Seven Literary Sins — The Dial

At the age of 13, I became addicted to stealing from other writers. It is what I call literary kleptomania. It started after I fell in love for the first time. She had green eyes, and I didn’t know what to do with the hungry fire inside me, so I fell ill with a fever. My grades were declining. My grandfather visited me, checked my temperature, and left a small book next to my bed. It was a study of Abu Nuwas, an Arabic poet (c. 756–814) famous for his poems on alcohol, love, homosexuality, and other sins.

In bed, with a new notebook, I started to copy the lines of poetry that drew me in. I recovered from the love fever in a week. But I never recovered from my addiction to copying the work of other writers. I would go to the library and wander around, flipping through the books, not looking for something to read but for the jewelry hidden inside them. Sometimes it was a paragraph written in a style that was new to me, sometimes a sentence that blazed, sometimes a single word I was learning for the first time. I never cared about ideas, or plot, or themes. They were pebbles on the road; the true hidden diamonds were the words and phrases whose  true power was hidden. Look, for example, at this jewel that I stole recently: “Pods of the laburnum at nine in the morning.” Because of it, I learned about the beautiful tree Laburnum, and its golden flowers in spring, which become pods in autumn, perfect as a metaphor or something to recycle to write a colorful picture. I will not tell you, of course, who I stole from, although any reader of American poetry might recognize her in those lines.

There is a legend about Abu Nuwas. He went to a master and asked to be taught. The master told him to go and memorize a thousand lines of poetry. He spent a year doing it, then returned. The master said: "Good. Now forget them. If you can, you will be a poet." That is what I have been trying to do all these years in Arabic and English. I convince myself that I forget what I memorize, but ghosts of writers and people I stole from keep chasing me.

I am a thief, good at hiding what I take, memorizing it, until it flows in my bloodstream, so no one can tell where the blood comes from, or which writers I stole from. Still, in most of my books, I have a list of writers that I stole from, to thank them.

—Ahmed Naji

My biggest literary sin is probably that I don’t like full stops, in fact I don’t use them at all if I can avoid it, really, I’m a comma girlie, my sentences go on and on, both when I write and when I speak, and sometimes I completely forget what I’m talking about as I’m talking, since I’m also fond of the occasional aside, especially a very long one, to the point that everyone including me loses the thread, because fundamentally I write the way I speak, and I speak the way I think, I don’t have the filter that full stops represent, I can’t tell where one thought ends and the next begins, until sometimes my editor pleads with me to add a full stop, like she’ll say you’re moving too fast here, Anna, and then I listen, because I have great faith in authority. And I try to remember it for the remainder of the text. That I’m supposed to take it slow, or, alternatively, at least, to rotate between short and long sentences. But then I get carried away again, fingers flying across the keyboard, like that time I had a manic breakdown while I was writing a book, when I felt at my most brilliant and I was comparing myself to Jesus and I think maybe also Aristotle, a bit, and I do remember some sort of long argument about why the most logical thing to do was to stop smoking without any help, because that’s what Jesus would have done, given that nicotine gum didn’t exist in his day, but in the end I wasn’t able to quit cold turkey, and people continued to try to teach me to use full stops. Sometimes I do.

—Anna Juul (tr. Caroline Waight)

The literary sin I want to confess (to the internet?) is that I’ve stopped unquestioningly trusting an author’s vision. I want to let them carry me into their story. But I find myself throwing a book on the floor as soon as a flourish in a sentence feels unearned or the writing contrived. Suddenly, I no longer trust the way the author deals with grief, marriage, breakups, unemployment, politics, or anything at all. 

It is an insane way to react to prose. Prose has sloppiness built in, it’s a loose art form. You cannot expect truth at all turns. Sentences are prepared every minute like sandwiches at delis. When I reread Balzac or Woolf I find so many dishonest things, instances where they have twisted an obvious reality in service of some kind of cohesive moral meaning. Yet these authors have raised me, and I’m happy with the result.

But I can no longer delve into novels that I feel have betrayed the bizarre unilateral trust I had in them — and yet I’ll spend weeks on a page I like, and read it aloud to friends, and worship it like you worship a bakery, or a grandmother, and be content.

I’m not proud of this. It’s not healthy. And besides, what am I really looking for — poetry?

—Francesco Pacifico

In the English-speaking literary circles, I often hear that writers should “show not tell.” This expectation is not as present in my literary world (I write mostly in French), but even so, I’ve noticed a growing appreciation of efficiency. Sentences are praised when they are ciselées (“chiseled”) — an adjective French literary critics over-use to describe any good sentence. Characters must be coherent; plots must be tight and any gaps in the plot must be patched. As if a short story or novel’s natural destiny is to become a well-crafted miniseries.

In my novels, characters plod through their lives. They are opaque to the narrator, to the reader. So often, they explain things to themselves. If they fall in love, they analyze the phenomenon until they exhaust it. If they’re sad, ditto. This is not as a gratuitous literary gesture; it’s because I think we are mostly opaque to ourselves and the written text feels like one of the only places where this opacity can still exist.

Instead of going straight to the point — or even having a point — a novel should meander with its characters, look for and fail to find explanations. The most compelling narrators often think they are telling a story but are in fact hapless as the narrative slips through their fingers.

Writers manipulate a cumbersome, reluctant material. Something happens when stories resist their forward momentum and characters resist their writers. Sure, we can hammer language into efficiency, but it doesn’t always yield. It’s unwieldy and it’s this unwieldiness I love.

Don’t get me wrong. I love compelling and exciting stories. I do not think that one type of literature is better than another, just as I would never consider inaccessibility for its own sake a virtue. But I also love stories that can only exist as texts, because they explore the singular features of this weird, inefficient, awkward art form of ours, because they stubbornly tell and don’t show.  

—Karim Kattan

I recently copyedited the first draft of my second novel, before a professional copyeditor got their hands on it. I did this because I vividly remember getting my first book copyedited and having to suffer the humiliation of someone else gently pointing out that  I had used several words over and over in the manuscript. “Trudge,” “unpleasant” and “lightly,” for instance, had all overstayed their welcome. Ever since, I have been on high alert for repetitions. And when I come across one, all too often I find myself sidling over to Google to ask it for a list of synonyms.

Could I think of my own list of other words for “to stare,” for instance? Of course I could. But for whatever reason, this is the one area of my writing where I am apparently happy to outsource the creative process. Perhaps if I were flitting to a bookshelf in these moments and taking down a copy of Roget’s Thesaurus I might feel less grubby. I would be using a physical reference text, which has a certain literary flair to it. But I don’t own Roget’s Thesaurus. When I need information of any kind, the first place I’m looking is online, because I am normal.

I feel a certain amount of shame about it, because coming up with words is what my brain is for. I know a great many words. There are plenty of them in there. I try to convince myself that there are advantages to my habit. Sometimes I learn a new word, or stumble across an interesting etymology! Sure, occasionally. It’s mostly laziness, though. I am almost certainly eroding some neural pathways by googling the thesaurus, in the same way that using my phone calculator app has slowly robbed me of my times tables. But I’ll continue never to do sums in my head, and I’ll continue to tell myself that, sometimes, it’s all right to choose from a little menu of words brought to me by the internet.

—Imogen West-Knights

A virtuous mentor once told me that I should read a work closely to the end before translating it — to be sure I wanted to take it on, to save myself the trouble of going back over repeated words, motifs and spellings, and to establish the right tone from the start. My mentor meant well, but honestly, where’s the fun in that?

I prefer to remain as ignorant as possible for as long as possible. Going through a text in murky slow motion, every sentence becomes a little thriller. How will the tightly knotted structure of the grammar and syntax loosen into meaning? What subterfuge has the author devised within a sentence, and what chills of humor or irony will run across its surface as the subterfuge is discovered?

The process of translation exposes how much you miss in ordinary reading, even in the language you know best. (I once reread Jane Austen while cramming vocabulary for a graduate school admissions test and noticed, for the first time, words in English that I'd previously read past as if they weren’t there at all.) The less you focus on plot, the more the elements of language come into view. So, for me, often, a quick skim to the end and then right to work. I go sentence by sentence, squinting into the half-light — looking just far enough into the penumbra not to crash into the trees. And when I do crash, there’s always the backspace key to uncrumple the car. Going backward is a small penance for the pleasure of not knowing what’s around the bend.

—Sabrina Jaszi

Every time I begin writing an essay, I promise myself that I’m going to track my sources. That, this time, I’m going to make things easier for myself by noting down where I come across every single fact. And yet I never do. Instead, at the end of each draft, once the fact-checking starts, I begin the arduous task of trying to remember where I read or heard something. Part of the problem is that a lot of the essays I write emerge from years of casual curiosity about a subject. But the bigger problem is that I don’t care enough to solve this problem.

I have many other literary crimes — an extreme snobbishness about what I read, trying too much to write like other writers I admire, and a habit of googling myself every few days — but none of them haunts me more than the inability to track my sources. And so I am heartbroken when a fact is struck from a piece of my writing because I can’t provide a source. My laziness haunts my nights. Once, I couldn’t remember where I had come across a particular crucial detail about a man I was writing about. I went back to all the papers I’d read, all the articles, all the interviews I’d done, but I couldn’t find it. So I convinced myself that I’d dreamed this detail. That I’d wanted so badly to tie things together that this piece of information came to me as I slept. A few days before the final draft was due, I realized where I’d read it. It was an email that someone had sent to me at 1 a.m., and that I’d read in the zone between deep sleep and wakefulness.

—Carey Baraka