Writer response: democratising text

19^th century France: peasants are taught to read but not write. Why? Because power and authority (and note the author in authority) reside in the ability to shape meaning with words. Those who control the production of the written word can pass on ideas in mass form. The peasant, unable to write, is trapped in his or her world of servitude. He or she can receive the word of authority but can never assume the position of authority.

Reader-response theory tells us that reading is not simply a passive activity. It argues that the meaning of a text is only formed when it is read. Without a reader, a text has no meaning. And each reader will bring a different meaning to each text. We can read for different purposes, reject what we read, give what we read our own interpretation.

But reader-response theory is  no use to the French peasant. The text remains the text, no matter how it is read. He or she has no means of offering an alternative.

Until recently those of us with a good deal more education than the average French peasant could not physically change what we read, not without a great deal of effort. Writing was a time-consuming, difficult process, publishing an expensive one. We were only one step removed from servitude. We might have been able to write, but we were unable to have influence with or over writing.

How quickly things change. Digital technology means we can publish material online in moments and companies can create physical books for individual customers quickly and at little cost.

Just as significantly we can copy numerous texts written by others into word processing programmes and transform them in ways big and small. We can edit, re-order, redact, re-size, cut or add in any way we see fit. We can change the colour of the font, or we can re-write entire paragraphs. Whatever we choose to do, the transformation reflects, in some way, on how we have read the text. Our reaction moves beyond mere reader-response and into the realm of writer-response.

What are the ethics of this transformed and transformative landscape? Copyright law still prevents the copying and reproduction of published works during an author’s lifetime and up to 70 years after his or her death. But several authors are leading a move to take copyright law in a new direction. They use a creative commons licence to authorise the distribution of already copyrighted material so that people can share, use and even build upon a work they did not personally create. There are different forms of creative commons licences available, depending on the extent to which an author wants to hand over control of his or her work. For example, some do not permit work to be distributed for profit, others only allow the re-transmission of their original work, rather than any derivative material.

Science-fiction writer, Cory Doctorow, is at the forefront of the Creative Commons movement. In the introduction to his book, Little Brother (the title a reference to Orwell’s ‘Big Brother’), and to all his other books available online, he explains the genesis of his desire to share:

Copying stuff is natural. It’s how we learn (copying our parents and the people around us). My first story, written when I was six, was an excited re-telling of Star Wars, which I’d just seen in the theatre. Now that the Internet – the world’s most efficient copying machine – is pretty much everywhere, our copying instinct is just going to play out more and more. There’s no way I can stop my readers, and if I tried, I’d be a hypocrite: when I was 17, I was making mix-tapes, photocopying stories, and generally copying in every way I could imagine. If the Internet had been around then, I’d have been using it to copy as much as I possibly could.

Views on creativity and originality have, in part, been shaped by the legal implications of copyright law. They privilege the author as an individual genius, drawing on his or her inner resources to create a unique work, a work that cannot (legally) be touched by others. But this is at odds with what we know about how language works. All language comes from other language. All authors draw on what others have produced before them (be it authorised written works, or simply the language of the world around them). The creative commons movement does not deny the right of authors to make a living from their work, but it does openly acknowledge the social nature of creativity, the fact that a work only takes on meaning when it is read and that when a work can be redistributed and transformed in various ways, it takes on additional meaning.

James Bridle, who writes extensively on digital publishing, links the possibilities for textual transformation to music’s use of remixing, a creative technique once frowned upon but now widely accepted:

… it’s a surprise that remix culture has yet to enter the literary world. The cult of the author remains strong, but is under continual attack. As a result, it cannot be long until the question is not “Have you read…?” but “Whose edit did you read?” I would read a Jonathan Lethem edit of Balzac, or China Mieville’s version of Moby-Dick. I like the original, but I prefer the remix.” (from, “Which book did you like best? The original or the remix?”)

So what might a textual remix look like in practice? The following are all strategies that rely as much on the manipulation of text on screen as on producing writing on to a blank page:

Patchwork Texts: the best example is Jonathan Lethem’s essay, “The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism”, which is made up of texts Lethem cut and pasted from the Internet before crafting them into a coherent whole.

Redaction: the term used for secret service documents with sections of text deleted. Great fun can be had deleting chunks of a given text so that what remains has a new meaning of its own.

Text transformed in terms of shape, font and by using redaction

Changing one feature: What happens if you change every verb in a text? Or every adjective? Or the gender of a central character?

Changing punctuation: read the Bridle article above to see the emotions stirred up when a writer dared to add punctuation to the final chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses.

Noun + 7: pioneered by OULIPO, writers replace every noun in a poem with one seven places on in the dictionary.

Editing texts: Shakespeare may be an author without compere, but sometimes his work can best be tackled in abridged form. Lengthy scenes can be edited to aid understanding and help performance. The act of editing also forces those doing it to seek out the most important aspects of a text. The following exchange between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth  has been reduced from over 70 lines to under 20:

MACBETH

We will proceed no further in this business:

He hath honour’d me of late.

LADY MACBETH

Was the hope drunk
Wherein you dress’d yourself? Art thou afeard
To be the same in thine own act and valour
As thou art in desire?

MACBETH

Prithee, peace:
I dare do all that may become a man.

LADY MACBETH
When you durst do it, then you were a man;
I have given suck, and know
How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me:
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have pluck’d my nipple from his boneless gums,
And dash’d the brains out, had I so sworn as you
Have done to this.

MACBETH

If we should fail?

LADY MACBETH

We fail!
But screw your courage to the sticking-place,
And we’ll not fail.

Google Translate: a multilingual poet’s best friend

The most beautiful classroom moment: a Ukrainian, a Croatian and a native English speaker reading their trilingual version of William Blake’s ‘The Tyger’.  Everyone listening has a strong knowledge of English, but no Ukrainian or Croatian. A general knowledge of the poem means there is no problem with understanding. The distance afforded by the unknown tongues adds resonance and poignancy.

Tiger, tiger, paljenjem svijetla

The task to write this poem came about when considering how to hear the many languages of a particular classroom in ways that were meaningful to everyone else. Small groups had to translate parts of a well-known work into two other languages, but leave significant chunks in English. They then had to read the transformed poem out loud, using their own first languages where possible.

It was remarkable to hear students using their native tongues. There we were, in a language classroom, yet we had never heard the main language of so many of the students. Clearly the classroom was a space to explore and learn English. But surely this can be aided when drawing upon other familiar languages? Additional languages should be a resource to draw upon, not a barrier to further learning.

Using a range of languages all at once is no easy task, though. The ‘superdiversity’ of many classrooms is so great, that there is no possibility of targeting intervention on a particular dominant language group. Resources cannot extend to giving individual attention to over 10 languages. This is the linguistic make-up of one class in a Newham secondary school, for example: English x14, Bengali x2, Polish x2, Persian x1, Danish x1, Tamil x1, Punjabi x1, Luganda x1, Gujurati x1, Albanian x1.

In the Blake example cited, students drew on their existing linguistic resources. But what of pupils with access only to English? How can they participate in such activities without relying entirely on others to do the translating. The answer can be found in Google Translate, a remarkable internet tool, which can translate any one of 72 given languages into another of those languages. Georgian can become Vietnamese, Swahili can become Armenian, Polish can become Gujurati, at the click of a button. Users simply cut and paste text in one language into a box; they select the desired language for translation and the world wide web does the rest in a fraction of a second.

And how good is Google Translate? Linguists tend to sneer, but actually it has a high level of accuracy. David Bellos, in his superb book on translation, Is that a Fish in your Ear? explains why:

Instead of taking a linguistic expression as something that requires decoding, Google Translate takes it as something that has probably been said before. It uses vast computing power to scour the Internet in the blink of an eye looking for the expression in some text that exists alongside its paired translation. The corpus it can scan includes all the paper put out since 1957 by the EU in two dozen languages, everything the UN and its agencies have ever done in writing in six official languages, and huge amounts of other material, from the records of international tribunals to company reports and all the articles and books in bilingual form that have been put up on the web by individuals, libraries, booksellers, authors and academic departments. Drawing on the already established patterns of matches between these millions of paired documents, Google Translate uses statistical methods to pick out the most probable acceptable version of what’s been submitted to it. (p263)

Google Translate is a form of conceptual writing. It treats language as a resource, foraging for what has gone before and re-presenting it within the context of a new translation. It can only get better too; as more translations are uploaded on to the web, so it has more material on which to draw. Many techies are confident that by the end of the decade mobile phones will have an instant translate facility, so two people with no common language could hold a text conversation with one another.

Back to our poems, though. How can the ability to translate a text at the flick of a switch be put to good use? One possibility lies in blending both versions to produce a bilingual work. This might seem a little arbitrary and pointless, but the words selected or rejected for translation, allow for reflection on their original meaning, and also on the way that they sound – for it is difficult not to ‘hear’, or, indeed, actually read out loud, a text once it contains a foreign tongue. For example, how can you not speak Hamlet’s lines as transformed below:

To be, or not to be: telle est la question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind de souffrir
Les frondes et les flèches of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against une mer de douleurs,,
And by opposing end them? To die: dormir;
Pas plus; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand chocs naturels
That flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. Mourir, dormir;
Pour dormir: rêver peut-être: ay, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause.

Clearly the original is diminished here, but there might be the odd word or phrase enhanced by being in French rather than English. The act of transforming the poem took only minutes, but it forced me to engage physically with the original in a way little afforded in most classrooms. By making something new, I came to know the original that bit better.

Having a Flarf: using search engines to write poetry

This is for all frustrated poets, an antidote to the tyranny of the blank page.

Flarfing: the act of creating a poem using search engine results for two unrelated terms (E.g. ‘astropysics’ and ‘cumberland sausages’).

The first ‘flarfers’ devised the technique with the intention of writing truly awful poetry. They submitted their work to a prominent poetry magazine and, needless to say, it was published. Much flarfing remains committed to the creation of the awful, but it does have some serious uses, as detailed in this article.

Flarfing is much loved by conceptual writers such as Kenneth Goldsmith. It has a certain theoretical soundness when considering how writing is generated. For how original is any writing? Does it not always draw on material that already exists? After all, no writer can make up an entirely new language and expect his or her work to be understood (even wildly experimental works like Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake rely on readers being familiar with a language shared with the author). Flarfing simply takes this to its logical conclusion. It looks at what has already been written about a topic, then filters the material available in order to re-purpose it.

Flarfing also draws attention to the bewildering levels of textual abundance in which we live. It allows writers to bring some order to that material – even if the resulting work makes little obvious sense.

Flarfing is a highly democratic form of poetry creation. Anyone can do it and do it quickly. It requires shape to be given to language (primarily through the act of cutting and pasting), but accepts that new configurations of language do not have to emerge from thin air. This poem came from combining results for “astrophysics is” (126,000 results in 0.23 secs) and “Cumberland sausages are” (309,000 results in 0.16 secs).

The evolution of celestial bodies

The Cumberland sausage is a topolegically compactified manifold

that originated in the ancient county of Cumberland

Now part of NASA

As entropy of the universe increases

more sausages are formed

I don’t think we can see back to the big bang

because that light has already passed.

Nonsense? Or nonsense with the occasional resonance?

Web searches can be used for more straightforward, non-flarfing, forms of poetry creation. Take this sequence by which a poem about ox-bow lakes was brought into being. It was devised as an example of how Geography teachers might make researching a topic more interesting and memorable, but could be used to write about anything.

1. Search for a specific term (e.g. Oxbow lake)

2. Cut and paste information from the search into a word document

3. Filter, order and shape the material so that it loosely resembles a poem:

Oxbow Lake

a U-shaped body of water

stagnant alongside a winding river

shaped like an old fashioned ‘U’ shaped yoke

formed when a wide meander is cut off

flood waters fall

material is deposited

because of soil erosion

the old meander is sealed off

Since the river now flows straight

it has more energy

a “dead river” is the transition stage between a river and an oxbow lake

a portion of the river becomes “dead”

when the current no longer runs through it

eventually, the river moves away from the dead river and an oxbow lake is formed

In Australia, an oxbow lake is called a billabong

4. Use the ‘found’ material of the initial poem to craft something more personal, adding/ changing/ cutting words and phrases as appropriate:

I quite like this poem. I could never have written it without using a search engine. I’m not sure I’d want to post it either, because I would feel too much on show. This, however, feels like it was created by me, but also  in collaboration with others: a great, unregulated, unseen mass of others.

Writing has met its photography: the work of Kenneth Goldsmith

With the rise of the Web, writing has met its photography. By that, I mean that writing has encountered a situation similar to that of painting upon the invention of photography, a technology so much better at doing what the art form had been trying to do that, to survive, the field had to alter its course radically. If photography was striving for sharp focus, painting was forced to go soft, hence impressionism. Faced with an unprecedented amount of available digital text, writing needs to redefine itself to adapt to the new environment of textual abundance. (Goldsmith, K. in  ‘Why conceptual writing? Why now?’)

Duchamp’s ‘Fountain’ is often held up as the first example of modern conceptual art. It took an everyday ‘found’ object – a urinal – placed it in a gallery and called it art. Conceptual writing does a similar thing. It ‘finds’ written text and presents it in a new context. The writing is re-contextualised, or re-purposed.

Duchamp’s ‘Fountain’: art’s response to photography

The results can be outlandish. But they often have interesting consequences. Not least, they draw attention to the reading process involved with more conventional texts. For each time we read something, are we not re-contextualising and re-purposing it within the confines of our own existence? Presumably a Dickens classic is read in a very different context and for different purposes in the 21st century than when written in the 19th?

Kenneth Goldsmith is a leading exponent of conceptual writing. The following are some of his best known ‘works’. The inverted commas are there to draw attention to the fact that he did not actually write them. Or did he?

Fidget: A transcription of the writer’s every movement made during thirteen hours on June 16, 1997. For example:

Forefinger moves to nostril. Enters. Tip of finger probes ridges inside nostril. Shape of left nostril conforms to shape of finger. Shape of finger conforms to shape of left nostril. Finger removes caked mucus from nostril. Wipes. Arms lock behind head. Back arches. Pelvis thrusts. Stretches. Stomach expands. Exhale. Yawn. Right leg lifts. Dangles. Left leg arcs. Hands move behind head. Left arm stretches. Knees crash. Bend. Right knee falls to bed. Flattens. Left leg waves. Bends. Straightens. Swallow. Eyes view lips. Mouth forms round o of swallow. Eyes view nose. Squints. Nose doubles. Closes.

Traffic:  Transcriptions of an day’s traffic reports from a New York radio station. An entire book of stuff like this:

Oh right now, you want nothing to do with the GW Bridge, which can take you up to an hour or more to use the GW Bridge into the city. The, uh, problem is the lower level is closed either way, that’s why the upper level is completely stacked up.

Soliloquy: Everything the author said over the course of a week, but with nothing that was said to him. An entire book that reads like this:

No we yeah well no right. We’re gonna fix that. Is this correct now? It goes from the ladies on third to interest. And where does this go? OK. That’s gonna be your title. OK? OK. OK. Not there. So, let me just do something then. OK reload this. OK so Connie tell me how everything flowing.
There to there. There to there. Now it’s in it’s in the document, um, let me open that thing again. I don’t know why it’s not showing up. There must be something else there. I don’t think those lines are working that way.

Seven American Deaths and Disasters: A departure for Goldsmith. His other works seek to find meaning in language and actions that pass in a moment and are rarely considered again. Here he transcribes the responses of radio presenters to significant events in U.S. history: the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy and John Lennon, the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, the Columbine shootings, 9/11 and the death of Michael Jackson. The material is, for once, readable, a fascinating insight into the way people reach for and use particular words when faced with the unexpected. Here, an early response to news about an attempt on President Kennedy’s life, juxtaposed next to the radio station’s continuing commercial activity:

Refreshing as a glass of water, that’s the taste, fresh taste that Hamm’s has captured. Rural Texas, the people of Hamm’s say thank you. Yes, thanks for making Hamm’s beer such a favorite. It’s got that famous taste that thousands of Texans are enjoying every day. In fact, somewhere in Texas, someone is opening and enjoying a Hamm’s beer every three seconds. This weekend is the perfect time to refresh yourself with a cold Hamm’s beer. Thanks again for the spectacular welcome. May we suggest you stock up for the weekend with Texas brewed premium Hamm’s beer at popular Texas prices. Refreshing as a glass of water, that’s the taste, fresh taste of Hamm’s.

Hey, be sure that you stock up for this weekend with Texas-brewed premium Hamm’s beer at popular Texas prices.

And now we take you to KLIF Mobile Unit No. 4 in downtown Dallas.

The latest information — and things are rather confused as this moment — shots were definitely fired at the presidential motorcade as it passed through downtown Dallas. All squads are converging code three in the area of Elm and Houston in downtown. There is a tentative description of the shooting suspect. A man, a white male believed to be approximately thirty years old, reportedly armed with a thirty caliber rifle. How many shots were fired, how many persons, if any, were struck and wounded, we do not know yet…

This link allows you to listen to Goldsmith reading the Kennedy assassination transcript and others.

Kenneth Goldsmith reading at the White House in front of President Obama

Conceptual writing in a textual age

We live in a visual age. Right? Leading exponent of conceptual writing, Kenneth Goldsmith, disagrees, arguing that the current era marks the return of the textual. Text is everywhere. Websites, blogs, instant messaging, email, twitter; even the images on a computer screen are underpinned by written text, in the form of code.

So much writing is so readily available that Goldsmith, a writer (as well as an academic, critic, artist, and much more), paradoxically feels no need to contribute new material. “The world is full of texts, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more”, he writes in Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age.

Goldsmith’s artistic response to ‘textual abundance’ is provocative to say the least. Take these lines of poetry, for example:

Well, hopefully this will be our last brutal holiday-weekend getaway day. We still have massive backups across the East River. We’ve got delays at the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges, jammed right now on the way to Brooklyn. The Manhattan Bridge is now picking up more traffic coming over Canal Street. Williamsburg Bridge won’t work, The Tribeca Bridge is still sluggish, 59^th Street Bridge better to Queens but jam-packed Manhattan Bound. The, uh, local streets around Long Island City and off of, uh, Second Avenue are just a real mess in Manhattan too.

Is this poetry? It certainly didn’t start life as such. The words are part of the written transcript of an entire day’s traffic reports on a New York radio station, transcribed by Goldsmith and published in a book called Traffic. The book is an example of conceptual writing: written text that treats language as an existing resource, a material already generated in one form or another, ready to be exploited by the writer. It is not a particularly new idea. Several canonical writers, such as T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Walter Benjamin and Gertrude Stein, for example, drew on existing text in their work in a process generally termed ‘citation’. The key difference between their work and conceptual writing is the ease with which, in a digital age, text can now be borrowed and appropriated.

Goldsmith does not take his work too seriously. Watch him perform at a White House poetry event in front of President Obama (yes! to the President! at the White House!) as proof. However, he certainly uses the work to make several points pertinent to any student of language and literature. His work challenges conventional notions of creativity and originality; it legitimises processes such as cutting and pasting; and it highlights the role of context in the generation of meaning.

There is an abundance of work in this fast developing field, much available on the web. The following links offer an introduction, with further material to follow in future blogs:

Paragraphs on conceptual writing, by Kenneth Goldsmith

So what exactly is conceptual writing? An interview with Kenneth Goldsmith

Proudly Fraudulent: An interview with MoMA’s First Poet Laureate, Kenneth Goldsmith

Review of Against Expression: An anthology of conceptual writing

The Ubuweb: Anthology of Conceptual Writing

Creative constraints

1950s France: it could only be France. A group of writers respond to what they see as the pointlessness of surrealist fiction (writing that can do anything effectively does nothing) by challenging each other to write within creative constraints. They call themselves Oulipo, standing for Ouvoir de Litterature Potentialle, roughly translated as “workshop of potential literature”.

Their work is bonkers. Some of it is barely readable, some has attained classic status.

Try writing using some of Oulipo’s techniques and you’ll soon see that constraints can be strangely liberating. Writing within limits requires a linguistic flexibility rarely drawn upon, and at the same time can throw light on some of the more conventional ways of using language.

Here are a few to get you started:

Lipograms: writing without using a specified letter.  Celebrated Oulipo writer, Georges Perec, wrote an entire novel, La Disparation, without using the letter E. Gilbert Adair, translated it into English as The Void, also without using any Es. His translation is 50 pages longer than the original! Try re-writing the first paragraph of your favourite novel using this technique and you’ll see how difficult it is. You’ll also get a strange sense of the power of the original words.

Noun + 7: replace each noun in a poem with the seventh following it in a dictionary. Proper nouns remain the same. You can skip further forward in the dictionary if you want to cheat a little. Here is my re-writing of the first few lines of Wordsworth’s Daffodils:

I wandered lonely as a clown

That floats on high o’er vales and hulls

When all at once I saw a crown,

A hotbed of golden Dormobiles

Beside the lamb, beneath the tremors,

Fluttering and dancing in the bruise

Multiple narratives: rewrite the same event using as many different strategies as possible. Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style rewrites a simple incident observed on a bus in 99 different ways. Matt Madden accomplished the same feat in graphic form in his book of the same title.

Writing in Pilish: the lengths of successive words represent the digits in the number Pi (3.14159265358979 …). This means the first word has three letters, the second one, the third four, and so on. Mike Keith’s website explains this in detail.

An early example: how I need a drink, alcoholic in nature, after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics!

Periodic Table: the first letter of successive words is required to be the same as the first letter of the chemical symbols (in order) in the Periodic Table. Totally nuts and virtually impossible to do, but this link to Mike Keith’s website demonstrates how it has been used to re-write William Blake’s ‘The Tyger’.

Occasionally Oulipo’s techniques do not so much use constraints as highlight the endlessly generative capacity of language. This is best shown by Raymond Queneau’s A Thousand Billion Poems. Queneau wrote 10 sonnets and published a book with the poems placed exactly on top of each other. A serrated line separates each line of poetry which readers must cut along so that the line can be lifted away to reveal another underneath. The Maths is explained in a compendium of Oulipo’s work, The Oulipo Compendium:

Start with the first line taken in isolation: there are, obviously, 10 alternatives or possibilities for it.  When we now add a line, we know that each of the 10 first lines can be followed by any of the 10 second lines: this gives us 10 x 10 = 100 (or 10²) possible combinations of two lines.  Each of these combinations of two lines can in turn be followed by any one of the 10 third lines, a step that will produce 10 x 100 = 1,000 (or 10³) possible combinations of three lines.  In similar fashion, every additional line raises the number of possible combinations by a factor of 10 until, with the 14^th line, we attain 10¹⁴ possible combinations of fourteen lines, a number that can be variously written as 100 billion (UK), 100,000 billion (US), or 10 million million – a very large number however you write it.  Queneau calculated that someone reading the book 24 hours a day would need 190,258,751 years to finish it (Mathews & Brotchie 2005: 14).

This link allow you to experience the (almost) endless number of poems that can be created using this simple technique.

Template for Matt Madden’s Exercises in Style

One of 99 versions

Best Young British Novelists

Granta recently published its list of the 20 ‘Best Young British Novelists‘ (young, in writing terms, being under 40). The collection of original work is an enjoyable way to discover names that, with one or two exceptions, are not yet familiar to most readers. The five below might appeal in particular to sixth formers:

Zadie Smith: because she is the best novelist in Britain regardless of age. White Teeth established her reputation when she was still in her mid-twenties; NW, her latest novel, is set in the same part of North-West London and, as this blog has intimated before, is brilliant.

Taiye Selasi: because this self-styled ‘Afropolitan’ draws on the multiple linguistic influences on her own life to write in such a distinctive voice. Her debut novel, Ghana Must Go, has been much praised and her short story, ‘The Sex Lives of African Girls’, was selected for Best American Short Stories, in 2012.

Sarah Hall: because her novels are rooted in the landscapes of the the rural North, particularly Cumbria, yet still  come across as exotic. Her best known, Haweswater, explores what happens to the residents of a remote village due to be drowned beneath a reservoir.

Sunjeev Sahota: because he is such an unlikely novelists, claiming not to have read a novel himself until he was 28. Ours are the Streets starts a little slowly, but the powerful voice of the narrator, a would-be suicide bomber, soon draws the reader in. The ending – never easy when your narrator is due to blow himself up – is sensationally experimental, reminiscent of some of the more far-out pulp fiction of the 50s and 60s.

Xiaolu Guo: because anyone who writes a novel in the voice of someone who barely speaks English deserves respect. A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers does just that.

                       

Great essays about the creative process

Fantastic essays that draw attention to the many ways of being creative.

Zadie Smith, Speaking in Tongues: one of Britain’s finest novelists explains why “flexibility of voice leads to flexibility in all things”. See how she puts her ideas into practice in her latest novel, NW.

Jonathan Lethem, The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism: one of the most creative essays  ever, or unoriginal in the extreme? You decide.

Toni Morrison, Once upon a time there was an old woman …: novelist’s lecture upon receiving the Nobel Prize  about the importance of telling a story in your own words. Also available in audio.

David Foster Wallace, E Pluribus Unum: television and U.S. fiction: erudite look at how contemporary novelists draw on TV for inspiration.

Cory Doctorow, Introduction to Big Brother: essay that prefaces the free electronic edition of Doctorow’s novel. It challenges traditional views of authorship by handing the text over to readers to borrow/ copy/ adapt as they see fit.

Kenny Goldsmith, It’s not plagiarism: in the digital age it’s re-purposing: closely linked to the Doctorow and Lethem essays, Goldsmith offers justification to his premise that “The world is full of texts more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more”.

You can explore essays further by visiting the following links:

Top 10 Essays since 1950

Top 10 non-fiction essays of the past 50 years

25 Greatest Essay Collections of All Time