Forum / 21st century forms of writing

Marcus Speh
Feb 05, 10:39am

A frequent comment on Fictionaut pieces, more often on the short ones (which get more comments and readers to begin with) is "good form".

I've just published a series of "diary entries", ONE WEEK ON THE HAPPY ISLES, which really is what they were originally, electronic diary entries, re-assembled, re-furbished and re-sculpted to fit the magazine's requirements:

http://aminormagazine.com/2013/02/04/one-week-on-the-happy-isles/

In an email, one of the editors, in the course of his attempt to convince himself that this was worth publishing, called this "a grocery list" and later: «There is [a] conversational, philosophical discussion, alongside a gentle, slightly weird, fable kind of quality.» Okay...

...no worries, I'm going to get to my point/question for the forum now:

WHAT DO YOU THINK IS THE FORM FOR OUR TIME?

— Give examples if possible...the electronic diarist mixing prose poem and mythical imagery? The fictional biography? The made up memoir? The novel made up of linked short stories? A caption for an image, bowing to the superior impact of the visual arts? ... yours is the floor, once and for all!

Gary Hardaway
Feb 05, 02:08pm

Animated meme-songs with cats or puppies no longer than 30 seconds.

Matthew A. Hamilton
Feb 05, 04:42pm

Not sure the answer, but I like what you have up at A-Minor.

John Riley
Feb 05, 04:54pm

One clear trend is toward unknowingability. Works that blend, or I should say may blend, what happened and what didn't happen. That is an inadequate description. I'll try again. Works that are seeded in the consciousness at such a level no determination is possible between the happened and the not-happened. The author/narrator lets us know he/she isn't able to or interested in making the distinction. Memory is fiction. Once an experience or observation or thought is dropped into time it is no longer actual. Sebald is the most obvious example of an author who wrote out of an awareness of unknowing. He has his imitators already and will have more and only time can tell if his work has an influence beyond them. The trend can also be seen in some of the works that are being "re-discovered." Walser's short works, particularly the feuilleton, are presented as descriptions of his daily walks and observations but there are sly hints he isn't being totally on the level or knows what the level is. His playfulness comes in part from being conscious that whatever enters his mind is immediately changed and it is foolish to be hindered by a concern for the "truth." I recently read John Haskell's "I Am Not Jackson Pollack" which blends historical essays with imaginative re-creations. I see this as a trend that continues as we and our descendants are drowned in more and more information. Story is still the core of fiction and the more our minds become reservoirs of data the more we'll need story to find some semblance of meaning. Story has done this since at least Homer and J and will continue to do so in the future.

My half-penny.

Marcus Speh
Feb 05, 04:54pm

@Gary Seriously! The examples I mentioned are all real and they've been tried by serious writers (though one may not like or enjoy their writing) over the past ten years or so.

Your example does not really give rise to literature. It's copywriting—possibly something to aspire to for a hack writer or a journalist, or a lover of cats and/or puppies...

Darryl Price
Feb 05, 05:20pm

I think what we're looking for is not a form but a feeling. For lack of a better word, I'd call it authenticity. Human beings recognize it instantly no matter what form it happens to take--because it sets off something within themselves that cannot be denied. It pushes the button of being. This can be funny or sad, mundane or extraordinary, but it cannot be still. It makes you want to get up and dance. It makes you believe. It makes you want to be creative, too. It pushes you out of the chair, out of the door. It forces you to realize you are breathing. It gives you a new appreciation for the sun, for the stars, for the line at the grocery store.The real thing smiles at you knowingly, but it doesn't show you any tricks. Just look and listen and do.

Dolemite
Feb 06, 02:22am

Good form. I like the voice here. Yes.*

Dolemite
Feb 06, 03:02am

(rather empty sounding, isn't it...)

Gary Hardaway
Feb 06, 03:55am

Jest is always deadly serious, Marcus. I described, in the terms I know, what I anticipate the post-literati will create instead of traditional literature- hyper-hybridized expressions that blur the boundaries we recognize altogether. Part music, part graphic, part words, blended through the nonchalant expertise in software children born since 1990 have that we do not. They are saturated creatures who must have their virtual senses involved full bore. I don't like what I anticipate. I think it will look and sound more like commercials and vlogs than prose and verse. It will assume the virtue of strident self-promotion that permeates all they've grown up seeing and hearing. It will fuse the techniques of art and commerce. It will be inherently ephemeral, ironic and sentimental. Market penetration will be the measure of aesthetic consequence. All of this while the lights still burn and the generators hum. Then, an extraordinary dark age that will make the silence of the Greeks sound like a Verdi chorus.

Dolemite
Feb 06, 04:25am

I agree with you, Gary (if I may speak directly to you--for how else is speech spoke?), though I'm not looking forward to it...

James Lloyd Davis
Feb 06, 05:44am

My father grew up on a farm near the Okefenokee Swamp outside Waycross, Georgia. Sharecroppers, they had no radio, no electricity, certainly no television, no indoor plumbing, rode horse drawn wagons on dirt roads... lived much the way people had lived for centuries, millenia. When he died last year, he'd seen change such as no generation has ever seen in the history of mankind, technological advances coming fast in an unbelievable, accelerated explosion of knowledge heaped upon constant discovery. Imagine, in one lifetime, to see technology grow from light bulbs to iPods.

Not that he was overwhelmed by any of the advances. As an engineer for micro-circuitry research at NASA, developing ever smaller electronic packages for satellites, he was part of the technology that led to the development of miniature computers that slowly evolved into PC's, GPS, smart phones, all the gadgets that the current generation seems to require. In my lifetime, I've seen change, but not the scope my father knew.

The culture will change and for those of us who could relate to my father's world, this brave new world can seem like a polyglot cacaphony, a corned beef hashtagged stew... lacking beauty, lacking heart, lacking soul.

But the culture will change to suit the lives of those who consume it. Rail against it, despise it, call it what you will... you can no more stop it than you can stop the wind, the tide.

You can still love the old things and appreciate the new.

Letitia Coyne
Feb 06, 06:45am

I have only recently fallen in love with the idea that there is no such thing as good and bad taste, only that which is valued by each tribe. That relates to this topic only in response to Gary’s, Serge’s and James’ contention, in that I do not believe Literature will disappear or be transmogrified by mass market tastes or technology. It will trend, perhaps toward the shorter, tighter, cleaner prose that seems popular at the moment, but it will not mimic commercial/mass market writing just because that is changing into multimedia soundbites.

As long as there is a tribe who values the beauty of language and the fine art of communication, Literature will remain a form of the written word. I have had many discussions with people successful in the genre/mass market industry about the need to reduce everything to its simplest. It is frowned upon to use commas unless absolutely essential and modifiers are unloved. I drag out old examples of Melville’s sentences with 76 words and eleven commas and four semi-colons, or anything by Joyce, to illustrate that well-loved literature once accepted circuitous expression. Since paperback fiction is essentially involved in telling a story in the most accessible form for the widest possible audience, it is moving rapidly toward very simple sentences and unambiguous statements. It is reducing to fit the small screens and short attention spans of time poor readers.

While there remains a group devoted to more than the story, the story plus the art of expressing language beautifully, Literature will remain, I think.

That does not attempt to answer what form it will take, only to argue against it becoming indistinguishable from genral fiction.

John Riley
Feb 06, 03:03pm

I think there is still room for the long sentence. Based on my spotty reading I'd say that some European writers are our best hope. Take a look at the work of Krasznahorkai. I read just last night a novella by Friedrich Delius that is a single 117-page sentence. ("Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman"--I highly recommend it.) No doubt this is something Marcus can speak to more knowledgeably.

Darryl Price
Feb 06, 04:40pm

The problem may be getting the work a proper viewing. I know for sure that when confronted with literature that speaks in incredible beauty and charm, it is hard to look away. It is hard to not want to go into that deep, dark forest. It is hard not to want to embrace that lovely vision.These people who are plugged in and run their veins like information highways had no idea what was happening to them in the womb. They've learned to navigate. But when presented with the honest sentence, I think they'll notice when something's up. I think they'll get the invitation that art makes. Writing, to me, is such rare,wonderful beauty. It has to be seen to be believed. Those willing to use their hands to feel each carefully placed letter are highly rewarded, regardless of how they get there to that brave point of view.

James Lloyd Davis
Feb 06, 06:27pm

The beauty of change lies in the experimentation. The audience eventually controls success and not always in commercial venues. When the 'literary' community controls exposure, circumvention becomes an 'alternative' or underground press, depending on your affection for romantic nomenclature. They have always existed, but now there are more possibilities, since anyone with a computer and enough savvy to start a web site can become the publisher of an online zine.

Long stories still find a venue, but they are too often tied to traditional control. The gatekeepers ultimately decide the fate of authors. They are clogged at the moment, I believe, but this will change.

What will be the 'form' for our time? Since we are in an evolutionary stage, it would be difficult to predict. But there are marvelous experiments abroad today.

I don't see flash fiction chapbooks becoming an alternative to novels or short story collections, but my opinion's likely jaded by my tastes and willingness to read the longer forms. Fact is, I still enjoy them immensely. I don't think I'm unusual in that, but I've never been the arbiter of fashion.

strannikov
Feb 06, 06:44pm

@ Letitia: Don’t know how rarified the air remains Down Under, but here north of the equator the rubric “bad taste” maintains its validity if not also its soundness, even if underutilized in critical discourse. Frankly, I’ve not read Paul Feyerabend’s AGAINST METHOD, but I appreciate his efforts at promoting epistemic latitudinalism and his criticism of contemporary scientism. That said: perhaps a consequence of poor political discourse, we continue to suffer from reluctance to discriminate: widespread naïve literalism and uncritical acceptance of myriad self-evidences have led us to think, believe, and behave as if any and all discrimination is evil. Yet not only is discrimination valid, it retains soundness and utility in its considerate intellectual and aesthetic exercise. My appreciation for Feyerabend aside, I hardly think that reality consists solely of subjective perspective, unless ONE OF US is the universal Solipsist-in-Chief. (Note that I don’t claim the title.) Objective criteria for judging literary merit exist because literary works themselves are the objective residue of an author’s internal spasms and tics.

As to acceptable or commendable literary form in our beloved century: I’m tempted to think that given reductions in readers’ attention spans, aphorisms/apophthegmata/epigrams could be enjoying much popularity today owing to their brevity: nevertheless, these forms require condensation of thought and compression of expression to succeed, concisions and capabilities not themselves fostered by contemporary cultural velocity (I’m also a part-time Vichian and concede that ours simply may not be a “poetic age” and that literature might survive this century only through its relative neglect). Shorter forms (novellas instead of novels, flash instead of “short story”, dialogues instead of plays) seem to work for now: John Riley’s invocation of the feuilleton is instructive, I myself endorse classic Menippean satire owing to my critical chauvinism regarding the past.

James Lloyd Davis
Feb 06, 10:48pm

I predict the rise of the telenovela as the literary form of the future... episodic installments of video drama, comedy, etc. They would be applicable to virtually every form that exists today in literature and to every size. They are adaptable to smartphone/iPod/brain-implanted-media and could be seen while waiting in a queue, on the john, on the bus, or a train, plane... but will be outlawed for use while driving.

There are many little episodes out there now and can be found in all sizes. They could be distributed in snack-size packages designed with the masses in mind.

High brow audiences could be trained to accept them, if only a savvy producer could recognize the value of ressurrecting uncopyrighted works.. classics and the like. I see a possible resurgance of fine old novels in the classical vein, transformed into musical productions with computer generated effects and backgrounds... you could catch a chapter of Dostoevski's crime and punishment on your lunch hour.

Imagine a singing Raskolnikov, bloody axe in hand, a chorus of painters in the empty apartment downstairs... a lovely, quasi-romantic duet between Raskolnikov and Lizaveta over the old woman's body that ends badly for her, but with lots of brass horns......

But I do go on.

Robin Graham
Feb 08, 08:47am

I love a good story, me.

Gary Hardaway
Feb 08, 04:09pm

I have no statistics to prove it, but I suspect that as traditional writing becomes more and more a marginal activity, the number of people engaged in traditional writing expands exponentially. Certainly the venues do. As long as we still have alphabets, writers will write. It is the cheapest and most portable medium of expression ever.

stephen hastings-king
Feb 20, 12:10am

It seems to me that things like "what is the writing form of the 21st century" get resolved in various ways later on as a function of people trying to work out the Zeitgeist as it appears to have been from some subsequent position in time. I am not sure how one would know in vivo the answer to it.

At one level, any form of writing is of the 21st century that's done in it.

There are a lot of people who make a living by declaring x or y to be particularly suited to whatever they imagine the present to be. Because it's big. And it's fleeting.

Different forms allow for different modes of being open to the present...but it's the particular approaches to or ways of thinking about that openness seem to me most important. If we're talking about "the present" then the ways of understanding time, which is not at all obvious when you think about it (Augustine said as much, yes? Time: I know what it is until someone asks me.) For example, one can follow thinking about time to thinking about the social-historical to approaches to writing as a way to make maps of social being. Since social being as a category operates at a remove from particular modes of operating in the social-historical, these maps wouldn't be directly representational, logically speaking. They'd be after something else, something in the air in a way, or something that travels what I suppose you could think of as a kind of hive mind that links people together by way of the forms of thinking and feeling that they share by being embedded in the same social-historical context. I don't think there's a genre or combinations of genres that necessarily corresponds to such a mapping project---I suppose it's a matter of disposition. I work at something like this using flash forms...but that's because flash seems to let me do certain things that other forms don't. Plus I can work in that form and maintain the rest of this whole real life fiction. But I can imagine parallel things being done by others who might be interested in such matters in any number of forms.

They say that this is a period of a reassertion of the visual. So you'd think concrete poetry a form of this century. And I suppose it is, in a way. But one's sense of whether that might be the case and how is a function of one's insertion into scenes or environments that are, from the viewpoint of some general sense of the world, arbitrary.

They say this is a period of intensive hybridization of forms. Maybe it is. If that's true, I'm not sure if that follows from the way this time period is labelled so much as from the disruptive political changes that are unfolding around us, the sorts of things that shake basic assumptions about being in the world but which manage to do it without being a particular object of discussion. Maybe avoidance explains such things. Maybe it doesn't. Things formerly held apart seem intuitively to blur into each other...maybe that has to do with a disordering of political arrangements, a shaking of a sense of--o I don't know--say American political hegemony for example, which correlates, maybe, to a disruption of senses of what is given or necessary that, in turn, corresponds to a sense of orders of arrangement blurring one into another. But that sense of something slipping away isn't universal...you could think about the effects of a media environment based in repetition that tends toward the approval of whatever the dominant order happens to be as an explanation for that. Or not, as the case may be.

So I don't know.

strannikov
Feb 20, 02:20am

@ Stephen: I think I agree with you, if you're saying that prevailing literary fashion bears disregard or repudiation, depending on its offense.

The matters you address are only more complicated than you suggest, I might argue further. Some of you here know that I am not in fact of Russian descent: I'm a native South Carolinian whose paternal family has lived here for almost three hundred years. Owing to historical circumstances of this region, I can attest to the living force of the spirits of Anachronism, Atavism, and Archaism. Many peoples' minds and souls are NOT geared to contemporary circumstances: their souls and minds click with the rhythms and mechanics proper to a functioning Antikythera Mechanism. Their souls and minds are, like Hamlet's time, "out of joint". Yet they live contemporary lives with people not so afflicted.

That any communication is possible through fiction of any form continually amazes someone like me, a native Southerner who spent years "abroad" in New York and Chicago. (And for an apt illustration of the temporal disjunctions or dislocations I speak of, all you have to do is read Faulkner's "Red Leaves".) And what I speak of is no psychic monopoly held by the American South: I see it in the literatures of Russia (Dostoevsky's "Peasant Marey") and France (Maupassant's Corsicans and some of his Normans), as translators permit, to speak of non-English literatures I'm at all familiar with.

Finding commensurate form is a matter of guesswork. I insist it is no matter of attempting the BEST guess, but then I detest the contemporary valorization of the superlative so dear to advertisers and marketers.

Ann Bogle
Feb 22, 12:54am

I coined a saying after long contemplation; years of experience produced it. It was the year 2007 or else I have forgot. The saying is an aphorism and reads as follows:

"The conspiracy is mediocrity."

I like it and test it around the house.

The conspiracy is mediocrity.

Proof of conspiracy includes hiring by hair color and hair length, hair lengths variable along seven-year lines, named as separate generations, for example, hiring in English departments based on book publication, where hair texture is weighted more than color and length. Age in relation to hair-style suitability, particularly at time of debut (publication of a first book on paper determined to be "full length") may be the surest measure.

James Lloyd Davis
Feb 22, 01:01am

One word... "Plastics."

James Lloyd Davis
Feb 22, 02:23am

My vote remains for short video dramas as the next big thing. Brief or serialized soaps and comedies, thrillers and such... a thing you could catch on your iPad in between tweets while driving and latte induced sugar highs.

But seriously... mobisodes? We need better terminology.

Of course, I refuse to participate... but then, nobody asked.

Has anyone tried Kindle Singles as a way to sell a short story? I wonder if that's not a trend. Is it the future? Never thought so before, but maybe it's worth looking at with a less jaundiced eye. Yes, I know about the stigma of 'self publishing.' I remember when the outlet for such ventures were called 'the vanity publishers.' Times, though, are changing. I also hear the return to the author is extremely high... 70%. Try getting that from a book publisher. Try getting anything for a short stroy anywhere besides the places who only publish the few and the famous.

Anybody have experience with this?

Dolemite
Feb 22, 02:30am

I sold a short story for $189.00

;-)

James Lloyd Davis
Feb 22, 02:39am

Bravo, Matt.

Dolemite
Feb 22, 02:42am

submit
to paying
markets

ya never know...

(story was rejected 26 times before paying acceptance)
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