Recently I've had friends ask me why I don't try to write for games or television or the movies. Ignoring the most obvious answer, which is that getting into those things is really, really hard and I don't feel like making the effort, I think the real answer is that none of those things really do it for me. I don't know. I mean...I love TV and movies and even electronic games, but at an early age the novel captured me, and that's simply where my heart lies.
Having said that, I have to say I don't have a very heroic vision of the novel. Nobody has ever satisfactorily proven to me that it's in any way superior to other forms of narrative media. Nor do I think that consuming narrative media (in any form, but let's restrict this discussion right now to the novel) is a particularly meaningful or revelatory act.
Authors sometimes talk about how deeply some book makes them feel, and when that happens, I'm like...really?
I mean I know why books make us feel deeply when we're young: it's because everything makes us feel deeply then. It's not any inherent virtue in the artist or in the media. If that was true, One Direction would be the greatest band of all time, because they clearly have inspired the greatest amount of feeling amongst all the bands in the world.
But now, as an adult, I can't say that books make me feel particularly deeply. In fact what I'm struck by is how insubstantial they are in comparison to real life. If there was any message I could go back and give to my younger message, it'd be Saul Bellow's "People can lose their lives in libraries."
There used to exist, amongst authors, a strong vein of suspicion about the real worth of the written word. Unfortunately, that feeling kind of ended up feeding into the mysticism and anti-intellectualism of fascism, and many authors who strongly questioned the written word ended up becoming fascists. But I don't think this means the idea was wrong. If anything, fascism is itself a response to the sense that intellectual life doesn't really have much to offer for a person who wants to feel deeply.
For me, writing books--the act of creation--sometimes provokes deep feelings. I live more vividly within my own imagined worlds than I do within anybody else's. But I don't expect my books to do that for other people. I primarily see them as, I guess, very sophisticated entertainments for people, like me, who are too jaded (or we could call it discerning) to enjoy most books. Those people can pick up my books, read them, and be like, huh, I haven't seen that before. That's interesting.
That, to me, is all books, pretty much. When I think of the books I've read in the last five years that've really stuck with me: House of Mirth, The Magic Mountain, Revolutionary Road, Middlemarch...the feeling I got from them was no more than that..."Huh, this is interesting. My attention is engaged."
And that's it, then it's over. There's nothing more to it than that. Some people spend their lives streamlining inventory flow management for Toyota, and I spend mine writing these books. They're of limited value, but their value isn't nothing, and there's a non-zero chance that one of your books will blow up and become really popular and then you'll make lots of money.
I read in Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy that times of societal decline lead to the popularity of quietist, inward-looking philosophies (hence the popular of Stoicism during the Roman Empire). Similarly, I think it's sometimes worthwhile to notice the smallness of human endeavor. When I write a book, I do think of myself as adding some sort of DNA to the world of literature. But I don't know how that DNA is going to be snatched up, recombined, or discarded by the forces of chance and necessity. But whatever ultimately happens to it, the result is going to be pretty minor. But still...it's pretty cool to have left something behind.