How to Write: Listen to Your Animal Impulses. A Lesson from Joshua Cohen | Big Think

How to Write: Listen to Your Animal Impulses.

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What's the best advice novelist Joshua Cohen has for aspiring writers? It's not to kill your darlings but kill your distractions. Put down the smartphone, close your laptop, and turn off your TV. Besides taking your writing time from you, watching videos creates a lot of noise in your life — literal and figurative — that keeps you from hearing yourself think and talk.

What frustrates many writers, says Cohen, is that they look for someone else in the writing rather than seek a deeper understanding of themselves. What stands in the way of self-knowledge is artifice, a quality that is unique to human consciousness. Animals at the zoo — an example Cohen uses in this video — experience no social rules, at least not consciously. They have impulses and the impulses are followed.

The task of the writer is to understand human impulses, scary as they may be and uncomfortable as they are to look directly at. Rage, resentment, and the strength that comes from fear all make for good writing, says Cohen, and a bad life.

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JOSHUA COHEN:

Joshua Cohen is a novelist and literary critic. He’s the author of the critically acclaimed Book of Numbers, which has been called “The Great American Internet Novel” and of Witz, which was named a Best Book of 2010 by The Village Voice and Four New Messages, which was named a Best Book of 2012 by The New Yorker..

Cohen grew up in Atlantic City. He currently lives in Red Hook. He reads both German and Hebrew and has translated works in both languages into English. He attended the Manhattan School of Music and studied composition.

Cohen is the New Books critic for Harper's. His essays have appeared in Harper's, The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, Bookforum, The Jewish Daily Forward, Nextbook, Tablet Magazine, Triple Canopy (online magazine), Denver Quarterly, The Believer, The New York Observer, The London Review of Books, N+1 online, Guernica Magazine', and elsewhere.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Joshua Cohen: The best way to start writing is to stop watching videos. The second one is maybe to stop being in videos. Yep, but I also – but that’s a joke but as Freud said there are no jokes. There is no substitute for uninterrupted time for the, you know, not the killing your darlings thing of killing your favorite lines but killing your distractions first. And then hearing yourself talk honestly and hearing the way in which – or for me at least hearing the way that ideas are framed in speech give me a sense of how they might be framed on the page. Even if people feel like they’re not fluent on the page or on the screen or on the screen that we still call a page. They probably speak with less um’s and ah’s and oh’s than I do sometimes. And but primarily I think that the real question is what are you writing for. And I don’t mean knowing your audience because you can never know your audience. And if you actually want to write well your goal should be that your audience is inconceivable to you.

So what I mean is know what you’re trying to find of yourself from what you’re writing. I think most people are stuck because they are either trying to find another person in what they’re writing or they’re not even sure what they are – they’re not even sure why they are hurting themselves so badly. You know writing is a very strange thing because it is – it’s not the messy thing that you give to children in kindergarten like paints where you can smear it everywhere. Or like when they give a bunch of kindergarteners xylophones and they drive everyone crazy, right. Because it requires a little bit more education, right, to make the same amount of noise let’s say. But writing then becomes the most basic way besides speech of communication. And people do it very easily, right. But then it also becomes the hardest thing to do.....

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