🚀 Want to WRITE better? Join my free writing school: www.skool.com/writeconscious 📚 Book club, daily podcasts, and my writing: writeconscious.substack.com 📖 Read my guide to William Faulkner here (free): writeconscious.ck.page/da5560dc29 Insta: instagram.com/writeconscious 🤔My Favorite Faulkner Novel: amzn.to/4ePUqtQ 📕My Best Books of All-Time List: writeconscious.ck.page/355619345e 🔥Want to READ my wife’s fire poetry? Go here: marigoldeclipse.substack.com
Finding that bigger fish is definitely true. Was writing a book a few years ago. Had maybe 10,000 or so words. Was pretty loose on the idea (didn’t really even have one idea but an ensemble). Then I got an idea for a short story that would be good practice-something to actually complete, because this book idea would go off into nonsense I could just feel it. Wrote the short story; it was something personal, something I knew a lot about. Finished it and said “No, this is what I should be working on” and dropped the first book in a snap to make the short story into a full novel. 100,000 words later I’m in deep with it, and it continues to excite me.
Interesting, but a pen name can be a part of style. Also, people have pen names for many various reasons. Some do not get along with family and so they don't want something they worked hard for being associated with them. Some have terrible last names that, agree or not, will affect how peopIe view the work. For others, depending on the text, it's protection. Some do write just to make moneyy and a pen name can keep peopIe away. It's not necessarily about confidence or vaIidation. Furthermore, a perceptive writer is aware how a pen name can actually help immersion.
Donald E Westlake wrote largely wrote more light hearted crime novels while he wrote a series of hard boiled crime books about a cold blood thief name Parker under another name. He also started writing what past for dirty novels in the late 50s under a collection of pen names. Stephen King published a handful of novels that were darker and more cynical than his other novels under a pen name.
I used pen names early on, but quickly learned to own it. I totally agree that you can't do it all in your mind - because it was never in there in the first place. It's not the realm of woo at all if you look into memory science, amongst other areas, mapped onto information science, narratology, semiotics, etc. It can certainly "feel" mystical though, to be in the zone... "assembled" with the alphabet, the mechanisms of writing, the traditional and non-traditional tropes. What it is exactly, who can say? In some way, perhaps all acts of writing are the answer to the question of what what the is is (as Klempner put it). Looked at it that way, it doesn't matter if the writing gets read or not. The process is the path, gateless goal, goalless goal, etc. It is the field in which the words appears but not ever quite wordable unto itself except by way of reference that can only draw the tools of reference from itself. If memory serves, that's basically Spinoza applied to testing what a body can do as a writer. Now there's a writer who did not mistake form for content, if ever there was one!
There are/ were many great writers, but to me, Faulkner is the GOAT. All you have to do is read a paragraph, a random paragraph, and it is as clear as clear can be that Faulkner is a towering genius. His writing screams genius. Melville comes close.
If you'll allow a true contradiction, this is true. I just can't possibly lock down on one and only one GOAT, as much as I'd like to... One of my fave experiences, as tragic as it is, involves being totally entralled during an initial read and then reading again only to wonder how on earth I ever got through such a thing. GOAT status need not last, it seems to me in my personal reading experience.
Can you say something specific about why he's a genius or why that paragraph/style is so great. Respectfully, I'm just genuinely curious about your take.
@@AnthonyMetivierMMM Absolutely! What you think is as valid as what I think. I'm certainly not stating absolute truths here, just my subjectivity. Heck, you could just think of me as a Faulkner fanboy. 😃👍
@@A_Million_Air These are the opening paragraphs from Faulkner's Sanctuary, supposedly one of his "weakest" novels: "From beyond the screen of bushes which surrounded the spring, Popeye watched the man drinking. A faint path led from the road to the spring. Popeye watched the man--a tall, thin man, hatless, in worn gray flannel trousers and carrying a tweed coat over his arm--emerge from the path and kneel to drink from the spring." "The spring welled up at the root of a beech tree and flowed away upon a bottom of whorled and waved sand. It was surrounded by a thick growth of cane and brier, of cypress and gum in which broken sunlight lay sourceless. Somewhere, hidden and secret yet nearby, a bird sang three notes and ceased." "In the spring the drinking man leaned his face to the broken and myriad reflection of his own drinking. When he rose up he saw among them the shattered reflection of Popeye's straw hat, though he had heard no sound"
Good writing always is instinctively, and your own strength in what kind comes out over time eventually, as you keep on craft and being avid reader helps tremendously because you start recognizing good bad mediocre to superlative absorbing writing and that helps you recognize your own writing also, if you do not enjoy what you write how do you expect others to? That’s all there is to so called craft like Stephen king never wavered from psycho thrillers and so on
I think this is honestly one of your least “woo” videos. The shadow self is a well documented and widely discussed psychological and artistic phenomenon.
You should look into the writers Paul Bowles and Robert Stone due to your interest in Cormac McCarthy. I think Robert Stone would most appeal to people intersted in Don DeLillo, but he is much different.
🚀 Want to WRITE better? Join my free writing school: www.skool.com/writeconscious
📚 Book club, daily podcasts, and my writing: writeconscious.substack.com
📖 Read my guide to William Faulkner here (free): writeconscious.ck.page/da5560dc29
Insta: instagram.com/writeconscious
🤔My Favorite Faulkner Novel: amzn.to/4ePUqtQ
📕My Best Books of All-Time List: writeconscious.ck.page/355619345e
🔥Want to READ my wife’s fire poetry? Go here: marigoldeclipse.substack.com
Finding that bigger fish is definitely true. Was writing a book a few years ago. Had maybe 10,000 or so words. Was pretty loose on the idea (didn’t really even have one idea but an ensemble).
Then I got an idea for a short story that would be good practice-something to actually complete, because this book idea would go off into nonsense I could just feel it. Wrote the short story; it was something personal, something I knew a lot about. Finished it and said “No, this is what I should be working on” and dropped the first book in a snap to make the short story into a full novel. 100,000 words later I’m in deep with it, and it continues to excite me.
Interesting, but a pen name can be a part of style. Also, people have pen names for many various reasons. Some do not get along with family and so they don't want something they worked hard for being associated with them. Some have terrible last names that, agree or not, will affect how peopIe view the work. For others, depending on the text, it's protection. Some do write just to make moneyy and a pen name can keep peopIe away. It's not necessarily about confidence or vaIidation. Furthermore, a perceptive writer is aware how a pen name can actually help immersion.
Donald E Westlake wrote largely wrote more light hearted crime novels while he wrote a series of hard boiled crime books about a cold blood thief name Parker under another name. He also started writing what past for dirty novels in the late 50s under a collection of pen names. Stephen King published a handful of novels that were darker and more cynical than his other novels under a pen name.
I used pen names early on, but quickly learned to own it.
I totally agree that you can't do it all in your mind - because it was never in there in the first place. It's not the realm of woo at all if you look into memory science, amongst other areas, mapped onto information science, narratology, semiotics, etc.
It can certainly "feel" mystical though, to be in the zone... "assembled" with the alphabet, the mechanisms of writing, the traditional and non-traditional tropes.
What it is exactly, who can say? In some way, perhaps all acts of writing are the answer to the question of what what the is is (as Klempner put it).
Looked at it that way, it doesn't matter if the writing gets read or not. The process is the path, gateless goal, goalless goal, etc. It is the field in which the words appears but not ever quite wordable unto itself except by way of reference that can only draw the tools of reference from itself.
If memory serves, that's basically Spinoza applied to testing what a body can do as a writer. Now there's a writer who did not mistake form for content, if ever there was one!
"they don't read anyway" . . . BWAHAHAHA!! bro, your channel is fire. Love how consistently you post.
Congrats on 22k
There are/ were many great writers, but to me, Faulkner is the GOAT. All you have to do is read a paragraph, a random paragraph, and it is as clear as clear can be that Faulkner is a towering genius. His writing screams genius. Melville comes close.
If you'll allow a true contradiction, this is true.
I just can't possibly lock down on one and only one GOAT, as much as I'd like to...
One of my fave experiences, as tragic as it is, involves being totally entralled during an initial read and then reading again only to wonder how on earth I ever got through such a thing. GOAT status need not last, it seems to me in my personal reading experience.
Can you say something specific about why he's a genius or why that paragraph/style is so great. Respectfully, I'm just genuinely curious about your take.
@@AnthonyMetivierMMM Absolutely! What you think is as valid as what I think. I'm certainly not stating absolute truths here, just my subjectivity. Heck, you could just think of me as a Faulkner fanboy. 😃👍
@@A_Million_Air The stunning originality and creativity of his use of language. So much more though. I need to think about it.
@@A_Million_Air These are the opening paragraphs from Faulkner's Sanctuary, supposedly one of his "weakest" novels:
"From beyond the screen of bushes which surrounded the spring, Popeye watched the man drinking. A faint path led from the road to the spring. Popeye watched the man--a tall, thin man, hatless, in worn gray flannel trousers and carrying a tweed coat over his arm--emerge from the path and kneel to drink from the spring."
"The spring welled up at the root of a beech tree and flowed away upon a bottom of whorled and waved sand. It was surrounded by a thick growth of cane and brier, of cypress and gum in which broken sunlight lay sourceless. Somewhere, hidden and secret yet nearby, a bird sang three notes and ceased."
"In the spring the drinking man leaned his face to the broken and myriad reflection of his own drinking. When he rose up he saw among them the shattered reflection of Popeye's straw hat, though he had heard no sound"
Your videos have me digging up a story that I was working on years ago and trying to finish it.
Im excited for your writing class. I need to take it seriously. I want it
This is a great video, and it addresses something I've been thinking about a lot. I'm glad I found your channel, dude!
YEAH! I finally did it! I'm the FIRST one!
Dude congratulations! 🎉 Sounds like you preserved and worked for it. 😎
@@Amanita._.Verosa._. Thank you!
"hey guys my name is ian"
Dear Santa, I wish I had 10% of Ian's enthusiasm.
Nabokov called Faulkner a writer of Corncobby chronicles😂 .. It was the Establishment that made him famous
Good writing always is instinctively, and your own strength in what kind comes out over time eventually, as you keep on craft and being avid reader helps tremendously because you start recognizing good bad mediocre to superlative absorbing writing and that helps you recognize your own writing also, if you do not enjoy what you write how do you expect others to? That’s all there is to so called craft like Stephen king never wavered from psycho thrillers and so on
Let's go Ian :)
Literary Renaissance!
Nah.
The reason you have a pen name is when you've got an insanely long last name that none can pronounce or remember.
I think this is honestly one of your least “woo” videos. The shadow self is a well documented and widely discussed psychological and artistic phenomenon.
Someone needs to write some high literary Bigfoot & Paul Bunyan erotica on par with that of Faulkner
Me thinking about writing my book with my original name.
The skeleton in my closet and the government: don't even think about it
I suspect the fact your teacher warned you about your writing probably means it’s good.
You should look into the writers Paul Bowles and Robert Stone due to your interest in Cormac McCarthy. I think Robert Stone would most appeal to people intersted in Don DeLillo, but he is much different.
Fine, I update my substack to my real name. Are you happy now?
I was looking forward to watching the cancelled video 😢
Damn, MFA's BTFO by the GOAT!