Today, as a working young adult, most of the words I consume are in the form of pixels on a screen. The articles I read are no longer printed with ink, and the stories I share with friends are no longer on paper. The Internet has become my library and I find that its contents have influenced my writing the same way that the books I love had.
The fact that most readers today keep to the Internet for its convenience and leave behind the physical book is not something to be lamented. If one is open-minded enough, he’s bound to encounter a few online gems that will make a lasting impression. Here are five online articles that changed my perceptions and challenged my earlier notions on writing:
“Why You Shouldn’t Be A Writer”
Susannah Breslin, Forbes
Skip this if you’re looking for inspiration. Go ahead. Go to the second link. The article delivers exactly what the title promises and nothing more.
Even when I started getting paid for writing articles, I was very hesitant to call myself a writer. I felt like the W-word was reserved only for the great masters. Shakespeare, Jane Austen, George Orwell—these are writers; I didn’t and I don’t deserve to be called one.
You see, the problem with writing, as with all art, is that it’s impossible to arrive at a conclusive statement on whether a work is good or not. It’s not like being a salesman wherein you base your skill on the amount of money you earn. It’s not like working as a teacher which enables you to measure the effectivity of your delivery by looking at the performance of your students.
“Writing is thankless work. It is like housework. It is like laundry. It is like a soap opera. It is never finished. There is always more to do. People may tell you that you are good, but you won’t believe them, or you will believe them too much, or you will not know who to believe, least of all yourself and this thing you created that is nothing more than a mess of letters trying to make sense of things that don’t: life, death, what happens in between.”
Writing is not as easy as speaking English on paper. This is my take-away from the article, and has been a sort of reserved comeback every time someone in my immediate vicinity has the audacity to belittle the craft. And given the subjectivity of its brilliance, making a profession out of writing is almost a matter of calling, the execution for which is best left to the brave.
“50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice”
Geoffrey K. Pullum, The Chronicle of Higher Education
I was in college when I first encountered William Strunk’s and EB White’s The Elements of Style, but it wasn’t until I was working as a staff writer for a kids’ magazine when I realized just how much influence that little book enjoyed.
To the uninitiated, The Elements of Style is the grammar bible most of what we were taught in school about English and writing were based on—”don’t join independent clauses with a comma,” “write with nouns and verbs,” “avoid the passive voice at all times.” The rules that make up this little book so determine our notion of good writing that some of them even found their way to the house style at my first job.
“Avoid the passive voice at all times.” Sure enough, every time I wrote a sentence where action precedes the actor, I would find my editor’s note glaring red: “Revise!” It did not matter that my passive sentences were merely placed as welcome breaks to the monotony of a five-sentence paragraph going doer-does, doer-does, doer-does. I was left with no choice but to change my sentences, costing me the “music” I worked so hard to incorporate in my words.
What I found in this article by University of Edinburgh’s George Pullum was an ally. He goes on to explain why some of the rules in The Elements of Style were not only groundless but stupid.
“It’s sad. Several generations of college students learned their grammar from the uninformed bossiness of Strunk and White, and the result is a nation of educated people who know they feel vaguely anxious and insecure whenever they write “however” or “than me” or “was” or “which,” but can’t tell you why. The land of the free in the grip of The Elements of Style.”
At the end of the day, writing for me remains a matter of the ear. And as much as our conversational language changes and evolves, so must our written language.
“What Great Artists Need: Solitude”
Joe Fassler, The Atlantic
I’ve always been the kind who’s dark and gloomy. You know the type: dark hair, glasses, eyeliner, with a face that never smiles to match. At 15, I started having mood swings. Years later, I’ve learned to romanticize depression and began thinking of the perpetual state of sorrow as a consequence or a prerequisite of being a writer or an artist.
I loved my sorrow. There were times when I would even trigger myself to be depressed just so I’d be able to put myself in an “artistic mindset.” I didn’t care that I was becoming self-destructive. I was a Creative.
“You know the cliché: You’re out on the town, you’re doing drugs, you’re drinking, you’re running on the walls, you’re pissing on the fireplace. It’s a cliché. Often you run into artists who live that life—and at one point, you find out that they’re not actually producing that much art. They’re living the life of the artist without the work.”
Ultimately, one learns that sorrow does not an artist make. And most dangerous for any writer or artist is to drown in alcohol, affairs, or feelings that he fails to create anything but a ruin of himself. Emotions, deep or shallow, do not string together words or paint figures. Discipline does.
“What is a Poem?”
Mark Yakich, The Atlantic
What is a poem? The closest answer I got from a professor back in college was “that thing that is not prose.” The definition of poetry, especially to its pursuer, always remains elusive.
Likewise, the matter of why people write poetry is a mystery. Especially today, bombarded as we are by mass and social media. The enjoyment of poetry became exclusive to the dowdy English teacher and the emo teenager. Even the discussion of poetry in school is almost always portrayed in films and TV as obligatory and tedious.
So why do we read and write poetry? It’s not something people nowadays admire. It doesn’t earn us money. And unpublished works just take up space in our computers.
Enter Professor Mark Yakich of Loyola University New Orleans:
““Poem” comes from the Greek poíēma, meaning a “thing made,” and a poet is defined in ancient terms as “a maker of things …” Like no other book, a book of poems presents itself not as a thing for the marketplace, but as a thing for its own sake.”
“It’s Not Plagiarism. In the Digital Age, It’s Repurposing.”
Kenneth Goldsmith, The Chronicle of Higher Education
Reading an article published by The New Yorker on Kenneth Goldsmith opened my mind to a world of possibilities. It was like going back to uni and listening to a much-admired professor deliver a passionate lecture and then going home to hear his words still ringing in your ear. I thought Goldsmith was controversial, daring, and a true intellectual if there ever was one. So much so that I scoured the Internet for more of his words and for people like him right after reading that introductory article.
In “It’s Not Plagiarism. In the Digital Age, It’s Repurposing,” I saw the evolution of poetry. Carefully tiptoeing past the clutter of emotional baggage writers have been throwing around since the birth of letters, modern poets who take the conceptual road play with ideas and not words.
“What would a nonexpressive poetry look like? A poetry of intellect rather than emotion? One in which the substitutions at the heart of metaphor and image were replaced by the direct presentation of language itself, with “spontaneous overflow” supplanted by meticulous procedure and exhaustively logical process? In which the self-regard of the poet’s ego were turned back onto the self-reflexive language of the poem itself? So that the test of poetry were no longer whether it could have been done better (the question of the workshop), but whether it could conceivably have been done otherwise.”
It may sound crazy, but this is how my faith in art, in literature, in words, in people, in the possibilities of the future got restored. For I felt that as long as art and literature are changing, the possibilities in our short lives remain inexhaustible.
BONUS: Don’t Try
Poetry for Sale 