A Writer Who Doesn’t Read is a Contradiction in Terms

An Interview with Professor Stephen J. Mexal

Stephen J. Mexal is a writer and a professor of English at California State University, Fullerton. His bylines have appeared in Pacific Standard, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Smithsonian, and elsewhere. He is the author or editor of three books, all about the intersection of writing, politics, and the American west. His most recent book is The Conservative Aesthetic: Theodore Roosevelt, Popular Darwinism, and the American Literary West. You can find him online at stephenjmexal.com or @stephenjmexal.

Why do we write?

Joan Didion would say that we tell ourselves stories in order to live, and I think that’s pretty close to why we write, too. We write in order to understand ourselves. But writing doesn’t mean transcribing life. It’s instead a kind of refined thought in itself. We often don’t understand something until we’re able to write it clearly. We write in order to observe ourselves thinking.

Why is storytelling important?

Storytelling imposes order on the chaos of the universe. It’s easy to list particular events in disconnected insolation, but those events only have a context, only make sense, if they’re put into a particular sequence of cause-and-effect. The narrative is the act of tracing cause-and-effect.

What writers do you love and why?

These days, I tend to be drawn to writers who have what feels like an attainable genius. Novelists like Toni Morrison, William Faulkner, Vladimir Nabokov, Virginia Woolf, or Ralph Ellison do not, let’s be frank, have an attainable genius. They’re too incandescent, too brilliant altogether. So while I do love those writers, these days I more often read contemporary writers of narrative nonfiction, which feels just slightly closer to something someone could achieve if they put in the hours: writers like Gay Talese, Susan Orlean, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Michael Lewis.

What books have you read recently? What did you like about them?

I tend to have several books going at a time, and my stack of reading only rarely includes new releases. Recently, I wrapped up Stanley Crawford’s Mayordomo, about the culture surrounding acequias in northern New Mexico; Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste, about the often-unseen caste system that shapes American lives; Lesley M. M. Blume’s Everybody Behaves Badly, about the creation of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises; and Christopher McDougall’s Born to Run, about endurance running and the Tarahumara tribe. All of them are smart and engaging nonfiction, and all are authored by writers trying to tell true stories about our world.

How do you think about creativity?

I suspect that most people think that creativity is the name we give to a fairly linear process: first, we are inspired, then we create. I don’t think that’s correct, though. If I wait until I’m inspired to write, I’ll never write anything. Instead, I think we force ourselves to create something, anything, whether due to an external deadline or an internal drive, and the inspiration only comes midway through the process, or even after it’s done. We like to think that we start at the beginning and confidently map out a journey from beginning to end, but really, we don’t know what we’re doing until after it’s begun. At some point our hands loosen on the wheel, our eyes slowly drift up to the rearview mirror, and we think, Ah, so that’s where I’ve been going.

How does writing influence society?

While it’s true that no one goes into a voting booth with a book of poetry that they intend to consult for voting advice, it’s also true that writing is one of the few things that has consistently changed the world. Our public selves are writerly selves. And whether someone writes a letter to the editor, starts a petition to bring together colleagues at work, or runs for elected office, that person is effectively telling a story about who we are now and who we imagine we could become. Society is shaped by politics, and politics is, at least in part, the work of a grand narrative imagination.

How do we determine what good writing is?

There isn’t any single or unchanging way of determining good writing, unfortunately. Today’s treasure may be tomorrow’s trash and the genius who goes unrecognized in her own time is so common as to be a cliché. So even though the actual writing in, say, Moby-Dick hasn’t changed over time, the perception of that writing definitely has. Today the novel is seen as a giant of American literature, yet when Herman Melville died in 1891, the novel was so overlooked that the New York Times initially misspelled it as “Mobie Dick” in his obituary. In W.S. Merwin’s poem “Berryman,” about poet John Berryman, the narrator wonders how you can know if your writing is any good. The response is, “you can never be sure / you die without knowing / whether anything you wrote was any good / if you have to be sure don’t write.” That about sums it up. Do your best and then move on. There is no other way. If you have to be sure, don’t write.

How does reading and writing develop identity?

It may be a cliché, but it’s true: books enlarge our worlds. When we meet people in books — Bigger Thomas, Ramona Quimby, Frodo Baggins, Clarissa Dalloway, whoever — we’re meeting people who are not us, and we’re also having experiences that are not our own. But if we’re reading well and deeply, those people who are not-us and those experiences that are not-ours can become our own. As Walt Whitman might have put it, we are large and contain multitudes because we’re human, sure, but also because of all the alternate selves we’ve assimilated through books.

What advice would you give to young readers and writers?

Well, the old advice to read a lot and write a lot still holds up. A writer who doesn’t read is a contradiction in terms. And I always encourage people to read broadly. You never know what’s going to be useful. So certainly you should read Shakespeare, Frederick Douglass, Jane Austen, all that. But also pay attention to pulpy crime fiction, blogs you’re interested in, catalogs or advertisements that catch your eye, or anything else. It’s all grist for the mill. I also try to encourage people to keep an extraordinarily broad conception of “writer” in their minds. Many of us have a narrow conception of writer-as-occupation: that is, a writer is someone who makes their living writing books. This kind of capital-W Writer, living a life of scarves and candlelight and cabernet, is both terrifically romantic and vanishingly rare. Yet people who do their best to live a writerly life are all around us, in any number of professions. It’s all in how you incorporate writing into your life. The accountant with a comedy Twitter feed, the physical therapist who occasionally writes Voltron fan fiction, the shop clerk who dabbles in freelance journalism — these people, too, are all living a writerly life.