How to Write: Susan Sontag explains the duty of a storyteller and the dangers of distilling culture into content

A great fiction writer both creates worlds and responds to the world, the famed American writer and philosopher said.

The inimitable Susan Sontag (1933-2004) valued words and appreciated the power of language to an extreme degree. Words demand our responsibility and attention, and they in turn provide meaning.

Writers have a social duty to apply precision to language, according to Sontag's collection of posthumous writings, At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches.

I’m often asked if there is something I think writers ought to do, and recently in an interview I heard myself say: 'Several things. Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world.'

The most pressing responsibility of a writer, however, comes down to telling stories and doing it effectively enough to make someone think and feel, in Sontag's view.

A story, when told with the right words, has the power to shift a culture, change a mind, and ultimately leave a mark on the world. Good writing therefore should not only exist in the world, but it should push the world's narrative forward. Sontag did so herself in 1963 with her debut novel, The Benefactor.

Nobel laureate John Steinbeck, comparatively, said he prioritized showing up to work each day. Compared to Sontag, he touched little on the role of the writer and their art as far as they related to the world. In any case, both great literary figures proved their diligence through their output.

In Sontag's words:

The primary task of a writer is to write well. (And to go on writing well. Neither to burn out nor to sell out.) … Let the dedicated activist never overshadow the dedicated servant of literature — the matchless storyteller.

For fiction writers in particular, Sontag describes something more difficult.

A great writer of fiction both creates — through acts of imagination, through language that feels inevitable, through vivid forms — a new world, a world that is unique, individual; and responds to a world, the world the writer shares with other people but is unknown or mis-known by still more people, confined in their worlds: call that history, society, what you will.

'To write is to know something'

Given how busy people are, the role of a writer is to accumulate and curate knowledge and disseminate it to readers. "To write is to know something," Sontag wrote in one piece, emphasizing the great pleasure that accompanies reading the work of a knowledgeable writer.

Literature, I would argue, is knowledge — albeit, even at its greatest, imperfect knowledge. Like all knowledge.

Still, even now, even now, literature remains one of our principal modes of understanding.

The writer's duty, she maintained, is to scrutinize society and the world, and then communicate the facts as they are, in a way that serves both culture and literature.

Good writing is honest about the state of things, and it should be able to evoke the best part of people. The best ideas are both aspirational and inspirational — two more responsibilities of a writer in an imperfect world.

Writers shouldn't reduce culture into 'content'

Sontag later distinguished between two potential models that compete for readers' limited attention.

There is an essential … distinction between stories, on the one hand, which have, as their goal, an end, completeness, closure, and, on the other hand, information, which is always, by definition, partial, incomplete, fragmentary.

Those two models, for Sontag, form the opposing mediums of mass media and literature.

Sontag said television, for example, provides information, whereas literature tells stories. She did not attempt to hide her preference for latter, as television at its core had nothing to do with the moral obligation of a writer.

"Literature involves," Sontag wrote. "It is the re-creation of human solidarity. Television (with its illusion of immediacy) distances — immures us in our own indifference." She adds:

The so-called stories that we are told on television satisfy our appetite for anecdote and offer us mutually canceling models of understanding. (This is reinforced by the practice of punctuating television narratives with advertising.)

They implicitly affirm the idea that all information is potentially relevant (or “interesting”), that all stories are endless — or if they do stop, it is not because they have come to an end but, rather, because they have been upstaged by a fresher or more lurid or eccentric story.

She carried on at length on the matter, illustrating her advocacy for gradual wisdom over just about anything else.

Five decades before smart phones and social media, the perceptive author warned against distilling culture into content.

To tell a story is to say: this is the important story. It is to reduce the spread and simultaneity of everything to something linear, a path.

To be a moral human being is to pay, be obliged to pay, certain kinds of attention.

When we make moral judgments, we are not just saying that this is better than that. Even more fundamentally, we are saying that this is more important than that. It is to order the overwhelming spread and simultaneity of everything, at the price of ignoring or turning our backs on most of what is happening in the world.

The nature of moral judgments depends on our capacity for paying attention — a capacity that, inevitably, has its limits but whose limits can be stretched.

Complement the wisdom of Susan Sontag with the sound writing advice of Ernest Hemingway, Kurt Vonnegut's essential rules for clean prose, and John Steinbeck's Nobel-prize winning tips for discipline.