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Generation Franchise: Why Writers Are Forced to Become Brands (and Why That’s Bad)

...I mean thinking very carefully about the extent to which we confuse our personhood and our work. The statement if your books aren’t successful, it’s because you failed to be an interesting public personality is only a hairsbreadth away from the statement if your books aren’t successful, it’s because you’re not a worthwhile person. Both imply the same thing: it’s really you, not your art, that’s being sold.

A much healthier attitude, to paraphrase Fugazi, is to look at the reader (or “the public,” if you prefer) and say, I don’t owe you anything. Just the book. Just the words. A work of art should be its own explanation.


Amen, bro. (*^-‘) 乃
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(♯^.^♯)

6/5/24 06:22 pm
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Okay, this is me. I totally envy and respect people who can write fast, and especially those who can write whenever they have a free moment here and there during the day, but I could never do that. I need a huge block of free time, and there is honestly no greater killer of creativity than interruptions.

Yup, I'm a firm believer in the findings of the University of California, Irvine study that says every interruption costs you more than 23 minutes to get back on track. So three lousy interruptions means a loss of over an hour of your life.

Imagine Jane Austen on her deathbed, needing another hour to finish Sanditon. She could've finished it if she hadn't been interrupted all those times before her illness, but people are so thoughtless and selfish, and they've got to interrupt you to ask where the damn TV remote is instead of hunting around for it themselves, and the result is Jane comes down with an unexpected illness a week later and never gets to finish what might have been her greatest work. Argh. How many times has this happened throughout history? And why can't people just look for things themselves?

Some of us just can't be hurried; it takes time to ponder a plot and themes and concepts and characters, and insights come to us only when we're left alone to reflect and analyze. Evidently people don't realize how cerebral writing is. I guess they see the word writing and assume it's exactly that: just typing or handwriting the thoughts that pour out of your brain fully formed. If only it were that easy. (ノ_<、)ヾ(´▽`)

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❝Many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.❞


─ Thomas Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, 1751

(=^ェ^=)

2/17/24 01:59 pm
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❝That of all the several ways of beginning a book which are now in practice throughout the known world, I am confident my own way of doing it is the best ─ I’m sure it is the most religious ─ for I begin with writing the first sentence ─ and trusting to Almighty God for the second.❞

─ Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, 1767
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Omg I've been saying this forever: Jane Austen, the Brontës, Hemingway, Carson McCullers and anyone else who ever wrote anything worth reading never used AI to help them write books.



We don’t need AI to help us tell interesting stories, at least not until we run out of our own.

─ Esquire