Tag Archives: Online Writing

Art feasts upon its maker – is writing bad for you?

“A writer flirts with schizophrenia, nurtures synesthesia, and embraces obsessive-compulsive disorder. Your art feeds on you, your soul, and, yes, to a degree, your sanity. Writing novels worth reading will bugger up your mind, jeopardize your relationships, and distend your life. You have been warned.”

David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks


Stephen King, On Writing

One of the most rewarding parts of helping other writers is what you learn in exchange. One of my clients, the fascinating David Dakan Allison, sent me the quote above from David Mitchell, author of Ghostwritten, Cloud Atlas and The Bone Clocks. I’m in the midst of an email interview with Mitchell at the moment, and tempted to ask him about the idea of art feasting on its maker. It makes me think of the opposing quote from Stephen King, that art exists to support life IE the writer writes a book to get paid so he can live a good life.

I’ve wondered before if King’s On Writing is so popular with aspiring writers because it argues that writing can be all gain and no give. Mitchell’s position is less easy to hear – writing is a gift to the reader because it sucks something essential out of the writer. It’s hard, and possibly bad for us. But then don’t writers just love to mythologise, and what better way to self-mythologise than to claim our art is killing us!

Two great writers arguing two very different opinions on the issue of art. I suspect the one we prefer says as much about ourselves as it does about the argument.

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The answer to a riddle



Which I have been meaning to do for sometime. So.






You can read A Vast Bit of Hod here.

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Flash fiction is not the future

Isaac Newton's personal copy of the first edit...
Image via Wikipedia

Here is a fact that us writers are struggling to wrap out heads around. Content is no longer in scarce supply. There will be more content generated in the time it takes me to type this sentence than any of us could consume in a lifetime. Putting content in to the world doesn’t make you special. It doesn’t even make you interesting. It just makes you another source of noise that people get better at tuning out with every passing day.

SIDENOTE: If you have ever used the word content to describe you’re own writing you are lost far from the true path. Start making you’re way back, there is still time to catch up.

Some of us, noting that in the attention economy demand far outstrips supply, toy with ways to use less of the scarce resource. Surely, in the fierce competition for human eye-ball time, stories that take only moments to read will multiply their chances of survival? Every fifteen minutes, somewhere on the internet, a new flash fiction publisher is launched. Where are they all? Does anyone read them? Anyone?

There is a basic principle that all salesmen know: It’s easier to close a big deal than a small one. Because you never sell the reality of the cost, you sell the dream of the reward. The bigger the deal, the bigger the dream. Billion £/$ deals are agreed in two sentences with a handshake over a drunken lunch, while the rest of us spend  an hour choosing between two different mobile phone contracts separated by pennies, and probably end up getting neither, because the truth is we don’t really care.

A book is never a big deal financially, unless it’s Newton’s Principia Mathematica or some such. But in the attention economy, a book is a very big deal. A book eats up hours of scarce eye-ball time. Our eyes could be looking at anything in that time…they could be gazing on miracles. And yet, every hour of every day, billions of us, choose to point our eyes at bits of paper with squiggles on. Why? Because implicit in that big deal is a big dream…that the book in our hands will unlock new potential in our minds and in our lives. That is the great dream that great books offer us all.

Flash fiction takes that dream and throws a glass of luke warm water in its face. Flash fiction is like opening a sales pitch with an apology for the poor quality of your product. What kind of dream is flash fiction offering? A cheap and dowdy one. Flash fiction sells itself as being perfect for people who only want to read for five minutes on their multi-function smartphone during their morning commute to their corporate job. To paraphrase Bill Hicks…the reason I read is so I don’t end up like those people.

At the start of the 21st Century, in the midst of the information revolution, is no time for books to be backing down. Books are the Jesuit missionaries of the intellect. They get sent out in to the barbarian world to bring civilisation. The great books of the future won’t apologise for their existence by trying to hide away in the gaps between other things. Like the great books of the past they will demand attention, in exchange for the dream of better things.

Tell don’t show

I want you to tell me a story. I want to hear your voice like a whisper coming up from the page even though you are thousand miles or a hundred years away. I want you to command my attention like a master storyteller bringing a hall full of rowdy warriors to silence with a tale of the weird and fantastic. I want every word you use to count, because if you wouldn’t stand and say them to an audience, why print them on the page?

Please don’t show me a story. Please don’t waste tens of thousands of words describing the technicolor movie spooling in your head because I’m not going to waste my time reading them. Please don’t open your novel with pages and pages of words describing the setting and the characters in endless, pointless detail because if you can’t create the image in a sentence a paragraph won’t do it any better. Please don’t treat your novel like a screenplay, or a stageplay, or a poem, or a comic script, or a feature article, or a blog post, or a text message, or like a fucking twitter update. Because it’s a novel, and it isn’t any of these things any more than a car is a plane or a boat or a hover craft, and trying to drive it like one is going to lead to disaster.

If you don’t tell me the story first it doesn’t matter how hard your try and show it to me later, because you have already lost my attention. Which is why I’m writing this post, because I’m looking at a pile of new novels for review, and too many of them want to show me spectacular images but have completely forgotten to tell me the story first. So please, for the sake of my meagre reading time, tell don’t show.