BORROWING FROM OTHER ARTS - THE METANARRATIVE IMPERATIVE

An excellent question from our community:

I’m sure there are lots of ways that other arts forms can inform writing …are there any pitfalls in letting other art forms inform writing? Or more specifically, have you ever tried bringing craft elements from other media to writing only for it to not work?

If you’re like me, writing is fucking hard. And because writing is hard, we must contrive strategies to deal with its difficulties. Some folks react to these obstacularities by narrowing their cognitive aperture — by focusing on their artistic genre alone to the exclusion of all others. I’ve had writers tell me that anything outside their artistic purview is a distraction. That’s one approach and if it works for you, it works for you. Speaking only for myself, I go the complete opposite direction, use everything I can put hands and mind on to help me overcome the agons of literature. From my earliest days my mentors encouraged me to leverage all the genres and media at my disposal to teach me what I need to know about writing. (Thank you Professors Holt, Brown and Sheck.) I didn’t have the luxury of purity, I guess. (Plus my focus is straight lacking.) A typical Caribbean, I’m syncretic as fuck by nurture and nature. A generic scavenger, an intuitive bricoleur, I constantly borrow / steal from films, from TV, from plays, from journalism. Truth be told I’ll borrow / steal from everything and everyone, resonating with Raoul Peck when he says:

So I had to steal from many places. And that’s the thing that saved me: I had no reason not to steal from everywhere. Like Baldwin, I decided the world was mine. I have access to the universal accumulation of knowledge. I never accepted the way the modern world cuts history, civilisation into pieces, and does not see we are the common development of humanity. I had no problem with reading Plato or Césaire to educate myself. Or Marx, to understand capitalism. Marx is my heritage, because it’s a human heritage.

I steal / borrow not only because I’m with Baldwin and Peck but because I’m not naturally great at what I do and therefore am desperate to learn in order to improve on my deficiencies. Thinking with other genres and narrative medias has helped me to understand my own genre immensely. Similar to how learning another language helps you speak your original language better.

(This is why I teach the kind of course I do, courses that pull in texts from across narrative media in the hopes of encouraging this praxis that has served me so well.)

Whether we’re talking about a formal language or a generic language, learning second languages has multiple benefits.

First and foremost this type of linguistic / narrative cross-training builds metalinguistic awareness, which as I said helps you understand your own language better, but also promotes a higher awareness of the nature and function of language. Metalinguistic awareness pulls language out of its default invisible mode and makes it more apparently a construct that can be manipulated.

Metalinguistic awareness, when we’re talking about writing, could also be understand as metanarrative awareness. The more metalinguistic / metanarrative awareness a writer has, the better for their writing — at least in my book.

Learning about forms other than fiction most specifically teaches me about my form in ways that my form could not do so by itself.

By studying the affordances of other forms — what a given narrative media does well — like how film is awesome at capturing movement and diegetic music and how literature’s central affordance is its ability to render interiority — by studying affordances in other narrative media I understand what affordances my own chosen form — fiction — does well, how I can both lean on its its affordances and strategize to compensate for its disaffordances.

(A disaffordance of literature, for example, is how poorly it can capture a dance as opposite to say film or animation.)

And finally there are studies that argue that people who speak another language are more utilitarian and flexible, less risk-averse and egotistical, and better able to cope with traumatic memories — all extremely useful habits for a writer.

This is why I don’t see any pitfalls “in letting other art forms inform writing.” There is more to be learned and gained by the fall than by the not-falling. And it is precisely by bringing craft elements from other media to writing, sometimes successfully, often not, that I have written what I’ve written.

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