Alan Moore: "read terrible books"

Up until a few seconds ago when I checked,I thought Colin Wilson wrote Life During Wartime. He didn’t. But you could start with that. :grinning:

In fairness to Colin Wilson, I read Space Vampires and all the Spider World books (around the same time I read Life During Wartime, hence the confusion) and I don’t remember them being particularly bad.

I still have Space Vampires, but I lent out the Spider World books and never got them back so they can’t have been that bad.

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I hope @papasan is writing it right now.

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I’ve been writing bad fiction for a long time. never had the courage to even try to polish it up enough to try selling it, or the lunacy of self publishing. Granted, I consider it self-indulgence and therapy in the same package, but I don’t think anyone would ever want to willingly read it. (it’s more or less shameless self-insert ‘slice of life’ drivel that explores the premise of ‘what happens if a race of anthropomorphic tigers decide to uplift our world to being a space-faring people, largely to expand their trade empire, and the ambassador falls in love with the narrator?’)

I never said it was good- that should have been obvious at the ‘shameless self-insert drivel’ phrase…

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90% of all literature is either revenge, therapy, or both anyway, so…

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I love my Tigger so I would read that.

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That’s my problem. I can’t write for just myself, because there’s not much of a point to it. Writers groups tend to suck, because they are always dominated by a “don’t say said” guy who almost got into an MFA program once and considers himself an undiscovered writer of great literature. What i really need is a group of people to sit around and write crap with. Very much not great literature, stuff that inspires to be what inspires to be pulp, but still stories we would like to hear.

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Oy, did that once and never again.

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I recently read The Possessed, Adventures with Russian Books and the People who read them. Probably not the best time to get acquainted with the literary roots of the Russkiy Mir, but it was interesting all the same

In the first chapter Elif Batuman critiques the culture of the writing workshop.

I remembered then the puritanical culture of creative writing, embodied by colonies and workshops and the ideal of “craft.” I realized that I would greatly prefer to think of literature as a profession, an art, a science, or pretty much anything else, rather than a craft. What did craft ever try to say about the world, the human condition, or the search for meaning? All it had were its negative dictates: “Show, don’t tell”; “Murder your darlings”; “Omit needless words.” As if writing were a matter of overcoming bad habits—of omitting needless words. I thought it was the dictate of craft that had pared many of the Best American stories to a nearly unreadable core of brisk verbs and vivid nouns—like entries in a contest to identify as many concrete entities as possible, in the fewest possible words. The first sentences were crammed with so many specificities, exceptions, subverted expectations, and minor collisions that one half expected to learn they were acrostics, or had been written without using the letter e. They all began in medias res. Often, they answered the “five Ws and one H.”*

  • For example: “The morning after her granddaughter’s frantic phone call, Lorraine skipped her usual coffee session at the Limestone Diner and drove out to the accident scene instead”; “Graves had been sick for three days when, on the long, straight highway between Mazar and Kunduz, a dark blue truck coming toward them shed its rear wheel in a spray of orange-yellow sparks.”
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Interesting. Seems almost like a complete flip of the same “debate” when it comes to art vs. craft in the area of visual media. Quilts versus oil paintings, for example. In that arena, “crafts” like quilting or basket weaving are often seen as something “less than” ‘fine art.” I guess because they’re beautiful and useful for everyday things.
TBC, I’m not arguing, just find it interesting.

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I’m not sure why “debate” needs to be in quotes. Virginia Woolf called it a craft in 1937

and of course, a working writer can’t subsist on a few generous patrons-- the dream is to be able to sell ones work to a mass audience. It’s this commercial appeal that separated Fine art from craft in the first place. One can have need of a dining room table, and want it to be beautiful, which is a different sort of instinct than commissioning a piece of sculpture. In the same way, magazine editors were always in need of beuatiful things that filled column inches.

Maybe not to everyone, no.

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Probably depends on whether the speaker wants to reinvigorate an obsolete distinction.


While I’m at it:

I thought the reason would be that it makes you think “jeez, this is crap, I can do better, and if this piece of shit got published…”

I was not disappointed.

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Because I was talking about visual media, not what Virginia Wolfe had to say about writing. :woman_shrugging:t2:
Like I said, I just found it an interesting contrast.

This was unnecessary.

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