John Warner stellt mit Blick auf ChatGPT die Frage, was am aktuellen Schreibunterricht eigentlich erhaltenswert ist und was wir getrost über Bord werfen können. Beitrag in Deutsch und Englisch (post in German and English).

Quelle: Was erhaltenswert ist, wird bleiben – ChatGPT und das Schreiben im Unterricht (Gastbeitrag John Warner) – Unterrichten Digital

“The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way… As a man is, so he sees.”

Quelle: William Blake’s Most Beautiful Letter: A Timeless Defense of the Imagination and the Creative Spirit

It’s 1965. Truman Capote was a known figure on the literary scene and a member of the global social jet set. His bestselling books Other Voices, Other Rooms and Breakfast at Tiffany’s had made him …

Quelle: How Truman Capote Was Destroyed by His Own Masterpiece

Sunday, 26 January 2020

You might have heard of this quote from Marty Neumeier, author of The Brand Gap

A brand is not what you say it is. It’s what they say it is.

What he means by that is that no matter how much you want your product or company to be perceived in a certain way by the public, what really defines your brand is what people actually think and say about it. This is surely true for brands, but it is also true for all the pieces of work we put into the world as creators. Be it an idea, a song, a drawing, a video, a website, or any written piece – you as the creator are not the one who ultimately decides how your work resonates with other people or if it is perceived as “good” by an audience. Of course, you might personally feel that your work is of high quality and also have a gut feeling that it could go down well with others. But this doesn’t necessarily mean that others will feel the same and, consequently, there is no way you can plan for something to become a hit.

What a piece of work really means is not determined by what you want it to be but by what happens when people interact with it. As Marcel Duchamp wrote: “All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.” In other words: Only by publishing your work and placing it out in the world and in front of other people it is truly complete.

So does this mean that we should listen to what they say? Many people indeed try to adjust their writing to what others might like. You could call this the SEO approach to creation: You try to meet the taste, opinions, and standards of others to get their attention and approval. There is one huge problem with this approach, though: The more you adjust your writing to the expectations of others, the more it will, inevitably, lose character. Your work will be stripped of your unique voice and will become generic and disposable.

We all want to create successful work. We want our voices to be heard. We all want to be recognized or, at least, respected. But instead of trying to please everyone, you should deep down inside of you accept the fact that it is not yours to decide if others like your work. This will give you immense freedom. Suddenly, you can start to just write, without worrying whether your readers like what you’re saying or how you are saying it. You can write whether or not the reader is in line with your values, your vision, or your sense of humor. You can write about what you deeply care about. Your process, your struggles, your opinions, your passions. You can focus on clarifying your thoughts, establishing your individual writing style, and getting better with each piece. Just do your best and create work that is genuinely you. That doesn’t necessarily mean that you stop thinking about what might be of value to others or that you can’t be open to feedback anymore. Not at all. Just don’t let this be the sole objective. Write about what is most important to you in the first place and create the opportunity for people to learn and reach their own conclusions. Oh, and don’t forget to publish your work. Ideally on your own site.

If your work resonates with a like-minded audience – and if you share your experiences and tell a story, I guarantee you that it will – great! If only a few people like it, great as well! And even if nobody gives a damn, never mind! You can still decide to continue working on what you care about because you enjoy the process of writing or you are convinced of an idea. That’s completely up to you. Because regardless of what they say, it is still your work. Your writing.

Autumn (2016), like all of Ali Smith’s novels (I’m guessing – I’ve only read a few so far), is a delight in linguistic and other ways. This post features a few excerpts that focus on language in one way or another. The main character, Elisabeth, is visiting her old friend Daniel in a care home. […]

Language like poppies in Ali Smith’s Autumn — Sentence first

Love them or hate them, unreliable narrators can make a book 1000x more fun. There’s something so captivating about a person who might be lying through their teeth while pretending to be completely transparent. Don’t get me wrong, not every unreliable narrator is skillfully written – but they don’t deserve a bad rep just because […]

7 Unreliable Narrators You Don’t Want To Miss — Wordy and Whimsical

Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985) seems to me the authentic American apocalyptic novel, more relevant now than when it was written. The fulfilled renown of Moby-Dick and of As I Lay Dying is augmented by Blood Meridian, since Cormac McCarthy is the worthy disciple both of Melville and of Faulkner. I venture that no other…

Harold Bloom on Cormac McCarthy, True Heir to Melville and Faulkner — Literary Hub

The Moment of Writing

By

 

 

When does writing begin? The act of committing the first words to a page—as I am doing now—is cited for its difficulty. Though those words might well be deleted from the final draft, the resistance of the blank page is justifiably famous. It’s an entrance to the unknowable, like the doorway on your first school-going day as a child. Once you’ve gone through, you’re in a different domain; you’re in the story, which involves inhabiting a new space and a new self. Before going in, you stare at the lit doorway of the blank page, partly with anxiety and partly with exhaustion. Exhaustion because the blank page is not only the beginning but the end of something. It’s the end of the hours or days or months you’ve spent considering both the subject and the prospect of writing about it. Arriving at the blank page represents our coming to the end of the undecided space we call living. Now we must get down to telling.

I experience this sense of loss as I put down the first word—the loss of the procrastination and the freedom to not do that for me are synonymous with life—yet I feel I must question this model by which we determine at which precise moment we start to write. The question might be particularly pertinent to me, who frequently returns—according to some—to my life as a subject. When did I decide, I’m asked, that I would write about an uncle in my next novel, or a cousin or the Calcutta I used to visit in my childhood or the Oxford of my student days? But, prior to this, surely another moment occurs: the realization that my uncle was extraordinary in a way that could be written about. Subsequent to this comes the idea of formulating a story in which he’s a character, after which comes, eventually, the act of putting the first words about him or where he lived on the page.

Naipaul calls this transition the “discovery of one’s material,” the difficult transition a writer must make from a passionate apprenticeship in literature to annexing an imaginary world that’s their own. After this—I would hazard—the matter of success begins to become, oddly, irrelevant in a way that it wasn’t before. The apprentice reads great literature and wants to produce it; his work must, then, carry the stylistic marks and the themes of what’s been approved as literary. However, at a certain juncture, the apprentice may find he wants, inexplicably, to write about his uncle. He hesitates: he isn’t sure if his uncle is a legitimate subject for literature. We grow up with mythic heroes, and uncles don’t generally adhere to a definition of the heroic. Surely novels need to tackle themes and conflicts that are significant according to a critical consensus. Finally, he sets aside his disquiet. This is how writing begins.

I’ve written at least twice about my uncles (I use “uncles” literally but also as a shorthand for whatever I once thought unfit for serious literature). The first time was in my first novel, A Strange and Sublime Address. The last was in my sixth, Odysseus Abroad. On both occasions, these uncles re-presented themselves to my imagination through a process that can only be called translation. That is, I found they were already extant in other books. I encountered one of my uncles when reading Sons and Lovers as an undergraduate in London. Reading of Walter Morel’s life-loving expansiveness and the way he whistled doing odd jobs, I felt my uncle’s proximity. This wasn’t a fully formed thought; it was an unexpected recognition of the familiar. Later, I discovered he was in other books, too: A House for Mr Biswas, for example. To discover them was, in a sense, to be involved in translation. I didn’t have to remember him—reading became a form of imagining his world: reading was the beginning of writing.

Odysseus Abroad was, years later, the outcome of a confluence of confused identities. In 2001, for the first time in my life, I bought a painting: a charcoal sketch, really. It was by an artist whose work I loved: F N Souza. He’d been living in self-imposed obscurity in New York and had come to Calcutta, just a year before his death, to exhibit in a gallery. The prices, given Souza’s reputation, were staggeringly low—I bought the sketch for fifty-five thousand rupees (a little more than eight hundred dollars $, using the conversion rates of today). An uncle who was unmarried and who, despite being a shipping executive, had lived in a bedsit in London for thirty years had then retired and was in Calcutta, spending most of his time doing nothing in his brother’s home. It was I who’d urged him to return to India in 1991 to attend my wedding. Since then he’d gone back to London for only brief periods. One afternoon, he came to my flat, unannounced, and challenged me: “I hear you’ve bought a painting for fifty-five thousand rupees?” I took him to where it hung in the drawing room: a charcoal sketch of the head of a man made up of wild lines and intermittent smudges. “You may as well have paid me fifty-five thousand rupees for farting,” said my uncle. “But this is a great picture!” I protested. ‘And the man in it looks a bit like you, doesn’t he?’ “Granted,” my uncle replied, “that the work of an idiot and the work of a genius look very alike.” So saying, he went off. I stood there, assessing my purchase and the resemblance of the man in it to the man who’d derided it. I recalled suddenly that Souza had called the sketch “Ulysses.” It came to me: was not my uncle a bit of an Odysseus-like figure? He was a wanderer. He owned no property. Could I write a book in which he played Odysseus? The thought—the “translation”—occurred that afternoon. It took a decade (the period of Odysseus’s travels) for the consequences of the idea to fall into place, and me to begin the novel.

When does writing really start? Convention tells us that it’s when we commit the first word or sentence to the page; put pen to paper, as I still do. The lead-up to this moment comprises memory, receptivity, and the transmutation—the fission—that turns intangible thoughts and images into words and story. You experience things; you live; from these experiences you produce writing. Today, for me, I feel this model holds less and less true. Since I’m writing about my life so often—or rather, of life in general as I know it—I find it increasingly difficult to demarcate the life I live within the book from the life I live outside it; the writing I do with words from the writing I do without words. Writing is an unpremeditated awareness of something coming into existence. Many things become part of the aura of possibility we call “writing”—the street one is walking on; a balcony with a man in it; sounds from a neighboring street. To produce a book containing that street or balcony constitutes only a part of what writing is. Writing spills over from the book, into a domain where there are no words, only a consciousness that something has happened. What has happened is not an event; it’s writing, which can begin at any point of time, in that any moment is a moment of possibility.

Let me give an example. Many of us buy books for different reasons—we’ve heard of the author or of a particular novel; it has won a prize; the book is on the curriculum (there’s a curriculum even after we leave school, and we obediently get what’s on it). Or it could be that we’re drawn to the title, or are absorbed by the book’s jacket. It could be a combination of all or some of these reasons. The number of books we buy far outnumber those we read. Again, the reasons for not reading are multiple—deferral, because of the paucity of time, is a common one. But a powerful cause for not reading is because the writer in us—I use the word “writer” not for one who’s produced books, but for whoever is possessed by the possibility of writing—takes over from the reader. This might happen when we’re transfixed by the jacket and keep studying it, unable to proceed to the first page. The image on the cover, its design, the lettering – these have thrown us into the realm of possibility. Once we’ve entered the story which that possibility engenders, reading the novel itself becomes redundant. We may not write a word, but the writer in us predominates. A version of the novel emerging from the jacket—or even the title—holds us in its spell. That’s why the crowd of unread books on our shelves is never, generally, a burden. They signal a possibility—not that we will one day read them, but of how the idea, and moment, of writing is constantly with us.

 

This is the fifth installment of Amit Chaudhuri’s column, The Moment.

Amit Chaudhuri is a novelist, essayist, poet, and musician. His most recent novel is Friend of My Youth