When are you an interesting writer?

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Perhaps (hah!) there's a difference between qualifying what you're arguing and qualifying YOURSELF.
 

craner

Beast of Burden
qualification when talking about anything aesthetic is a huge no no. never do it.

everything has to be the greatest thing that ever happened or worse than the holocaust. nothing inbetween

I learnt that reading Melody Maker in the early early 1990s and then responded to it later in Pound and Huysmans. The ruthless blade of censure!
 
I've found that over the last few years, editing and working on copy and working on other peoples writing that I've started to enjoy the mistakes and slightly juvenile 'sensational spelling' in text a lot more, the way it to allows emotion and personality to spill through, maybe because there's less of it with auto-correct. Maybe also a strong dislike of people priding themselves on being grammar nazis
 

Simon silverdollarcircle

Well-known member
It's not that different from being an interesting speaker/conversationalist IMO

Most people can't write like they speak though cos they think writing is something different and special and they have to affect a certain tone.

I've realised this working as a copywriter, proofreading stuff by people who are very clever but have absolutely no idea how to write.

It also means thinking about who you're talking to. The temptation when writing is often to be as clever as possible, to fart around with words etc. But imagine if someone you were talking to did that. You'd want to slap them. Or you'd just walk off.

Yeah I agree. Altho I think often the most interesting writing is very quick and conservational in tone but verges on the writer coming across as a bit of a prick

Basically you've got to write like you'd speak, but as you'd speak in a slightly cunty frame of mind. Not enough for someone to slap you, but just enough for someone to be a bit riled by you.

Grand sweeping statements
Half baked theories
Wild disgressions and sudden turns

...all make for interesting writing but would make someone exhausting in conversation
 

entertainment

Well-known member
Write like you aspire to speak, like you would speak if you had a few minutes to think each statement over and formulate it in the most trenchant and evocative way, not like you actually speak for goodness sake!

Writing is consecrated language. It should be considered, not just blurted out.
 
Being a bit of a cunt is essential though, there has to be some risk for good writing, you have to reach
 

entertainment

Well-known member
If your language is lofty and full of obscure words, it's important also to weave in some antagonism towards the old, conservative readers, so they don't get too comfortable and paint you one of theirs.
 
Soul-destroying marketing copy tries to grab an uninterested readers extremely limited attention, and then convert it into brand affinity or a transaction ASAP, you might want to intrigue with oddness firstly but then you want to be as frictionless as possible in your seduction. So a conversational, speech-like style can fit the bill.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I don't disagree with you really.

I guess what I was suggesting wasn't to write like you speak, exactly, but to remember that writing is a sort of speech act, and that this is how you fundamentally make things interesting for a reader — you're "speaking" TO them, even if your object is to mystify them.

Of course writing can be much more considered and refined than speech.

OTOH personally speaking I've found many of the best thing I've written HAVE been "blurted" out. Perhaps I've tidied them having blurted them but I think you can get in a terrible mess sitting there trying to formulate the perfect sentence.

It's odd, really, writing — you can premeditate all you like but as soon as the words start piling up you're almost instantly thrown off course. In that way I think it is as instinctive as speaking. It's just that you can then go back and edit out the awkward bits, polish it up, etc.

Also I find a lot of YouTube comments more interesting than "proper" music journalism. Perhaps it isn't the prose style so much as the fact that they have interesting things to say which aren't permitted in "proper" writing.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
It is an interesting question.

Take 'The Wasteland' for example. How is that written so that you remain interested in it despite it being (for most people) utterly confusing? (Could be an open question as to whether people WOULD read it if they didn't know how important it is. If it was written by Joe Bloggs not T.S. Eliot.)

"April is the cruellest month" is a killer first line, not just because of how it fits into the whole poem, but the counterintuitive sentiment it articulates. At least for somebody already interested in poetry, there's a confounding subversion here of the traditional poetic equating of spring with rebirth, love, joy. And probably if you read through it you could pick up all sorts of these lines which keep people strung along, even if they can't make head nor tail of a lot of it.

I think Eliot was a master at keeping people hooked, in spite of his forbidding reputation. "Let us go then, you and I" instantly piques your curiosity, you're being taken on a journey — and then the evening is "spread out against the sky like a patient etherised upon a table". Before you read that you'd never seen that sort of comparison or even imagined it could be made.

Obviously Prufrock is a lot less challenging than The Waste Land but...
 

entertainment

Well-known member
Also I find a lot of YouTube comments more interesting than "proper" music journalism. Perhaps it isn't the prose style so much as the fact that they have interesting things to say which aren't permitted in "proper" writing.

That's true. Often it feels like immediate opinions and subjective reactions are filtered through this self-imposed, tacit bureaucracy until they become something else entirely.
 
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