I know I’ve written about this before, but I’m coming to realise that I don’t like literature. I don’t much enjoy writers who put the writing in the way of the story, for whom the technique is on show as much as the plot/characters, or whose personal idiom and syntax is clunky, grinding, or arduous (Poe, and Pynchon (gravity’s rainbow, anyway) come to mind, but as much could be said for Aasimov, Niven, Jemisin, and just about everyone in sci-fi/fantasy). It’s one thing to have a style, a cadence, but it’s another entirely to write in a way that obfuscates things, or drags them out unecessarily, or reads like a bike with flat tires riding down a cobblestone street. All of the books I get into are simply written by craftsmen whose primary talent is being able to assemble a well-structured sentence. I’m not of a particularly analytical mind, and so I find it difficult to articulate exactly what elements are involved in this, aside from adherence to very basic Subject-Verb-Object structure, and perhaps a bit of playfulness with parentheticals and subordinate clauses. But I genuinely don’t think that analysis is important, and certainly not required. Don’t confuse fluency in jargon and theory with actual ability. In therapy, I work with introverts and neurotics, and I have some theoretical knowledge, but the majority of my ability is simply in knowing the right things to say at the right time.

The same thing goes for writing. There is an abundance of theory, not to mention well-established formulae for plots and characters, but no writer worth their salt actually relies on those things. There is no requirement that every story be the hero’s journey, and by this point, the only satisfaction you can get from a hero’s journey is the natural aristotelian satisfaction of a story that works because it resonates with our most basic human cognitive structures. But this satisfaction is that of eating again a meal you’ve eaten every day for the last month. You know it will fill your belly, but it won’t stimulate or satisfy.

The most important feature is not the structure, but momentum, the feeling that something is happening, that we are going somewhere and that we will actually get there. Even if nothing is happening, even if the character is bored, there has to be a pregnancy, a sense of something impending. This doesn’t have to be anything more than the toaster popping or hearing the sound of a gunshot in the street.

Tension

I feel such unbelievable tension about writing when I’m not clear on what’s going to happen in a story. And not the good kind of tension, not suspense. I feel an anxiety which locks me up entirely and prohibits me from writing the next word, which naturally prevents me from discovering what is going to happen. This is mostly the worry about it being good. The story being good, but moreso the writing being good, the senstences being aesthetically well-formed and literary.

This worry, and more generally this kind of performance anxiety, directly feeds into my avoidance habits (porn, junk food, open-world games) and prevents me from doing the thing I would actually find satisfying and which would dispel my fears of incompetence and ungoodness, namely actully writing. It’s the same thing with music. I make good music. It’s idiosyncratic and not quite as masterfully played and recorded as I would like, but it’s always catchy and engaging. Dan makes a good point that it’s almost always a little undercooked, that I always get to 85% and then give up, but that’s because of the performance anxiety mentioned above. The tension I carry makes me unsure in my decisions and so I assume a lackadasical mindset which aims to get things done as quickly as possible so as to escape from the tension of perhaps unwittingly making something bad.

This neuters the all-important non-destructive perfectionsim which is the drive to make something as good as you can possibly get it. In otherwords, it lowers the threshhold for good-enough to the point of just-below amazing and just-above-wasted-talent.

Narcissism

The problem here is narcissism, but the retiring kind, not the demanding or manipulative kind. This is the kind of narcissism which manages its non-existent self-esteem by generally avoiding anything that could invite correction, rejection, or ridicule. This is my central problem. In the absence of conflict or expectation, I am hugely creative and prolific, but as soon as there is any scrutiny at all put upon me, I crumble, and cannot perform (almost) at all. I still make things, writing and recording, but it is a painful slog through anticipation and performance anxiety that makes the whole process generally unpleasant—and so something to avoid.

But the purpose of writing this piece today has been to offer myself a little bit of confirming evidence that I don’t have to worry about my actual ability. A story might fall flat, an intellectual point might not be argued as elegantly as it possibly could, but I can write a thousand-ish word piece in a single draft and have it be pretty damn readable and easy-to-follow.

Drafting

This is the other bit that I so often forget about in my desire to get the thing done so I can escape the tension of it maybe not being good: the first draft is just a first draft. I agree with DWS on the point that a first draft should be as clean and clear as you can make it, but I very much disagree that even the best-possible first draft is good enough to publish. And, having flicked through a couple of his books, his very loose good enough apporoach makes for very amateurish and superficial writing and characterisations. This 70 year-old man has been writing professionally for 35 years and his work still reads like a precocious 12-year-old who knows nothing about life and hasn’t yet noticed that all of his male characters are 6’2” and ripped, and all of his women are prettier-than-they-think-they-are and have suprisingly great tits. The fact that his niche is cosy-sf-romance is no fucking excuse for how ridiculously bad his writinng is.

And that’s the point. His clever rationalisations and audacious public disavoiwal of doing even a second draft is a cover. It allows him to get over the performance anxiety hurdle without ever having to return to his work with a critical eye, admit his failures, and do the often difficult work of hammering a weak and wobbly story into something robust and actually worth reading.

Whenever I’ve seen him speak about it, he ridicules people who are upset by his laziness and justifies it by saying “I enjoy telling the story, not editing it, so when i’m doing telling it, it’s done.” This is all well and good, but it is also facile and superficial. I mean, it fits pretty much perfectly into the modern ethos of constant, empty stimulation, but it doesn’t make for good art. And I don’t even want to get into that quagmire of tautologies and endless snobbish handwringing, but the purpose of making a piece of art is not simply to titilate, but to use your creative powers to create an object which generates feelings in others. The obsession with craft and mastery is exactly the obsession with how best to structure a piece and communicate its contents such that these emotions are evoked as powerfully as possible. It is not possible to do this in a first draft. An improvisiation is never a final piece, or if it is, its spontenaity is the point. This almost never works in literature, except for Robert Rankin whose entire approach is pure audacity and cheeky button-pushing. But I guarantee that Rankin does at least 3 drafts of a book before publishing it. He may not substantially change anything in the plotting, but you can absoluely feel the care with which he has edited and re-edited the work. In spite of being wild and chaotic and unhinged, it nevertheless feels polished and professional. I wonder if he’s dead yet.