I’m not writing about writing in the hope of birthing more writers—if anything, we need less writing, or at least we need to balance the scales between purposeful writing and ‘strategic’ writing on the market. There is no end to the utter deluge of imitative slush that surfs the internet waves, but I don’t wish to sully the opening of this article with their sewer run-off ideas. What I’d like to talk about is ‘premium’ writing, which isn’t necessarily limited to a form—whether it be prose or poetry, a novel or a screenplay—but is instead a kind of way of thinking ‘about’ writing, which is to say it’s a way of thinking about thinking. Writing, or a piece of writing, the ‘finished’ product (although such things never are quite finished), is really not a thing achieved, but is the delivery of a style of thinking; there are other styles, kinds which refuse a linguistic form, such as dance, music, chess, painting, and so on. I don’t posit writing as the ‘arch-artform,’ as some others might, which to me always came off as an untempered form of insecurity, like that of Tolstoy in his brazen hatred of Shakespeare, or Nabokov’s dismissal of Hemingway. Certainly when I look at the major works by major voices from eras past, such as Titian’s Poesies, or Chopin’s Nocturnes, what I feel isn’t that it’s inferior in some way, but rather is a part of that continual stream of lived experience from which my own craft depends on—depends on to its entire extent of being. In another life I was a musician—it inflects itself throughout all of my work, but enough: let’s get into the meat, if only to tear it from the bone.
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