Why is writing fun?

More seriously, I've often felt writing to be this great rush, this sense of balancing off the sometimes crazy ideas running loose in your head with the discipline of getting them down on the page, and sometimes formulating as you type. Quite often things that I've received a bit of praise for happened as I wrote them rather than with any immediate forethought -- this isn't to say that forethought doesn't or can't have a role. But for me, it's the sense of hitting a live wire of something in your head and being able to put it into words, or at least capture what you're trying to get it at even if not to your complete satisfaction, that explains why writing is fun.

Seriously.

A fantastic writer, fantastically really drunk once wrote me a letter stating that the only difference between somebody who calls themselves a writer and somebody who doesn't is this:

"When one claims the mantle [of writer] the process [of writing] is suddenly much, much harder. One has to acknowledge the irreplacably vivid histories and literary precedents to one's products, and one's absolute inability to write of that caliber. The process [...] is a constant struggle of halving the distance to greatness; fighting against twin tides of overwhelming creativity and existential ennui."

When I was little I used to see racks of blank exercise books at the supermarket and get all excited, though I could never work out why. Now I do.

Whether I'm writing or not, I frequently get an insatiable urge to write, even if there's nothing to write. Do you get this, Maria?

Ah, solution! Call yourself an observer.

There's certainly a buzz to be had by getting it down on paper.

I don't even need that! Bring on the typing! In fact I have to say that if it wasn't for modern typewriters and then since 1987 a computer at home I'd write far less than I did, because frankly writing longhand sucks rock. Your hand cramps. Yeah, Neal Stephenson did longhand for his trilogy but he's a freak and can afford the reconstructive surgery.

1) writing never gets easier
2) the final product is always compromised and weak
3) the process is writing, the product is commerce

(xpost to self)

I find poetry HAS to be written by hand. Longer texts, I do on the PC but I cant do poems that way, I think its because I see them more like paintings - I work on them, adjust them, fiddle with the look.

what ratio of time do you spend prewriting (researching, plotting, planning, consciously and undistractedly thinking about your piece) before you actually sit down and write?

with prose, I'm thinking I probably spend 1:1 prewriting/writing
with drama, I'd estimate 4:3

Totally, dude! Having to find ways to sell a manuscript sucks! Why can't they just agree to my genius? ;-)

I find poetry HAS to be written by hand

I'm sure everyone finds their balance. For my part, I don't write poetry or short pieces as such (my FT blog posts and my AMG reviews are vaguely heroic efforts in getting me to stop -- check out this ILMixor post as an idea of how every 'normal' post would run if you let me!), so perhaps there's a difference in style that's key. I am more slapdash and less prone to fiddle around, though people like the good Mr. Matos have been very helpful editors on that front.

Ratio? Hmm. With 'essay' pieces something can often gestate as an idea but it has to reach a certain critical mass before I can start writing about it, and usually I'm thinking of it randomly rather than with concentration. Beyond that I'm not sure...

Oops, I was talking figuratively; I rarely write anything at all by hand. Lectures and exams, that's it. Everything else I do is typed.

No. I did a few years ago but now I get the urge to write about things and don't because I feel that I don't have the organizational thought capacity, the insight, the vocabulary, the elegance to say what I really want.

it's thought concretized.

Couldn't we say something nicer, like "it's thought given vitality"?

1) A writer has to set false conditions for themselves. No great (and this is substantively different than mere 'good') novelist / dramatist / poet ever got to where they are by simply writing when they felt like it. Self-imposed rules like '50 words / day' or '50000 words / day' or 'I must finish a chapter each month' or the simple 'write every day' are incredibly important. Since none of us feel truly inspired all the time, and most of us feel it almost none of the time, it's these artifical goals that keep us creative and unblocked.

2) Writing rituals are arbitrary and dumb. Flat-out foolish. But that doesn't mean they're untrue. I think I focus on my writing better in a public place -- but this is because I'm forced to appropriate social behavior (e.g. not getting bored with a scene and jerking off) which at home I can indulge. The important thing about these rituals [wearing a robe, writing at a certain time of day, writing to music or without] is that they augment your writing, not limit it. A stone-mason can't call in to work because he's feeling 'creatively blocked.' Neither can a good writer.

3) Writing is serious and lonely. Get used to being weird and critical and driving yourself into a funk over dumb, personal, unarticulable shit. Even more, get used to answering it yourself. I used to sleep with a girl who'd wake up in the middle of the night with, practically, a fever, to ask me shit like "do you think that the phrase 'smooth as silk' can be transmuted to 'smooth as milk' and maintain the original Asian allusion while piling on a maternal notion, or do you think that's overkill?' I'd usually roll over and go back to sleep, and I really dug this girl.

4) Kill your babies. If you notice a phrase (metaphor, paragraph, page, scene, what-have-you) as a piece of Beautiful Writing - one of those Paterian "gemlike flames" - take it out and deconstruct it. When something draws attention to itself too boldly, destroy it. As Paul Magrs told me, "sacrifice it on the alter of your future craft." The goal of a great writer, in my estimation, is to write transparently (often) and lucidly (always). To tell the story. Unless one's a poet (god bless poets) one's ALWAYS at the primary service of the story. Fancy-pants articulation and narrative filagree come with experience, not with surface manipulation.

5) "Know thy audience." -- Jack Epps, Jr. Writer of "Top Gun" "Dick Tracy" "Turner and Hooch" and "Anaconda." There's no such thing as broad-appeal. Write the story for a particular person, hopefully somebody close and optimally for one's self. Be your own worst audience, cruelest critic, and heartless editor. Don't write to genre convention; write a good human story of blood, sweat, shit, bile and semen in spite of the genre of your piece.

and a few personal observations

a) Don't write about a drug you haven't used
b) Don't write with 'tone' first in mind. It's absolutely crippling.
c) Listen! I doubt anybody can give characters voices completely from the atmosphere. Your experience
d) Don't write what you don't believe / like. This is an undergraduate plight. I can't tell you how many papers I grade by people who don't believe in the shit they spout. "Marx was right when he said .... " written by a blonde sorority chick from the OC who drives a Lexus with gold-tinted windows won't convince anybody.
e) (or d #2) You CAN'T write what you don't believe / don't like. If you're not a cheesy person, you won't write cheesy stuff. If you don't like cornball romances, don't write one because you believe you can 'hack it.'

or do you think that's overkill?' I'd usually roll over and go back to sleep, and I really dug this girl. = or do you think that's overkill?" And I'd like to imagine I'd said "let's fuck instead, but ususally I'd roll over and go back to sleep, and I really dug this girl.

c) Listen! I doubt anybody can give characters voices completely from the atmosphere. Your experience = c) Listen! I doubt anybody can give characters voices completely from the atmosphere. Your experience is your greatest asset, far more so than your limited imagination.

Know a good editor/reader. Doesn't have to formally do it for a living but if you know someone who likes your work but isn't afraid to focus in on things and point them out to you, keep that person as your friend!

I hate actually writing unless it's easy, which it usually isn't. I love having written, though, because I'm not actually writing anymore then.

His brother Ron has been on the news in Chicago 4-EVAH.

If I'm writing to be read, I don't always enjoy the process, because I tend to be rather painstaking (too much, perhaps) -- reading and rereading what I've typed, slowly tweaking -- but most of the time I like what I'm able to come up with. I impress myself a lot. And it instills a certain pride in me that I rarely get elsewhere.

Don't write what you don't believe / like. This is an undergraduate plight. I can't tell you how many papers I grade by people who don't believe in the shit they spout. "Marx was right when he said .... " written by a blonde sorority chick from the OC who drives a Lexus with gold-tinted windows won't convince anybody.

Um, you fucking idiot. Was Marx poor? No. Could he manage to maintain a critical distance between his own circumstance, and that of an economic theory (with social repercussions?). Yes. Oh boy, it would've been fantastic to have papoers graded by a tutor who judged you not on the strength of your ideas, but the colour of your hair..
Dick.
Also, Maria, be careful about taking advice from writers. It's a product, not a process. respect those who've published widely, well, and made money from it; that's what writing as a profession is.

See, the funny thing is that Paul IS a professor.

I'm not exagerrating. Many of the most important writers (academic, literary) are not somehow "representative" of those they write about. In fiction it's called imagination, and in academia, it's called research.
Not bald, and I grade papers. I would fail yours, cos you're a dumb fuck.
Also: didn't claim that music that's good (necessarily) sells well; but most music writing that's good is popular for a reason. Grow up kid, and accept the fact that you've got a long way to go, and few excuses for that distance...

Basically, I have no patience.

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.

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.

augh

Writing is rewarding when you do it well, but it can only be fun if it incorporates an element of play. This sense of wordplay can and probably should come naturally, but it is often extinguished by the injection of strong ambition, competition for praise, and the imposition of editorial judgments about what is good, better or best. Someone who is under pressure to perform seldom feels that their task is full of fun.

For a shining example of writers having fun, see A thread where you commission a poem from ILE

Analytic writing makes me smile. It is a pleasure to compose sentences.
Creative writing makes me want to impale a fork in my skull.
― 57 7th (calstars), Tuesday, March 1, 2005 3:57 PM (fourteen years ago) bookmarkflaglink

otm

Writing is least fun when you've got an audience in mind.

I hear it helps if you imagine they are naked.

Erotica will never be my forte.

Not if you write children's books

xp

What about grotesquerie?

I like it when my pen makes the funny marks on the page. Oh, how it makes me laugh and sing to see the funny marks!

Then nakedness is only one eldritch state of many.

xp

Writing became more fun when I finally incorporated it into my daily routine. Once the initiatory act no longer required intentional effort and just became a thing I did regularly like eating or weeping in despair for a fallen world, I was able to forget about the more mechanical parts of the process and just, like, roll with it, baby.

(This is what makes my contributions to ILX so very, very chefkiss.jpg.)

the only good writing is posting

Pretty much. What did people even read before message borads existed?

Shredded Wheat nutritional panel is only good for maybe 2-3 close readings and then I'm out.

Try the romance copy on the opposite panel. Real tear jerker.

i think twitter has made me a better writer in some way. especially the 140 era (rip). not sure about ilx. my academic writing is strong relative to my peers and i take great pleasure in it; it’s a fun game to try to inject just the right amount of style while maintaining the dry tone and technical correctness

Writing became more fun when I finally incorporated it into my daily routine. Once the initiatory act no longer required intentional effort and just became a thing I did regularly like eating or weeping in despair for a fallen world, I was able to forget about the more mechanical parts of the process and just, like, roll with it, baby.

― Logy Psycho (Old Lunch), Friday, July 12, 2019 2:58 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

this is probably the biggest influence of ilx, in terms of writing. reading ive aped all my styles from you guys

Contemporary English's (acquired, not innate) tendency towards dryness and consummate transparency drives me up the wall, although it's a useful corrective when grafted onto other, less cost-effective languages.

I like rite gud

“Writing is like the life of a glacier; one eternal grind” - my man John Muir

Def

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