On Writing: Part Five

I’ve mostly focused on meta-considerations with writing so far, I’d like to fix that today.  It isn’t that I reject the conventions of craft or turn away from main-stream conceptions of productive aesthetically appealing writing.  In fact, I actively dislike and do reject the so-called “experimental” modes of fiction that seem to channel Joyce or Borges at their best and distill them into unfathomably atrocious simulacrums that I would feel terrible wall-papering my bathroom with.  Most “flash” fiction and “hypertext” novels are as enjoyable to me as I imagine having a bowl full of rusty nails shoved up my rectum would be.

On Writing: Part Four

This next part is important.  When you think of the modern or contemporary authors that are going to be studied in the future—assuming that anyone bothers to engage studying such a quaint and curious notion as authorship in the centuries to come, given the inevitable proliferation of the Internet beyond rational comprehension—you are probably thinking of a few dead white guys, perhaps some middle twentieth century feminists and later post-colonial writers, and if you are extremely generous you might make a grab bag of some of the authors you find in the “literary” sections at Barnes and Noble.  More than likely, of course, you’ll end up being completely wrong.