You know the story.
Friend X or family member Y declares that they have undiscovered literary talent.
They buy a top-of-the-line laptop and a few books about Process or Story and they start to infest local cafes and bars, ostentatiously tapping away, looking up every so often to ensure that they are making the desired impression -
And in time they do produce a book, or something that's indistinguishable from a book except by concentrated seeing, something that begins surely enough and also (thankfully) ends, with an appropriate number of words in between, observing those carefully prescribed limits between the proper lengths of book: the novella, the short novel, the epic novel etcetera -
And the Now Writer then takes to sitting around in those same cafes and bars sighing about how difficult it is to get one's Oeuvre published, how the Big Houses now refuse works unsolicited and agents are going the same way, lamenting the ease of earlier generations of writers who were fewer and thus more In Demand, victims of the same technology that enabled them to write in the first place -
And they fill up the pages of Amazon and KDP and Smashwords, these great book-sinks that can never be satiated, so that everyone is drowning in a sea of indifference and mediocrity, the fate of a culture exploded by the the monstrous capacity of the internet -
But this is just one side of the story.
There may also be aspirants with talent and heart who realise that all technology can be used for good as well as for ill, that any tech is just a tool, that the same power given to pretenders to multiply words without knowledge also has other potential -
The potential to sculpt words as never before, in units and as groups, to test them and try them, and by the infinite slow transformation of language create something increasingly rare, increasingly beautiful -
Aspirants who know how to work both fast and slow, who get their rough gems out in a few frenzied sessions and then turn to the Greater Work, of honing and perfecting their words until they shine like cut stone, until they no longer feel like merely "their" words -
Who turn and trouble the words for months and years until every word finds its place, until the rhythms of speech are perfected and all points beautifully made, until it is single phrases that are worried at and perfected, until single words are tried and found true or else swapped out for other better words -
Who use that awful power to bring their works towards perfection, to turn what was good into something that is great, and then move past greatness towards something that has never been, something that might be called (with a tremor in the voice) perfection -
Yes even such a terrible thing as perfection -
Until they are left with words honed to the sharpness of a needle, effortlessly piercing through ignorance and preconception to sway our human hearts, words the like of which have never been rendered upon the earth -
Of these two types of aspirant, which are you going to be?
P. Julian
14 August 2018
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