I used to treat other people's writings exactly like those redditers do. In my case, it was a defense mechanism against how overwhelmed I was by the amount of stuff there is to read. My world had to get a lot bigger before I could stop making bullshit excuses for dismissing people's work. I would seriously say shit back then like, "I don't read free-verse, because it's not even real poetry." 🤣
Some of my low points as a human, content creator, and writer are when I unconsciously tap back into that energy! I wonder how many ripples of positive growth could have stemmed from the people we dissuaded from different artists/ideas.
It seems that trying to attain the status of 'good writer' is a lifelong pursuit, one that, if you claim you've reached it, only goes to show how lost and delusional you truly are. Even if you were to dedicate every waking minute of your life to both studying the history of writing AND scribbling away, developing your craft, by the time you reach old age, you'd find you barely made a dent in the vast ocean of your potential.
I think it's interesting when you ask what writing lineage someone is following in. A part of me has an identity crisis in that sense. It feels like, as someone who writes in English, I should be trying to tune into the so-called Western canon, as that is what my literary audience will inevitably compare me to, whether I make the 'cut' or not. I don't think it necessarily makes sense for someone to try to replicate the skill and craft of someone like Nabakov, for example. Not only was he gifted with a truly genius mind, but he also had the good fortune of having a privileged upper-class education to help that voice flourish.
For me, it doesn’t make sense to try to perfect the techniques of the Western canon. I say this not as a lowering of standards (though some might read it that way), but as a realignment of my storytelling values. While not something I'm actively working on right now, I do feel some modicum of responsibility to explore and sustain the tradition of my long-suppressed, culturally diffused Mesoamerican storytelling roots (Popol Vuh) and the literary movement of authors who emerged from Central America. Though largely ignored by the English-speaking world and not considered 'fine literature,' this is where my true literary DNA lies. Perhaps only by following this path can I write authentically and, in doing so, come closer to becoming a 'good writer.'
I still think about my "writing lineage" quite a bit, but I always feel like I haven't read enough to make an informed decision on it. For now I'm just sticking with my gut, keeping an open mind, and learning to be eclectic with my influences to find out firsthand what works and what doesn't.
I try to just write and not think about a lot of this. I don't even know what makes me do it, it kind of just happens. I'm having a hard time with Substack, because I have to acknowledge to myself that I'm doing it and I somehow expect something to happen because I write. I don't like it much.
But I have to admit, I would feel very smug if people were dissing Joyce thinking it was me. "I suck at a level to which I never even aspired!"
XD so true! I noticed, in my personal experience, the more true your style is to you, the more likely people try to rip it down, because you have the courage to do what they never will.
Also, why is the Like button always unworking whenever I come here?
“Orin's special conscious horror, besides heights and the early morning, is roaches. There'd been parts of metro Boston near the Bay he'd refused to go to, as a child. Roaches give him the howling fantods. The parishes around N.O. had been having a spate or outbreak of a certain Latin-origin breed of sinister tropical flying roaches, that were small and timid but could fucking fly, and that kept being found swarming on New Orleans infants, at night, in their cribs, especially infants in like tenements or squalor, and that reportedly fed on the mucus in the babies' eyes, some special sort of optical-mucus — the stuff of fucking nightmares, mobile flying roaches that wanted to get at your eyes, as an infant — and were reportedly blinding them; parents'd come in in the ghastly A.M.-tenement light and find their infants blind, like a dozen blinded infants that last summer; and it was during this spate or nightmarish outbreak, plus July flooding that sent over a dozen nightmarish dead bodies from a hilltop graveyard sliding all gray-blue down the incline Orin and two teammates had their townhouse on, in suburban Chalmette, shedding limbs and innards all the way down the hillside's mud and one even one morning coming to rest against the post of their roadside mailbox, when Orin came out for the morning paper, that Orin had had his agent put out the trade feelers.”
I'm not sure how to keep my writing from being quote-unquote "too polarizing." I never dock points from other authors or content creators for being "too polarizing" myself. It actually makes me like them more. That includes you, Ian.
At the same time, I feel sometimes that I'm tossing my writing into a fucking black hole abyss. I'm getting a third of the readers I was getting in October and November. Each time I gain subscribers I lose two more. I know I'll have a huge body of work on here in five years' time, because not to sound like one of those sadboy introvert authors but I don't really care in the sense that nothing is going to stop me from publishing my work, I just don't understand why people don't click on it. I have more than a thousand facebook friends and more than a thousand twitter followers and I post every link and nobody clicks. How exactly would they know whether or not my work is too polarizing if they don't even read it?
I find the modern landscape incredibly depressing. Most people on social media make it very obvious that they don't care about self-improvement let alone the deeper themes of life or even connecting to something like their fellow human being, God, or nature, the way we authors do. They post about their sex lives and they post about their liquor and they post about their pithy personal relationship drama, but none of them post poetry. I feel like a sore thumb on the earth.
One time when I was the editor of our high school newspaper our headline was "ART TEACHER FIRED!" He wasn't really fired, he fired some ceramic pots in a kiln. It is my all time favorite headline. It also taught me that headlines are fun, creative and can be a story in themselves. If our art took offense I guess all we could do is say, "Oh well...". But he didn't and we kept having fun and we learned so much by being present. I owe my desire to write to that time in my life. I hope you can read my subtext here. Good teaching and freedom to learn is difficult to find these days.
In my experience, YOUR writing, as in, contemporary writing that you've made, is put under a level of unappeasable scrutiny for the very reason that it has to "prove" itself, and this proof is beyond the credentials or experience of people critiquing it. The classics have an alibi, they're classics. Writing made now, regardless of quality, is viewed under a frame of "malleability" that is forever sculpted like a picture frame that's never quite straight. You can't appease the masses, you can't appease anybody. All of our greats were once contemporary and "unproven" writers. Nothing is ever going to get done if we don't allow a space for it TO be done.
Speaking of the classics, I sometimes think about Jonathan Harker noting scrumptious Hungarian recipes in Dracula or Ishmael rambling about the ontology of the whale and why it's a "fish" in Moby-Dick, and then I lament that those similarly weird, offhand moments that don't necessarily serve the plot would likely get cut in modern writings to appease the impatient readership of our post-literate times. The more widely I read, the more I find that there are many moments and elements in books that just aren't in vogue anymore despite their memorability. What I've learned? Just write whatever clicks, and don't worry about cutting it like it's a movie; books can be oddly tangential and still be insightful and entertaining.
One of the best things I ever did was make my students putt like beat for beat “Hills Like White Elephants” and write an imitation. They are high schoolers.
There is a lot of truth I. What u say. But I tried to read William Thurber and Eudora Welty. They won big prizes in their day but their work is unreadable today because they use 500 words where 3 would do.
Still, we become like whoever we hang around with. So lately I’m reading Stephen kings non scary stuff and Earle Stanley gardener’s perry mason stories. Both wonderful writers and thoroughly enjoyable.
As a completely new poet and story writer, I somewhat inadvertently avoided writing confessional stuff, probably because I knew it would make me feel the ick deep inside. So instead I wrote a bunch of Jabberwocky type trite so I wouldn't spill my guts about some personal issue I have when I don't have the experience or the audience to make it worthwhile.
Oh my, it wasnt enough they didnt read anything you made, they also made a false allegation too! Just because you have the courage to do what they never will.
*
Good description of our current era! This ‘deconstructionism’ I think began in the 2010s, particularly with the Skeptic Movement, where logic became obsessive dismissiveness, using terms like fairies to mock people, unaware that fairies reference bees (hence why fairies are depicted as women with insect wings, because most bees are female, the midwives of nature so to speak, pollinating environments to sustain life). The belief in god is one’s respect to ancestrality and nature, hence sacred trees referencing the placenta, such as the Norse sagas using the world-tree represented by the placenta, or how ni Turkic their word for placenta is world-tree. Biblically, the Tree of Life is the placenta, whilst Eden is the womb. Odin has two sons, Thor and Baldur; their Mesopotamian equivalents are Adon and his two sons, Touros and Baal, the similarities in their names are not coincidence and their mythologies bear many identical features, too. The further back in time you go, the more similar religions become.
Nature is sacred, inspiring the creation of art, so humans transform into heroism.
*
I did not know that about Dune. Coincidentally, in the sagas, accessing ancestral memories does appear, and seems to reference recurring traits in consecutive generations (genetic traits?). The sagas were often written by the descendents of the figures or witnesses involved. The Vikings greatly admired poetry and skalds. Odin is even attributed to creating poetry, using words with multiple meanings, contrasting logic bros with singular meanings everywhere they look. Jesus also often spoke with multiple meanings poetically.
I would answer by referencing the sagas, though I have not yet read all of them, as most aren’t translated to English. I have two books on learning Old Norse, but I have yet to learn fully! Maybe someday…
XD your blunt points are funny to read, they get the point across very well! I definitely hated reading in high school, books like The Giver, The Chrysalids, MacBeth, Margaret Atwood, and others I don’t remember, etc., I just didn’t like reading. I only enjoyed reading non-school-related books, like history books about medieval armour and weapons, Hemingway’s Old Man & Sea, Clive Barker’s Hellbound Heart, Yves Meynard’s The Book of Knights, Leonard Wibberley’s The Seven Hills, and, of course, the main sagas.
Nevertheless, I definitely have not exceeded any of those authors, and require more time. It’s OK to study and practise like those before us to learn, blended with our own unique tastes.
I’m special regarding my unusual childhood, which was overflowing with regular nightmares and crazy dreams, sometimes lasting several hours, and were so vivid I could feel pain, hunger, touch and breathing. So, my own stories often also have nightmarish and dreamy qualities, blended with realistic combat.
*
Agreed! People don’t seem to ever care about my writing as, not only is it polaring, it’s also monstrous and gory, but sometimes I write with gentlest fantasy.
*
Seashells are magical, they are perfect words for poem! Mother Nature is both beauty and brutality.
---
XD ‘dopamine cyborgs’ is a perfect descriptor! I definitely cannot match the poetry of Wright or Odin, but I can unfurl imagination and words and try.
Thanks for that. I have no delusions about my writing, but I am immensely grateful to Substack for providing an easterly to get my stuff out there which means I’m putting a lot more time and effort in. New to social media of any kind, I am on guard about screen time and the influence of “likes.” On the one hand, a toss-off note of mine is about to reach 4000 likes and 200’re-stacks but more significant posts seem noticed by a handful. I keep reminding myself that I rarely experience noticing or caring about the same things as “the public” so this should come as no surprise. So I keep writing, posting, happy to engage in the process.
I gotta see those comments chirping James Joyce
I used to treat other people's writings exactly like those redditers do. In my case, it was a defense mechanism against how overwhelmed I was by the amount of stuff there is to read. My world had to get a lot bigger before I could stop making bullshit excuses for dismissing people's work. I would seriously say shit back then like, "I don't read free-verse, because it's not even real poetry." 🤣
Some of my low points as a human, content creator, and writer are when I unconsciously tap back into that energy! I wonder how many ripples of positive growth could have stemmed from the people we dissuaded from different artists/ideas.
Yeah, from here I definitely want to be as supportive and open as I can be.
It seems that trying to attain the status of 'good writer' is a lifelong pursuit, one that, if you claim you've reached it, only goes to show how lost and delusional you truly are. Even if you were to dedicate every waking minute of your life to both studying the history of writing AND scribbling away, developing your craft, by the time you reach old age, you'd find you barely made a dent in the vast ocean of your potential.
I think it's interesting when you ask what writing lineage someone is following in. A part of me has an identity crisis in that sense. It feels like, as someone who writes in English, I should be trying to tune into the so-called Western canon, as that is what my literary audience will inevitably compare me to, whether I make the 'cut' or not. I don't think it necessarily makes sense for someone to try to replicate the skill and craft of someone like Nabakov, for example. Not only was he gifted with a truly genius mind, but he also had the good fortune of having a privileged upper-class education to help that voice flourish.
For me, it doesn’t make sense to try to perfect the techniques of the Western canon. I say this not as a lowering of standards (though some might read it that way), but as a realignment of my storytelling values. While not something I'm actively working on right now, I do feel some modicum of responsibility to explore and sustain the tradition of my long-suppressed, culturally diffused Mesoamerican storytelling roots (Popol Vuh) and the literary movement of authors who emerged from Central America. Though largely ignored by the English-speaking world and not considered 'fine literature,' this is where my true literary DNA lies. Perhaps only by following this path can I write authentically and, in doing so, come closer to becoming a 'good writer.'
I feel you, brother. The greatest lineages to follow are spiritual and cultural lineages.
I still think about my "writing lineage" quite a bit, but I always feel like I haven't read enough to make an informed decision on it. For now I'm just sticking with my gut, keeping an open mind, and learning to be eclectic with my influences to find out firsthand what works and what doesn't.
Wow, that Dune analogy is awesome. So concerned about our modern world.
Writing is much harder than I expected.
Yeah, you're killing it, though!
You’re being polite, but I’ll take it anyway, haha. Thank you!
I try to just write and not think about a lot of this. I don't even know what makes me do it, it kind of just happens. I'm having a hard time with Substack, because I have to acknowledge to myself that I'm doing it and I somehow expect something to happen because I write. I don't like it much.
But I have to admit, I would feel very smug if people were dissing Joyce thinking it was me. "I suck at a level to which I never even aspired!"
Writing is hard enough without someone saying I suck at it.
XD so true! I noticed, in my personal experience, the more true your style is to you, the more likely people try to rip it down, because you have the courage to do what they never will.
Also, why is the Like button always unworking whenever I come here?
there's lit bros. man these bros are like cockroaches they get everywhere nobody wants em and they keep coming
“Orin's special conscious horror, besides heights and the early morning, is roaches. There'd been parts of metro Boston near the Bay he'd refused to go to, as a child. Roaches give him the howling fantods. The parishes around N.O. had been having a spate or outbreak of a certain Latin-origin breed of sinister tropical flying roaches, that were small and timid but could fucking fly, and that kept being found swarming on New Orleans infants, at night, in their cribs, especially infants in like tenements or squalor, and that reportedly fed on the mucus in the babies' eyes, some special sort of optical-mucus — the stuff of fucking nightmares, mobile flying roaches that wanted to get at your eyes, as an infant — and were reportedly blinding them; parents'd come in in the ghastly A.M.-tenement light and find their infants blind, like a dozen blinded infants that last summer; and it was during this spate or nightmarish outbreak, plus July flooding that sent over a dozen nightmarish dead bodies from a hilltop graveyard sliding all gray-blue down the incline Orin and two teammates had their townhouse on, in suburban Chalmette, shedding limbs and innards all the way down the hillside's mud and one even one morning coming to rest against the post of their roadside mailbox, when Orin came out for the morning paper, that Orin had had his agent put out the trade feelers.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
Look how long that last sentence is, lmao.
I'm not sure how to keep my writing from being quote-unquote "too polarizing." I never dock points from other authors or content creators for being "too polarizing" myself. It actually makes me like them more. That includes you, Ian.
At the same time, I feel sometimes that I'm tossing my writing into a fucking black hole abyss. I'm getting a third of the readers I was getting in October and November. Each time I gain subscribers I lose two more. I know I'll have a huge body of work on here in five years' time, because not to sound like one of those sadboy introvert authors but I don't really care in the sense that nothing is going to stop me from publishing my work, I just don't understand why people don't click on it. I have more than a thousand facebook friends and more than a thousand twitter followers and I post every link and nobody clicks. How exactly would they know whether or not my work is too polarizing if they don't even read it?
I find the modern landscape incredibly depressing. Most people on social media make it very obvious that they don't care about self-improvement let alone the deeper themes of life or even connecting to something like their fellow human being, God, or nature, the way we authors do. They post about their sex lives and they post about their liquor and they post about their pithy personal relationship drama, but none of them post poetry. I feel like a sore thumb on the earth.
Yeah, on that post title it's going to be an unfollow from me, bro.
I took my method & madness a step too far :P
One time when I was the editor of our high school newspaper our headline was "ART TEACHER FIRED!" He wasn't really fired, he fired some ceramic pots in a kiln. It is my all time favorite headline. It also taught me that headlines are fun, creative and can be a story in themselves. If our art took offense I guess all we could do is say, "Oh well...". But he didn't and we kept having fun and we learned so much by being present. I owe my desire to write to that time in my life. I hope you can read my subtext here. Good teaching and freedom to learn is difficult to find these days.
In my experience, YOUR writing, as in, contemporary writing that you've made, is put under a level of unappeasable scrutiny for the very reason that it has to "prove" itself, and this proof is beyond the credentials or experience of people critiquing it. The classics have an alibi, they're classics. Writing made now, regardless of quality, is viewed under a frame of "malleability" that is forever sculpted like a picture frame that's never quite straight. You can't appease the masses, you can't appease anybody. All of our greats were once contemporary and "unproven" writers. Nothing is ever going to get done if we don't allow a space for it TO be done.
Speaking of the classics, I sometimes think about Jonathan Harker noting scrumptious Hungarian recipes in Dracula or Ishmael rambling about the ontology of the whale and why it's a "fish" in Moby-Dick, and then I lament that those similarly weird, offhand moments that don't necessarily serve the plot would likely get cut in modern writings to appease the impatient readership of our post-literate times. The more widely I read, the more I find that there are many moments and elements in books that just aren't in vogue anymore despite their memorability. What I've learned? Just write whatever clicks, and don't worry about cutting it like it's a movie; books can be oddly tangential and still be insightful and entertaining.
One of the best things I ever did was make my students putt like beat for beat “Hills Like White Elephants” and write an imitation. They are high schoolers.
There is a lot of truth I. What u say. But I tried to read William Thurber and Eudora Welty. They won big prizes in their day but their work is unreadable today because they use 500 words where 3 would do.
Still, we become like whoever we hang around with. So lately I’m reading Stephen kings non scary stuff and Earle Stanley gardener’s perry mason stories. Both wonderful writers and thoroughly enjoyable.
King’s book on writing is my favorite of the many I’ve read on the topic. It’s been awhile since I’ve consumed Thurber.
As a completely new poet and story writer, I somewhat inadvertently avoided writing confessional stuff, probably because I knew it would make me feel the ick deep inside. So instead I wrote a bunch of Jabberwocky type trite so I wouldn't spill my guts about some personal issue I have when I don't have the experience or the audience to make it worthwhile.
Oh my, it wasnt enough they didnt read anything you made, they also made a false allegation too! Just because you have the courage to do what they never will.
*
Good description of our current era! This ‘deconstructionism’ I think began in the 2010s, particularly with the Skeptic Movement, where logic became obsessive dismissiveness, using terms like fairies to mock people, unaware that fairies reference bees (hence why fairies are depicted as women with insect wings, because most bees are female, the midwives of nature so to speak, pollinating environments to sustain life). The belief in god is one’s respect to ancestrality and nature, hence sacred trees referencing the placenta, such as the Norse sagas using the world-tree represented by the placenta, or how ni Turkic their word for placenta is world-tree. Biblically, the Tree of Life is the placenta, whilst Eden is the womb. Odin has two sons, Thor and Baldur; their Mesopotamian equivalents are Adon and his two sons, Touros and Baal, the similarities in their names are not coincidence and their mythologies bear many identical features, too. The further back in time you go, the more similar religions become.
Nature is sacred, inspiring the creation of art, so humans transform into heroism.
*
I did not know that about Dune. Coincidentally, in the sagas, accessing ancestral memories does appear, and seems to reference recurring traits in consecutive generations (genetic traits?). The sagas were often written by the descendents of the figures or witnesses involved. The Vikings greatly admired poetry and skalds. Odin is even attributed to creating poetry, using words with multiple meanings, contrasting logic bros with singular meanings everywhere they look. Jesus also often spoke with multiple meanings poetically.
I would answer by referencing the sagas, though I have not yet read all of them, as most aren’t translated to English. I have two books on learning Old Norse, but I have yet to learn fully! Maybe someday…
XD your blunt points are funny to read, they get the point across very well! I definitely hated reading in high school, books like The Giver, The Chrysalids, MacBeth, Margaret Atwood, and others I don’t remember, etc., I just didn’t like reading. I only enjoyed reading non-school-related books, like history books about medieval armour and weapons, Hemingway’s Old Man & Sea, Clive Barker’s Hellbound Heart, Yves Meynard’s The Book of Knights, Leonard Wibberley’s The Seven Hills, and, of course, the main sagas.
Nevertheless, I definitely have not exceeded any of those authors, and require more time. It’s OK to study and practise like those before us to learn, blended with our own unique tastes.
I’m special regarding my unusual childhood, which was overflowing with regular nightmares and crazy dreams, sometimes lasting several hours, and were so vivid I could feel pain, hunger, touch and breathing. So, my own stories often also have nightmarish and dreamy qualities, blended with realistic combat.
*
Agreed! People don’t seem to ever care about my writing as, not only is it polaring, it’s also monstrous and gory, but sometimes I write with gentlest fantasy.
*
Seashells are magical, they are perfect words for poem! Mother Nature is both beauty and brutality.
---
XD ‘dopamine cyborgs’ is a perfect descriptor! I definitely cannot match the poetry of Wright or Odin, but I can unfurl imagination and words and try.
Thanks for that. I have no delusions about my writing, but I am immensely grateful to Substack for providing an easterly to get my stuff out there which means I’m putting a lot more time and effort in. New to social media of any kind, I am on guard about screen time and the influence of “likes.” On the one hand, a toss-off note of mine is about to reach 4000 likes and 200’re-stacks but more significant posts seem noticed by a handful. I keep reminding myself that I rarely experience noticing or caring about the same things as “the public” so this should come as no surprise. So I keep writing, posting, happy to engage in the process.