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nature of the artform

How Not To Write, by anon. (I wrote this anonymously on another Web site before I moved it here after that site went out of business.)

A site/manual for the writer who's beginning to suspect that she's mentally obtuse
because she just can't get those basic writing rules into her head or style, or
she just can't comprehend why the publishing industry has to be exactly the way it is.

you never know what you're doing while you're doing it
it's only later that you know that's why people write books about it
whatever I tell you it's not true the same as is true of others who tell you too

My art, like cubism, is an attempt at breaking through an appearance of who I am to get to the essence beneath by deconstructing certain phenomena and themes in my life and presenting the resultants side by side in a collection of similar views taken at slightly different angles. You can look at each view independently, as you can look at each individual "take" in a cubist painting, and you might try to do just that in order to try to make some sense of it, but you will only begin to comprehend its real truth when you see it all as one. Any individual piece of it is incomplete. But the world doesn't want an incomplete art of self. Audiences want art to create the illusion of the world as a definite place to be, a place that makes sense. The world wants an art that confirms an absolute, even if it is not the absolute that any individual perceiver wants to believe in. My art is not absolute, it is tentative, it says, "Tomorrow, or an hour from now, conditions will be different, the world will not be the same, and this art will be gone." In circumstances such as these, how can you expect me to be self-assured, let alone believe that one day I will produce world-renown art?

There's just not that much difference, if any, between best sellers, moderate sellers, low sellers, and no sellers in terms of writing quality. Often, best sellers are of only average quality, e.g., John Grisham or Tom Clancey.

So quality, above a certain minimum acceptable level (correct grammar, etc., when it is appropriate) has nothing to do with the process of publication. Ostensibly, publication has to do with what the readers want, but often, what the readers want is what they're influenced to want, by the marketeers, and who knows by whom else.

Knowing this is enabling, if not in terms of earning a living as a writer, at least in terms of understanding that you can be a legitimate artist without being published, or shown, or popular.

But even this should not have to be the case (but we can get so down on ourselves, not being reinforced in our efforts). If you pursue your life as an artist whose purpose is expression, then the expression is the meaning. Legitimacy has no relevance.

If you are said to produce "bad" art, what does that mean? It means that a majority of people do not think you are any good. And since when did that become the deciding factor in art? It is a factor, maybe, in style, if you want to travel that road, and I don't, so why bother?

In this sense, maybe it is better that I never become published. I've never wanted to do what others were doing. I've always rebelled. I've always shied away from the crowds. Why do I want, then, now to be accepted. It's ironic. I am better off being unknown. (Sour grapes? Lack of security? Low self-esteem?)

I have an ideal of the pure artist, unpolluted by the hype, who eschews a society of popularizers of technique and content. (This is analogous in some circles to the avoidance of political correctness for its own sake.) The epitomé of this ideal would be an unpublished writer, an unseen artist, and the epitome, in this sense, of individuality would be a hermit living in the hills.

Stories function to keep ideas alive in a society. I overheard someone in a video store say, "I'm sick of stories about the holocaust." I caught myself starting to agree with him, until I realized that the only way in which we will ever prevent the recurrence of that or any other tragic epoch in our history is if we are kept aware of it, if it is etched into our collective memory. Storytelling is the device that does the etching.

My stories, if they can be called that, many of them (I don't call them that, but I guess that's what they are), are not told widely. They do not etch, since etching is done by many stories told by many storytellers over time. (They etch me, but that's a different story.) My art depicts a lesser known holocaust, that of the mind, and how it is twisted by society's pressure. There is an inherent tragedy here to be prevented, but we are not going to prevent it, for a long time to come, because we don't know much of it, it's not too well documented, and that of it we do know, we don't understand too well, and that of it that we do understand, we don't take too much to heart as a society, as a species. We have not yet evolved the empathetic compassion, despite those among us who would want to have it, those who strive, despite themselves, despite their baser natures, to be better than they are. I mean, after all, who takes Kafka seriously any more? Who ever did?

If I painted eight to ten hours a day for fifteen or twenty years,
I could render fabrics as delicate as [fill in the name of the artist].
or skin tones as fine as [fill in the name of the artist, your favorite].
As it is, I draw or paint an hour or two every second or third day,
enough to pretend I'm a visual artist. There's no reason to want
really to do it, full time. Photography has taken on the role, rendering
what fine art used to, as accurately or interpretatively as it could, before
the more accurate method enhanced interpretation to a fault. I know
there are purists who will vehemently object to this characterization; but
it's true. (You may know this by the nature of purism.) Before all else,
the purpose of art is to depict society to itself. Great photography does
this far better than great paintings of the past, more accurately, just so
that we believe it more profoundly, this vision, seen in fact, in images
we know to be real. Photography has freed painting from reality bonds,
enabling modern art. Technology will do this: advance society.

I am a photographer. I have a lab in my basement, disused.
I'd been a photographer most of my life, but it's over now.
Why bother? The world's already filled with far more photos,
depicting the human condition, than it ever will have paintings.
Any good artist can crank out art, as photographs as well as in paint.
Besides, the digital artistic process will soon overwhelm us,
its product replacing photographic art in its turn. Soon enough.

I've been speaking words and constructing sentences most of my life,
sixteen or more hours a day, if you include thought processes
and exclude dreams (which are an entirely different phenomenon).
I've been reading good material for at least thirty-five of these years.
I know how major works of literature are structured, I understand
all content is all but irrelevant; in any case, the life of an artist, great
or small, is,
always,
valid, material, struggling in turmoil to produce. Everything is in place,
the stage is set; fortunately, this is all I need. I express my self in words

one little bit at a time added on an accumulation of creativity a piece written from a dream an idea a taped item a note processed a sentence added to an incomplete piece a note in a project resolved an association followed up on a transition written a journal entry turned into a piece added to a project all adds up and results a disjointed collection episodes events memories fantasies thoughts theories well hey what is life aren't you exactly that way huh what perfectly reflected creativity

she knows what she wants to do with her life this is all she wants to do control line type appearance document subsidiary reprint rights visionability complete product skill control

per se if she likes its good if she doesn't not

There is a subtlety of language that is inexpressible, or at best, expressible only with a great deal of study and discipline, and even then not very accurately, where certain nuances of meaning are not renderable. I refer especially to an emphasis on words. For example:

"We all make mistakes."

How do you convey the meaning of the second sentence exactly? It can be ironic. It can be a sincere question, and as a sincere question, it can have at least two meanings: Is it true that we all make mistakes? Is your perception of the concept of mistakes perhaps wrong?

There is a subtle emphasis on the word "we" that is, perhaps, not renderable. We might write: "Do we?" to indicate that "do" is to be more emphasized than "we," but that "we" is to be more emphasized than the "we" where the speaker is calling his or her own participation in mistakes into question.

Another example: "Excuse me."

This can be a straight-forward request.

Or it can be Steve Martin saying "Excuse me!"

Or it can be "Excuse-me," meaning, "Get out of my way. You're blocking the aisle with your shopping cart, and I'm a bitch."

But how far can we go in highlighting words to indicate their meaning. Even the boldface and italics in this simple two word sentence are distracting the reader to the method as opposed to the meaning. What happens when there are ten, or twenty, words, with many multiple variations?

I've come across examples of this difficulty often, and as an artist I often welcome the ambiguity, thinking that the possibility for interpretation makes for a potentially wider readership as well as for better, more universal art. But sometimes I want, for sake of exact clarity of what I mean, to specify precisely the intonation and the consequent meaning of words and phrases, and often I am at a loss as to how to do this without resorting to typeface techniques. One solution might be to use multiple typefaces to excess so that the reader becomes so accustomed to the method that it is not at all distracting and yet still is able to convey precise meaning. And it's very postmodern. But I wouldn't want the reader to become so accustomed to the technique that she skimmed right over it without considering at all the supraficial sense.

I don't care if I'm never published at all, I refuse to pay to be recognized. Paying reading fees for writing contests is almost the same as entering a lottery. The only difference is that in a genuine lottery, you have an objective chance of winning.

Being Published

State of mind after the television breaks, again:
I am disappointed, upset. Get rid of everything!
The less I own, the less I can be disappointed.

I'm doing what I always thought I should be doing
but was not until this time ever able to manage to do.

The television is the bane of my existence, or else
it is my salvation, from a life of boredom, ennui,
when I will sit around not working, because I am

a postmodern writer, which means I don't have to
write or rewrite, if I don't want to, being unmoved.

One reason my work is postmodern is because once it is written, I seldom change the form in rewrite, it stands as it is, unless I am motivated in the moment to add to it. It becomes a local environment, a past I have been that I do not want to alter, because we alter the past via memory, and I want my memories to remain, intact. To a certain extent, we cannot avoid changing what we remember. It's the nature of the physiological process, that we construct new material to fill in the gaps which are left unrecorded, re-recording them shortly or long after memories' first occurrence. But to the extent that we do not alter memory, this is a postmodern phenomenon, the existence of discrete facts/events juxtaposed as memory renders it, intact. So, at my best, I am a postmodern writer, when I do not alter memories of events, phenomenal and cerebral, which become eventually,

I get no encouragement from anyone. This is the price of isolation.
But then, I get no discouragement from anyone either. Then again,
I get as much discouragement as I can handle from my own self.

I'm re-reading Strunk and White's The Elements of Style. I don't know why I picked this book (out of the whole pile of books that I've yet to read, left in the living room after The Reorganization), but I'm finding that, unlike previously (I've been well-trained in modernism), I'm sort of disagreeing with some of the points made [this is a result of the postmodern influence], in particular, with:

Rule 12. Choose a suitable design and hold to it. [My objection is similar to my ideas about plot and resolution in fiction: boring.];

Rule 13. Make the paragraph the unit of composition. [Words and phrases are better units--or sentences--prose written like poetry. The world has become a diverse and disparate place, or rather, we've become more aware of the diversity, and our language and our prose should reflect it.];

Rule 14. Use the active voice. [Okay, for the most part. But there is also something to be said for round-about ways of getting to the point.];

Rule 16. Use definite, specific, concrete language. [Well, sure--as much as it's possible. The problem is that in a lot of my writing I'm trying to do something that defies concrete expression. In past decades, the argument might be made that if I don't know exactly what I'm talking about, I shouldn't write until I do. But we have passed that time and place in literature, I think. Writing has increasingly become not only a means of personal expression, but of personal and universal investigation and research as well. At least, this is what I'm trying to do with it. And a lot of the subject matter (my psyche and the psyche of the world/universe) is obtuse and highly complex, and to leave material unstated just because it's vague seems to me to be a violation of my personal agenda. I'm trying to get at something, a process that's developmental. I don't want to lose the ephemeral insights just because I can't quite write them out in perfectly clear prose;

Rule 17. Omit needless words. (I completely agree with this, but I doubt if Strunk or White (or William Zinsser, that other advocate of perfect anal prose) would agree with my opinion of which of my words were useless. I use many vague words denoting vague concepts, and many complex constructions mirroring complex psychologies. Although I may make the prose more "clear" by condensing it and eliminating much of the equivocation and meandering investigative methodology, I do not necessarily make it more "true." In fact, I may make it more false, by making it simpler. And as for making it easier for the reader, well, it's a lot of hard work to get the ideas I'm trying to present into words, and to simplify the process after the fact simply for the sake of "clarity" is to do the material a disservice. Readers who really want to know the psychology behind the prose should work at it as hard as I have had to. Without hard work, the victory is incomplete. We can know things simply and clearly, or we can know them for what they are. Nothing is simple and clear; everything is far more complex than our capacity to understand it.];

Rule 18. Avoid a succession of loose sentences. [Same argument as above. This is the investigative method. If it is appropriate to the "stream of consciousness," for lack of a better concept, I leave it as it is. Rewriting, when I do it, is for grammar, punctuation, associations, and sometimes clarity, when it occurs to me at a later time that I had originally been not so clear, either because I hadn't exactly expressed what I had been thinking, or because I subsequently improved the material with a more clear line of thought; but never because shorter, terser sentences are better for their own sake.]

If Edgar Allen Poe is a good writer, I am a great writer.
If he's a great writer, I'm a goddam genius.

This is a hard conclusion to come to: my writing projects (novels, books) are not so important an art form as I have previously considered them to be. My journal work and my website are far more important, as are the journal derivatives, the pastiches. The projects are also derivatives, but archaic ones, modeled after a form I no longer (want to) use, a false start, a method used before I stumbled, onto the postmodern form I'm using now. The pastiches (which are, in a way, projects themselves, but more loosely conceived and executed) have replaced projects as a means of presenting the daily expressions that I log into my monthly journals. The projects were a format. But now, my format is my website, a far more inclusive mechanism. So, I no longer need projects--except as simple pastiches that get reworked over time as new material is added to them, perhaps eventually ending up as conventional books. Thus, my developing projects are now of far less importance--except that they contain my past writings, and so become the equivalent of the journals (because a lot of what they contain was never first contained in journals) in that they need to be processed in the same way, mined for content to put into pastiches and onto the website. The website is my novel now, the one and only one, the final, all-inclusive format for expression. This is what I set out to do a very long time ago, but I'm only just now starting to learn how to do it effectively.

[This is not an apology. It's an accident.]
On music albums, as an example, not all songs are of equal quality.
(I'm talking about creative, original material here, not covers.)
Some songs stand out, better than the rest. Some are chosen as singles
(but that could be as much marketing and exposure as quality.)
Generally though, some songs become hallmarks and others do not. Others are merely repetitious of the themes and technique, false starts.
Or they are zeitgeist repetitions, disconsidered by critics and fans.

The same thing happens in the other arts; artists repeat themes
in paintings, some of which stand out. Writers do the same thing,
across and within works, which comprise a body of work, done.
The point being: not everything an artist creates is so good. Duh.

This is it. I find it hard to believe it, but this is the one thing I want to do for the rest of my life. Didn't I just write this somewhere else before? Oh, yeah. Here.

As a general rule of thumb, use that instead of which wherever possible, unless a comma preceeds (disconsidering the case where it's been punctuated incorrectly), in which case always use "which." It's not grammatically "wrong" to use which and that interchangeably (unless the term introduces a restricted clause, in which case which is the correct choice), it's just considered ignorant to use which as an introduction to unrestrictive clauses by people who tend to exert control over important places/processes in the writing world. In other words, if you want to get published, follow the anti-rule as if it were true grammar.

Some people believe that fiction can be true, truer than life, but this is not necessarily so. A lot of fiction, especially modern fiction, is an exaggeration, sacrificing reality for story devices and plot, stereotyping, the creation of cliches. And in this sense, fiction is not truer than real life. But usually when people say that it is, this is exactly what they mean, that it generalizes life to the point where it presents what purports to be reality, when it is nothing more than a caricature of it. Generalization is not reality. Particularization is reality. Postmodern fiction recognizes particularization as the essence of reality, and so presents facts as they are, ungeneralized, as local character and environment. It tends to avoid story devices and plot, letting characters and images stand for nothing other than what they in fact are. In this sense, it presents particular "truth," which is truer than general truth, because it doesn't water down the "truth" by trying to apply it to a larger domain. It just is, itself. The epitome of postmodern writing has got to be writing out actual (recorded) conversations and providing reportorial descriptions of the actions of the people talking. Short of that method, which no one appears to be doing, online journals seem to be the "truest" writing extant. "But this is not fiction," you say? Oh, but it is. How many of us can say that we know ourselves so well that when we report on our lives, we tell the truth? Even, or especially, if we know the truth, we probably won't tell it. The more truth we know, the more likely we are going to cover it up, so that others won't discover how pathological we are. (We are all pathological in that deep core of being where we are each afraid to go, or to remain.) And as for telling the truth about others--well, it's almost as hard to get at as our own truth is. No. No one tells the truth, and no one writes it. Truth is the reality of life, not our interpretations of it. If you want the truth, live your life, without comment. If you want to lie, write. The creation of art is a fiction we engage in in order to avoid our lives. This is the truth.

If I have to capture the attention and interest of people within the first few lines of text (or with images, if that is my format), then these are not the people whose attention and interest I want. I'm looking for an audience with some staying power, not an air-headed conglomerate of superficial scatterbrains with Attention Deficit Disorder who are only readers because it's an "in" thing to be.

Arguments Against Publishers

"Do you really think there's a difference between self-published and publisher-published work?"

"That's exactly what they want you to think. They got you right where they want you."

"They don't have me anywhere. I know what I know."

"Do you think the quality of the work is determined by the publisher?"

"Well, you're right. And a person who self-publishes is his own publisher. The quality of the work is determined by himself."

"But publishing with a publisher subjects the work to scrutiny. Editors review it for mistakes in usage and style."

"And for adherence to convention, so that if a work is too un-pc, it's rejected, and the net effect is that published work is homogenized and the overall body of work is reduced to the lowest common denominator. And style is the one thing editors should not be editing. When you edit style, you further deteriorate personal voice. Pretty soon, it won't matter who you read. It hardly matters now. Most writers are all saying the same old, tired thing, abetted by editors and publishers who keep them out of print if they will not stay in line."

The primary opinion a self-publisher must face is the prejudice against him, that self-publishing is ego-aggrandizement, yet it is not any more so than that of the other-published author. Ego is of central concern to any writer/artist. It is out of ego that an artist produces work, hoping to be noticed for work attributed to his own ego, his by-line, his pen-name, his persona. But the stereotype is that a self-published artist has more of this motive, that he works outside the system because he is not so competent, that he is somehow pushing the envelope of content/procedure, that he doesn't quite fit the proper role of writer established by the companies who determine it, the publishers, that he exists outside a good old boy and girl network, so that his/her credentials should be called into serious question. There may be truth in any of these postulates, but they are not givens. Any single instance can prove any of them wrong. A self-published author may be every bit as qualified, as literary, as artistic as any "house-author." Psychosocial reasons may exist for why an author chooses, feels he/she must, or is driven to self-publication. The writer may feel an isolation from the writing community, or he may feel that in everything he does, he must take complete control, retaining for himself all editorial policy, or he may be anti-business, or anti-big-business, or� Or, there may be strictly social reasons, like the content is too far out, too unconventional, despite its writing quality. (It can go the other way too, such as with The Celestine Prophecy, where the poor quality prohibited house publication, but the self-publishing success brought the whores crawling out of the woodwork with lucrative offers.)

"Instead of choosing to judge the book by its actual content, they base their judgment of its worth on the fact that it was self-published."

"Well, what did you expect?"

"I expect them to read it before coming to a conclusion."

"You expect a lot."

"Well, they're kind of pissed off that you didn't tell them outright that it was self-published. They feel you misled them."

"I didn't mislead anyone. They believed what they wanted to believe."

"They feel you should've told them it was self-published when you gave them copies."

"Why? So they could have criticized it from the start, before they read it?"

"Is that why you didn't tell them?"

"I figured they'd find out sooner or later, and if I could get them to read it first, then at least they'd have made up their minds without that prejudiced point of view."

"They could always change their minds after they found out."

"But they didn't, did they?"

"But they're pissed. They feel like they've been taken advantage of."

"They'll get over it."

"I don't think so. They're really pissed at you."

"Yeah. At me. But no one's blaming the book."

"They'll get around to criticizing it."

"No they won't. First impressions are tenacious."

"They can change their minds."

"They won't. If they could have been decisive in the first place, I could have trusted them to evaluate the book without prejudice. But they're easily led and initially mindset, and I knew they wouldn't evaluate it on its own merits if they knew it was self-published."

"Maybe they're pissed now because they feel you didn't trust them."

"It doesn't matter that they're pissed now. It only matters that they liked the book. Even if they would change their minds, they liked it at first, without prejudice. And that's what's important to me."

To think that a book published by a corporation is more important, or more significant, or more literary than a self-published book is an insult to the authors, of either type of publication. To the corporation-published author, the opinion says: you can't write a good book without the professional editorial services of the company. To the self published author, it says: you're book is no good because it has not had such services. In either case, the same personal effort, and possibly an equal amount of skill, went into producing the book. Yet the opinion requires authors to turn to an outside source for verification that their books are worthwhile.

Enigmatic books, like Acker wrote, or like my reidentity is turning out to be, books that are pieced together in a true postmodern pastiche fashion, create a mystery for the reader, who tries to "figure" them out, because readers have an expectation of normal linear prose and, as they read, they try to fill in sections that are not there. It's a natural human preoccupation that enables the creation of "normal" fiction in the first place. PM authors take advantage of this propensity in readers. They develop the mystery via thematic threads in apparently separate "stories" and "different" characters that are named the same or similarly so that they could be the same protagonist and may also be (probably mostly are, even in "normal" fiction) aspects of the author's psyche, so that in reading the book from that perspective, the reader can see strains of that psyche running through the work and almost put together a main character/protagonist by trying to see how the characters are these aspects, filling in the blanks as they go along, transferring some of their own psychic material into the work to flesh out the characters in places where they are thin, or where the author never even thought to look or intended even to go. What does the postmodern epic mean? Like any other work of fiction (or truth), it may mean different things to different readers as the readers bring their own interpretations to it. But with (true) postmodern works, readers are required to bring far more of themselves to the work in order to understand it, because the author does not (necessarily) intend for the reader to so much understand as she does to more merely express herself, usually in ways that are not so understandable, because the more we try to make someone else understand who and how it is we are, the more we create works of fiction in the attempt. We are not easily understandable people, none of us, and neither is the universe we live in so comprehensible. The success of an artist may be measured in how difficult she is to understand. The more difficult, the more she renders the truth she knows. And we all know the truth, a truth, our own personal truth. But very seldom, if at all, do we manage to get it across so completely as we would like to, because it is so complicated that even we ourselves do not often see or even intuit its full depth. Artists see it, and they try to depict it, and postmodern fiction (and nonfiction) is a better mechanism for relating it--if the readers "understand" what its really trying to do. Fiction is not so much fiction any more. Actually, it never was, but fiction writers used to pretend it was, because they didn't yet have available to them the mechanism (postmodernism) whereby they could reveal so much without worrying about how it would be received by an audience that wanted black and white instead of areas of gray.

When I'm writing a novel, I start to get depressed when I finish a section and don't know where it's going and I start to think that it's been just a waste of time. But then, all of a sudden, it takes off again as I apply new ideas I encountered or dreamed of and all of a sudden I'm elated with the new direction it's taken. It's always a surprise to see where a novel I'm writing novel ends up.

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