Alison Wilder

Musician, technologist, storyteller

writing

The nut, the moron, the stylist, and the critic

I liked this bit from Susan Sontag’s journals. Apparently, the LitHub post from whence this came was in violation of something, so it’s gone.

Rules for Being a Writer
from Sontag’s journals, December 3, 1961

The writer must be four people:

  1. The nut, the obsédé
  2. The moron
  3. The stylist
  4. The critic

1 supplies the material; 2 lets it come out; 3 is taste; 4 is intelligence.

A great writer has all 4—but you can still be a good writer with only 1 and 2; they’re most important.

Obsédé means the obsessed person, or the fanatic. So not nut like “poop smearing,” nut like “can’t stop looking at this thing no matter what else happens.” This is aligned with the concept of creativity in Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention:

The first [phase in the creative process] is a period of preparation, becoming immersed…in a set of problematic issues that are interesting and arouse curiosity.

Csikszentmihalyi (what a name!!) makes it clear that, while this sounds benign, truly creative individuals who have made a significant contribution to culture generally are immersed at a level that is unusual. Obsédé.

The second phase of the creative process is a period of incubation, during which ideas churn around below the threshold of consciousness…the third…is insight, sometimes called the “Aha!” moment.

The moron.

The fourth component is evaluation, when the person must decide whether the insight is valuable and worth pursuing.

The critic.

The fifth and last component of the process is elaboration. It is probably the one that takes up the most time and involves the hardest work.

The nut + the stylist.

NB: the featured image, which reads “Theater Square of Susan Sontag,” is from this Flickr account. It turns out that Susan Sontag “actively participated in the creation of the history of Sarajevo and Bosnia.” Who knew?!

Books that wish they were movies

I know I’m not the first to notice that lots of recently-authored books seem more like a verbose screenplay written in prose than a novel. This seems to especially be the case with genre books.

I recently finished the first book in an acclaimed new fantasy series, the Draconis Memoria trilogy. The Waking Fire is a super fun read in its way — engaging characters, easy language, light on the politics and heavy on the quests. Every time I read passages like this, though, I was left with a nagging feeling that I’d be better off just…seeing the show.

When it seemed it might never end, Tekela reached out a hand to Lizanne. She sat with knees drawn up and her back against the Thumper’s base, eyes closed tight and trembling arm extended. Lizanne took her hand, holding it tight, watching the girl’s lips move in an unheard prayer, or was it a song? The suspicion was confirmed when at last the final shell came slamming down and a thick wall of silence descended on the trenches, the sudden, almost shocking stillness broken only by Tekela’s song. Lizanne’s estimation of her musical talents deepened upon hearing her voice. She recognised the tune, “The Leaves of Autumn,” the Eutherian lyrics sung with a captivating sweetness at odds with the landscape that greeted their gaze.

– Chp. 31

Can’t you just see the framing of this shot? Hear the over-compressed, breathy vocals? It reads to me like stage direction. It has the feeling of a scene that might provide some insight into the characters, if only I could see them. Or how about this?

Clay crouched, ready to dodge the flames, then stopped as a crack sounded from above and a large piece of the dome’s ceiling fell, tumbling straight down to deliver a glancing but heavy blow to the White before slamming onto the glass floor. Clay watched an intricate matrix of cracks spread through the glass from the point of impact, staring with an unwarranted detachment as his Green-enhanced eyes tracked the complex array of fractures until it has covered the floor from end to end.

 

– Chp. 45, emphasis mine

For the love of pete, Anthony Ryan literally describes the camera’s/Clay’s detached viewpoint in the middle of this fast-paced fight scene.

The book even follows the 90s action movie convention of switching between multiple separate stories/main characters that come together at the end. I’d like to say the connections were pleasing and unexpected, but I would need to use scare quotes, and I refuse to do it. I refuse, damnit.

This is not to say I didn’t enjoy the book — I actually kind of did, although I won’t be continuing to the second book in the trilogy at the moment. I mean, the fantasy-steampunk-spy mash-up is kind of worth the price of admission.

At the end of the day, I like dragons and that kind of shit enough that I kept reading, despite feeling weird that I knew that, even with my mild aphantasia (I find it EXTREMELY difficult to see images in my mind), this book managed to express to me exactly what each and every scene looked like. It did this based on movie tropes and conventions that we all love, but are probably a bit tired of at this point. Color me old-fashioned, but I’m just not into that.

Passing the buck

Shame is now both global and permanent, to a degree ­unprecedented in human history. No more moving to the next town to escape your bad name. However far you go and however long you wait, your disgrace is only ever a Google search away. Getting a humiliating story into the papers used to require convincing an editor to run it, which meant passing their standards of newsworthiness and corroborating evidence. Those gatekeepers are now gone.

“Shame Storm”, Helen Andrews, First Things

This seems disingenuous, since most stories people share are still from major news outlets. If people were writing long, hateful screeds on their personal blogs, and that was the material that was spreading through Facebook and Twitter, I would agree that the gatekeepers are gone; however, every media outlet has editors.

It’s not that there are no gatekeepers. It’s that the gatekeepers are motivated only by clicks, and it turns out that people click on shit-for-brains, hateful language over measured, thoughtful analysis.

Hope me, Agatha.

The elements of Christie’s fiction are all already in place: a country house, a finite list of suspects, the outsider detective intruding into a place of order and hierarchy that has been disrupted by a crime. The world of Christie’s books is something like the ‘imaginary’ as described by Cornelius Castoriadis, a mental representation in which this orderly household stands for a whole society as a shared universe of meaning, with values and social roles encoded everywhere we look – and then, into this world comes a murder, and a detective trying to solve the murder. Something doesn’t mean what we thought it meant; someone isn’t who they appear to be; something didn’t happen the way it was said to have happened.

The Case of Agatha Christie, LRB

Quote from Essays in the Art of Writing

Music and literature, the two temporal arts, contrive their pattern of sounds in time; or, in other words, of sounds and pauses.  Communication may be made in broken words, the business of life be carried on with substantives alone; but that is not what we call literature; and the true business of the literary artist is to plait or weave his meaning, involving it around itself; so that each sentence, by successive phrases, shall first come into a kind of knot, and then, after a moment of suspended meaning, solve and clear itself.  In every properly constructed sentence there should be observed this knot or hitch; so that (however delicately) we are led to foresee, to expect, and then to welcome the successive phrases.  The pleasure may be heightened by an element of surprise, as, very grossly, in the common figure of the antithesis, or, with much greater subtlety, where an antithesis is first suggested and then deftly evaded.

Robert Louis Stevenson