Tim Powers on chronocentrism and conformism
/For the last week I’ve been reading Tim Powers’s 1987 pirate fantasy On Stranger Tides, a book that everyone seems to agree Pirates of the Caribbean couldn’t have come into existence without—even before Disney optioned the title for the fourth one—and that got me watching Powers interviews on YouTube again.
In this interview with a channel called Through a Glass Darkly, host Sean Patrick Hazlett asks, as a wrap-up, “What advice would you give to new writers?” Powers responds with a list of “the old, traditional advice, which is solid-rock true,” and that I have to add is still good advice for people who’ve been writing for years or decades. Here’s the first part of his answer in bullet-list form:
“Read very widely, read outside of your field, read outside of your time, don’t restrict yourself simply to stuff published since 2000 or 1980 or whatever. You don’t want to be chronocentric.
“Have as wide a base as you can, chronologically and [in] subject matter. Read mysteries, read plays, read poetry, non-fiction, et cetera.
“Write a lot. Set yourself a schedule and keep to it. Even if it’s only a thousand words a month, stick to it. Use guilt and fear as motivators. Tell yourself you’re worth nothing if you don’t get the writing done.
“Get it in front of editors, send it out. Don’t get trapped in a revision whirlpool. A story doesn’t exist until an editor has looked at it. It’s like Schrödinger’s cat.”
He follows this up with an elaboration on his first point of advice:
“Don’t be a conformist. Don’t bend your writing to fit what you see as trends, even if they seem to be mandatory trends. They’re not.”
Okay, all that’s true. Then I would say—goes back to chronocentrism—don’t be a conformist. Don’t try to clock what’s selling now, because even if you could correctly gauge that and then write a story, it’s very likely not to be what’s selling now by the time your story comes out. Don’t be a conformist. Don’t bend your writing to fit what you see as trends, even if they seem to be mandatory trends. They’re not. If you say, “Oh this is what they’re buying now. This is what you have to do now in order to get published. There’s some boxes you have to check.” No. Be different. Be a nonconformist. Because if you go along that conformist road, even if it gets published your work is just going to be one more of that generic type, and what’s the value in that? So I would say, ignore trends.
Hear hear.
Powers has said versions of this before—here’s a blog post I wrote last October based on a similar interview conversation—but it’s stated more firmly and in more detail here.
I especially like Powers’s framing of the problem in terms of “chronocentrism.” As I recently told one of my classes, the most neglected form of diversity in our diversity-obsessed age is chronological diversity. Powers is steeped in CS Lewis and loves his non-fiction, so he’s probably got Lewis’s concept of “chronological snobbery” and passages like this from “On the Reading of Old Books” at the back of his mind:
Every age has its own outlook. It is especially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. . . . None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.
For a similar concept, see Alan Jacobs’s “temporal bandwith.”
