Prose Ailment (Or Virus Or Disease Or Something)

My writing has been suffering lately, and not in terms of content and volume, but in terms of style. It's lacking that quality that used to make it sparkle. See? I just said "used to make it sparkle." That, if anything, is an indication that something is wrong.

What I mean is that my writing has become turgid; simple; unrealized garbage. My writing used to speak both in what it said and how it was said and now it seems to perform only the former. Gone are the days, it seems, when I would write in a way that would inform my topic, or inform something, anything. My prose is now simple, straight, direct, and lackluster. It's nearing obscurity and normality. Examples are abundant in the majority of my last 10 or so posts.

I don't think I'm the only sufferer of this disease - "inferior writing." I think it's a common disease (or virus or whatever; I'm no linguist, I won't attempt to identify it's biology) among writers in my generation (or, in my case, people who aspire to be writers). Lots of what I read has that quality where it could have been written by anybody, by some random person. I've no way of telling who authored most things I read, today, and that's bothersome.

Perhaps the reason things got this way is this: in an age of ever-increasing information volume-flux and the abundance of mediums through which to communicate and transfer this information, people are demanding, possibly subconsciously, writing that is more direct, straight, and narrow, writing that doesn't dance around a point for the sake of dancing, writing that doesn't speak in awkward sentences in order to further the point of the piece. People who read blogs and other mediums want prose that is easy to understand, easy to ready, and that gets to the point without meandering through the woods first, even if there's an intellectual and artistic purpose behind such meandering - for instance, the way I'm meandering and repeating myself in this paragraph in order to emphasize the antithesis of what I'm identifying.

People have no time for art, anymore, especially in writing. Writing is perhaps the most difficult art to consume appropriately, because it takes the most time. Or at least that's the pathology. People feel they can look at a painting, a drawing, a sculpture, whatever and get whatever there is to get in a relatively short amount of time, and then move on to the next victim piece. And the same can't be said for writing, which requires applied reading, thinking, and re-reading in order to comprehend whatever the hell is being said. It's much faster to look twice and three times at a piece of marble than it is to re-read Moby Dick. So folks don't have time, they say, to do "art writing" - which to their mind is anything not related to the media and the news.

For this reason, blogs, to attract attention and a healthily dispersed demographic, tend towards journalistic writing as opposed to artistic writing, which causes a decrease in the volume of good writing out there. And hence the explanation to my current prose woes.

As you've no doubt discovered, I've regained some of my prowess in this very blog post, but it all seems unnatural, a little off, somehow, to be writing fluidly and artistically after indulging in garbage newspaper script, a practice that came much too easily for me to be at all comfortable about the future.

The information influx, Total Noise to David Foster Wallace, is having a profound effect on everything, and we - I - keep discovering new consequents to its antecedents.

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Thoughts

I've been writing a lot recently. Not sure what any of it's about, or why I suddenly have the inspiration to put pen to paper and produce something other than blog posts, but whatever. I won't fight it. This shit doesn't come often.

It is random, though. I found myself writing a lengthy character sketch that started out as a description of a poker table. And I don't know why I started out describing a poker table. Later, I started writing a short narrative about a particular experience and now that's turned into a real story, or at least the beginnings of one. Where does it come from?

The uneasy part about it all is the inability to discern whether or not any of this is, um, good. And I'm not even talking about if people are going to read things I write, like mainstream people and what not. I'm talking about good from the standpoint of literary fiction, of writing for writing's sake. How do you tell? Unless it's eerily similar to something someone has already done, how do you tell if it's good or not?

It seems especially difficult if you're like me and you have a distinctive tone and feel and style to your fiction writing, one that's easily identifiable from among the many. You can pick up twenty random books and it's probable that all of them will be written in the same manner: action, dialogue, plot, "normal" sentences and style. Varieties exist, but the rule of thumb that you should write how you speak, or how others speak will still apply. So most books you pick up have the same drawl to them, the same lilt, the same speech patterns. I don't write that way. I'm different, difficult, perhaps. Will this be accepted? Probably not.

Go Lakers, or something.

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My Non-Future

Print-based media is on the decline. Newspapers are filing for bankruptcy. The average American reads less and less every year. Books are being purchased at an alarmingly decreasing rate.

And I'm going to be a writer.

What the hell was I thinking? At least with philosophy I was always guaranteed a teaching position, even a meager one, in some corner of the States; people are taking philosophy classes with greater frequency (there's no change in the number of majors, just the number of people taking classes). So if I were to have continued philosophy, I was guaranteed a job, of some sort, even considering an ailing and soon to be depressed economy. But with writing, I'm guaranteed nothing but a good read every time I head to my throne (all men, in case you didn't know, are Toilet Kings). I'm going to have to work, really hard, for everything I get.

And the worst part is this: nearly every book we call a "classic" would never be printed if written today. If a book doesn't look marketable and doesn't sell right away, it's a dud, and it's sent packing. So the only feasible way of being a writer is to write trash - hence the popularity of Nicholas Sparks et al. Certainly, Sparks' writing isn't worthless, but he's nothing special. He sells, and in these trying times of print-based media recessions, that's the only thing to be.

Since I have a tendency to shy away from writing crap just so it will sell, I might not make it. But I hold on dearly to the sneaking suspicion (blind hope, really) that if something comes along that is GREAT it will sell. The logic there is that above average meal will not sell, probably, but way above average meal will sell because it's too good to be ignored. This implies that I'll actually write something that's way above average. At least I have a goal, I guess.

I could always, however, write short stories and essays. That seems to be the presiding way authors make their living in today's world. They write novels, for sure, but make their gravy through a combination of teaching and selling short stories and essays to magazines on a monthly basis. The novels they do write are only on occasion and sell mainly on the basis of the author's popularity from other ventures. So that's a possible "life design," if you will (you don't have to).

In spite of the economic woes and the downturn of general interest in literature by the American populace, I'll try to be a writer. Hopefully, I'll wind up somewhere better than a gutter in Atlantic City, wearing a dress, with a vague recollection of the night before. If nothing else, I can compare each event in my life to the previous and things should seem sterling.

And, on a related note, I have an interview with the ASU State Press. I applied to write an opinion column, and here's hoping that they let me do it.

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