WALTER MOSLEY

The following is an edited transcript of the talk given by Walter Mosley

I was told the other day that on a population level black readers outnumber white readers in America 2:l. I tend to believe that because black readers are looking for something; white people have forgotten whatever they’ve forgot in America. So you think that something like The Scarlet Letter is marginalised because the proportional majority of readers are black people and they’re not reading it. It’s an interesting thing, you can just turn it on its head and say that maybe our writing is not marginalised, that it’s central, our writing in America.

What I decided to do was to talk about fiction using the concept of space and also maybe talk a little bit about the contemporary, who we are. My understanding of fiction is that it’s limitless. You can do anything with fiction, you can say anything with fiction. When they asked Mark Twain if it was hard being a writer, he said ’No it’s easy being a writer, all the words are in the dictionary, you just have to put them together’. And I think it’s really true. Fiction for me is simply like a concatenation of words that don’t pretend to be anchored to veracity, though most often it’s more true than non-fiction because non-fiction has this onus to be true and it’s impossible because you have to condense to write anything, so you can’t write the truth, you can only write what you saw or believed that you saw.

You can write about anything and you can do it to anyone and the only definition, I guess, of your success is your readership, if people like it, if people read it, if people respond to it. So certainly you can write in a marginalised kind of way, you can be like Donald Goines. Donald Goines is a guy who got murdered. He wrote about criminal black people and kind of reflected that in his own lifestyle. Young black men in America who live in the inner city love to read Donald Goines. He’s really marginalised as there’s not too many people outside of the young male black community in America who read Donald Goines. But Donald Goines, even though he may not be doing something that a lot of people, say, are teaching, or making life better in some way for people, actually he’s causing people to read, and at some point the people who are reading are going to want to read something else, hopefully Devil in u Blue Dress, and I always say let ’em read Donald Goines for a while and when they get tired of that they can read my books.

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Everything leads to other places. It’s very interesting about fiction, even if you‘re marginalised, are you? To be marginalised means to say there’s no pathway out, and as long as you are reading there are pathways out and so it’s hard to say that anybody can be marginalised in their fiction.

Even though I think that there’s no limits to fiction, I think there does have to be definitions for character because character is how you pull people into novels and how you bring them to another place. The fictional character like any other form in art is defined by the negative space, and what I mean by that is the space that surrounds the character, that sur- rounds the form. The first thing that surrounds the character is language: the language describing that character, the language that character uses to define themselves. Another thing is the character’s history, where they came from. It’s always something that you’re very interested in, you want to know how did they get here. Another thing, a very important thing, they’re all intertwined, is other characters. What are their relationships? How do they meet people? And also situations. You can have a character who has a language, who has a history, who knows other people well, then the situations that that character finds him or herself in defines him or her as human or inhuman, as trustworthy or untrustworthy, as good or evil. The thing that I find most interesting is place. Where you are and how you live there.

Place, for me, is the border of character. It defines you. But a lot of things define a character, so if somebody is very hungry, or very horny, or their life is threatened, anybody can identlfy with that. So again you’re not marginalised. But these kinds of definitions are a little too powerful to get all the subtle nuances of character and I think that place is a wonderful way to define characters in juxtaposition to each other. So I was thinking of situations like, for instance, a person comes to a resort and they’re in this resort and it’s a beautiful place but they have a lover in prison and so the place for this particular character is a prison because it reflects the prison that the lover is in. So you’re seeing the place but you’re not really seeing the place, what you’re seeing is the character.

I was once writing this book, and in the beginning Easy and Mouse are driving along and Easy’s very happy and everything that he sees is wonderful and beautiful and great and he’s so happy and he’s so exhilar- ated and so that‘s how you see the world. You don’t think you‘re looking at Easy, you think you’re looking at the world and so his character seeps into you. Then they get to this place and Mouse kills someone and gets Easy implicated, so they’re driving back and he’s not happy any more and everything looks ugly and terrible and awful but it’s the same place that they drove through in the morning. Because the writer had displaced the

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character into the negative space you‘re allowing the character to develop in the minds of the readers in a way that’s different. In Rashomon you have people looking at the same event among people. But for me that’s a little too underlined, a little too bold. But if you ask people to look at the same place, or to exist in the same place, then their character almost without weight rises to the surface in a kind of funny and wonderful way.

So you think that we‘re writing about people who are marginalised, but 99.9 per cent of people’s lives are the same, throughout history we’ve had the same kinds of emotions. For me, and I don’t think for everybody, it’s important that the fiction is available to everyone. A lot of people don’t want to take it, that’s OK but it’s available. At one point when you turn to it you will be in that resort and you will be in prison and so then you will understand what the fiction might have been trying to do. That’s one of the subtleties of our craft.