Productive

The actual problem is that I am too productive. Which is to say that my effort is always scattered. Rather than sculpting a statue, I’m always just chipping bits off at random. Basically, my artistic approach is to turn a block of marble into a big pile of marble dust. Nothing ever gets finished, and when it does, it doesn’t feel like the completion of a real thing. It’s just another messy thing that I’ve somehow managed to pull into a form.

In itself, this isn’t necessarily problematic, but when it comes time to sell the thing, I can’t help but feel that I am tricking people into buying a diarrhoea dookie that I’ve mixed up into a milkshake.

Productive. I don’t think this is the correct word for it. If I was productive, I wouldn’t feel like my 20 albums of music are just random junk I cobbled together. At the same time that I complain about the stifling oppression of having to be “professional” all the time, I do need to direct my energy in a more deliberate kind of way.

One way to do this is to continue as I have done, coming up with sketches and new ideas, but then actually going back and finishing them properly.

Or, I can move one project at a time and only allow myself to work on that one thing until it is finished.

Experimentation. This is the issue. I am a tinkerer, not a technician or an engineer. I’m only interested in creating the prototype and have almost no interest in creating the final product. But again, it’s a misuse of the word. What I do is not experimentation. It’s not controlled, or repetitive, or documented. I’m not an experimenter, I’m a child twiddling a knob that makes beep beep noises.

Indulgence

Something I have lately come to realise about myself as a reader is that I hate indulgent books. I hate novels that meander aimlessly or waste time or mask a bunch of exposition in a long flashback. I have done these things myself, but there is something about Umberto Eco’s approach to it, and RAW’s which, frankly, pisses me the fuck off.

A bit of meandering parenthetical doesn’t bother me when it’s aesthetically justified (though it rarely is), but it needs to be engaging and feel as if it is in spite of itself leading somewhere.

Filler

Maybe indulgence is the wrong word, because indulgence done well, can be artful and compelling and not at all irritating. And then there’s RAW’s Joyce breakdowns and literal empty faff in Masks of the Illuminati. It turns out that the best part of the Illuminatus! trilogy actually wasn’t RAW, but Rovert Shea, who seems to have been the one actually capable of telling a story for more than five pages without pulling his dick out and rubbing it in your face.

It seems like at least a third of Masks is this meandering shit, and the actually interesting idea (Einstein and Joyce meeting in 1900s Vienna) literally disappears behind a bunch of coming of age shit about a young British aristocrat being inducted into the mysteries of the Freemasons. Which is exactly the plot of a different trilogy he wrote.

I hate to admit it, but what I really want is a start-to-finish story with interesting characters and an intelligible plot. It’s nice when those two are not quite clear and leave room for guessing and imagination, but Raymond Chandler is incredibly compelling, even though his novels are painfully straightforward.

I realise the irony that it’s taken me three full paragraphs to get around to the point of this section, but fuck it, it’s my blog and I’ll cry if I want to.

The point is that you can always always alwasy tell when a scene, chapter, or whole section of a book has been written only to pad out the page-count. Some books (and movies) need to be as long as they are, but most don’t. Most have at least 50 pages that are extraneous to the actual story. I especially hate digressions and red-herrings that actually divert the narrative from the main path.

Jonothan Strange and Mr. Norrell is an example of the opposite. It is huge, immense, mega, and yet no word feels wasted. It is a long story that takes a lot of telling, and almost as much explaining (the footnotes are exquisite), but you don’t ever have the feeling of being taken for a ride because the publisher had a minimum word count that the author was too afraid to challenge.