only way to do so is to return literature where it belongs – in the mud of life, reeking of compulsion and desperation, not perfumed with ‘culture’ and capital. There was a time, following the more woolly excesses of the romanticist trajectory, when it made sense to tell young writers that what they need to do is write four hours a day, no matter what. Now it is time to tell them again that they should not write, unless they cannot help it. Literature is not a technique; it is not even a profession; it is a vocation.

Tabish Khair is the author of The Thing About Thugs and How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position.