Note to Readers: Just Do It Yourself!!! You Build the Story!!! Experience Firsthand the Awesome Power and Control of Being a Writer!!!
First, do stream-of-consciousness writing and then follow these instructions:
Subpart 1: Open the Bible anywhere and insert any passage from it at random here!!! The length you decide!!! For those of you who are Cyber Age savvy, just Google a Bible on the Internet, and grab away!!!
Then put in:
Subpart 2
News Headlines – For these, just use the Internet again
3
Weather Reports – Where would any of us be without the Internet?!
4
Twitter and Facebook – This is an advantage you have over the arrogant Modernists of almost a century ago! All those messages on record and at your disposal!!! What a shame to waste them. Instead of letting them fade away into irredeemable time and fathomless cyberspace – except for their use by powerful hidden forces of surveillance and control to compile data files exclusively on you!!! – turn them into literature!!! Splice them and dice them, yours and your friends’ (they’ll never know; and if they suspect, they can never prove it, ha-ha!!! For YOU are the writer!!!), mix them up and put them back again – BUT IN YOUR CHOSEN ORDER!!!
5
Song lyrics and/or lines from movies – it can be a sort of insider, show-what-you-know thing, even though you can once again get it all from the Internet, and if some people don’t have a clue what cultural landmarks you’re referring to, it’s their problem!!! Highbrow Hopscotch References for their own sake that are clear to you and to, at most, only a small circle of your likeminded friends – whom you can smugly but guiltlessly call a coterie – will remain obscure to all others. Google offers up a bonanza of possibilities for the real writer. Go on a cyberspace pillaging spree! Plundering Wikipedia and slapping down passages from it wholesale in the midst of your creations still makes it look like it came out of your head. People understand that, but it’s a way they want to be fooled! They need an authority who knows everything to speak to them, like children who want guidance and instruction, and they are willing to believe that you are it! This is your chance to create meaning on more than one level! Doing it, you’ll feel like an intellectual and an elitist! Years later, after your work has been grudgingly but inevitably recognized, musty four-eyed chroniclers (barring unforeseen accidents with this world) using the latest technologies will obsequiously and exhaustively footnote your creations, providing the rest of the now fawning world with the long-awaited explanations to your profundity that it has so desired – although it was always too jealous to ever tell you. This is your big chance to even the score with the self-styled self-appointed self-ordained literary hoity-toity snobs of yesteryear… AND OF TODAY!!! Ezra Pound – HA HA HA HA HA!!!!!
6
Writing things as lists is extraordinarily entertaining.
7
Write so that by the time you get to the end of an otherwise endless sentence you can’t connect back to the beginning. Readers really like that. One hand should wash the other, but the left one should not know what the right one is doing.
As they say.
And you are naturally funny. The humor will come out without even trying.
Now, intersplice everything you’ve done into and throughout the stream-of-consciousness writing you started with, according to your judgment and taste. Be arbitrary! Dare anyone to deny that you are truly an artist.
No, it’s not contrived! It is organic, not synthetic. That’s right. It’s not innovations for the sake of innovations, no, but because they fulfill needs that arise with the challenges of original expression!!! Yes, of course, of course… The flights of fantasy, the handmaidens of imagination; imagination, the bridegroom of storytelling; storytelling the lusty paramour of writing. Yes, of course, yes, yes…!!!
And remember – YOU HAVE THE IMAGINATION TO TELL THE STORY – YEAH, SURE YOU DO…
Do you have a master’s degree in literature; or better yet, in writing; or better still, in novel writing? Are you on the board of a literary magazine with a readership of 600? Do English professors and derivative academic critics listen to and consider what you have to say about the subject seriously? Do you feel like you are owed a sense of entitlement from readers for colonizing their minds with your particular very special brand of writing formula rather than owing them a good story to read? Well, that practically makes it official, and you’re more than halfway there!!!
Congratulations! You have just about joined the club!!!
You have played the game and now it’s time for the big payoff! You have carefully and loyally followed the rules established by a long line of predecessors – VERY MUCH LIKE YOU!!! And have finally gotten into their graces – and accepting, they trust you, for they have become convinced that you pose no threat to them. Together, you will only further each other’s carefully defined and limited scope of interests – scratching each other’s backs, and then patting them, you do for me, I do for you. Being on the inside! Getting there and then staying there! Yeah! We’re the best, we’re the best! Ours is the authority! That’s the most important thing! We’re the ones who have the say! Who have claimed literature for their own and jealously guarded the domain with a secret and byzantine system of barriers, vicious intentional misdirection and snooty ferocity from upstarts and clownish invaders who simply want to tell a good story (having the cheek (if they can for that rare moment break through their own tormented self-doubt with a momentary pointed and perhaps feverish shiver of confidence in their own (imagined) abilities), to think, greatly mistakenly, you say of them, that it is actually well-written – ha-ha!) to zealously protect a literature that is not really literature but a pathetic attempt to imitate particular misguided notions of literature as cooked up encoded and aggressively preached by frustrated dolts and untalented fools – who are one and the same, and then some. Who smile, but the smile is more malicious than sincere. Or who, not seeing beyond their own assumed self-importance, simply ignore anything that doesn’t come out of their exclusive and agreed little circle inside which they feel safe – absolutely convinced in their own minds that what they manufacture and approval stamp isn’t just a despot-sanctioned conveyor line of tripe – so judged by time, but later, when they are bitter and going, leaving this world goodbye or already gone and their miserable legacy is only that they have left nothing of worth for humankind and our posterity – and are themselves very quickly forgotten – even before they’re dead (come to think of it, they weren’t even remembered during their lifetimes). But a bunch of fucking shit – flushed into the Vast Disremembrance Sea. Meanwhile, that which has always been literature, recognized on its own merits and not according to the fleeting twisted and cockeyed theories of insecure poseurs and their phony agenda-suiting arguments (emanating from a sort of refined depravity), continues to hold its place. No, you are not pretentious, arrogant, and condescending all puffed up with yourself and your imagined vast knowledge and near-limitless abilities, self-aggrandizing and oh-so rarified and esoteric, full of grandeur delusions and self-referencing vainglory – NO!!! You are the real thing – YOU ARE A WRITER!!!
SOOOOOOO…
Be a Real Writer!!! Who Writes Novels!!! As the Novel Has Not Exhausted Its Possibilities, Not by a Long Shot – NOOOOOOO…!!! (And Won’t Exhaust Its Possibilities Because YOU Haven’t Had YOUR Turn Yet, So It Wouldn’t Be Fair) – And Is on Its Way Out And Dying, Whether You Like It or Not. But If Anything, Is Only Getting Started!!! That’s Right, That’s Right. And Not These Shitty Little Commix Pieces!!! Like Someone with an Axe to Grind…
BE THE REAL THING!!! REMEMBER, YOU ARE TRULY GREAT, AND NOT MERELY DOING THE SAME THING THAT COUNTLESS OTHER SELF-PROCLAIMED WOULD-BE WRITERS HAVE DONE BEFORE YOU… FOR THE UMPTEENTH TIME!!!!!!!
Otherwise referred to as hacks.
Filed February 24, 2015