"Writing, I'm convinced, should be a subversive activity - frowned on by the authorities - and not one cooed over and praised beyond common sense by some teacher"
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Simmons argues that writing should be an act of resistance, a practice that unsettles comfortable certainties and invites distrust from those who police norms. Authority here is not only government or censors, but any institution that rewards conformity: schools, workshops, markets, even the writer’s own internal gatekeeper. When praise becomes the primary goal, language softens, risk is avoided, and art is domesticated. The image of a teacher who coos and praises beyond common sense suggests a culture of approval that mistakes politeness for excellence and safety for virtue.
Coming from a writer who spent years as a teacher before publishing celebrated speculative fiction and horror, the provocation carries a self-aware edge. It is less an attack on teachers than a warning about how institutions temper the dangerous energy of art. Subversive writing interrogates power structures, undoes euphemisms, and insists on complexity where authority wants simplicity. It makes readers feel the cost of a lie, exposes the mechanisms behind a moral panic, or asks why a sacred assumption became sacred in the first place. Such work is rarely embraced by the gatekeepers it challenges, at least not at first.
The line also speaks to motive. Seeking approval is a poor compass for a writer; it nudges the hand toward familiar sentiments and tidy conclusions. Seeking trouble, by contrast, invites formal invention, tonal risk, and emotional honesty. Literature that endures often begins by being frowned on: the banned, the mocked, the misunderstood. Once domesticated by praise, it risks becoming mere decoration.
Simmons’s stance places writing in the lineage of dissent, from pamphlets and samizdat to novels that smuggle forbidden arguments under the cover of story. It calls for prose that makes readers less governable by lazy ideas, more alert to manipulation, and more stubbornly human. If the authorities are comfortable, the writer has not gone far enough.
Coming from a writer who spent years as a teacher before publishing celebrated speculative fiction and horror, the provocation carries a self-aware edge. It is less an attack on teachers than a warning about how institutions temper the dangerous energy of art. Subversive writing interrogates power structures, undoes euphemisms, and insists on complexity where authority wants simplicity. It makes readers feel the cost of a lie, exposes the mechanisms behind a moral panic, or asks why a sacred assumption became sacred in the first place. Such work is rarely embraced by the gatekeepers it challenges, at least not at first.
The line also speaks to motive. Seeking approval is a poor compass for a writer; it nudges the hand toward familiar sentiments and tidy conclusions. Seeking trouble, by contrast, invites formal invention, tonal risk, and emotional honesty. Literature that endures often begins by being frowned on: the banned, the mocked, the misunderstood. Once domesticated by praise, it risks becoming mere decoration.
Simmons’s stance places writing in the lineage of dissent, from pamphlets and samizdat to novels that smuggle forbidden arguments under the cover of story. It calls for prose that makes readers less governable by lazy ideas, more alert to manipulation, and more stubbornly human. If the authorities are comfortable, the writer has not gone far enough.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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