On "Prose-Forward" Writing and the Pleasures of Different Genre Conversations
Lincoln Michelcountercraft.substack.com
On "Prose-Forward" Writing and the Pleasures of Different Genre Conversations
Alara and added
“I wish I could observe life like Maggie Nelson,” I said to my manager.
“You can,” he replied. “I think reading literature makes one much more attentive. I go from ‘writing op-eds about who is good and who is bad’ to ‘writing vignettes about what's amusing, unusual, or thematically resonant’ in my head. It's like, ‘What genre do I want my internal ... See more
“You can,” he replied. “I think reading literature makes one much more attentive. I go from ‘writing op-eds about who is good and who is bad’ to ‘writing vignettes about what's amusing, unusual, or thematically resonant’ in my head. It's like, ‘What genre do I want my internal ... See more
Jasmine Sun • 🌻 Audience of One
This means when I do things that seem audience-pleasing, it’s because I enjoy them too. I occasionally enjoy wordplay, memes, pastiche, and lyrical writing, so you readers get treated to my attempts too. Not all writerly pleasures coincide with readerly pleasures.
Venkatesh Rao • My Post-Ai Writing
Jonathan Simcoe added
When I can use prose as I do in writing stories as a direct means or form of thinking, not as a way of saying something I know or believe, not as a vehicle for a message, but as an exploration, a voyage of discovery resulting in something I didn’t know before I wrote it, then I feel that I am using it properly.
Ursula K. Le Guin • Words Are My Matter: Writings on Life and Books
More generally, I mostly don’t care about the aesthetics of writing, which are almost entirely for the benefit of readers. This includes the aesthetics of brevity and structure (the architecture as opposed to the brick-by-brick part). Sometimes I enjoy the challenge of maximal tightening, compressing, re-ordering for better flow, shortening, and si
... See moreVenkatesh Rao • My Post-Ai Writing
Jonathan Simcoe added
When I can use prose as I do in writing stories as a direct means or form of thinking, not as a way of saying something I know or believe, not as a vehicle for a message, but as an exploration, a voyage of discovery resulting in something I didn’t know before I wrote it, then I feel that I am using it properly.
Ursula K. Le Guin • Words Are My Matter: Writings on Life and Books
A sentence is more than its meaning. It is a line of words where logic and lyric meet – a piece of both sense and sound, even if that sound is heard only in the head. Things often thought to be peculiar to poetry – metre, rhythm, music – are there in prose as well, or should be.
Joe Moran • First You Write a Sentence.: The Elements of Reading, Writing … and Life.
Lael Johnson and added
Another DFW essay, E. Unibas Pluram, offers us a useful lens for understanding what’s going on here: Lorecraft is — or aspires to be — Management Metamodernism, the organizational analogue of the literary movement his essay helped provoke into existence.
Venkatesh Rao • Towards Management Metamodernism
Stuart Evans added