As someone who purports, or even
pretends, to be an artist, I feel I must at least make an effort to
actually write about creative things. I have, and will continue, to
try my hand at political writing, but it is all too sober a subject
for me.
I think politics is important, sure,
but I do so tire of reading other people's repetitive remarks about
whatever flavour is currently bothering them. And, as I said, it is
hardly the most creative type of writing. To make political writing
anywhere near creative, one has to put far too much effort into it.
There's little room for creativity, and since muggles are so
perpetually confused by genuine creativity, creative political
writing will have a small impact unless the points are laboured and
easy to follow.
I think the prevailing barrier between
me and other people is: most people don't get artists; and, as much
as I despise artists, amongst artists is where I am most comfortable.
Artists understand the rhetoric and the stupidity that muggles get so
irked by.
I guess I love artists really.
I pretend to be a writer also so I have
decided to write a little bit about writing. By the way, please don't
judge my books by the quality of the writing on this blog; my books
are far worse than this drivel.
As I trawl the back washes of the
internet, I often stumble upon tips for writers and various lists of
dos and don'ts; but one issue I have with these lists is that
they all seem to assume you are aspiring to be a best-selling,
popular-fiction kind of writer.
As I mentioned at the beginning of this
post, I often pretend to be an artist – a real
artist that is – and real
artists all know the true aim of self-expression is to aim to please
oneself, not to please others. (Albeit in reality artists are just as
much crowd-pleasers than anyone else).
If you want to be a
best-selling author, then the advice (and the so-called advice) you
can find online might be perfectly valuable to you; but if you are
like me you are more concerned with self expression – and that does
not necessarily mean your writing is impenetrable and difficult to
read – being popular might not be of interest to you. You see, you
might not actually give a shit what other people think – especially
muggles – or you deliberately break so-called rules to suit your
expressive needs.
I was reading some
comments on a Facebook post about electoral reform. The headline of
the article was 'More Votes but Less Seats', and quite a few pedants
had engaged in an online intercourse simply to point out the apparent
'correct' grammar is 'More Votes but Fewer Seats'.
The problem for me
is that 'More Votes but Less Seats' is a little more snappy and
direct than the supposed correct version, yet none of the pedants
realised this. If I was to write such a sentence, I'd probably go for
the deigned incorrect version simply because it is a better sentence.
But it turned out
the idiot author of the article then bowed down to pressure and
changed the heading to fewer. I guess writing about electoral
reform, he could only respect democratic consensus.
I do not purport to
be an expert of the avant-garde, but I do try to be something along
the lines of a self-pleasing creative, and I certainly am not trying
to be the next Dan Brown. If you have a problem with anything I
write, so much the better.
So here are my tips
for aspiring avant-garde writers. These tips may or may not be of any
use to anyone, but here they are all the same:
1 – Ignore all
advice from everyone and please only yourself.
2 …
… And that's
about it, really. That and try to be offensive to at least someone,
somewhere (which, to be fair, isn't difficult at all). You can, of
course, bear all advice in mind when you write. After all, writing
books that are enjoyable to read is no terrible thing; but I think
that main thing is to prioritise your intentions.
All advice is fine
until it outstays its use.
Over and out!
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