What is good writing? Why and when should we write? What should it do for us? The representation of writing in a season-four episode of Mad Men — Blowing Smoke — and in the episodes leading to it throws some light on the answers the dominant ideology of writing in our culture provides for these questions.
The episode depicts a crisis in the newly founded advertising agency. The agency has lost its major client, Lucky Strike, a tobacco company, is not successful in landing new accounts, and is on the verge of bankruptcy. To defy the agency’s seemingly inevitable demise, without consulting the other partners, Don Draper, the pensive, mysterious, and incredibly creative protagonist who is a founding partner at the agency, decides to do something which in the eyes of others has nothing short of a business suicide. In what that seems like a fully-fledged fuite en avant, he writes an open letter stating that he is happy that his agency no longer advertises tobacco, a product that he knows kills customers, and posts the letter as a full-page ad in the New York Times.
But writing the letter is not the only act of writing Draper is shown to undertake. Before he decides to write the open letter, we see him picking up the habit of writing his thoughts and memories in a journal. In fact, while the journal-keeping practice is meant to steady his mind after the death of a close friend, swimming as well as reducing alcohol consumption are meant to help him improve his physical health. In other words, we see that before the NYT open letter, Draper is a good old diarist who takes on writing to maintain his sanity — to fix something inside him. But when he wants to actually do something in the real world outside himself — to alter the fate of the agency and solves a problem by writing the open letter — we see that he affectedly rips out his journal entries and throws them into the garbage.
But why should he throw the journal pages in the garbage before writing the open letter? Could not he find a fresh page in the journal to pen a draft, put a blank paper in his typewriter, and start writing the open letter? Is it not true that the scene with ripping out of the journal entries exists because the creators of the show want to tell us that writing a journal is boring and uncreative? Don Draper is a cool guy and his character is all about creativity. It is simply his job to be creative. Do the series’ creators then not want to convey that writing a journal is out of character for Draper and that when the time is right, he abandons the boring task of writing a memoir and emerges as the cool and creative person he truly is?
In the eyes of the creators and probably in our eyes, what Draper does is totally in line with his character. He is a forward-looking person who always creates new opportunities for himself. He once did it by changing his own identity, because he hated his past, and now he is doing the same thing by writing the letter. Someone of Draper’s caliber knows that nothing valuable can be created by writing a journal.
Is it not then like what faithful journal-keepers have most likely heard at some point from friends and family: “Why do you waste your time writing diaries? Do something useful with your life.” “You are a good writer; why don’t you use your talent to write a novel? Why do you keep that all for yourself?” “If you had spent that much time studying, you could have got two PhDs by now!” “Dairy writing? That’s a children’s hobby. No. That’s what retired people do. Either way…productive people don’t waste their time writing journals.”
Also, the series’ creators show us in details that for writing the letter, Draper goes through a meticulous process. After giving it a good thought while staring at his friend’s painting, he initially, writes a handwritten draft on a fresh page in the journal before typing a first draft on his typewriter. He then carefully reads and revises the typed draft. We even see a shot of the page with actual mark-ups. By contrast, Draper’s journal-writing scenes show that writing a diary is both effortless and also inconsequential to the outside world and moreover does not involve any precision and care. The creators do whatever they could to convince the audience that the open letter, in contrast to the diary entries, is a well-thought and serious piece of writing with real-world consequences.
If the episode reveals the dominant ideology of writing in our culture, cannot we conclude that in this view writing is valuable only if it does something; and it does something only if it changes something in the future? The dominant ideology of writing manifests itself in the episode by contrasting two types of writing: (1) writing a journal which does not need to be thought and whose humble goal is to steady the writer and (2) writing a strategic and even deceitful open letter whose goal is to achieve a planned business advantage. While the former revolves around the self and is pointed inward, the latter is written for others and looks outward. Also, while the former is directed towards one’s past history, the latter looks forward to future business. Finally, while the former is thought to be unaffected, the latter is deliberately constructed and worked on. As a result, whereas the former is a reflection that creates nothing new as it only at best fixes an already made self, the latter creates new opportunities as it seeks to change the world outside. In other words, in our dominant view of writing, when it is untouched, directed inward, and towards the past, it is not considered to achieve anything in real world and is therefore eventually futile.
I will write more about the dominant ideology of writing and its consequences for how people understand their practices of writing.
Originally published here.