Why is writing fun?

And yes, I'm being a dick. I'm actually sorry. I get like this when I suspect somebody's talking down to me. Here's why: I expect I can speak freely about my observations on writing without being called-out as - and I'm quoting you here - "a fucking idiot" for announcing a personal demon: writing on a subject on which one doesn't really have a true considered opinion. Especially given my experience, writing successes, and own personal academic shading. In proper circumstances I'll namecheck any hip culture theorist/ movement from Adorno to Zhdanovshchinan dissidence, but I don't need to trot these out to justify my positions.

Disingenious discourse (meaing writing as a strictly intellectual exercise, currently the vogue of liberal-arts educations in middle-upper class US circumstances) is pointless, masturbatory, and the entire problem with contemporary academia. Professors who require binary or dichotomic response as 'thought exercise' or 'skillbuilding' or 'to test your knowledge' should be dragged into the street and shot for condescending cruelty. In direct contrast to your experience (with talented kids who are also trying really hard (and they're not all rich!), I find that the majority of all the papers I grade are written in a way which supports uncritically (or challenges cursorily, and vaguely) the professor's presumed position. There's no heart, spark, vibrance, or true thinking in most of them - which is absolutely in polarity with the stunning (if unrefined) creative prose I read. The cases which prove me wrong - academic papers strongly written and truly smart - are ALWAYS written by somebody who has a vested, outside, and extra-academic interest in the subject matter. Thus my post: write only what you care about. Dumb blonde OC girls - and I mean this as at type with whom we're both familiar - aren't only dumb, blonde, and lexus-driving. They can be poor, righteous, and and recovering metamphetamine addicts. Point is: they're writing cold and distant jargon to appease a machine, and with no connection to their individual person. This is, as far as I'd make a moral statement: wrong.

Also: I've never claimed to be a great mind (though I doubt I'm a dumb fuck) but the thought of being graded by a man who would lambaste a stranger without personal provocation as 'dick' and 'fucking idiot' for free expression of their ideas is hardly a model of academic integrity.

I have to say, as a non-writer, Jeremy's advice seems pretty sound to me. And he writes pretty well on this thread, even though it was all he could do to activate and reactivate testicular bravery on a thread of mine the other day. In any case, my background and training is in math and science and the nature of such writing is very different from writing in other contexts-the ideal of mathematics writing is the shorter (and more impersonal) the better. In order to write about any non-mathematical topic without sounding like a third-rate sci-fi writer I've had to relieve myself of the notion that everything has to adhere to the rigorous standards of a proof and, to protect myself from problems coming from the other direction, learn to write about what's interesting to me and what I know something about, as opposed to giving a pale imitation of what I think "the (imaginary/idealized) grader" wants to hear. In any case, at the risk of appearing disingenuous, I have to admit I still can't write for much longer stretches than what it takes to fill up one of the tiny message boxes on this board- I assume such stamina comes with practice of some of the good habits mentioned on this thread.

You so did.

And Ken L: NYU? That might explain something

Have you studied here? Do you know how hard I worked to get here from a tiny town in New Zealand by now? Sorry, I wish I had a sense of homour right now, but I bet you work womewhere that I can't add an "that explains something" so easily to, right?

Hahahahaha! (I actually kinda like John McWhorter, though!)

Er.. aside from that, currently wondering why is there such hostility here. That's kind of the mood I'm in after trying to work on a piece of academic writing - I've done so much of it, and it's just killing me how much I've come to dread and hate every aspect of the entire process.

and you don't like LOTR so yr. advice on writing is sorta suspect.

(http://denisdutton.com/rings.htm) !!

anyway the best part about (academic) writing is turning little bits of rage and chips on shoulders into lengthy and subtle arguments so well couched, defended and constructed that yr. huge irrational chip-on-the-shoulder about a particular piece of dickery passes for established and incontrovertible fact. mad props to the smug magisterial sweep of the masters of the grand old style in rhetoric. today's neo-cons are a pathetic, defensive, and shrill imitation of the classix!

I don't know what you're trying to say, Sterling, nor how to respond.

My favorite academe source would be "Thomas H. Benton" on the Chronicle of Higher Education's website, who's written columns on "thinking about grad school in the humanities? don't go!" and "Is grad school a cult?"

Really, trying to find a place where there wasn't one for me, in the academic world, has messed up my life on so many levels. It's nobody's fault that at this point writing research papers makes me want to stab myself in the eye. But there's something else, something about academe qua institution, that manages to take a bunch of people who I find, personally, to be brilliant, engaging, friendly, and great company and turning them into a collective in which grad students and adjuncts are treated like shit and almost everyone is working the flat-affect day in day out, because they're just plain miserable.

The only way to satisfy yourself that you really know the tricks of the trade, that you understand the occult secrets, is to do it yourself. All writers start out by making imitations of works they love or admire. Once they learn how to make good imitations, they know the first elements of the craft.

When you've found the ability to tinker words into nice shapes, fitting shapes for the purposes you have in mind, then you may or may not move on to the next stage, which is to couple your craft with your life, your thoughts, your substance, the ideas that give your life meaning.

You take these ideas and you clothe them in words. The words will be the right ones for the ideas. For example, if they are ugly, brutal ideas, they will take an ugly, brutal form - and there is a kind of beauty in that. It doesn't matter what you write, so long as you write of the ideas that speak to you in the words that do them justice. Lawyers write lawyerly words. Sadists write sadistic words. Comedians write funny words.

The 'fun' of writing is in the art of it. If the art of writing doesn't grab you as worth your while to learn and master, then go carve marionettes or chop cars or whatever it is that calls forth the same love and care and fascination in you. I just happen to love words.

See Paul, this makes me a little sad, to get back to what I saw the thread topic as (Fun in writing). You seem like someone who has as you say worked very hard to get where you are - and as an Aussie myself I can totally understand and respect what you've done.

I on the other hand only have a diploma in writing and editing (TAFE course), which I did in my mid 20s. I have never been to uni and wouldnt know an academic essay or how to write one if it up and slapped me. In fact I cant stand academic models of thought - I see the same stuff echoed all over, and it makes me cold and want to turn away with its lack of emotion and life.

I just like playing with evocativeness, with invoking moods in my readers, and hell it seems to work, from the responses I have had. I'd rather than than dry academe any day of the week, even though I make no money ad have no fame at all from the doodling I do.

xpost bit - On writing - I'm still trying to crank out one last paper. It may be too late, but I've told myself I have to finish it. But just as a practical matter, writing in a language that isn't one's native language can throw more roadblocks into an already painful process. So that may be no small part of the problem. I've done professional copy editing and proofreading and have an incredibly picky editorial eye for English, so it certainly caused me some severe guilt/shame problems to be constantly producing work in another language, which inevitably had grammar problems I was helpless to correct.

And if Stanley Fish is right and the next big thing in academe will be studying religion, again I feel like it's a real shame that I can't survive in the environment - it was one of my interests within my field (and I took it quite seriously, really trying to see from the inside of an entirely different worldview from several centuries past) and would that I still had it in me to be a responsible, motivated, hard-working student, I'd be wowing them at the MLA in four years. I've always been good at predicting the trends.

xxpost:I could never really get into Stanley Fish. I much prefer his fictionalized counterpart, Morris Zapp.

When Jacques Derrida died I was called by a reporter who wanted know what would succeed high theory and the triumvirate of race, gender, and class as the center of intellectual energy in the academy. I answered like a shot: religion.

Precisely. Also, I am kicking myself for having spent my time in undergraduate philosophy courses reading aesthetics and "high theory" when I should have been reading Machiavelli and Strauss and such. Foucault was worth the time, though, he's as handy as the jar of crushed red pepper I use for cooking just about anything.

tonight only?

ah no, for the rest of my life. you run hard and you spit. that's what you do when you breathe the words.

i guess the REAL trick is turning that into a sea i can sail a ship on... something you would all be pleased to spend an afternoon... cause dude, it's plegm.

loogie bay. you never see that on a t-shirt with a silhouette sunset and sea gulls.

some folks run for the olympics and some folks run peck peck peck around the block every day.

you know, i could pull the mint out... or turn myself into neptune... then i'd spit salt water and sardines would take photos in front of me in my sleep.

ah, but my complexion is not nearly green enough i would imagine.

i suppose that's why i like plays, because there's always those colored filters you can pull over a spot light... and then i could be as aqua as i wanna be.

[this is one of those posts i will have to scurry away and hide for weeks after i submit it. i fall in the school that believes it's as easy to admit you're a writer as it is to admit you're an alcoholic. embarrassment from the privilege vs. embarassment from taking pride in my thoughts/lunacy/poor technical abilty vs. denial of the burden and addiction. take your pick all you want, but it's a three-or-three-and-a-half-headed beast at my house.

i've enjoyed the posts upthread. peck on, pickled pipin' peckers. er. uh. um.]
m.

i'm not sure i cd distill advice into a list, and watchin remy an paul bite chunks out of each other is partly why: i have bad habits an good ones, and i probably don't know which is which

i magpie from others the whole time

i cannot disguise my writin as someone else's

i have an absurdly low threshold of boredom: i try and make this work for me rather than against me

i have a good memory for anecdotes an unexpected counter-flow items: i think this is worth cultivatin (ie you remember who someone was an what they thought by recallin the story which is the exception to their rule)

"concretised" isn['t a pretty word but it's right in one sense: when your sentence is on the page you can move it round... your writin is made up of little bricks of thought an there are good, better, best orders

as a professional sub-editor i wd say that 40% of what i read wd be better at two-thirds the length (you reorder to effect this), and 40% at one-third

there are not enough published works that are just one sentence long

just by making cold black marks on a blank white page i can reach out far away and fuck w.your hd

one sentence, 69,457 words long.

oh oh oh it's magic!

But then I read them back and realize I have to edit and delete stuff because it's rubbish, and then edit some more, and then a little more, and ...

Using math proof writing as a model for writing papers isn't as bad an idea as it sounds, in my experience. It really forces clarity.

Muir's livelihood was grounded in the money he earned from his writing, mostly for periodicals. Hence, the eternal grind.