# Experimental/nonlinear language writers that are furries?



## SwaggleTooth (May 29, 2010)

I was just curious if there were any other furry writers out there who take their clues from giants like James Joyce, William S. Burroughs, Thomas Pynchon, etc.? Basically those who are really trying to bust open the limitations of language by seeing how far the intonations of the words can stretch -- using techniques like puns, hallucinations, "cut-ups", unconventional punctuation and capitalization, spontaneous alliteration and rhyming, etc.? 

This is the stuff that really titillates my frontal lobe; if you've worked with any of those techniques, or really just say "fuck-you" to the conventions of language and prose in any sense, well then I want to read your work. 

A couple of newer writers that should be cited, as I am falling in love with them, are Hal Duncan (The Book of All Hours) and Mark Z. Danielewski (Only Revolutions). I want to know if furries are riding the rift too!


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## panzergulo (May 29, 2010)

I mangle the English language all the time, but that is not because I try to be artistic, it is because I am a non-native.

Although, in my experience, trying to do anything like that will end up in tears. Furries are awfully unimaginative and blunt little creatures. I once asked in the forums: "What makes art of any kind 'furry'?" and all I got was nitpicking, the good old "the fan of anthro art is 'a furry', and sometimes the characters are called 'a furry'" while I was using the word as an adjective... and telling them that, the next answer was "durr, when it's covered in fur, durr". So yeah... apparently there is no "furry art" at all.

Also, concept of "sameness" is very difficult for some people. I once said in a friendly group of furries that "all teenagers try to be different while being just like everybody else" and got an uproar against me. It took me ten minutes to explain that I don't necessarily mean that all teenagers think and look the same, there are more levels of sameness there and in the end, most people are rather similar to each other. And one's peer group isn't necessarily in their physical neighborhood in these days of web. Two persons even said they are nothing like anyone else. I so wanted to say the two were more similar than they even noticed, because they both claimed so eagerly that they are so different. But I let it be.

Better stay with simple English if you want to write in this fandom. Just saying... using unorthodox language causes hatred and confusion. Don't do it!


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## TakeWalker (May 29, 2010)

I've yet to try anything like this (still haven't read any examples, though Finnegan's Wake is on my to-read list), but this is the kind of shit I love doing to make myself feel smarter. :3


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## SwaggleTooth (May 29, 2010)

panzergulo said:


> Also, concept of "sameness" is very difficult for some people. I once said in a friendly group of furries that "all teenagers try to be different while being just like everybody else" and got an uproar against me. It took me ten minutes to explain that I don't necessarily mean that all teenagers think and look the same, there are more levels of sameness there and in the end, most people are rather similar to each other. And one's peer group isn't necessarily in their physical neighborhood in these days of web. Two persons even said they are nothing like anyone else. I so wanted to say the two were more similar than they even noticed, because they both claimed so eagerly that they are so different. But I let it be.



Hm... Well I don't think that I'm really attempting to promote the self-perpetuating alienation that comes from the "identity-designing" of youth wanting to separate themselves from the flock as much as I'm just fascinated with lateral thinking, lateral forms of communicating, intuitive writing, etc. "Knight's move thinking" as the psychoanalysts who specialize in schizophrenia refer to it as. 

I would even argue that lateral thought has more bearing on "sameness" than linear thought does. It's like how they say the two hemispheres of our brain work uniquely: the left, dominate, "masculine" side that sees everything distinct from one another, the parts rather than the whole. This is the sort of perception that's dominant in conventional style; perhaps its not how we all see, but it certainly seems to be how we communicate what we see. Then the right, less dominant, "feminine" hemisphere that sees everything as one, the intuitive, the "silent knowing", the lateral and the strange that still somehow makes sense. This is the form of perception that's aware that a bicycle and the Higgs Boson is indeed the "same thing". There's more interconnectedness in the surreal than there is in the mundane. 

So I figure the kind of writing I'm looking for is the kind that attempts to give the "silent knowing" a voice. I'm not saying this makes me unique; indeed every one of us _shares_ these characteristics -- its really only the forms of expression that are unique.  

Your English is just fine, btw. 



TakeWalker said:


> though Finnegan's Wake is on my to-read  list



GOOD LUCK ON THAT ONE hahaha. Very foreboding read. Maybe ya might want to start with Ulysses.


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## foozzzball (May 29, 2010)

A) The vast majority of the furry fandom is way too young to seriously be delving into this stuff. Before you can turn the rules on their head you must have an intrinsic and very very deep understanding of those same rules. Getting enmeshed in all this properly takes decades, and it then takes  further decades to unmesh. If you don't go through the process, the subversions are - essentially - meaningless and incomprehensible. (As most 'high art/literature' ends up being because it's art/lit for the artists/writers, not the public, so it requires decades of delving into the art/lit world. Which is, frankly, lazy. You spend time on it, you will learn how to convey yourself without disappearing up your own ass and without leaning desperately on 'giants' and other elements external to your own body of work.)

B) Language is not limited. Your brain is. The sooner you learn that the sooner you'll figure out how to use language _and_ your mind.

C) It's much easier to have pretensions of high art when dicking around in complicated little shadowy corners. If you want a voice for the 'silent knowing', read material where plain and simple language is used to say something without saying it. There's a lot out there, most of it's as old or older than your grandparents. Try Hemingway, look up Iceberg Theory, consider the massive power of language when used well within the rules.

D) I never really got into Vellum: The Book of All hours. In fact, it narrowly escaped a wall-throw, but it did get put down at around page seventy.


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## M. LeRenard (May 29, 2010)

Any kind of multiple-layered meanings I put into my language usage is entirely accidental, I assure you.  I'm a pretty traditional writer when it comes to the rules of language, myself, though I do from time to time punctuate things oddly to draw more attention to them.  But that's about the extent of it.
And anyway, poets have been writing this way for centuries (hell, millenia), so I see no real need to incorporate it too much into prose.  If I wanted to screw with language, I'd just write poetry.  But I don't even do that, so there you go.


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## SwaggleTooth (May 29, 2010)

foozzzball said:


> (As most 'high art/literature' ends up being because it's art/lit for the artists/writers,


That's a good point. I really don't take pleasure in alienating anyone; I figure the ideal would be to able to convey something simply and concisely on the surface but has many layers beneath. That would be the ultimate hope, but it's gonna be a long journey to get there...

However, I would probably say the best time to be the most experimental is when you're young since that's when the fire is most untamed. People have their own methods that work for them, however I've always found for myself that starting with chaos then evolving it into structure is far more potent than the other way around. It's like with music - start with the aimless noise then, if you allow it to progress, it coalesces into a form. You don't see a lot of music theory majors playing hardcore punk. 



> You spend time on it, you will learn how to convey yourself without disappearing up your own ass and without leaning desperately on 'giants' and other elements external to your own body of work.)


I cite those authors simply for points of reference. I'm not looking for mimics. The first time I tasted the language I'm talking about was in Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers, but I figure not many would get the reference; they'd probably think I was talking about folk poetry. 



> B) Language is not limited. Your brain is. The sooner you learn that the sooner you'll figure out how to use language _and_ your mind.


Well, I'd probably say that it's interchangeable. Language and the mind evolve each other.  



> C) It's much easier to have pretensions of high art when dicking around in complicated little shadowy corners.


I feel the urge to clarify that its not "high art" that I'm talking about. I have no interest in artistic classism. It's all about what's attracting _you_. There's no hierarchy, but there could potentially be niches. Really all I'm trying to say in this thread is, "I like the weird shit. Who here writes it?" If that comes off as pretentious, I apologize. 



> Try Hemingway, look up Iceberg Theory, consider the massive power of language when used well within the rules.


I'll check out Iceberg Theory, haven't heard of it. I've read Hemingway though and its not for me.



> D) I never really got into Vellum: The Book of All hours. In fact, it narrowly escaped a wall-throw, but it did get put down at around page seventy.


Haven't gotten to Vellum yet, but I just picked up Ink last week. I'm halfway through it and I think it's one of my favorite things I've ever read. Its fucking incredible.


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## sunandshadow (May 29, 2010)

SwaggleTooth said:


> the left, dominate, "masculine" side


Urgh.  The adjective form is "dominant".  "Dominate" is a verb form.  (Sorry, English-major reflex kicked in there.)

As for cut-up fiction, I had to read Burroughs' Naked Lunch for a college class but I really couldn't make heads or tail of it.  I observed over my friend's shoulder when he read House of Leaves and thought the tricks used there were unnecessary and mostly dumb.  On the other hand I like Leonard Cohen's song lyrics and the poetry of e.e. cummings and T.S. Eliot.  I don't think I've ever written anything like that, or could; I'm really a straight-forward thinking, literal-minded person.  I failed when I tried to write surrealism, and this is a similar idea.  I also like to have complete control over what I'm doing, a random or procedural technique like cut-up would drive me insane.


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## SwaggleTooth (May 29, 2010)

sunandshadow said:


> I observed over my friend's shoulder when he read House of Leaves and thought the tricks used there were unnecessary and mostly dumb.



i couldn't really get into House of Leaves either -- I think the idea there was to display an irresolvable puzzle, which I don't need to read 700 pages to get. However, Only Revolutions was fantastic, and I'd especially recommend it if you can get into stuff like e.e. cummings.


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## foozzzball (May 30, 2010)

SwaggleTooth said:


> However, I would probably say the best time to be the most experimental is when you're young since that's when the fire is most untamed. People have their own methods that work for them, however I've always found for myself that starting with chaos then evolving it into structure is far more potent than the other way around. It's like with music - start with the aimless noise then, if you allow it to progress, it coalesces into a form. You don't see a lot of music theory majors playing hardcore punk.



I disagree, violently. The number of well meaning people I've seen spiral into incoherant beret-wearing-coffee-slurping-intellectual-cliquedom by doing this is astounding. 

Like, I have never, ever, ever, ever met anyone doing these things who has not turned out an insufferable little twit. (With literature, mind you. I know a couple of musicians who take the 'aimless noise' path but they were never, actually, going with aimless noise at all. Their noise was always pretty tightly focussed, just along a very different tradition.)

Trouble is this: There is no 'fire that is untamed', there is merely blissful ignorance. What really worries me is that in your first post you're like, 'are there any OTHER furries doing this', identifying yourself as someone trying to do this. The kinds of tricks you're talking about playing are ones people play very, very late in life after getting so used to the status quo that they must break out of it. Burroughs started writing in his late thirties, James Joyce started writing Ullyses at thirty-two, finished it shortly before he turned forty.  

Yes, there's power and depth in this stuff, but it's a very slippery slope into incoherancy for the sake of incoherancy, for those coming at it without a background in heavy literature. I also don't think it's possible to get the full depth and power out of it until a person's gotten a fully functional knowledge of how the 'conventional' do it. And the quick and easy short track to that knowledge is reading and writing a bit of everything. A large bit of everything. Maybe six metres or so of shelf space.



SwaggleTooth said:


> I'll check out Iceberg Theory, haven't heard of it. I've read Hemingway though and its not for me.



This is because while Hemingway is bandied about as God's gift to literature, the simple fact of the matter is he's not exactly writing for writers, but he is writing for a strange subset of the ridiculously literate. 

Hemingway is _hard_ to read. If you feel up to it, read 'Hills Like White Elephants' (okay looking version here), because that's probably the most accessible of his works I know, and it's really not particularly accessible.


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## SwaggleTooth (May 30, 2010)

foozzzball said:


> The number of well meaning people I've seen spiral into incoherant beret-wearing-coffee-slurping-intellectual-cliquedom by doing this is astounding.
> 
> Like, I have never, ever, ever, ever met anyone doing these things who has not turned out an insufferable little twit.


I feel like you've mistaken me for someone else, here. We're talking about _tastes_ here. I have no interest in painting myself into some special clique; I'm just talking about what I _like_. It shouldn't be such a big deal; and it certainly shouldn't be a representation of who we are or how we come off. 



> Trouble is this: There is no 'fire that is untamed', there is merely blissful ignorance.


Okay, so you're a writer who doesn't believe in passion? Don't take this the wrong way; I don't want to get into a flame war as I appreciate this discussion, but you're the one that's sounding like a coffee-slurping-intellectual here. You're disregarding what thousands of us feel for the sake of some precedents that can't possibly apply to everyone?



> What really worries me is that in your first post you're like, 'are there any OTHER furries doing this', identifying yourself as someone trying to do this.


Yeah, man, I'm exploring this territory. And I'm not alone. I have peers in the same territory. I just want to see if its out there in the fandom too. 



> Yes, there's power and depth in this stuff, but it's a very slippery slope into incoherancy for the sake of incoherancy,


You don't have to believe me I suppose...when I write this way I feel like I'm being more genuine and sincere in my voice than if I were to attempt write discursively, in the standard way. It's why I'm into it. Like any other writer, I'm just looking for my voice, and there's nothing for-its-own-sake about it. Its not pretentious because I'm not pretending. I want to sing the songs the way I hear them in myself. And I'm not feigning importance. I don't see one voice as more important than any other. Again, its about what attracts _you_.


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## sunandshadow (May 30, 2010)

Here's a kind of random question - do you think the Voynich Manuscript is interesting?  I mention that because some of the speculations about it suggest that it was basically a code to hide information, which is a similar sort of deliberate obfuscation to that in cut-up fiction and some other level-crossing metafiction.  And I'm personally very interested in the Voynich Manuscript - it's the strangest form of fiction/art that I'd like to try emulating.

Hemingway's hard to read? *blink*  I don't really care for his stuff because it's so male and tends toward the tragic, but I thought it was pretty easy to read.  (You know what classic author I can't stand?  Dickens.  Eurgh.)


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## foozzzball (May 30, 2010)

Alas, Ginsberg's Gang claims another.


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## SwaggleTooth (May 30, 2010)

foozzzball said:


> Alas, Ginsberg's Gang claims another.


Oh yeah I'm a goner, baby 



sunandshadow said:


> Here's a kind of random question - do you  think the Voynich Manuscript is interesting?  I mention that because  some of the speculations about it suggest that it was basically a code  to hide information, which is a similar sort of deliberate obfuscation  to that in cut-up fiction and some other level-crossing metafiction.


I haven't checked out the Voynich Manuscript but the way you describe it definitely seems to display how the alchemists would do it. Deliberate obfuscation not only to protect the information but to protect the authors from persecution. You could argue that similar methods were applied to the divine mysteries. Hence why its so dangerous to take the scriptures literally. (gotta add here that the Nag Hammadi texts are some of my favorite obscure metafictions)

So, who's to say those self-coding methods aren't still alive and well, recurring now in post-modernism? Perhaps the freaks are latter day alchemists


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## TakeWalker (May 30, 2010)

Voynich Manuscript: fucking sweet.


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## M. LeRenard (May 30, 2010)

I agree with foozzz, in that you really should get the basics down before trying to break away from them.  The way English is taught in high schools betrays this in a really obvious way, which I've seen first-hand: grammar and vocabulary are skimmed, and writing is given only a short going-over with some basic rubrics in mind, with the intent to allow students to express themselvesâ„¢ more freely, by letting their uncluttered minds explore their own niches, blah blah blah.  Anyway, the result is that no one in high school knows how to write.  I once was asked to read a student's essay, for the National Merit Scholarship application (this student was a finalist, so obviously s/he was pretty intelligent), and it seriously read like it was written by a third grader.  And I'm actually not exaggerating at all when I say that.  It was absolutely horrifying how bad it was.  It might as well have been titled "My Summer Vacation", with a big smiley face to dot the i, written in pink crayon.
So I wouldn't dissuade anyone from trying to explore and experiment with their writing more, but please, please get the basics down first, or you'll really end up regretting it.  The best way to express yourselfâ„¢ is by first learning how to do so accurately and effectively, and that means learning the rules.  Once you figure that out, by all means, go wild.  But if you don't you'll end up not making any sense to anyone but yourself.


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## sunandshadow (May 31, 2010)

TakeWalker said:


> Voynich Manuscript: fucking sweet.


:mrgreen:  I also think loglangs are fun, so I'm really tempted to write an alien or fantasy race story, translate it into a a made-up language, illustrate it with colored pens, and publish it as a faux archeological find for people to play at analyzing the pictures and translating the text.


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## Endless Humiliation (May 31, 2010)

i love pynchon dfw cummings the whole kit and kaboodle

i tried reading only revolutions and stopped but i thought house of leaves was okay if a little gimmicky so i might give it a try again

tbh i am going in for a writing degree but i dont do too much writing outside of class so i wouldnt call myself a writer but i do appreciate a nice obscure allusion

b.s. johnson is a guy you might want to look into

_"telling stories is telling lies, and i want to tell the truth"_


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## SwaggleTooth (Jun 1, 2010)

yeah, Pynchon's awesome. Mason & Dixon blew my fickin head apart and sewed it back together strange.

A couple of nights ago, I had a dream that I discovered who Thomas Pynchon really was...Tommy Pickles from the old Nickelodeon program "Rugrats". Tommy Pickles is Pynchon in a twinner reality, and that's why no one knows who he is, because he's one and a half years old and stuck in a cartoon. It all makes sense now!


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## Altamont (Jun 1, 2010)

I like to experiment with a lot of stream of consciousness stuff, like King and Joyce are apt to do. That and I'm really fond of Beckett's style of wordplay and his experimental paragraphing. In his novella Molloy, one of his paragraphs is roughly 85 pages long  Though I'm nowhere near _that_ esoteric; at least, not yet


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## sunandshadow (Jun 9, 2010)

For some reason I was inspired to work on my Voynich emulation today.  Maybe because I've been working on an extra left-brained and logical project this week and was in the mood for something mythical and surreal instead.  Anyway I was thinking to myself, "This is really a beautiful story I am writing."  Please excuse the egotism, I wouldn't normally tell anyone else my story was beautiful.  But the reason this thought was relevant is that this is the same story I plan to 'hide' by translating it into a created language.  And this seeming paradox made me stop and puzzle over why I wanted to do that.

Why do I want to hide a story I think is beautiful, yet I still want to make the hidden story into an illustrated book to show readers, who will hopefully consider it beautiful?  Is it just fear that others would read the story and think it was stupid instead?  Certainly I've experienced that many times, more with my art than writing but over the years I have developed a fear of people disliking my work even though I'm happy with it.  I want people to decode the language, I don't want the story to remain a mystery forever.  Maybe I think that if they put work into getting the story they'll appreciate it when they get it just because it's something special and rare?  Or maybe I irrationally imagine that only the people who would be pleased by the story will discover what it says?  It would be awesome if I could make sure my work was only visible to those who would enjoy it, but that would require magic (which I may write about but don't believe exists in the real world).

What do you all think, do you have any insight about a writer's motivations for obfuscating their work rather than either more logical path of writing clearly or of not trying to make something for an audience at all?


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## Poetigress (Jun 9, 2010)

I think it's certainly possible that a lot of writers (and particularly poets) who write obscurely are doing so out of fear of one type or another. Saying what you mean straight-out can be very risky (especially if you're putting your work online, where people automatically tend to feel more anonymous and willing to say harsher things than they would offline). On the other hand, if you don't say anything clearly with your work, then no one can criticize it, because you can always claim that they just doesn't understand what you meant (and/or that they aren't supposed to get it anyway, because they're not smart enough/artistic enough/whatever).

For more on this viewpoint, I recommend reading the section "Higher Obfuscation" (pages 105-114) of Ralph Keyes' _The Courage to Write_, an excellent book that delves deeply into fear involved with the creative process, and how writers deal with it.


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## sunandshadow (Jun 10, 2010)

Was thinking about this more today.  Does it actually count as fear if you know that maybe 15% of people who bother to comment at all will react very badly to a piece?  Maybe that's just pragmatism.

On the other hand, I love videogames and I think one of the reasons I'm enamored of the idea of hiding a story by translating it into a made-up language is that it's the closest I can get to making a videogame while still using a normal book format.


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## Kipple (Jun 10, 2010)

I love Burroughs and Pynchon, but I don't like to take the stuff too seriously. I'm not an especially academic reader, but text is very synesthetic to me and these guys really know how to get things buzzing and thrumming. Despite that, my actual style tends to be a bit more straight-edged.

I am in the process of writing something that fits your criteria. One part of the setting resembles Interzone a bit, though the rest of the narrative creeps along places that mimic other Mediterranean locations...Italy, Turkey, Egypt. A war between humans and a coalition of desert-jungle-dwelling insects ends and with it, the war economy. As political barriers loosen and former war profiteers try to make a buck in the reconstruction, the only two survivors of an infamous weapons cartel lays low and gets involved in a new culture war fought not by soldiers, but by artists, baristas, chemists, and so on. Plenty of hallucinations. And the few segments written from the insect's point of view are self-indulgent, purely an excuse to play with text.


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## jinxtigr (Jun 11, 2010)

Eliot is THE BOMB. Some of his poetry seriously frightened and upset me when I was younger- it just gave this overwhelming sense of uncontrol, dissolution and chaos. I'm thinking of 'Hollow Men' more than anything, but 'The Waste Land' is also very experimental.

The thing is- viscerally conveying a sense of disintegration into meaninglessness is a very powerful artistic thing, but it is only ONE thing. Eliot didn't go "I want to be experimental, this is what came out", it's way too forceful for that- Eliot went, "I'm gonna convey THIS no matter WHAT I have to do to get it across, even if you're really detached and complacent, I'll break up my sentences and ideas if I have to, I'll hit you with stuff you don't expect, to rattle you, because I need to make you feel this".

Formalist stuff doesn't always come out of a formalist intent.

I don't tend to do typography stuff as a rule- the one really cool thing I've seen out of that is from Pat Cadigan's book "Fools", where there's a multiple personality narrator and you know who's driving by which font is being used. On at least one occasion she gets an effect by slipping the font of another personality in the middle of some text- part of my reaction was just being impressed that she'd think to attempt that at all. It could've been more pointed, I think- it's HARD to set stuff like that up so that the formalist trick packs an emotional or narrative punch. If you don't, it's just a random card trick interrupting the narrative.

I've had a character speaking lines in an alien language, which he does not deign to translate all the time, and I got some reader reaction saying it was annoying. True, but the point is that he is rather intolerant- the fact that he's not speaking the reader's language is a tip-off that he's sticking rigidly to his own culture's rules with no consideration for the fact that he's visiting another culture with rules of its own- to him, it all has to fit within the context of his own culture, and that's an intentional theme, the conflict of POVs that don't work unthinkingly together. It didn't really work, though, because the reader tended to think this refusal to translate was MY failing as a writer to make an appealing, hero character, rather than my illustrating a character who had some serious flaws to him. If I had to do it over, I'd probably find some way to narratively flag that, pointing out that this refusal to speak the language was arrogant and wasn't helping the guy make friends, yet he continued to do it automatically.

Nonlinear poetry tends to drive me up the wall, so I'm all the more impressed by guys like Eliot who can give it real force- anytime I can't viscerally 'get' the purpose of any given dislocation or rule-break, I turn right off. And again- there's a very limited range of experience that legitimately calls for. Just the other day I broke a word, though I did tack on an ellipsis and resume with a new paragraph, out of habit. But I could have gone,

Now, she loitered outside Mistress Elistary's office, heart pounding, listening at the door to the sound of Mistress talking. She was almost certain she'd heard the word Dinsam. She couldn't make anything out, especially with the footst
                                                     The door opened, and nearly hit her in the head. Allie's tail tucked between her legs in complete panic, but the guy coming out didn't notice her. He looked troubled and annoyed and Mistress's voice pursued him, harrying him.

I'd have to have better page layout to make that work well, on a forum post it could line up any old way. It would be the word 'footsteps' cut off, and then the line below with the door opening- the 'break' from narrative practice would highlight what was happening (Allie is caught up in listening and not interpreting events in time, and is startled by getting caught outside the door). The jarring interruption from standard narration punctuates a jarring interruption in the story. I could've got away with that, especially if I could lay it out so the new sentence is just under the cut-off old one, a tiny bit to the left on the page. But I couldn't get away with it most of the time, I couldn't get away with it just to add visual interest to the page, because readers aren't reading to look at the shapes of words that way.

Offering to shake up the narrative structure for visual effect for the reader is like offering to feed the book to the reader because he's used to eating cellulose as meat filler at McDonald's. The reaction's gonna be 'WTF?' and anytime you can count on a 'WTF?' reaction through experimental/nonlinear writing, it had better be because you plan to use that reader reaction and take it somewhere you intended to go- whether that be to upset and destabilize the reader (as Eliot does) or because you are narratively describing an event that shakes up a viewpoint character whose feelings you want the reader to share.


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## SwaggleTooth (Jun 13, 2010)

^ very insightful post jinxtigr, and I agree whole-heartedly. It's not about meaninglessness, its about endless possible meanings through its own malleability. And FORCE, good choice of word, pushing our passion and urgency into the work, not just meandering with self-entertaining randomness, but exploding into oddity because we're fucking rigged to explode and there's no disarming us... 

Kipple, your idea sounds awesome. I'd love to read it. 

sunandshadow, why trip out about what your readers might think so much? Just go for it and see what happens. That internal thought-chatter causes brain erosion ya know.... and there's nothing wrong with thinking your own work is beautiful. Beauty is what we're working to discover here, remember? It's not necessarily pride and ego to recognize your potential for beauty; that's called inspiration, really. Go with it. Sounds like you're having fun and learning


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## sunandshadow (Jun 13, 2010)

Well, I think the only reason to go through the struggle of putting words down on paper is because you want readers to read them.  For myself, I'd be just as happy just daydreaming.  Also, I'm just interested in what and how people think,  I like stream of consciousness and chatty introspective narrators.  But if you mean it's a waste of energy to worry about what others think, I agree with that.  I think it's a difficult balance, between being aware that writing exists to affect an audience, and having artistic integrity which means knowing that the piece has it's own goals which the audience might not appreciate, and not being anxious or servile or overeager to please toward that audience.


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## Dyluck (Jun 13, 2010)

I guess I'll have to make an anal deposit~


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