- Follow most fiction-writing handbooks, and you’ll produce a well-crafted narrative that could have been produce just as easily in 1830.
- The benefit of performing such reiterative aesthetic gestures is…what, exactly?
- Habitualization, Viktor Shklovsky wrote, devours work, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war.
- The difference between art and entertainment:
- Art deliberately slows and complicates perception so that one can re-think and re-feel language, narrativity, and experience.
- Entertainment deliberately speeds and simplifies perception so that one doesn’t have to think about or feel very much of anything at all.
- Boredom is always counter-revolutionary, Guy Debord pointed out.
- Always, he felt it important to emphasize.
- Debord: In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles.
- Even bestsellers exist in a secondary position to the cultural italicizations of film, TV, the Web, the Xbox, the iPad, the iPhone.
- The world flies at us in bright splinters.
- Japan: 5 of the top 10 bestsellers in 2007 were originally cell phone novels.
- Mostly love stories written in text-message-length sentences sans the plot or character development found in conventional novels.
- My ambition, Friedrich Nietzsche commented 118 years earlier, is to say in 10 sentences what everyone else says in a book.
- What everyone else does not say in a book, he appended.
- I grow gnomic, announced Samuel Beckett in a (1934) letter. It is the last phase.
- What modes of writing, I wonder, what structures, what problematics, best capture how it feels to be alive in this instant, here, now?
- What, in other words, feels like realism to us?
- Why?
- What sort of writing currently answers the questions: Where are we (I use the pronoun loosely), and who, and how?
- Every age gets the literature it deserves.
- The Facebook novel.
- The Twitter.
- A writer, Thomas Mann suggested, is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
- Stories you watch rather than read: Traveling to Utopia, e.g., by Young-Hae Chang.
- But also corporate authors’ novels that want to be films when they grow up.
- Everything will work out in the redemptive end, those books’ thematics and architectonics argue.
- Every story is the same story because every person is the same person. There is nothing new under the Ecclesiastes.
- Don’t worry. Be happy. Be sad for a little while, obviously, sense the dramatic tension, but then be happy.
- Characters are plump people triumphing over adversity. Plot is pleasant arc. Language plain transparence.
- The body is boring, politics passé, gender stable, the page a predictable array of paragraphs descending. Now go back to sleep, please.
- N.Y.C., 1968 = 100+ publishing houses = Barth, Barthelme, Coover, Cortázar, Gass, Kesey, Nabokov, Pynchon, Reed, Vonnegut, et al.
- 1973 = oil crisis = recession.
- Aesthetic concerns = economic concerns.
- Prophets = profits.
- N.Y.C., 2010 = 3 media corporations dominate commercial publishing (while using the print arms of their conglomerates as tax write-offs).
- Debord: Young people everywhere have been allowed to choose between love and a garbage disposal unit.
- Debord: Everywhere they have chosen the garbage disposal unit.
- This is a true story. That’s why it seems so unbelievable.
- Whatever you write, Beckett reminded us, never compromise, never cheat, and if you plan to write for money or fame, do something else.
- Dan Brown. Stephen King. Danielle Steele.
- (Amazing Race. Extreme Makeover. The Biggest Loser.)
- If you don’t use your own imagination, Ronald Sukenick always told his writing students, somebody else is going to use it for you.
- Once upon a time, we already knew these things.
- Mary Higgins Clark. Nora Roberts. Dean Koontz.
- The purpose of art, Shklovsky maintained, is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived, and not as they are known.
- (The Hangover. Land of the Lost. Night at the Museum: Battle for the Smithsonian.)
- Bachelard re: art: an increase of life, a competition of surprises that stimulates our consciousness and keeps it from becoming somnolent.
- I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas, John Cage observed. I’m frightened of the old ones.
- The McDonaldization, you could call it, of arts and experience in America.
- It was, Dickens began, the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness…et cetera.
- E.g.: The stunning proliferation, since the mid-seventies, of independent small/micro presses bringing out beautiful monsters.
- Coffee House, Chiasmus, Fiction Collective Two.
- All of us have a place in history, Richard Brautigan once remarked. Mine is clouds.
- There are two kinds of writing in the world: boring & boring.
- Boring writing #1: unselfconscious, formulaic, tiresome. (Now go back to sleep, please.)
- Boring writing #2: writing that bores—as in burrows, plumbs, perturbs, troubles, termites along.
- Starcherone, Clear Cut, Raw Dog Screaming.
- If one doesn’t know these names, one doesn’t know anything about contemporary fiction.
- Shklovsky re: art: to make objects “unfamiliar,” to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception.
- Alongside the flat faded universe of commercial publishing, there sparkles an alternate one with its very own laws of physics.
- Independent presses: the quantum state of literature.
- Viz.: authors buying each other’s work, reading it, reviewing it, teaching it across the country.
- Viz.: authors launching FB pages, blogs, journals, presses; helping any way they can to get word out about the writing they love.
- Ask not what publishing has done for you. Ask what you can do for publishing.
- What have you contributed to fiction’s future this week?
- A generation, you could call it, of literary activists.
- Bookish tribalism: one can move among multifarious clans and coalitions as easily as one can move among the aisles in a(n indie) bookstore.
- Narrativity’s tomorrow, according to Michael Martone: anonymous, viral, collaborative, ephemeral.
- What modes of writing, what structures, what problematics?
- What, in other words, feels like realism to us…and why?
- Let’s begin again. Proposition 1.0: Writing should be a possibility space in which everything can and should be attempted, felt, thought.
- The postmodern, Jean-François Lyotard imagined, would be that which puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself.
- Proposition 2.0: Writing (there is no longer a distinction between fiction & poetry, nonfiction, etc.) should be less accessible, not more.
- Lyotard: That which searches for new presentations, not in order to enjoy them but in order to impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable.
- Proposition 2.1: Writing should thus demand greater labor from readers, even uneasiness and apprehension, not effortlessness and comfort.
- Cf.: the difference between art and entertainment.
- Ergodic literature, Espen J. Aarseth wrote, is that which requires nontrivial effort on the reader’s part in order to traverse a text.
- Because—
- Because vexing texts make us work, make us think and feel in unusual ways, attempt to wake us in the midst of our dreaming.
- They are tools to help us thinkfeel.
- Writing that misbehaves is more valuable than that which agreeably tells us what we already know in ways we’ve already seen.
- Meaning is meaning, but structure is meaning as well.
- All art, Anthony Burgess noted, thrives on technical difficulties.
- Because—
- Literature, Roland Barthes noted, is the question minus the answer.
- Because—
- Stories generated and sustained by the American political system, entertainment industry, and academia, Curtis White noted, have taught us:
- Precisely how not to think for ourselves.
- Another way of saying this: The Difficult Imagination is dead.
- Another way of saying this: Long live the Difficult Imagination.
- Because—
- The Difficult Imagination asks us to envision the text of the text, the text of our lives, and the text of the world other than they are:
- Thereby asking us to contemplate the possibility of fundamental change in all three.
- Return, through complexity and challenge, to perception and contemplation.
- Can innovative writing be taught?
- Can essays (like the one you’re reading) be written that give productive advice on how to write innovatively?
- Yes.
- No.
- When we say We are teaching innovative writing, we really mean: We are re-learning methods of reading.
- We are re-learning how to experience textuality from the inside out.
- How to pay attention to narrative dynamics by practicing the thoughtful, passionate disruption of narrative dynamics.
- Every technique a writer employs carries with it philosophical and political consequences…whether or not s/he can articulate them.
- Whether or not s/he is even aware of the fact.
- Because—
- Fiction = technique = ideology.
- Meaning is meaning, but structure is meaning as well.
- In aesthetics, as in law, ignorance is never admissible as a defense.
- E.g.: When we say Freytag’s Pyramid, we mean: How can we undo it, redo it, ask why in one sense it exists and in another it doesn’t?
- How/why would Text X be effectively different if told in another style, from another point of view, within another architecture?
- What Eliot, Faulkner, Joyce, Kafka, Musil, Pound, Proust, Stein, & Woolf taught us, although we have already forgotten.
- When it comes to art, success is a vastly overrated affair.
- We write wholeheartedly into our own obsolescence, our own obscurity, Carole Maso declared—a place at once tender and absurd and fierce.
- What Kathy Acker, Lydia Davis, Gary Lutz, Ben Marcus, & Steve Tomasula taught us, although we aren’t conscious of it yet.
- (Petronius. Laurence Sterne. Joris-Karl Huysmans.)
- The narrative you are working on today is only as good as the best narratives you have read within the last two months.
- Mark Danielewski. Shelley Jackson. David Markson.
- Lance Olsen to his workshop: If you have any questions, I’ll try to answer them. If you have any answers, I’ll try to question them.
- Try again, Beckett’s protagonist in Worstward Ho eggs himself on. Fail again. Fail better.
- Limit Texts = those that take elements of narrativity to their brink so that we can never think of them in the same ways again.
- Innovative Narrative = narrative that asks: what is narrative, what can it do, and how and why?
- Because—
- On the other side of failure lies opportunity.
- Noy Holland. Lidia Yuknavitch. David Foster Wallace.
- What modes? What structures? What problematics?
- On the other side of failure lie Guy Davenport, Gilbert Sorrentino, and Michael Joyce.
- There are some texts that, once you’ve taken them down from the shelf, you’ll never be able to put back up again.
- Ask yourself: If it’s the case every genre does something other genres can’t, then what does “fiction” do that film, TV, the Xbox, etc.?
- Martin Heidegger. Hélène Cixous. Mikhail Bahktin. (Theory being a subset of narrative that informs narrative.)
- What genre besides “fiction” allows you to reJoyce in language, explore the complexities of consciousness, for hours, weeks, on end?
- The only useful advice on craft I have ever given: craft is always about more than craft.
- Write the narrative you’ve always wanted to read, but then ask yourself why you’ve always wanted to read it.
- Jacques Derrida. Walter Benjamin. Jean Baudrillard. Michel Foucault. Georges Bataille. (Ghosts in the machine.)
- Don’t write about what you know. Write about what you want to know.
- The only useful advice on craft I have ever given: Write a novel that’s seven chapters and three pages long.
- Write a narrative that fits on a postcard, then send it to a friend who lives across the country.
- Write a story that’s precisely 140 characters long. One sentence. 10 words or fewer. How are they structurally different?
- Write a story composed solely of nouns.
- Write a critifiction, when critifiction is defined as what you imagine when I say the word critifiction.
- Write out of restless curiosity.
- Ask yourself: Why is self-therapy the opposite of literature?
- Write out of restless curiosity.
- Ask yourself: What did Truman Capote mean when he said, re: Jack Kerouac: That’s not writing. That’s typing.
- What did you try and what did you learn?: the only significant questions to ask yourself after finishing a first draft. (There should be at least five drafts more after that.)
- Ask yourself, along with The Talking Heads: Well, how did I get here?
- Where? Who?
- The only useful advice on craft I have ever given:
- Write a fiction set inside an disembodied mind. Make it impossible to know the world outside. Shun details, senses, traces of externality.
- Write because you don’t know what you think until you do, and then you know it even less.
- Write a narrative in which none of the words are yours, but cut-ups of passages from J. K. Rowling, Cixous, and Joyce’s Ulysses.
- Remember: whenever you write, you are carrying on a conversation with other authors across space and time.
- Remember: “Writing in isolation” is an embarrassing Romantic myth.
- Narrative, Barthes noticed, is a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash.
- Or, for example:
- Write a narrative in which characterization undoes the Freudian model of identity that believes: past trauma = present self.
- Undoes a narrative that believes in a unified operator sitting in a tiny red chair behind your forehead.
- Because—
- Because writing should always be a thought experiment.
- If not that, then what?
- Because when we say characterization, we really mean: How do biology and culture manufacture identity through us?
- By re-imagining characterization, we come to contemplate the devices by which we tell, retell, and untell ourselves.
- We remind ourselves we are always-already not ourselves and not not ourselves.
- (For example.)
- Because when we say We are talking about craft, we really mean: We are really talking about everything else.
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