Jeanette Winterson's 10 tips on writing, James {NAME}'s forgotten only children's book, Lewis Thomas on the scientific poetics of altruism

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[Jeanette Winterson’s 10 Tips on Writing]( [winterson.jpg?w=680]( 2010, inspired by Elmore Leonard’s classic [10 Rules of Writing]( published nearly a decade earlier, The Guardian [invited]( some of the world’s most celebrated living authors to share their own dicta of the craft. “Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never ­being satisfied,” Zadie Smith counseled in the last of [her ten](. Midway through [her list]( Margaret Atwood grounded the psychological dimensions of the craft in the pragmatic and the physical: “Do back exercises. Pain is distracting.” Neil Gaiman thought [eight]( rather than ten tenets would be sufficient — a meta-testament to his sixth: “Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving.” Among the contributors was Jeanette Winterson — a writer of exquisite prose and keen insight into the deepest strata of the human experience: [time and language]( [our elemental need for belonging]( [the power of art]( [how storytelling transforms us](. [jeanettewinterson00.jpg?resize=645%2C645] Jeanette Winterson (Photograph: Polly Borland) Winterson offers: - Turn up for work. Discipline allows creative freedom. No discipline equals no freedom. - Never stop when you are stuck. You may not be able to solve the problem, but turn aside and write something else. Do not stop altogether. - Love what you do. - Be honest with yourself. If you are no good, accept it. If the work you are ­doing is no good, accept it. - Don’t hold on to poor work. If it was bad when it went in the drawer it will be just as bad when it comes out. - Take no notice of anyone you don’t respect. - Take no notice of anyone with a ­gender agenda. A lot of men still think that women lack imagination of the fiery kind. - Be ambitious for the work and not for the reward. - Trust your creativity. - Enjoy this work! For more hard-earned guidance on the writing process from other titans of literature, see Henry Miller’s [eleven commandments of writing]( Eudora Welty on [the art of narrative]( Susan Sontag’s [advice to writers]( and T.S. Eliot’s [warm, wry letter of advice]( to a sixteen-year-old girl aspiring to be a writer. [Forward to a friend]( Online]( [Like on Facebook](NAME}-thomas?fblike=fblike-64703efc&e=729b5d7c3e&socialproxy=https%3A%2F%2Fus2.campaign-archive.com%2Fsocial-proxy%2Ffacebook-like%3Fu%3D13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1%26id%3Dac461089fd%26url%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Fwww.brainpickings.org%252F2018%252F09%252F05%252Fjeanette-winterson-10-tips-on-writing%252F%26title%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Fwww.brainpickings.org%252F2018%252F09%252F05...) donating=loving Each week of the past eleven years, I have poured tremendous time, thought, love, and resources into Brain Pickings, which remains free and is made possible by patronage. If you found any joy and stimulation here this year, please consider supporting my labor of love with a donation. And if you already donate, from the bottom of my heart: THANK YOU. monthly donation You can become a Sustaining Patron with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a Brooklyn lunch.  one-time donation Or you can become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation in any amount. [Start Now](  [Give Now]( [The Scientific Poetics of Affection: Lewis Thomas on Altruism and Why We Are Wired for Friendship]( [themedusaandthesnail_thomas.jpg?fit=320%2C490]( “There is in us a deeply seated response to the natural universe, which is part of our humanity,” marine biologist Rachel Carson, who sparked the environmental movement with her epoch-making 1962 book [Silent Spring]( wrote in reflecting on [science and our spiritual bond with nature](. “We forget that nature itself is one vast miracle transcending the reality of night and nothingness,” her contemporary and admirer Loren Eiseley wrote six years later in his beautiful meditation on [what a muskrat taught him about reclaiming the miraculous in a mechanical age](. “We forget that each one of us in his personal life repeats that miracle.” In the same era, another splendid writer influenced by both Carson and Eiseley — the great physician, etymologist, poet, and essayist Lewis Thomas (November 25, 1913–December 3, 1993) — explored this profoundly humanizing quality of the natural world in a short essay titled “The Tucson Zoo,” originally published in The New England Journal of Medicine and later included in his 1979 collection [The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher]( ([public library](. [lewisthomas1.jpg?resize=595%2C737] Lewis Thomas (Photograph: NYU archives) Thomas recounts a spontaneous visit to the local zoo during a trip to Tucson, where he found himself walking a curious and magical path between two artificial ponds, one populated by a family of otters and the other by a family of beavers — a kind of open-top, glass-walled tunnel that allows visitors who stand at the center to view both the depths of each pond and its surface. In a passage evocative of Eiseley’s transcendent encounter with the muskrat, Thomas writes: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]I was transfixed. As I now recall it, there was only one sensation in my head: pure elation mixed with amazement at such perfection. Swept off my feet, I floated from one side to the other, swiveling my brain, staring astounded at the beavers, then at the otters. I could hear shouts across my corpus callosum, from one hemisphere to the other. I remember thinking, with what was left in charge of my consciousness, that I wanted no part of the science of beavers and otters; I wanted never to know how they performed their marvels; I wished for no news about the physiology of their breathing, the coordination of their muscles, their vision, their endocrine systems, their digestive tracts. I hoped never to have to think of them as collections of cells. All I asked for was the full hairy complexity, then in front of my eyes, of whole, intact beavers and otters in motion. But unlike Nobel-winning physicist Richard Feynman, who spoke so poetically about [how knowledge amplifies mystery rather than detracting from it]( Thomas finds himself quickly slipping into a kind of habitual reductionism: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]Something worth remembering had happened in my mind, I was certain of that; I would have put it somewhere in the brain stem; maybe this was my limbic system at work. I became a behavioral scientist, an experimental psychologist, an ethologist, and in the instant I lost all the wonder and the sense of being overwhelmed. I was flattened. But I came away from the zoo with something, a piece of news about myself: I am coded, somehow, for otters and beavers. I exhibit instinctive behavior in their presence, when they are displayed close at hand behind glass, simultaneously below water and at the surface. I have receptors for this display. Beavers and otters possess a “releaser” for me, in the terminology of ethology, and the releasing was my experience. What was released? Behavior. What behavior? Standing, swiveling flabbergasted, feeling exultation and a rush of friendship. I could not, as the result of the transaction, tell you anything more about beavers and otters than you already know. I learned nothing new about them. Only about me, and I suspect also about you, maybe about human beings at large: we are endowed with genes which code out our reaction to beavers and otters, maybe our reaction to each other as well. We are stamped with stereotyped, unalterable patterns of response, ready to be released. And the behavior released in us, by such confrontations, is, essentially, a surprised affection. It is compulsory behavior and we can avoid it only by straining with the full power of our conscious minds, making up conscious excuses all the way. Left to ourselves, mechanistic and autonomic, we hanker for friends. [velveteenrabbit_sakai2.jpg] Illustration by Japanese artist Komako Sakai for [a special edition of The Velveteen Rabbit]( As a scientist thus moored in the poetic and the philosophical, Thomas seeks to bridge this beautiful creaturely awareness with the scientific understanding of the world. With an eye to ant colonies, where cooperation between individuals builds a magnificent cohesive whole — a superorganism governed by hard-coded selflessness — he reflects again on that deep response to the beavers and the otters and, by extension, to his fellow human beings: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]Maybe altruism is our most primitive attribute, out of reach, beyond our control. Or perhaps it is immediately at hand, waiting to be released, disguised now, in our kind of civilization, as affection or friendship or attachment. I don’t see why it should be unreasonable for all human beings to have strands of DNA coiled up in chromosomes, coding out instincts for usefulness and helpfulness. Usefulness may turn out to be the hardest test of fitness for survival, more important than aggression, more effective, in the long run, than grabbiness. If this is the sort of information biological science holds for the future, applying to us as well as to ants, then I am all for science. One thing I’d like to know most of all: when those ants have made the Hill, and are all there, touching and exchanging, and the whole mass begins to behave like a single huge creature, and thinks, what on earth is that thought? And while you’re at it, I’d like to know a second thing: when it happens, does any single ant know about it? Does his hair stand on end? In another piece in the book — a commencement address at a medical school — he offers a complementary sentiment we would be well advised to encode into every piece of policy and personal conduct as we wade deeper and deeper into the increasingly turbid estuary of twenty-first century humanity on this increasingly fragile planet: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]We are by all odds the most persistently and obsessively social of all species, more dependent on each other than the famous social insects, and really, when you look at us, infinitely more imaginative and deft at social living. We are good at this; it is the way we have built all our cultures and the literature of our civilizations. We have high expectations and set high standards for our social behavior, and when we fail at it and endanger the species — as we have done several times in this century — the strongest words we can find to condemn ourselves and our behavior are the telling words “inhuman” and “inhumane.” There is nothing at all absurd about the human condition. We matter. It seems to me a good guess, hazarded by a good many people who have thought about it, that we may be engaged in the formation of something like a mind for the life of this planet. [The Medusa and the Snail]( is an uncommonly wonderful read in its entirety — a gift from one of those rare science writers whose work [rises to the level of enchantment](. Complement this particular portion with Lucille Clifton’s spare and stunning [ode to our kinship with all life-forms]( and pioneering naturalist John Muir on [the interconnectedness of the universe]( then revisit Lewis Thomas on [our human potential and our cosmic responsibility](. [Forward to a friend]( Online]( [Like on Facebook](NAME}-thomas?fblike=fblike-e2e15a04&e=729b5d7c3e&socialproxy=https%3A%2F%2Fus2.campaign-archive.com%2Fsocial-proxy%2Ffacebook-like%3Fu%3D13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1%26id%3Dac461089fd%26url%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Fwww.brainpickings.org%252F2018%252F09%252F27%252Flewis-thomas-altruism%252F%26title%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Fwww.brainpickings.org%252F2018%252F09%252F27...) [Little Man, Little Man: James {NAME}’s Only Children’s Book, Celebrating the Art of Seeing and Black Children’s Self-Esteem]( [littlemanlittleman.jpg?fit=320%2C420]( “The greatest poet in the English language found his poetry where poetry is found: in the lives of the people,” James {NAME} (August 2, 1924–December 1, 1987) wrote in his superbly insightful essay on [Shakespeare, language as a tool of love, and the writer’s responsibility in a divided society](. But while “the people” of sixteenth-century Europe were very different from the people of twentieth-century America, as were their lives, cultural representations of “the people” of our time and place — of what Whitman celebrated as “a great, aggregated, real PEOPLE, worthy the name, and made of develop’d heroic individuals” — have remained woefully stagnant and unreflective of diversity in the centuries since Shakespeare. Fifteen years after Gwendolyn Brooks — the first black writer to win a Pulitzer Prize — released her [trailblazing poems for kids celebrating diversity and the universal spirit of childhood]( {NAME} set out to broaden the landscape of representation in children’s literature by composing a short, playful yet poignant story inspired by his own nephew — Tejan Kafera-Smart, or TJ. Originally published in 1976, with a jacket that billed it as “a child’s story for adults,” [Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood]( ([public library]( is {NAME}’s addition to the compact canon of sole children’s books composed by literary icons for their own kin, including Sylvia Plath’s [The Bed Book]( J.R.R. Tolkien’s [Mr. Bliss]( and William Faulkner’s [The Wishing Tree](. [littlemanlittleman19.jpg?resize=680%2C604]( The book is less a story than a series of vignettes depicting African American life and childhood on a particular block on New York City’s Upper West Side — one that looks “a little like the street in the movies or the TV when the cop cars come from that end of the street and then they come from the other end of the street.” {NAME}, who considered the book a “celebration of the self-esteem of black children,” began working on it shortly after his [historic conversation about race]( with anthropologist Margaret Mead and set out to find the right illustrator for it. [littlemanlittleman16.jpg?resize=680%2C577]( He chose Yoran Cazac, a white French artist he had met more than a decade earlier through a mutual friend — the African American painter Beauford Delaney, who had mentored the young {NAME} and had [taught him what it really means to see](. When Delaney was diagnosed with schizophrenia and committed to a psychiatric asylum outside of Paris, {NAME} and Cazac rekindled their friendship in this hour of devastation and sorrow, and soon began collaborating on bringing Little Man, Little Man to life. [littlemanlittleman18.jpg?resize=680%2C510]( Cazac would complete the art — pencil and watercolor, vibrant and alive, evocative of children’s jubilant and free drawings — without having ever been to Harlem. Instead, {NAME} transported the artist by giving him books on black life, telling him stories about his time in New York, and sharing photographs of his own family there, including his nephew and niece, after whom the characters in the book were modeled. Cazac was determined to “imagine the unimaginable” through these telegraphic descriptions that became a form of artistic telepathy. [littlemanlittleman12.jpg?resize=680%2C493]( The story is written in the authentic colloquial language — children’s language, African American language — of its time and place. It is a creative choice that embodies poet Elizabeth Alexander’s notion of [“the self in language”]( and evokes a sentiment from the [stunning speech on the power of language]( Toni Morrison delivered when she became the first African American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature: “We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.” [littlemanlittleman15.jpg?resize=680%2C819]( In the introduction to the 2018 edition of Little Man, Little Man, scholars Nicholas Boggs and Jennifer DeVere Brody quote from {NAME}’s essay “If Black English Isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me What Is?”: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]It is not the black child’s language that is despised. It is his experience. A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled. A child cannot be taught by anyone whose demand, essentially, is that the child repudiate his experience, and all that gives him sustenance, and enter a limbo in which he will no longer be black, and in which he knows he can never become white. Black people have lost too many children that way. [littlemanlittleman11.jpg?resize=680%2C702]( We meet TJ, just shy of five; his older, bigger friend WT; and Blinky — the bespectacled tomboy who lives with her aunt because “her Mama went away with somebody.” Blinky’s eyeglasses fascinate TJ — he knows that without them, she can barely see, but when he puts them on himself, the world becomes a blur. Even in this subtlest of story-props, {NAME} — who [championed the empathic rewards of reading]( — plants an invitation to empathy rooted in the vital act of taking another’s perspective: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]If he can’t see out them, how she going to see out them? [littlemanlittleman10.jpg?resize=680%2C907]( The kids have a way of seeing through the veneers which the adults around them wear to get by in the world. There is Mr. Man, the janitor living in the basement of the brownstone, who is always playing his record player and hardly ever smiles. Behind the frowning life-battered facade, TJ can see a kindly, warmhearted man: [littlemanlittleman1.jpg?resize=680%2C731]( [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]Here he come now, Mr Man, huffing and puffing with them garbage cans, setting them on the side-walk. He try to act like he don’t see TJ. He always try to act like he mean. He ain’t mean, but he getting pretty old, TJ Mama say he got to be about thirty-seven… He don’t hardly never grin, except at TJ and sometime he act like he don’t see him. But TJ know he see him, all the time, even when he look like he ain’t looking, and he even grin at WT and Blinky, too, when he act like he see them. He a real nice man. Sometime he take them down the basement where the furnace is and he tell them stories and he give them ginger snaps and the furnace keep huffing and puffing just like Mr Man with the garbage cans and it get real red hot and Mr Man grin with all them teeth and it real nice then, he a real, real real nice man. [littlemanlittleman9.jpg?resize=680%2C723]( But, in consonance with Neil Gaiman’s insistence that [children must not be shielded from dark themes]( {NAME} doesn’t sugarcoat the reality of life for the community he depicts in this fictional story. This is a neighborhood strewn with churches and liquor stores, with motherless and fatherless children, where robberies and police chases are a frequent sighting. We gather, though the child reader might not, that Miss Lee — the stunning woman with whom Mr. Man lives and on whom both TJ and WD have a crush — is troubled by depression and addiction: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]Sometimes Miss Lee look sad and she walk like she don’t know where she going. But she walk straight. She don’t stagger and stumble. Her eyes is red sometime and she smell strong, like smoke, and sweet, like she been eating peppermint candy, and sometime she smell like licorice. But she always walk straight. [littlemanlittleman14.jpg?resize=680%2C653]( But there is also joy in the neighborhood. The kids pass their time sitting on stoops, playing basketball, skipping rope, and amusing one another with their “African strut.” There are beach trips and delicious Sunday mornings full of laughter and love. [littlemanlittleman17.jpg?resize=680%2C473]( [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]“I want you to be proud of your people,” TJ’s Daddy always say. TJ proud of his people, just like he proud of his Daddy. His Daddy one of them people: they boss people. {NAME}, who [read his way from Harlem to the literary pantheon]( celebrates the importance of reading coupled with critical thinking in moving through the world with agency: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]TJ’s father read Muhammad Speaks sometime, but then he say, “Don’t believe everything you read. You got to think about what you read.” His Mama say, “But read everything, son, everything you can get your hands on. It all come in handy one day.” [littlemanlittleman13.jpg?resize=680%2C740]( At the heart of the story is a meditation on color — on being black, on the many shades of beauty embedded therein. {NAME}’s description of the different characters’ skin could belong in the [pioneering nineteenth-century nomenclature of colors]( that inspired Darwin: WT is “the color of tea after you put in the milk,” Mr. Man is “the color of chocolate cake without no icing on it,” Miss Lee is “a color like honey and water-melon,” TJ’s mom — “the most beautiful woman in the whole world” — has “skin the color of peaches and brown sugar” and a crown of “coal-black hair,” and Blinky, “she a funny color”: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]Her color changing all the time. She always make TJ think of the color of sun-light when your eyes closed and the sun inside your eyes. When your eyes is open, she the color of real black coffee, early in the morning. Echoing William Blake’s exquisite observation that [“the tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way [for] as a man is, so he sees,”]( {NAME} touches on this dimensionality of color in recounting the lesson in seeing Delany had taught him: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]To stare at a leaf long enough, to try to apprehend the leaf, was to discover many colors in it; and though black had been described to me as the absence of light, it became very clear to me that if this were true, we would never have been able to see the colour; black. [littlemanlittleman20.jpg?resize=680%2C750]( Complement [Little Man, Little Man]( with a lovely contemporary picture-book about [how John Lewis’s childhood shaped his civil rights leadership]( and the [darkly philosophical children’s book]( Toni Morrison wrote with her son, then revisit {NAME} on [freedom and how we imprison ourselves]( [resisting the mindless majority]( [the artist’s role in society]( and [“the doom and glory of knowing who you are.”]( [Forward to a friend]( Online]( [Like NAME}/ on Facebook](NAME}-thomas?fblike=fblike-1406c6c5&e=729b5d7c3e&socialproxy=https%3A%2F%2Fus2.campaign-archive.com%2Fsocial-proxy%2Ffacebook-like%3Fu%3D13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1%26id%3Dac461089fd%26url%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Fwww.brainpickings.org%252F2018%252F10%252F01%252Flittle-man-little-man-james-{NAME}%252F%26title%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Fwww.brainpickings.org%252F2018%252F10%252F01...) donating=loving Each week of the past eleven years, I have poured tremendous time, thought, love, and resources into Brain Pickings, which remains free and is made possible by patronage. If you found any joy and stimulation here this year, please consider supporting my labor of love with a donation. And if you already donate, from the bottom of my heart: THANK YOU. monthly donation You can become a Sustaining Patron with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a Brooklyn lunch.  one-time donation Or you can become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation in any amount. [Start Now](  [Give Now]( [---] You're receiving this email because you subscribed on Brain Pickings. This weekly newsletter comes out on Sundays and offers the week's most unmissable articles. Brain Pickings PLEASE DO NOT USE AS A MAILING ADDRESS 47 Bergen Street, 3rd floorBrooklyn, NY 11201 [Add us to your address book](//brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/vcard?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=179ffa2629) [unsubscribe from this list](   [update subscription preferences](