Is the act of writing a statement?

A warning before you start: this is a bit off-the-cuff and not well thought through. Also I didn’t check for typos, and, like always, my use of commas and such is abysmal. Caveat emptor (as if you’d pay to read this)!

I hold off on posting too many things in one day because I try to space out the few things I do (that isn’t writing because that’s what I actually spend most of my time doing), but I want to tell you a story. Like most of the fiction I like, it will start with something kinda unrelated and eventually get to the point where you (dear reader) get the title. So forgive me for writing about this two days after the fact. I also am lazy and refuse to do anything on Christmas after spending most of it with family. It’s a good thing that I’m not so misanthropic that some people strangely want to hang out with me (trust me, I don’t get it either).

In fact, that’s the root of today’s post. Next time I’ll talk about Deep Space 9, which I finished rewatching (I think for the third time), but this is about a discussion I had with my brother. I think this is the fundamental difference between us. He went into important and serious things, Engineering, Math and Economics and even got his doctorate in it. I, on the other hand, went into the Arts and Sciences despite being very similar our upbringing. If you’ve read my recent stuff or my book (please do, it’s awesome!), some major sh… stuff happened to me when I was 18. I decided after that point that I should do what I want with whatever was left of my life because I wasn’t anticipating ever getting out into the real world.

Unfortunately, my decision was going to college and growing up because I wanted to demonstrate to others and (most importantly) to myself that my mind still functioned. I didn’t really think about the long term consequences of my decision. All I did was what felt right in the moment, and that was mostly working my butt off and getting (what I will not try to demur on even though I’m usually modest, I promise) stellar grades. However, it was in things that aren’t marketable: Classics (language focused), Italian and Linguistics. And I didn’t do any of that cool career-creating stuff like Speech and Language Pathology (for various reasons, but I was too enamored with Italian at the moment to go into that or a Masters in Linguistics, another subject I can tell a great many stories about).

The conversation began with what I feel is me talking about the general problems with book writing, mostly how little you get paid and transitioning into how you aren’t guaranteed any income. That is a question that I consider often because it seems quite silly that writers should get any money without making it. But, I present to you the counter arguments: professors get a paycheck as long as they do a job, managers get paid. There are few people who are in a position like writers: artists, people who start companies and salespeople. Otherwise you are more or less protected unless the company folds or you are fired for cause, but let’s assume that isn’t it because well, (and this is an important issue), there’s no way to judge writing so there is no way to say if you’re doing a good job or not.

Before I go on about the digression from the digression from the main topic, I feel like that’s an important part of my point above. You have to perform according to certain standards, assuming you aren’t friends with your boss and people care enough. There are a bunch exceptions to this like how a lot of big companies outsource their HR so they don’t have to fire people directly or instead downsizing. So what are the criteria to be a good writer? Is it the elusive creativity? Okay, that can be one, in the abstract, but can you define a book/fiction that is entirely creative? We all build on each other, and just like Newton wrote about calculus as somewhat of an innovation, he was drawing on knowledge that had been there for thousands of years. Edgar Allen Poe wasn’t writing entirely new stories. He was including a certain amount of realism/relatability with the unknown. When we (me included, a first person plural inclusive in Fijian, there’s some Linguistics knowledge bombs on you) ask for creativity, it’s a very specialized term because we want some but not too much. The biggest one is probably culture as in we won’t tolerate something that is remarkably human but too disconnected from us.

This is the same in Sci-fi and Fantasy too, which is kinda funny but completely understandable. Okay, diversion level four or five or whatever, but if we can’t tolerate a foreign but equally human culture, how can we possibly extrapolate something so alien as… actual aliens? I’ve talked about this in my books (I’m pretty sure Manual Automata), but we don’t have exact matches between languages. And the cultures are even more disparate than that. For example, French, Italian and English, despite being incredibly similar languages (compared to non Indoeuropean languages and because they’re modern languages with little verbal conjugation and noun case/number usage), have different words for house, apartment and home. This means how the users of each language imagines where the normal person lives is vastly different, and there are different assumptions about daily life. It’s not groundbreaking to say these things, but I want to share the astonishment of learning that someone who is supposed to be out of the box will be punished for non-conformity. By punished, I mean mostly as far as money/etc. goes. I’ll talk about that later.

Okay, next criteria for succeeding is how well you work on the art, such as anything from the fundamentals like grammar to structural elements like producing the 3-act-play or superliteral items such as adherence or rebuking artistic movements. I probably have the least to say about this than the other categories since it’s (in my opinion) pretty boring, abstract and least tractable without delving into specific things, which I don’t really know. I don’t study those matters, and even as someone that writes little to be commercially acceptable, I write to satisfy my personal thoughts and not because of artistic movements or whatever. But I will talk about grammar stuff (because of the linguist in me).

Grammar is a funny and should be way more of a touchy subject than it is. Right now we have a standard, kinda. There are various forms. I’ll start off with the most strict: academic or scientific writing. Vocabulary and grammar is heavily controlled so that it is understandable not only unambiguously but easily to an international and non-English speaking audience. I experienced this a lot when I took classes at the Università di Firenze. A lot of it would be comprehensible even with a minimal Italian education as long as you understood both the Italian accent and had a general college education in the United States. I’m not going to delve into all the boring little things that they talk about in classrooms, but there are four that I want to talk about (and these terms are mostly my own invention), the aforementioned, writing standard, conversational medium and conversational low.

Writing standard deals mostly with grammar though some syntax. Imagine a video game, this is what’s expected. It can be clunky, but that’s not what it’s concerned with. It’s the ‘art’ or supposed ability of the user of this mode of writing to make it less so. It’s things like capitalizing at the beginning of a sentence, idem for beginning of quotes, when and how to layer quotes, that alternating quotes is a conversation, where to put commas (and the Oxford one too, which is supposedly about free choice between two restrictive styles) and all the rest. It’s very much about nonchalance because you don’t notice when it’s right but you notice when it’s off. Side note: I didn’t learn until I was about 23 or 24 that nonchalance meant knowing a difficult subject so well that you can play off knowledge of any of it as easy. It’s easy to take it to mean cool cucumber when it means something much more detailed and only superficially related. This is what we expect writing to be (such as this blog post). Any correct usage will be regarded as the normal and goes without praise, and incorrect usages (not even errors) are seen as wrong and an indication of my poor education/capabilities. It is largely a formal convention. I’m not going to comment on that until I get to the end of writing styles.

Okay, medium and low conversational English. I’m going to ignore high conversational English because it mostly conforms to writing standard as much as can be in such a different method of expression. Conversational medium holds writing standard as an abstract goal, but it allows some freedom, especially in grammar and syntax. This is everyday conversation between normal folks that don’t necessarily know each other too well. It’s the register you probably use with your parents. A few curse words are allowed (because this in a continuum, let’s say in the middle) but not too many. Sentences may have too many “ands” in lists and such, ungrammatical expressions like “But the man! Eating his lunch!”, etc. Low Conversational, and why I feel like it has to be differentiated, though it is on the same spectrum just at a different point, is because it’s different enough to be worth highlight. I’m talking about the land where new words are spontaneously created to filter into human consciousness and grammar is just a suggestion because ideas come before them. Communication is the main focus of low conversation, and it occupies half of if not more conversation. One invention: AF as in “as fuck” that’s just added so easily to things. That reference may be out of date, but as soon as I stopped being a teenager, I stopped paying attention to this stuff. Another might be considered is dick pics, where a concept has a verbal form, but this may not be a classical, typified, fully constructed idea and more of (what we might consider in this context) an act. Oh, one last one that I really like is when you mix words and movements like “and he went like this” and you say the main act of your sentence by playing an air guitar.

So of these four categories (and there’s a lot more complication that I won’t get into), they go from educated (err, kinda, hold on a second) to less and rigid to fluid. So instead of low and stuff, maybe I should’ve put them on one end as rigid and the other as free flow. But I didn’t because I was too lazy to do it. Anyway, back to my point. My first comment is that the whole point of it being educated has a rocky start. Education was inseparable from class for a long time. Over time(and largely thanks to stuff like the Enlightenment, modern democracies and everyone’s ability to participate in democracy), the two have been decoupled at least literally, but our social attitudes keep them int he same bucket. That whole thing about nonchalance? It was a way for the upper classes to demonstrate education and therefore superiority. We still have this association of knowledge to value, but well, it’s not true. You can see this with yours dearly (a joke, hopefully), but there are many demonstrations of this. Let us ignore the question for now what value is (since I will address that when I finally get back to my main point, whenever that is), but most of us know somebody that doesn’t have education or works for peanuts and is a smart cookie and capable of more critical thought than their ‘superior’ counterparts. One is my friend Andy who does the podcast with me. He’s great, and his abilities have nothing to do with how much time he spent in a classroom.

Okay, I’m sorry, I’m starting a new paragraph because that was all a side story pretty much. Now, I’m going to talk about how innovation or intriguing effects travel up (already a metaphorical reinforcement of classist structure) the great continuum from everyday usage to the formal. However the reality of our situation may be, the choice of register shouldn’t be rigid. Obviously, we don’t have to use scientific writing, but why should we be held to writing standard as the norm? Alternate spellings, grammar and syntax should be allowed if our President 45 doesn’t adhere to it? These should be choices, and I think writers have used them well in past books, but let not artistic merits be punished. However, they are. The classist structure of how conversation should be formalized is still alive in societal thought. And if you don’t adhere to the norm, even beyond how happy your editor/partner/reader may be, you will be punished for experimentation or such. And if you’re not, you’re writing a gimmick book that relies only on that to make a point. There are very few opportunities to mix high and low registers that incorporates from informal word-act to academic discreet.

My last possible criteria for how to measure the success of a book is how people outside of writing/dedicated readers (and some authors and hardcore readers) will see it: how successful you are, how many books you sell and how many people actually read them. It makes some sense to think of this as the means of being prolific. Under our current system, it’s kinda true and kinda not. This was a lot o the discussion with my brother, the tyranny of the big five (more of an informal consortium is what I should be saying). They’re the goal of most authors, but they present a problem too. If we should assume that they’re perfectly fine and not enforcing their standards for writing (and let’s not kid ourselves that they aren’t), that there are only five poses a problem. As much as they might be diversified, they will make writers conform to what they want, not that they will look out into the greater world for the most outlandish works. If we come to reality, they want to make money above all so they will be normative at the very least. I don’t know (and feel free to correct me if I’m wrong), but there aren’t any indie books on bestseller lists. I would wager, and this is true for me at the least, that most people who create or invent aren’t interested in making money. They couldn’t care less about anything other than doing what they do. The assumption is that they can continue to live while producing is basic but it’s as unfeasible now as it has ever been. Anyway, my reasons for talking about this is that financial success has little to do with anything except exactly that. Just like you cannot control what goes viral on the internet, you cannot say what will get popular. However, certain qualities will be universally appealing to a certain degree. I have no explanation for it, but I think at least some of it is being in the right place at the right time. Another part of it is ease of reading, and that is a big nonchalance thing, where some books flow easily. Now for examples to illustrate my point:

Dan Brown, the best book in selling good and flowing well. His books are ultimately vacuous, but it’s not a bad thing. The author acts like it is, hiding all of the fast action in little tidbits of knowledge. It fulfills the modern reader’s expectations. It reinforces the need for sprezzatura-enforcing trivia (I’m not going to go into the history of the word, but trivia was one of those blunt instruments to hammer in how superior rich people were, but this whole thing is why people on Jeopardy are seen as smart when they may be so but it’s only coincidental and usually only because a good education will teach critical thinking and trivia) to justify how much it isn’t thought provoking. His books give equally little insight into history of the lifestyle of any real person (such as no professor outside of Indiana Jones having a life that’s nearly that exciting or fulfilling of what he studies). Grisham kinda fits into this but lesser on the continuum, especially his early stuff. You get an insight into how lawyers actually fit into every day life. A bunch of popular authors fit into this like Tom Clancy and Stephen King.

As a brief aside as I get into other major other category, I want to mention Malazon, Book of the Fallen as an interesting change from most fantasy, in that it’s obsessed more with the functioning of the world than philosophy or art. I mean there are small, specific points that it brings up such as the stereotype of the noble savage and stuff. But it’s mostly character-focused or world-focused. By that it means that there is a lot of time spent talking about how magic works, and there’s nothing greater you can get from that. It’s somebody explaining their weird dungeon and dragons rules, and unremarkable for that. However, one thing I do like is that the mythical beings who live for millennia actually do demonstrate some of the possible intelligence they would gain from that. They have long term plans that demonstrate a lot of creativity from the author. I haven’t seen this much in the (admittedly little) fantasy I read, where most races (kinda a funny thing to consider) are entirely analogous to humans.

I’m going to just jump to the other end of books (without giving many in-betweens because I’m lazy and don’t want to dig up books that I’ve read to give out examples), the books that you read for your literature/English/LA classes. I mean things like The Great Gatsby, The Old Man and the Sea, The Lathe of Heaven, Crime and Punishment, and other stuff you probably had to read in school. Shakespeare is probably the most common one. Most of these books seem (though I don’t know about their history) to be driven more to making a point or a statement than being commercially viable. I will be delineating that there are a few that seem to belong here but don’t. One that isn’t read in school (God, I hope not) but could fall into this category is The Fountainhead. Another is The Jungle (which is better but neither talks about the human condition, just one specific political/historical point).

To end this (somewhat), I want to bring it all back to me and form a conclusion from my own interaction with it because I am the center of the universe. Like pretty much everything, writing isn’t one thing or another. There is the moneymaking (or culturally approved or popular) side of it, the creative side and there’s the selfish side. Let’s put this in the context of the question I started off with, whether my writing or outputting work will change the world at all in a vacuum (and I think we all know it will be pretty much that because I’m not published by the big five). My brother was telling me if I want to make my opinions known (that the world should be forced to allow us to exist and live off of writing alone), I should protest and make my voice heard. I should conform to society because writing by itself is not an effective form of doing that. However, my contention is this: it shouldn’t be on me (in an ideal society) to go out and force them to conform to me. It should be on them (who them? anyone I meet and asks this question, whether they voice it or not) to prove I shouldn’t exist because first off, finding your way to fit into society is way more intricate than saying it makes it seem, and second off, why do I have to justify my existence when we are so far from being unable to feed every mouth and house every person out there? I feel for myself (because of what has happened, the subject does come back around to relevance) and everyone, even those who have faced few difficulties in life (however few of these people they are because I haven’t met anyone personally who doesn’t have something screw up), I’m sick of it. It’s common advice when you look for a job to sell yourself, but no one has ever bothered to say why. One constant in history is people saying “this is how it’s always been so it’s better to adapt to it than worry about it changing.” That’s why I write, and I believe that the mere act, even if no one should read it or care about it in the least, is an expression of not only my values but universal, philosophical ones. Even if my writing is incoherent or talks about something else, no human should have to justify their existence. I exist because I exist, not because you think I exist.

Okay, that was a bit rant-y so I’ll try to put it better. My writing is a creative effort. I need my books to be a pure expression of my soul and being because even if no one besides my family cares about me, I need to matter for my life and my continued existence to make any sense whatsoever. I don’t care about capitalism, and I believe my mere act of existence and the writing endemic to it is an expression that has no monetary value, but it has sentimental value and don’t dare talk to me about how society isn’t paying the true value of entertainment or the arts because that is not at all what I’m talking about. As a thinking, functioning human being, you should be able to remove the value of a human’s production from the value of a human’s soul and social worth because though they are the same to anyone who doesn’t know you, they are never, ever the same thing in reality. However, and this is why I sound like a whiny teenager learning about communism for the first time, I don’t want my family to live in want. My more eloquent fight against the tyranny of the world we live in is my writing, and that is a hill I’m almost ready to die on, at least one I’ll haphazardly lay my banner until my case gets resolved and I move on from solidarity, much like a politician.

P.S. I didn’t want to include this in the main body because it’s a nerdy aside. I want to give an alternate example of the same issues I talk about in writing because it is something that I know about as an amateur, Starcraft. I watch a lot of it while I write. In fact, I’m doing it right now (not when you’re reading this, maybe). It’s a video game about making a city to fund an army and technology to defend your opponent. However, how you play it can be seen as a medium to express yourself. There isn’t complete freedom like there is in writing (besides the need to express ourselves in words, the written form limits us but allows infinite possibilities of words and their combination) because there are so only so many resources to prolong growth, there is only one goal (to defeat your enemy) and three main variations of gameplay (I’m not going to digress because it wouldn’t get mentioned again in this rant). There is the professional gamer that does the utmost to win, those who do it casually without knowing what exactly what they’re doing, and there are some people who goof off while they play. Most people see the force that drives all players is the elimination of the enemy, but shouldn’t we be allowed to walk the land too if all we do is comment on how we can make funny pictures by getting our subordinates to position themself in patterns? Or if all we want to do is prolong the game at a cost only to ourselves? I haven’t provided many examples or details, but the game can be a medium of expression, and it too can be steered in one direction. That’s my point.