“I have a trick that I used in my studio, because I have these twenty-eight-hundred-odd pieces of unreleased music, and I have them all stored in iTunes,” Eno said during his talk at Red Bull. “When I’m cleaning up the studio, which I do quite often—and it’s quite a big studio—I just have it playing on random shuffle. And so, suddenly, I hear something and often I can’t even remember doing it. Or I have a very vague memory of it, because a lot of these pieces, they’re just something I started at half past eight one evening and then finished at quarter past ten, gave some kind of funny name to that doesn’t describe anything, and then completely forgot about, and then, years later, on the random shuffle, this thing comes up, and I think, Wow, I didn’t hear it when I was doing it. And I think that often happens—we don’t actually hear what we’re doing. . . . I often find pieces and I think, This is genius. Which me did that? Who was the me that did that?
Working under constraints improves your creativity. You can’t just think up worlds and words. They have to flow organically, where the specific environmental constraints fuels further environment creation, which in turn give you more constraints and more raw material to work with - more things to play around, jumble, reshuffle and come up with more beautiful environmental products. Sort of like evolution - The universe wasn’t just thought up by God, brought out of existence from nowhere, nor does it follow deterministic rules. It grows from chaos, under specific constraints, is path dependent, contingent on prior events. It grows from a mixture of rules and chaos.
Keep adding details, and then reuse the ones which make it better, and erase the ones which make it ugly Details add depth The eye with which a critic reads it is not the eye with which a writer writes it Show, don’t tell. People reading New York Times, etc. Scene elements.
Difference between tell-all honesty by an upperclassman dressed-up in sophistry vs whining diary by a cheapskate. You better have observations and thoughts to convey which lend themselves to nuanced articulation.
The word or phrase search algorithm doesn’t work. If it did, we would have had AI programs churning out great novels by now. You need to have meaning first, a visualizationf first, and the phrase automatically opops up, out of the blue, out of nowhere, like a magicians rabbit. Try as you might you can’t deconstruct the algorithm that brings it about. It’s all about ideas, pictures, metaphors. Searching for language and words won’t do you any good. Think about meaning. Don’t think about thinking.
Writing is like preparing food for your linguistic tastes. Like you have senses in the tongue which decide whether you find a food item delicious or not, similarly you have linguistic senses in the brain which decide whether a piece of writing has the right mix to be delicious or not.
Writing fiction and dialogue, is for me, a release from two opposite forces in me which pull in opposite directions. One is writing, or seeing , the world with an “I” in mind, which is to say, making assertions like “I believe the world behaves this way”, “I think that people are that way” and so on. This “I” almost permeate your thoughts even if it is not explicit, for example, when we think to ourselves “How ridiculous it feels that such a thing happens to be so and so.” Read that last sentence back. You are not making an assertion about how the world actually is, but how it is to you. When writing or seeing the world with such a strong presence of a sense of self might be a catalyst for the very art of writing, it makes your thoughts seem self centred or reeks of narcissisms and other such vices. On the other hand, there is the other extreme, of removing an “I” completely from the picture, in such sentences like “The world behaves this way, People are this way, etc.”. But this sort of language always makes the critic inside me jump out and say “No! How presumptuous!” The world might behave that way or it might not, but what you ought to say is “I think it behaves that way”. Removing an “I” shrouds your language in a superficial layer of objectvity and detachment, hence is deceptive. You presume that other people also feel the same way or are the same, and that is at the root of some of the most glaring flaws of humanity - intolerance (to other viewpoints and lives). A mature and honest writer ought to use language which doesn’t deal in such trickery, and embed the knowledge or at least the possibility of existence different, even opposite perspectives.
This is where fiction jumps in. It allows us to make clear that what we are offering is just a perspective, a viewpoint, one not wearing the pretentious cloak of objectivity, not claiming being anything more than what it is, and at the same time doesn’t make our verse self centred or narcissistic. We speak through our characters, and we give ourselves to their perspectives knowing fully well that they are nothing but a figment of imagination. We feel safe.
Laziness is your biggest nemesis. We just want to get our thoughts out quickly on the paper, regardless of whether the words we excrete actually express what’s in our head or not. On the other hand, stopping and trying to find the mot juste interrupts the creative flow. Finding the right balance, the trade-off is one of the most defining labours of a writer.
“It really irritates me when reviewers do this:
“At times the only laughter it inspired was the nervous kind. That felt funny, you thought — is that where I was supposed to laugh?”
That’s from an NY Times review of “Louis,” and what irks about me about it is its use of “you.” It makes me want to scream, “No, that’s what YOU thought. Don’t tell me what I thought, and don’t make assumptions about what other people thought. Just own your fucking reactions and don’t project them onto others. That’s fine. That’s what reviewers should be doing. Explainyour reactions to me, and then let me compare them to my own.”
I’m probably over-reacting. Using “you” in that sense may just be an expression meaning something like “If you’re anything like me…,” but my gut reaction, whenever I read it, is that the writer is telling me what I feel, and sometimes I get this nauseating sensation of conflicting worlds, because he’s wrong.
In this case he’s wrong. I have never once laughed nervously while watching “Louis,” and I have never once wondered where I was “supposed” to laugh. I don’t even thing “supposed to laugh” makes any sense. But that’s me.
“You” can also come across as a form of distancing. I sometimes hear people lapse into it when they’re being interviewed about a traumatic experience:
Reporter: What was it like being trapped in a mine shaft for six days?
Victim: You get hungry. You get scared. You think you’re going to die, and you wonder if anyone out there is looking for you…
I guess on one level he’s trying to make his experiences universal, but they’re not, even if most people would probably have similar feelings. To me, it feels as if (maybe understandably) he’s using second-person as padding between himself and the experience. I always want to hear him say, “I got hungry. I got scared. I thought I was going to die, and I wondered if anyone out there was looking for me…”
NY Times guy, try this: “At times it made me laugh nervously. ‘That felt funny,’ I thought. ‘Is that where I was supposed to laugh?’”
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23 March 2019