What writers really do when they write

March 7, 2017 4:47 AM

An artist works outside the realm of strict logic. Simply knowing one’s intention and then executing it does not make good art. Artists know this. According to Donald Barthelme: “The writer is that person who, embarking upon her task, does not know what to do.”
posted by roolya_boolya (18 comments total)

This is a pretty great thing to read. His point at the end about pursuing that miracle again but dreading the hours of knitting required to get there makes me wonder about Dickens and his series of serialized novels and how much trust he, also, had in knowing the knitting would lead to the miracle.
posted by hippybear at 5:05 AM on March 7, 2017 [1 favorite]

Metafilter: maybe a very quiet internal “Yes.”

[I **loved** Lincoln in the Bardo, and catch myself thinking about it constantly. Thank you for this post, I'd have missed the article.]
posted by DigDoug at 5:23 AM on March 7, 2017 [2 favorites]

What a lovely read. Thanks for posting.
posted by ZipRibbons at 5:31 AM on March 7, 2017 [1 favorite]

This is the sort of piece I should have found tiresome, but did not.

The whole genre of "writers on writing" is kind of a narcissistic cliche, by now, isn't it?
posted by thelonius at 5:41 AM on March 7, 2017

"maybe a very quiet internal..." This MFA crap.


if you have to sit for hours
staring at your computer screen
or hunched over your
typewriter
searching for words,
don't do it.
posted by larry_darrell at 5:45 AM on March 7, 2017 [2 favorites]

We buy into some version of the intentional fallacy: the notion that art is about having a clear-cut intention and then confidently executing same.

The actual process, in my experience, is much more mysterious and more of a pain in the ass to discuss truthfully.

Which probably goes a long way to explain the visceral hate so many in the tech world have for modern art. Techies look for logic and reason for something and modern art regularly confounds them. It just is. It exists for reasons that are very difficult to explain (and trying to explain often comes off as sounding like so much mental masturbation.)
posted by Thorzdad at 5:48 AM on March 7, 2017 [2 favorites]

Kurt Vonnegut once said that the great thing about writing was that, with a little patience and application, you could make yourself look much more intelligent that you really were. I like Saunders' idea even more - that the process of careful polishing and revision makes the writer not just seem kinder and more empathetic, but to actually to become so.
posted by Paul Slade at 5:55 AM on March 7, 2017 [8 favorites]

Oh I don't know, by any definition I am a "techy" (semiconductor device engineer), but I don't have any kind of visceral hate for modern art. I'm just... amused and exasperated by the kind of modern art that requires a title to give the audience anything to think about, although as years pass those are fewer and fewer in my perception. (I.e. I find something to think about in more and more pieces without paying attention to the titles.) So... "younger techies," maybe?

But the article resonates anyway. The artistic attempts I make that are more like crafts, those need to be planned, and come out as planned (e.g. calligraphy) although "planning" may happen piecemeal and just-before-execution, too (knitting). But those that lean more towards abstract art, musical arrangement to be precise... well, every piece I've done has had either "...I was going to do a straight transcription, where did this come from?" or "okay that sounds very cool did I put it there? Definitely? How did I manage to build that?"

I've heard others ask the same questions of themselves, too. It's years of accumulation from listening and playing coming out, of course, as in a writer's case it's years of reading and observing and practicing that's coming out, but always on its own terms—we have the mental control to gather that accumulation but in many cases not the control over its re-emergence, it seems.
posted by seyirci at 6:08 AM on March 7, 2017

I have, more than once, began writing something and then found myself caught up as if I was the reader discovering the text for the first time. "What happens next?" I think, excitedly, as I look behind myself and find, unexpectedly, a whole rack of Chekhov's guns.
posted by SPrintF at 6:09 AM on March 7, 2017 [3 favorites]

I don't have the slightest idea what people (especially those eager to not like it) mean by "modern art". Stuff from the 1950s? Contemporary art? Do they just mean anything that isn't representational?
posted by thelonius at 6:12 AM on March 7, 2017

if you have to sit for hours
staring at your computer screen
or hunched over your
typewriter
searching for words,
don't do it.


This is terrible advice. Please don't take it.
posted by You Should See the Other Guy at 7:13 AM on March 7, 2017 [14 favorites]

“The writer is that person who, embarking upon her task, does not know what to do.”

Many more people are writers than I had realized.
posted by Going To Maine at 7:47 AM on March 7, 2017 [2 favorites]

Which probably goes a long way to explain the visceral hate so many in the tech world have for modern art.

No, it's the conceit that you need a DFA in Font Kerning from Julliard to be a "Creative". That therefore the effort, skill, and vision that goes into making Thing1 talk to Thing2 so that the eggheads in Accounting can do things a little easier have apparently little value as human works.

Writing is a skill, and writing well is hard. There is often real artistry in creating something larger than the sum of it's parts. But you know, that's pretty much a thing in every human endeavor. There is often some really great creativity that goes into any construction project or business network.

And yeah, I know not every app or circuit board or bathroom tile job is art. But if we're throwing stones, there's livejournal, too. Creativity and Art abound in every field. You just have to know how to appreciate it.
posted by Pogo_Fuzzybutt at 8:49 AM on March 7, 2017 [2 favorites]

No, it's the conceit that you need a DFA in Font Kerning from Julliard to be a "Creative".

Funny, I'm a poet and teacher living not too far from Silicon Valley, and I feel the same way about the tech industry. How many forty-somethings in tech do you know who found their way there because they were hardware geeks and tinkerers in high school--and if they went to college they studied English lit, or history? Now how many twenty-somethings have a similar path today? Could a thirty-year-old with an anthropology BA who'd somehow become a slapjack programmer even get far enough past HR gatekeepers for a hiring committee of programmers to figure out that he's a great programmer?

(I was initially going to write "to figure out that she's a great programmer," but let's be real: she definitely wouldn't get an interview.)
posted by tapir-whorf at 9:30 AM on March 7, 2017 [2 favorites]

Eh. A lot of art is inspired, automatic, instinctual, even lucky, but the implication that intentionality and craft does not or cannot make good art is nonsense.
posted by xyzzy at 9:51 AM on March 7, 2017 [1 favorite]

intentionality

Do you mean "intention"? Intentionality means something else., although I guess it may have deviant senses as well.
posted by thelonius at 10:25 AM on March 7, 2017

Tech who went to unaccredited fine arts school to do experimental music and theater, checking in to say our field is more open to self educated or non traditional employees than anything else with comparable salary, outside perhaps sports or entertainment.
posted by idiopath at 12:33 PM on March 7, 2017 [1 favorite]

Russel Hoban liked to say 'it writes'. There's a mystical element to it, for sure, but there's also a practical element of putting your dumb meat fingers on the keys and squeezing out the brain poop, then doing it again, and again, and again, forever.
posted by Sebmojo at 2:51 PM on March 7, 2017