In answer to the infamous question, "Where do you get get your ideas?" -- which virtually every writer addresses in introductions and essays on writing, generally not answering -- I can only say that they come unbidden. The slightest object, sound, word, or event can set off an idea, if one is in the right mentality. The problem is not the ideas -- there are always too many -- but how to structure the story, poem, or essay around them.

The only absolute rule about writing is that all rules can be broken -- if the result works. Violate every grammatical rule in the book, fine -- but know the rules you're violating intimately and know the implications of each violation. Write consciously, masterfully, and you can write things that others find insane but that the intelligent know to be brilliant, however difficult. It’s not all that impossible to tell who just made an error and who did so deliberately for an intellectual or aesthetic point, however hard that point might be to grasp, both for yourself as reader and for the writer himself.

The most important element of actually writing is experience, both with writing and with reading. Having read many writers who regretted publishing too early, when their abilities were still amateurish, I decided to spend a great deal of times honing my skills prior to publication. On the advice of a professor who was a seven-time novelist of great quality (and who, ironically, told me I was ready to publish a novel just a year later), I decided to set this time of apprenticeship, if you will, at ten years. During that time I wrote several hundred, if not one or two thousand, pages a year. I also read a hell of a lot, trying to figure out what made a certain text, or a certain moment, produce a particular effect. I recommend this, rather than simply copying another writer’s style -- which should be impossible, as most competent writers vary their style dramatically, however much they prefer one style or have underlying similarities between works of different styles. Of course, I wouldn’t recommend the ten-year approach to people who don’t care about their legacies or what their name on a book or other piece of writing signifies -- in other words, to the would-be hacks.

Incidentally, it is for the reason of experience that most people sound so foolish when they talk of writing something meaningful. I have no problem with people wanting to write for money -- after all, one hardly needs talent or even ability to be published. Both publishing houses and film studios have famously accepted manuscripts by near-illiterates whose work had to be edited dramatically -- say, by adding verbs or punctuation -- to make it the least bit grammatical. Jacqueline Susanne, who hit it big for the novel Valley of the Dolls, is only one such example. The bestseller lists, incidentally, are filled with incompetently written, or (worse) just blandly written, but well-marketed works that just happen to appeal to enough people of questionable education and ability to distinguish crap from great art to sell well-enough to rate being labeled a "best-seller" -- a questionable term much like movies being labeled "hits" before they open or "flops" when they make 200 million dollars but under-perform to expectations. In fact, romance novels aren’t even included on the bestseller lists because otherwise those lists would be entirely composed of titles like Hot Stallion and other literary classics. It’s funny that novels that make bestseller lists get a certain amount of literary respect whereas, say, no one would say that a velvet Elvis was great art or fill the galleries with them. So, I have no problem with people wanting to write for money, though they often find it more difficult than they'd expect, and I hate writers, often themselves bestsellers, who mistake bad writing for un-sellable writing. On the other hand, if you're serious about writing and aspire to be more than a hack, the ten-year, no-publishing rules is a fantastic idea that you’ll doubtlessly greatly appreciate after the fact. You may be able to paly popular music or do a Liberache act (the same thing, essentially) with little skill, but don't expect to make the philharmonic without years of tiring, stressful, constant work. Writing's different in that you can get the fame of a famous Olympian without Olympic skill (in fact, a lack thereof is probably an asset, as by the time you can write really well, and have labored to do so, it's hard to force yourself to write the crap that's more marketable, or to figure out ways to do so in sophisticated, deceptively approachable manners). Just don't pretend real Olympic writing ability comes after only a few months or even years.

The same situation, in terms of many writers’ illiteracy, exists, shockingly to many, in academia as well as popular fiction. I recently attended an international academic conference at which I corrected the grammatical errors of the one-page letter welcoming us to the conference, written by a university president with a Ph.D. I found about a dozen, though they were admittedly half errors with commas. I also had a small number of suggestions for revision, noting places without grammatical error as such but where the meaning was obscured not by stylistic choices but clear lack of knowledge. I know of a professor in cinema studies who is exceedingly well-published and well-respected, and who has a terribly superior attitude to boot, who can't write a grammatical sentence to save his life; his editors virtually have to rewrite every thing he writes, and they do so -- presumably to have his name attached to their projects or simply because his work was well-reviewed by consultants in the same field, themselves barely literate. This is, regrettably, quite true, and certainly not confined to any one academic field; scientists, for example, are notorious.

I’m assuming, of course, that you have a certain degree of intelligence; a hell of a lot of intellect is required to produce most masterpieces, or even works of lasting interest, but even the retarded and utterly uneducated produce artistic curiosities. All one has to do to realize this is to visit a museum and see much of the ancient art, the tribal art, and the contemporary outsider art; or, in the alternative, one can read Homer -- which is not, by the way, a dash on Homer, just an acknowledgement that he didn’t have so much as a bachelor’s degree and that he orally composed, in a method not so dissimilar from rap music, often repetitive, melodramatic adventure yarns. The way intellect and education are normally useful is simply in reading your and others’ writing and in adapting (sometimes after adopting) what works, adding it to one’s mental literary toolbox, and in figuring out what doesn’t work, or simply how something will be received, and why.

There’s no reaction that one should automatically want from an audience. Awe and worship are certainly nice, but so are shock and disgust; with my writing, and the writing that tends to most interest me, the two often go hand in hand, sometimes from the same person. Often, one wants to play with one’s audience’s reaction -- a fact I rarely, if ever, find discussed. This is not so dissimilar from varying one’s tone or style, and I think such mastery the mark of great writers -- but then, consciously watching and manipulating the tone and style of every word choice and sentence, it’s easy for me to say. I like to use highly literary sentences, rich in references and complex in grammar, then use very informal sentences rich in references to popular culture, if any, and even in colloquialisms. The effect is to impress and alienate, then manipulate the reader into confusion at his own response to an informal style, only to pull the rug out from under the reader yet again. This is both hostile and amusing, stylistically, but is ultimately the product of simply finding complex sentences and references as simple as most simple ones -- which many sound like bragging, which it is, but which is also simply a sign of experience-born intimate familiarity with writing, perhaps not so dissimilar from a chess player who’s spent his life playing the game and simply knows most moves and their implications far better than someone who has only seriously played for, say, a decade.

I’m often asked, given my presently prolific output -- or, rather, others’ difficulty writing a fraction thereof --, how much I revise. Generally, fairly little. But I note here that such an approach is not necessarily a good one for you. I can only have first drafts of publishable quality because I spent those ten years writing virtually every day, many times in manic, all-day sessions, all with the idea that I absolutely hated revising and wanted to focus as much as possible on getting it right the first time. My revision has always been additive: even when I cut paragraphs entire, the new version is almost always longer than the previous draft. I tend to add additional qualifications and perspectives which are longer than however much I cut, even when I’m being mercilessly economical with my words. Again, I wish to emphasize that I have had to revise entirely virtually every salvageable work of those ten years of self-imposed training. Moreover, after those ten years, I can recall the precise sentence structure of page-long sentences, diagramming them in my head, as well as the precise intellectual and tonal structure of the paragraph in which I am presently writing, and the same for the essay or chapter as a whole, as well as a good idea how all of this fits into larger structures, up to an including everything I’ve written. All of this I balance in my head, word by word, comma by comma, and I recommend that if you cannot do this, you continue to practice or shift towards more revision.

In my case, however, I find that revision tends to much up the original, carefully balanced work. Revising for me means re-familiarizing myself with the entire structure, which is very hard to do, so that I'm aware of how changing or adding a phrase here affects the style and pacing of not only the sentence and the paragraph but the entire work as a whole. The results, even when I do this, rarely satisfy me: greater clarity in sentence X tends to disrupt the flow of that paragraph and consequently the whole essay or chapter as well as the book or collection of works (which exists mentally, complete with each part's relative placement, even before such a collection exists). I suppose, to be modest, that Mozart felt much the same way.

Here I insert a personal anecdote: an editor of mine once revised a work for publication with a number of minor changes. As I compared his version to the original, I consistently found my original intensions foiled by the changes. Phrases that were supposed to mirror or echo famous or not-so-famous writers, their texts carefully chosen to produce effects in the reader, largely either subconscious or for the chosen few while not detracting (at least, no more than an occasional, half-noticed puzzlement at, say, a particular word choice), were consistently befuddled by this editor’s minor changes, which felt like building highways through monuments or historic sites, blind to their signification. There was no way an editor could have caught most of these references (even I often have trouble catching many of them upon rereading), or that I could have reasonably expected him to, say, know that a certain phrase mirrored a certain translation of a certain book which I liked and which reflected in its topic not my topic itself but an implication of it that I wanted to bring out. To me, as the writer, such an allusion felt quite apparent. After the editor, who worked at a major publishing house, refused to try to convince me to make the changes myself, instead acting as if he had final authority over my words, leaving the generally impression that he wanted to feel that he was earning his salary, I withdrew the piece from consideration. True story, as they say.

In any case, rest assured that most writers, even great ones, were not nearly so consummate. I have found, for example, significant evidence of Shakespeare’s inconsistent revision -- e.g. not changing the rest of the text to accommodate his revisions -- and there is the idea that, in his time, writers saw the scene or the chapter as the main unit rather than the whole work and did not expect, so the idea (demonstrably faulty, given obvious concern for such unities, yet certainly not without merit) goes. Rest assured, moreover, that the great majority of classic modern writers, about whom we have the most evidence, were appallingly lazy; the tales of the "lost generation" spending most of their days in cafés and not writing for significant periods of time are notorious. Moreover, Alan Moore, a comic book writer of a great mount of drivel of varying degrees of cleverness in addition to a sizeable volume of really phenomenal classics, admits that he never revises -- and I greatly admire him, at least among my contemporaries.

So, budding writers, take heart: it's unlikely, but you can make a fortune with no training or noted talent. But, if you're serious about writing well, much less having a reason to be read a millennia from now, expect to devote a significant portion of your life to simply practicing before you enter the public arena and wow everyone (as I seem to, because I have). Writers of all levels of success, both literarily and financially, take heart: you don’t have to spend the majority of your time revising. But you do have to be damn good, if not outright blessed by the gods, not to do so and to write well, or better yet have control over your writing.

YOUR ASSIGNMENT THIS WEEK

The next column is still due on Thursday, 22 August. This column is a freebee -- the fourth one to make up for the six weeks that this column was on hiatus. I'm still working on a five-part series that I will post as soon as it finds completion.

See Smoke (Appollonian Bacchanalia 18), released on the same day as this column, for information about updates.

No assignment for this column as it's the fourth in a series of columns posted at the same time, and there's one for one of the others released on the same day. Actually, you really should have an assignment for each and every column, regardless of release schedule, as each does represent a week of time. But giving you this time off is just another example of the nice man I am, you lazy gits.