Great analysis! There is many publications on Amazon or print-on-demand that are unprofessional, unedited, or rushed to print. But I disagree that past eras had better edited works. Instead, they had to do the best they could with limited means of revision, whereas today the bar is so much higher because we can edit over and over again, use software to edit grammar and spelling, and must reach a higher standard than the old days of the 1800s and 1900s where the writer carefully wrote their draft the best they could, submitted it to an editor who gave editing suggestions, and then (like today), rushed to print. The biggest problem today is that there is seldom a connection between an editor and an author, and the author must do a lot of what publishers did in the past. The intense competition to publish has created an atmosphere where authors are lost in the millions of written voices vying for attention. Also, Cancel culture and political censure by social media definitely affects agents, publishes, and academia who are afraid to publish something that may bring negative attention to them on social media. E.g., if an agent refuses to consider selling a novel to a publisher because they know it won't pass their intenrnal censors, then we have a strong limitation on publications. (And I'm not talking about inappropriate right wing, inflammatory, fascist, or racist type of writings.) But if ordinary writings that once could have been published are not considered because it might offend a group of Tik-Tokers, then we don't have much freedom of publication.
I feel personally attacked. I think one of the understated issues that has to do with mags saturating the field with unfinished, half-baked manuscripts is that many magazines' editors don't really, y'know, edit. I've had work published through mags with dozen-strong mastheads, and they very obviously only read the manuscript once or twice before putting it up on their site, completely unedited. Editing duties, first and foremost, is on the writer themselves, of course. But editors are supposed to be that last line to catch the inevitable dumb little errors and whatnot. So many people in the indie space are just now trying to get serious with their craft and there's a sorry lack of dedicated editors to provide the feedback integral to a creative getting better at their art. Anyway, great vid
Excellent point! There's a real paucity of editing taking place in most indie outlets, and while I totally understand why, given how tight time and resources are, you can definitely see that lack of editing in the final work, unfortunately.
I use bodybuilding as an analogy: everyone is born with different genetics (talent), and thus potential. Someone with above average genetics can train poorly, eat a poor diet, and still look good in the gym in his tank top or her yoga tights. But even if he trains, albeit poorly, and never learns about nutrition and recovery, he'll never come close to realizing his potential. Again, he'll look pretty good with his shirt off, but will never be anything special, and will soon fade. However, if he studies training, nutrition, and rest, and starts to grind and show self-discipline and motivation, he might just make something special. When you see pro bodybuilders on a contest stage, in extreme shape, you're looking at people who have attempted to maximize their potential, pushing themselves to their limits. In the same way, a poet can push his poem, taking it as far as it will go, helping it become, as you say, Bill, the best poem it can be--do what it's trying to do, to the utmost. I read a lot of poems that seem OK, but don't seem to have been pushed to maximize the poem's potential. And that's OK, but it's a choice the writer is making, maybe unconsciously. If I look at such poems generously, I'm reminded of Frank Zappa's model of "project / object": some writers or artists are more involved in art as a process. Frequently, such works contribute to the overall importance and aesthetic significance of the body-of-work-taken-as-a-whole, but such poems often fail to leave a lasting, distinct, memorable impression on the reader. Joh Ashbery, particularly from the late 70s on--after Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror--is this way for me. James Tate's work, which I love, also comes across this way: how many lines or poems or even images in Tate's work really remain in your memory? Not many, although there are some. Again, process-writing. I tend to put Bukowski's writing in this category--a lot of his writing kind of blurs together, without any single work (esp. poetry-wise) standing out above the rest. In cinema, the Spanish direct, ultra-low budget sleaze-meister Jesus "Uncle Dirty Jess" Franco, who churned out over 200 films, most of them individually forgettable, if not embarrassingly "bad" could be considered this way. Yet, over hours and hours of individually flawed films, interest ideas about cinema and self-reflexivity and "folding," a kind of meta-aspect to his work, emerges. The Japanese film-maker Takashi Miike would be someone else along these lines--hundreds of direct-to-video films, sometimes at a clip of 6 or 7 a year, mostly forgettable schlock, but over the course of many films, an aesthetic vision and sophisticated ideas about cinema emerge. the "object" school is the opposite of these project-artists. The object-poem tends to be labored over, with the aim of creating a single aesthetic object that can be returned to again and again. TS Eliot famously said he wanted every poem of his to be "an event"--something to be taken in and fully experienced. Berryman's 77 Dream Songs might have started out as a more along the lines of "object," but by the end, maybe the work seemed to become more of an ongoing project. However, there are still bangers near the end, in particular the one where he's standing over his father's grave. Yet, for this reader, the first few dream songs are unforgettable--there's a potency, a vitality to the poems. It reminds me of what Francis Bacon said about painting: how, for him, there was a vitality in the first brush stroke, often put to canvas when he was nearly in despair at how to begin, a vitality that seemed to fade as he progressed in the work. His goal was therefore to play psychological games with himself to try to up the stakes, as he worked on a painting. In the 1971 film, "Two Lane Blacktop," a middle-aged advertising executive who has had a midlife crisis, is driving a 1970 GTO muscle car. He knows nothing about the auto, except it's flash and fast. He encounters a couple of "small town car freaks," who have re-stored a 1955 chevy, supercharging it with a 454 engine. The car freaks are driving the 55 Chevy across country, racing folks in the quarter mile for gas and food money. The GTO and the Chevy cross paths. The driver of the Chevy remarks "the GTO could be a real street sweeper" if he'd put some work into it. GTO says, "I go fast enough." Then Chevy says, "you can never go fast enough." I guess the question is, if you're having an identity crisis, is writing just a way to weather the storm, or do you really want to put some work into it, and maybe have something special? Maybe it starts out the first way, but you decide at some point to pursue the latter. Camille Paglia lamented how the pop music scene pushes artists to release an album ASAP, and then further albums forthwith to capitalize on the new-found fame & success. She described this process as exploitative and ultimately bad for the artists, regardless of the financial success. Rather, she said, it was better when a guitarist would spend so many years practicing his playing he ended up "sleeping with his guitar" for 10 years, so the instrument became an extension of his arm, before he ever released an album. An exaggeration, but you get the point. And there's something in this illustration relevant to the indie lit scene. A lot of books get released in ways that are surely gratifying to the writers, but what's the effect on the development of the writer? Instead of the financial incentives, like in pop music, instead there's the sense that a writer needs to continue producing to have new stuff to post--the voracious devouring maw of the bottomless cyber-trunk of online lit can never be filled. The phone as lit-adjacent tool has probably made it worse--how much time and attention can one give to a poem on the tiny screen of a phone? The smartphone doesn't lend itself to prolonged moments of contemplation of the intricacies of scansion, line breaks, word choice, and so on, much in the same way it's hard to appreciate cinema or reproductions of canvases that are perhaps 100 sq feet and intended to awe the viewer with visual power. Ezra Pound in Canto 81 wrote, "what thou lovest well remains / the rest is dross." I suppose that's what all this talk about the maligning of craft & "refinement" (the term I prefer) comes down to. To refine a poem is analogous to the self-less investment that loving another is. Just as Bill says refining the poem is about helping it be the best that it can be--staying true to what you the poet want the poem to be--so love is about wanting what is best for the other person. To do this in a romantic relationship, however, requires me to get past my own ego, selfishness, and vanity--not least because I have to want what I understand to be best for the other person, but because I have to pull my head out of my own ass long enough to learn about and understand another person on a very intimate and meaningful level. This comparison between romantic love and a poem and the poet pre-supposes the poem exists independent from the poet, or at least comes to, at some point in the composition process, between the points of conception, the initial inspiration and composition, and the grind of refining and crafting: the poet comes to understand the poem as something independent from him, and to make decisions based on what the poem is telling him it wants, or what he, the poet, understand the poem demands or requires. To be critical, a good bit of the writing on indie lit may come across not as the product of a prolonged, deep, passionate love affair, but rather the beer-y, ssri-lensed, perfunctory sex of our current app-supported hook-up culture: hinge, tinder, grindr, bumble, etc. To paraphrase commissioner Gordon at the end of the Dark Knight, maybe grindr and hinge "post-fuck exit interview" poems aren't the poems we want, but they may be the poems we deserve.
mosquito + will. thanks for doing these. i enjoy your contagious enthusiasm every time, and this one made me revisit how I think about 6 years of publishing.
first half of this vid is lit like a Tarkovsky movie, damn. this is a good looking production. your description of craft is good because of its emphasis on the positive return for any work done polishing vision. the polish vs "release more" thing has always been lnteresting and frustrating for me personally, but i now basically look at it like this: polish allows your thing to be more itself like you mentioned, and also allows it to be more transparently that (like polishing a gem), so you should polish until you get the right transparency of intent for the piece. i think pieces that I want people to wonder more about (or ones where I myself am OK with leaving my own doubts about the piece in it as a kind of process record) get less craft applied than some where I want my vision to match the reader's perception of the piece more closely. as much as i hate crafting in video games, I think the actual process of creative craft is a lot like that; a potentially ongoing loop of refinement that stops when you're happy. "upgrade 1x 'notes app entry about my shitty breakup' to autofiction?" is a prompt a lot of indie peeps probably see a lot (some may have even turned the message off; I'm sure a certain rat boy has batch production enabled so that every stack of 5 notes about hot wheels is queued to be polished into a new chapter)
Great analysis! There is many publications on Amazon or print-on-demand that are unprofessional, unedited, or rushed to print. But I disagree that past eras had better edited works. Instead, they had to do the best they could with limited means of revision, whereas today the bar is so much higher because we can edit over and over again, use software to edit grammar and spelling, and must reach a higher standard than the old days of the 1800s and 1900s where the writer carefully wrote their draft the best they could, submitted it to an editor who gave editing suggestions, and then (like today), rushed to print.
The biggest problem today is that there is seldom a connection between an editor and an author, and the author must do a lot of what publishers did in the past. The intense competition to publish has created an atmosphere where authors are lost in the millions of written voices vying for attention.
Also, Cancel culture and political censure by social media definitely affects agents, publishes, and academia who are afraid to publish something that may bring negative attention to them on social media. E.g., if an agent refuses to consider selling a novel to a publisher because they know it won't pass their intenrnal censors, then we have a strong limitation on publications. (And I'm not talking about inappropriate right wing, inflammatory, fascist, or racist type of writings.) But if ordinary writings that once could have been published are not considered because it might offend a group of Tik-Tokers, then we don't have much freedom of publication.
Pinning this comment because you make some really exceptional points that I didn't cover in my video. Thank you!
Please do more videos on publishing, literary issues, and the like! I greatly enjoyed your analysis!
Thanks so much!
I feel personally attacked. I think one of the understated issues that has to do with mags saturating the field with unfinished, half-baked manuscripts is that many magazines' editors don't really, y'know, edit. I've had work published through mags with dozen-strong mastheads, and they very obviously only read the manuscript once or twice before putting it up on their site, completely unedited.
Editing duties, first and foremost, is on the writer themselves, of course. But editors are supposed to be that last line to catch the inevitable dumb little errors and whatnot.
So many people in the indie space are just now trying to get serious with their craft and there's a sorry lack of dedicated editors to provide the feedback integral to a creative getting better at their art.
Anyway, great vid
Excellent point! There's a real paucity of editing taking place in most indie outlets, and while I totally understand why, given how tight time and resources are, you can definitely see that lack of editing in the final work, unfortunately.
I use bodybuilding as an analogy:
everyone is born with different genetics (talent), and thus potential.
Someone with above average genetics can train poorly, eat a poor diet, and still look good in the gym in his tank top or her yoga tights.
But even if he trains, albeit poorly, and never learns about nutrition and recovery, he'll never come close to realizing his potential. Again, he'll look pretty good with his shirt off, but will never be anything special, and will soon fade.
However, if he studies training, nutrition, and rest, and starts to grind and show self-discipline and motivation, he might just make something special.
When you see pro bodybuilders on a contest stage, in extreme shape, you're looking at people who have attempted to maximize their potential, pushing themselves to their limits.
In the same way, a poet can push his poem, taking it as far as it will go, helping it become, as you say, Bill, the best poem it can be--do what it's trying to do, to the utmost.
I read a lot of poems that seem OK, but don't seem to have been pushed to maximize the poem's potential. And that's OK, but it's a choice the writer is making, maybe unconsciously.
If I look at such poems generously, I'm reminded of Frank Zappa's model of "project / object": some writers or artists are more involved in art as a process. Frequently, such works contribute to the overall importance and aesthetic significance of the body-of-work-taken-as-a-whole, but such poems often fail to leave a lasting, distinct, memorable impression on the reader. Joh Ashbery, particularly from the late 70s on--after Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror--is this way for me. James Tate's work, which I love, also comes across this way: how many lines or poems or even images in Tate's work really remain in your memory? Not many, although there are some. Again, process-writing. I tend to put Bukowski's writing in this category--a lot of his writing kind of blurs together, without any single work (esp. poetry-wise) standing out above the rest. In cinema, the Spanish direct, ultra-low budget sleaze-meister Jesus "Uncle Dirty Jess" Franco, who churned out over 200 films, most of them individually forgettable, if not embarrassingly "bad" could be considered this way. Yet, over hours and hours of individually flawed films, interest ideas about cinema and self-reflexivity and "folding," a kind of meta-aspect to his work, emerges. The Japanese film-maker Takashi Miike would be someone else along these lines--hundreds of direct-to-video films, sometimes at a clip of 6 or 7 a year, mostly forgettable schlock, but over the course of many films, an aesthetic vision and sophisticated ideas about cinema emerge.
the "object" school is the opposite of these project-artists. The object-poem tends to be labored over, with the aim of creating a single aesthetic object that can be returned to again and again. TS Eliot famously said he wanted every poem of his to be "an event"--something to be taken in and fully experienced. Berryman's 77 Dream Songs might have started out as a more along the lines of "object," but by the end, maybe the work seemed to become more of an ongoing project. However, there are still bangers near the end, in particular the one where he's standing over his father's grave. Yet, for this reader, the first few dream songs are unforgettable--there's a potency, a vitality to the poems. It reminds me of what Francis Bacon said about painting: how, for him, there was a vitality in the first brush stroke, often put to canvas when he was nearly in despair at how to begin, a vitality that seemed to fade as he progressed in the work. His goal was therefore to play psychological games with himself to try to up the stakes, as he worked on a painting.
In the 1971 film, "Two Lane Blacktop," a middle-aged advertising executive who has had a midlife crisis, is driving a 1970 GTO muscle car. He knows nothing about the auto, except it's flash and fast. He encounters a couple of "small town car freaks," who have re-stored a 1955 chevy, supercharging it with a 454 engine. The car freaks are driving the 55 Chevy across country, racing folks in the quarter mile for gas and food money. The GTO and the Chevy cross paths. The driver of the Chevy remarks "the GTO could be a real street sweeper" if he'd put some work into it. GTO says, "I go fast enough." Then Chevy says, "you can never go fast enough."
I guess the question is, if you're having an identity crisis, is writing just a way to weather the storm, or do you really want to put some work into it, and maybe have something special? Maybe it starts out the first way, but you decide at some point to pursue the latter.
Camille Paglia lamented how the pop music scene pushes artists to release an album ASAP, and then further albums forthwith to capitalize on the new-found fame & success. She described this process as exploitative and ultimately bad for the artists, regardless of the financial success. Rather, she said, it was better when a guitarist would spend so many years practicing his playing he ended up "sleeping with his guitar" for 10 years, so the instrument became an extension of his arm, before he ever released an album. An exaggeration, but you get the point. And there's something in this illustration relevant to the indie lit scene. A lot of books get released in ways that are surely gratifying to the writers, but what's the effect on the development of the writer? Instead of the financial incentives, like in pop music, instead there's the sense that a writer needs to continue producing to have new stuff to post--the voracious devouring maw of the bottomless cyber-trunk of online lit can never be filled. The phone as lit-adjacent tool has probably made it worse--how much time and attention can one give to a poem on the tiny screen of a phone? The smartphone doesn't lend itself to prolonged moments of contemplation of the intricacies of scansion, line breaks, word choice, and so on, much in the same way it's hard to appreciate cinema or reproductions of canvases that are perhaps 100 sq feet and intended to awe the viewer with visual power.
Ezra Pound in Canto 81 wrote, "what thou lovest well remains / the rest is dross." I suppose that's what all this talk about the maligning of craft & "refinement" (the term I prefer) comes down to. To refine a poem is analogous to the self-less investment that loving another is. Just as Bill says refining the poem is about helping it be the best that it can be--staying true to what you the poet want the poem to be--so love is about wanting what is best for the other person. To do this in a romantic relationship, however, requires me to get past my own ego, selfishness, and vanity--not least because I have to want what I understand to be best for the other person, but because I have to pull my head out of my own ass long enough to learn about and understand another person on a very intimate and meaningful level. This comparison between romantic love and a poem and the poet pre-supposes the poem exists independent from the poet, or at least comes to, at some point in the composition process, between the points of conception, the initial inspiration and composition, and the grind of refining and crafting: the poet comes to understand the poem as something independent from him, and to make decisions based on what the poem is telling him it wants, or what he, the poet, understand the poem demands or requires. To be critical, a good bit of the writing on indie lit may come across not as the product of a prolonged, deep, passionate love affair, but rather the beer-y, ssri-lensed, perfunctory sex of our current app-supported hook-up culture: hinge, tinder, grindr, bumble, etc. To paraphrase commissioner Gordon at the end of the Dark Knight, maybe grindr and hinge "post-fuck exit interview" poems aren't the poems we want, but they may be the poems we deserve.
coffee a cigarette and a yap session w this guy would heal me
I don't smoke, but I appreciate the sentiment!
craft, as I used to explain it to my writing students: when the writing is hard, the reading is easy.
and the converse.
im supposed to be writing hard or easy ?
mosquito + will. thanks for doing these. i enjoy your contagious enthusiasm every time, and this one made me revisit how I think about 6 years of publishing.
Thanks so much! I'm glad my videos have been resonating with you!
first half of this vid is lit like a Tarkovsky movie, damn. this is a good looking production.
your description of craft is good because of its emphasis on the positive return for any work done polishing vision. the polish vs "release more" thing has always been lnteresting and frustrating for me personally, but i now basically look at it like this: polish allows your thing to be more itself like you mentioned, and also allows it to be more transparently that (like polishing a gem), so you should polish until you get the right transparency of intent for the piece. i think pieces that I want people to wonder more about (or ones where I myself am OK with leaving my own doubts about the piece in it as a kind of process record) get less craft applied than some where I want my vision to match the reader's perception of the piece more closely.
as much as i hate crafting in video games, I think the actual process of creative craft is a lot like that; a potentially ongoing loop of refinement that stops when you're happy. "upgrade 1x 'notes app entry about my shitty breakup' to autofiction?" is a prompt a lot of indie peeps probably see a lot (some may have even turned the message off; I'm sure a certain rat boy has batch production enabled so that every stack of 5 notes about hot wheels is queued to be polished into a new chapter)
Much needed video.
Thank you!
Rizz King!!
... Thank you.
talent is inborn, and skills are developed from talent + practice (learning, technique, etc.) = skills
Nothing is inborn. You'll never see a newborn baby pick up a pen and start writing.