Posts tagged writing
“ Language is driven fundamentally by the desire for unconscious experiences to leap like lightning from one brain to another. That’s why writing is so dangerous.”
“ My standard for verisimilitude is simple and I came to it when I started to write prose narrative: fuck the average reader. I was always told to write for the average reader in my newspaper life. The average reader, as they meant it, was some suburban white subscriber with two-point-whatever kids and three-point-whatever cars and a dog and a cat and lawn furniture. He knows nothing and he needs everything explained to him right away, so that exposition becomes this incredible, story-killing burden. Fuck him. Fuck him to hell.”
How to work like a writer
1. Ignore deadlines.
2. Take criticism badly.
3. Burn bridges.
4. Hate yourself.
5. Trust no one (especially not yourself).
6. Sabotage all of your personal relationships.
7. Drink heavily.
You might not get a lot of respect as a writer, but the crippling self-doubt and soul-crushing poverty make it all worth it.
“”I found him, this time, squatting between two vicious-looking drum machines I hadn’t seen before, rusty spider arms folded at the hearts of dented constellations of steel cans fished out of Richmond dumpsters. He never calls the place a studio, never refers to himself as an artist.
“Messing around,” he calls what he does there, and seems to view it as some extension of boyhood’s perfectly bored backyard afternoons. He wanders through his jammed, littered space, a kind of minihangar cobbled to the water side of the Market, followed by the smarter and more agile of his creations, like some vaguely benign Satan bent on the elaboration of still stranger processes in his ongoing Inferno of gomi. I’ve seen Rubin program his constructions to identify and verbally abuse pedestrians wearing garments by a given season’s hot designer; others attend to more obscure missions, and a few seem constructed solely to deconstruct themselves with as much attendant noise as possible. He’s like a child, Rubin; he’s also worth a lot of money in galleries in Tokyo and Paris.
William Gibson, “The Winter Market”
This passage is a pretty good summation of what I hope to achieve with my life.
