Tag Archives: discourse

Intellectual terrain

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Books today are for sharing, not reading

Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be read once. Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise

I’ve been reading Cyril Connelly’s Enemies of Promise. It is wonderful, brilliant, and meandering; analytical where complexity requires it to analyse; spiritual where the soul needs to be fed; and optimistic just when your spirit is about to break.

It also manages to make you think about what you’re doing and where you’re coming from.

Which is humbling.

Despite the wide ground it covers — style, autobiography, grammar — it maintains a steady focus on the subject of promise, what it means to be a promising writer and how it either pans out or doesn’t.

It’s meandering in the same way that a hiker meanders. Like Connelly, the hiker has a destination and they aren’t diverging from their path, but the terrain they are covering simply doesn’t lend itself to direct routes. You can’t run a marathon or sprint without a road or a track. Uneven terrain requires a wandering path.

Modern writing, the chatter that fills websites, newspapers, and short ebooks, doesn’t account for terrain. They are mental sprints — short bursts along a paved road where everything uneven and unnatural has been removed, cut away, or flattened. The longer books might qualify as marathons, but they still only track along the ready-made roads of pre-fabricated ideology and and cookie-cutter abstract arguments.

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33 observations on the year 2012

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The year in retrospect.
  1. Doing good work is its own reward, while sharing it leads to suffering. Most of the time nobody will notice, so it’s hard to see why anybody should bother.
  2. My ideas got a lot more attention than I expected, which has been very cool.
  3. Best case scenario for doing stuff online is that people will start knocking on your door, asking you to work for free, never offering to give anything in return. Which is fine when those people are making art, doing research, or generally working to the benefit of humankind in a self-effacing manner, but less fine when the request comes from people whose annual salaries are in the multiples of your own, or if they’re working on a startup, trying to edge their way into a multi-million dollar, early retirement payout.
  4. The cranks came out in force. Odd emails from odd people with odd opinions who think they are preaching God’s honest truth.
  5. The vast majority of those I encountered were incredibly nice and friendly, even when we disagreed.
  6. I have almost no readers but some of my work is read a lot. The number of people that will read every post of mine is miniscule. Most of the traffic comes from retweets or links. I have more than a thousand followers on twitter, but of those only about ten will click on a link to a post of mine to read it. I suspect that there is a substantial crossover between this group of readers and the group of people I like to call friends. (Although not nearly as big a crossover as you’d think.) No matter how hard I work, the best I can hope for is to catch the attention of somebody more influential who will momentarily lend me some of their traffic.
  7. A few of my blog posts did catch people’s attention, which was interesting and gratifying.
  8. There is little to no discourse online. What you get are dug in factions and people’s opinion on you are based solely on whether your argument supports what they have chosen to be ‘their team’. If you try and stick to facts and logic, most factions will reject you. It’s ideological trench warfare and the best you can hope for is that the machine-gun nests don’t notice you.
  9. Large organisations are even more dysfunctional than I expected.
  10. Writing isn’t highly regarded by anybody, even in publishing. There’s a lot of romanticism and inane adolescent fantasy about being a writer, but little to no follow-through by anybody, especially not those who call themselves writers. It seems like very few people actually enjoy writing, they just want to enjoy the fruits of popular writing (not necessarily good writing). I’ve even heard people suggest, on more than one occasion, that those who manage to get attention for their work through good writing are basically cheating. This was from people whose careers hinge on being published.
  11. The world is on the verge of another, major, economic meltdown. Happy happy, joy joy.
  12. People love to send you argumentative, angry, or otherwise negative emails. That is, if they aren’t asking you to work for free.
  13. I often don’t mind doing stuff for free, as long as I get to do and say things my way in return. Those who agreed to that have been a lot of fun to work with.
  14. Praise is generally only handed out on disposable media, like Twitter, and rarely anywhere where it counts (like blogs, reviews, or other writing), unless you pay for it. (See the repeated review-scam scandals in publishing this year.) A remarkable number of people will only say nice things to your face, in private, and never in public (related to point 3 above). The end result is that positive feedback is ephemeral while negative feedback gets preserved forever on angry blogs, comments and forums.
  15. People will always prefer you to state the obvious and spout common sense. If you say anything that requires a bit of thinking, or that would require them to learn new skills or ideas, your audience will evaporate into nothing, no matter how important those new things are. (Also see point 8 above.) You can trust that ideas that are new and unfamiliar to an audience will be either ignored or met with anger.
  16. Nobody cares when you’re right but a lot of people really enjoy it when you’re wrong. They will rub it in your face.
  17. There’s no way to tell beforehand which bits you make will take off and which won’t. That nicely written, funny, and informative post will go down like a feminist speech at a men’s rights convention while the quick info-dump written and posted in less than an hour takes off and gets stratospheric traffic.
  18. There is absolutely no correlation between how much work you put into a post or a piece of writing and how much attention it gets.
  19. Nasty people are incredibly persistent while nice people go off having lives of their own (they have lives because they are not nasty).
  20. The only thing people like more than a post that states the obvious is an angry post that states the obvious. Angry and unreasonable will easily get ten times the attention of even-handed and rational. It doesn’t matter if they agree with you or not, they will still flock to your cuss-filled rant.
  21. Communities get the discourse they deserve. When either the inane and obvious, or frothing lunacy are all that get attention, then that’s all you end up getting. Moreover, it’s your own damn fault. People may well instapaper the good stuff fully intending to read it at some point in the future (hah!), but bile is the stuff they actually read and it certainly is the only thing they respond to.
  22. The ones who do read and respond to the more thoughtful stuff are glorious angels to be treasured forever and ever. 🙂
  23. I learned that praise goes a long way. Try and make sure to mention to people the parts you like about their work, even if it’s only a tiny part, even if you don’t like the rest. People don’t improve without work and they don’t work without motivation. Sometimes you just have to suck it up and not mention the crap parts. People tend to be really appreciative if you convey the praise in a non-disposable medium (which, with the data retention we’re living with these days, is anything but Twitter and Facebook).
  24. Being honest with writers is a surefire way of becoming incredibly unpopular incredibly quickly. More than a few of them are neurotic and none of them realise that critique is the only way to fix flaws. You can read as many books and blog posts on writing and language as you like, if you don’t see the flaws in your own writing you will never improve.
  25. Trying to figure out when you’re supposed to be honest to people and when you’re supposed to be diplomatic requires a higher level of telepathy than I was born with. People expect you to read their minds and are utterly unforgiving when you can’t. (I’ve known this since childhood, but it was a point hammered home several times this year.)
  26. Most people don’t know how to critique, they tend to resort to personal attacks, jabs at your family, and instantly switch to critiquing the subject instead of the writing (i.e. they focus on what you’re writing about, not on the writing). I’m actually okay with that last part.
  27. Designers, illustrators, animators, and the like, OTOH, often thrive on brutal critiques where the blood and meat on the floor reaches abattoir levels. Of course, this varies depending on where the person went to school, but a lot of art and design schools don’t believe in protecting their students’ fragile egos.
  28. Working with a good visual artist who can take and dish out harsh criticisms, and understands the problem domain the two of you are working in, is a glorious joy that isn’t often repeated.
  29. Feeling incredibly poorly, to the level of being debilitated, is a frightening experience that hammers the fear of $deity into your soul.
  30. There is also serenity in suffering when you know it isn’t a death sentence.
  31. And there is immense joy and appreciation when you’re well again (or thereabouts) and don’t have to worry about having the energy to walk to the corner shop to buy essentials such as food. There is a glee in being able to buy your bread without counting spoons.
  32. Github is amphetamine for improving your programming. Not because it’s full of code you can reuse. Not because it has enabled a new generation of development tools. (Although both of those things are important.) The magic of Github is that it makes it really really easy to find and read good code. Find a reputable project in the language you’re working in and read through the codebase, figuring out how it works as you go. Keep the language’s documentation on hand and look up anything you aren’t familiar with. Do this for long enough and you’ll begin to recognise beautiful code, clever code that’ll be difficult to maintain, and ugly code that works, just by looking at it.
  33. On the whole, it was a very good year, filled with good people.