Ethics and writing

I’ve realised when reading the account of the session at the Edinburgh International Writers’ Conference (The Guardian 20 August 2012) that this was what I was waiting for – a debate, in effect, with an ethical and values dimension about the conditions in which writing takes place.

Irvine Welsh, author of Trainspotting, criticised the structural bias in the literature prizes such as the Booker prize as ‘middle-class’ and this sparked off in me the renewed preoccupation I’ve had as an author not just of fiction but of non-fiction as well over the past 30 years – basically not wanting to follow tram lines laid down by somebody or by an organisation such as a mass publisher, reflecting values and principles I simply don’t hold.

So, what does this amount to in practice? In practice, for me and, reading this piece about the Edinburgh Festival it seems I’m not alone, it means not accepting the way something is constructed culturally, elsewhere – which more likely than not means somewhere where upper-class Englishness rules – as the set of rules and procedures by which what I write has to be judged and/or measured. And for me, of course, working as I have since the late 1960s with people who’ve been judged by other people as not acceptable, criminal, deviant, needing to be socially excluded, okay to be stigmatised and all those other ghastly terms that refer fundamentally to processes of differentiation that reinforce social inequalities and people’s sense of personal inadequacy.

Coming back to what Irving Welsh said, I think he argued that the globalisation of the culture in which we write makes it difficult to conceive of certain pieces of writing being published nowadays by London-based publishers. This, I imagine from my own experience of mass publishers producing my non-fiction – I have to rest with small publishers for my fiction at present – is because of the focus on marketing, the need to define products, the need to fit them into pre-described categories.

Another remark I took from the article relates to ideas that sociologists have talked about for years, which doesn’t make them less important, but, given all the ways in which media studies and degrees in the ‘ologies’ are rubbished by the right-wing press, enables ill-informed and prejudiced comment to snipe away without any basis in genuinely critical reflection, have identified ways in which globalisation, or universalism, has become to an extent tied to global capitalism – and needs authors and readers to challenge this trend, in their different ways.

A good deal of my time has been taken up over the past 12 years in trying to achieve the setting up by the trade union of writers in the UK, the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain, of the Writers’ Guild Books Cooperative. (www.writersguildbookscoop.co.uk ) I can’t at present engage in the further development of this, even though I still chair it, because I’m convalescing from a serious brain operation and engaging in follow-up treatment through chemotherapy and radiotherapy. However, I think what I’ve just written sets out what might be the parameters for further debates by writers and their smaller and independent publishers to purse.

To me, there should be a statement by writers about what they mean by their own values and principles. These shouldn’t be imposed on them by external, oppressive or prejudiced and exclusionary forces, rooted in social or personal inequalities and/or attacking people’s personal or social identies as writers. There should be no hierarchical thinking hidden in the ways these statements are socially constructed, no pre-defined notion of what constitutes ‘good’ literature that is transposed from vantage points of privilege, social inequalities, class, gender, age, (dis)ability or geography.

And that is precisely what I wanted to say for today, about writers, the Writers' Guild Books Cooperative and my own frustrations about the narrowing of the tramlines of what can be written for mass publishers and ways of transforming the world of publishing beyond them.