When are you an interesting writer?

Simon silverdollarcircle

Well-known member
I don't write because I don't really have anything to say or any ideas of my own.

I think for lots of people it's the act of writing itself that creates things to say. Like you see what you want to say emerge out of the words on the page. But without some words there first it can't emerge, there's no shape for it to fill in to.

I say "lots of people"...I only know like a dozen writers and most of them are on dissensus
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
Most of my writing that I've not only liked at the time but gone on liking has had an automatic aspect to it. Literally not knowing from one phrase to the next what will end up having been written. I do edit a bit, but the initial process has to be guided by non-conscious impulses. When it works out, I find out what I really think and feel about something - or maybe I had no definite thoughts or feelings about it until they were written; but they tend to stick.
 

luka

Well-known member
I think for lots of people it's the act of writing itself that creates things to say. Like you see what you want to say emerge out of the words on the page. But without some words there first it can't emerge, there's no shape for it to fill in to.

I say "lots of people"...I only know like a dozen writers and most of them are on dissensus

There's a quote I like that I can never remember and I can never remember who said it
But it's something along the lines of the poem tells the poet what he thinks
 

luka

Well-known member
What writing on the street has helped me with is emotion. Doing the emotion head on. Articulating it and aestheticising it but letting it retain its full power. I might be the only one. I done quite a lot of poems for people with terminal illness or people who have lost a loved one. I've written more love poems than anyone who has ever lived. And I do them properly. Proper love poems with no jokes and no undermining the emotion. Poems that make people burst into tears on the spot. That's maybe, maybe what I'm proudest of. Although I would not publish that stuff ever.
 

luka

Well-known member
That's me boasting. I've had a few beers and whiskys. Self aggrandising.
 
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luka

Well-known member
If you do something like that you have to keep it completely pure. Even if you're a horrible person. Or it won't work. It has to be for them. No photograph. Nothing. Give it away. Be horrible in the rest of your life. But that you have to keep pure or you won't be able to win the trust you need to operate.
 

droid

Well-known member
Im imagining a feel good movie about the street poet who makes the bereaved and smitten cry with the power of his words. When he falls on hard times his patrons band together through a series of unlikely coincidences to collect the lost and scattered fragments of his best work and save him from destitution and penury.
 

luka

Well-known member
Im imagining a feel good movie about the street poet who makes the bereaved and smitten cry with the power of his words. When he falls on hard times his patrons band together through a series of unlikely coincidences to collect the lost and scattered fragments of his best work and save him from destitution and penury.

I'm not far off having to rely on this unlikely scenario
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
You're right actually droid that is a solid scenario for a rom com.

Street poet Brit woos American beauty by writing poems about how unhappy her relationship with a high powered businessman must be.
 

blissblogger

Well-known member
Part of the appeal of doing something physical is that it's very clear when you're good at it. There's forever an emperor's new clothes thing in my mind with anything artistic. Joyce is considered a master, but it could all be bollocks whereas you can't argue that Messi isn't a good footballer.

sports-obsessed Drake said something similar, it was to do with some awards ceremony, about how he and another artist who didn't get an award like some thought they should - and he said 'we have to work in an opinion-based field, unlike with sports which is results-based '

that's one of the things people who like sport like about it, isn't it - that it's supposedly pure - a player or team either has the right stuff or doesn't - it's a completely clear-cut metric. inarguable.
 
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version

Well-known member
I think for lots of people it's the act of writing itself that creates things to say. Like you see what you want to say emerge out of the words on the page. But without some words there first it can't emerge, there's no shape for it to fill in to.

I say "lots of people"...I only know like a dozen writers and most of them are on dissensus

There's an interview with a producer called M.E.S.H. where he talks about this in the context of music via graphic design:

You've previously talked about working with presets. There's a producerly orthodoxy that you should steer clear of the presets. But that doesn't seem to worry you so much.

I don't want to sit there with three sine waves making little envelopes all day and then end up having some really boring synth sound. I mean, some people are really good at it—producers who make sounds that are more synth-based. I think my sounds are more sample-oriented. Even the synths that I like a lot are more sample-based. It's almost like with digital graphics: it's raster vs. vector. I'm more raster when it comes to sound.

[...]

I really, really hate starting with a blank slate, it drives me insane.

This seems like the kind of approach that lends itself to poetry more than prose. Something which doesn't demand as rigid a structure. I can't imagine just chasing each word resulting in a particularly good novel, surely you'd also need some idea of an overarching plot, themes, characters and so on? I guess you could get the first bit down like that then feel your way through, find ways of stitching things together and sussing out what you were talking about.
 
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