notes on written things and writing

I visited an author’s old home in Beijing, and now I have some notes on writing.

Sentences

Owing to Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer (graciously recommended by and borrowed from Ms. Dawson - thank you!), I’ve learnt a great deal about writing sentences. I’m reading DeLillo’s The Name, himself a great if not repetitively stylish sentence writer. I’ve realized that what I think I’ve learnt is incomplete. Writing good sentences isn’t all that important. A work can have terrible sentences in it and still be great. Rather, a writer should be comfortable with their sentences. This idea of comfort must contribute to the “flow” of the work somehow… in that the sentence is fitting in terms of the writer’s style and the work’s practicability. If a work overflows with great sentencing, then the overall effect is overly kaleidoscopic and expansive, and a work can no longer be viewed as a cohesive body. The determination of comfort is quite abstract. Whatever I’ve written, when I look back upon it, I’d always feel it somewhat ugly. Not tightened up. The sentences could work better. Whether this is the proofreader/editor’s job or the writer’s job is up to us to decide. (In Inkling, at least, it’s my job…)

In any sense, I recommend everyone to use this approach to write anything and everything. You can write novels, poetry, lab reports, college applications. Like a secular God, the method doesn’t care, and always loves you.

Experimental Literature

这是个伪命题。No literature could be experimental. From a scientific perspective, experiments are set out to confirm hypotheses, or in terms of literature, to see if something “works.” How do we ever know whether something works or not? By the number of sales, by the marks given in a GCSE exam? Experiments designed to find out something intrinsically impossible is, while poetic, futile and nonexistent. Critics and writers use this label as an emphasis in the deviation from conventionality, but what even qualifies as conventional? The fact that this phrase exists is a sad little fact about how we decide to brand and interpret ourselves.
2018.12.30 于苏州初雪