KINDS OF WRITING
Writing today is unreal. Roughly grouped, the most dominant kind is merchandise — what will move quickly and cheaply for consumption. It’s repetitious, baited with violence and sex, often totally invented and unmoored from facts, and distorted by headlines and video images. Sensation and passionate opposition are keynotes.
This used to be labeled “yellow journalism” but isn’t even on paper anymore. Read aloud or spoken on the scene, pretending to be news.
Next is “rule of law” writing which has hogtied government with restrictions, interpretations, and definitions until it has become weaponized by a stampede of semi-lawyers untroubled by the ethics of a profession. Mafia, which does not write down their laws but enforces them scrupulously, simply ignores the Constitutions, Ordinances, Treaties, Conventions, Regulations, and other structuring print for governance.
Social media and blogging were supposed to be entirely uncurbed self-presentation — nobody knows you’re a dog on the internet — but like everything else became merchanized, weaponized, and a source of trouble, while the platforms providers became trillionaires and suppliers of data patterns for vendors and enemies. It was often evanescent: accessible, then gone, then retrieved, then displaced or distorted.
All print became layered with derivatives: refutation, promotion, imitation, translations to other languages, intellectual property law, underground paper and parallel internets. Companies based on rights to documents for the sake of marketing issued versions, editions, altered material conveyances, and even oral versions or movie scripts. Discovery — how to find stuff — is major.
Scholarly and scientific writing and publishing tried to be separate, prestigious, and reviewed for accuracy. This turned out to be cumbersome and easy to game. Then came the huge sea change enabled by the latest technology which changed everything and forced new vocabulary and concepts. International participation meant confusing cultural assumptions influencing from underneath. There was simply too much to master and no way to cope except by breaking down into specialties with hyphenated names.
A strange pop culture cross between science and fantasy developed between health breakthroughs and people’s determination to make themselves safe and better. Technological ability to wear a lab on your wrist, discover pregnancy, and test blood demands a lot of writing.
More than anything else, quantum mechanics and various approaches to math have shattered the old confidence that we could know everything, that history is over, or that that what we think is the world is really arbitrary and vulnerable to drastic change. Very hard to write about. Old religious ideas become merely interesting concepts. A new morality is demanded.
At the same time the public developed a Puritanical thirst for what was real, dependable, and endorsed by “God” — like the Bible and other compendiums that were keystones of religious institutions. Religious writing is also overwhelming in amount, specialized in terminology, international in concepts. Like the mafia ignoring the rule of law, the uneducated pick up word-of-mouth religious ideas and impose them on as many others as they can.
But also they have developed the idea that writing in some romantic sense is privileged, mostly meaning novels for women but also writing by people like Bukowski or wild travel reports. “Novels” were alternative realities, “new” stories. But then it was necessary to label the reverse, which always appears as a shadow of a strong category, and it was non-fiction, meant to signal actual fact and authentic opinion. But then there was creative or personal non-fiction, meaning that close accounts were accompanied by their personal impact and human meaning. Soon the distinction was useless again, in the same way that the secular versus religious concepts blurred and merged.
When fertility-based morality began to lose power due to birth control and DNA certification of specific unions, so that it was a weak way of structuring the passing on of ownership and power, the edges of what was acceptable began to change. Some of the rules were frozen and demonized, like pedophilia or abuse, so that what was previously accepted becomes outrageous and obsessive. People wrote about it and some of it became acceptable.
Surgical gender change (not sex — an X chromosome cannot be made into a Y or vice versa) is marginally acceptable. Plastic surgery is common. Same sex “marriages” are no longer based on the creation of children but can be based on attachment/bonding which some people call “love.” All this needs writing.
Pornography in the sense of nudity or watching coitus are mainstream now. Whether that affects sales and personal reading is open to speculation. Clearly sex is irrepressible and yet not always present or relevant, but just as clearly one can write suggestive material about anything, taking advantage of displacements and extremes and the constant need of explanation. Dead serious and not deliberately salacious “how to” writing is easily accessible. One can get descriptions and pics of 5 or 7 or 10 “normal” penises with explanations.
One major category of writing is about writing, chasing the fantasy that one can make huge amounts of money, or that writing well is a “gift” that arrives mystically and lifts people into a special status. The idea of how many years of experience with the skill eventually produces competence was an idea that quickly came and as quickly left. Yet some claim to be able to “teach” writing.
When I began to blog more than a decade ago and signed up for clustr.com so that I suddenly saw I had hundreds of readers world-wide, I remarked on that to the librarian. She said, dismissively I thought, “Oh, everyone is interested in our special world of cowboys and the West.” But that what not I was writing about. Promotional writing about small tourist attractions is a strong genre, partly because it can be matched with advertising from businesses to make money, the same as social media platforms do. It’s “bought” subjects with all shadows erased. On a local basis, it gets praised.
Very fine writing, such as that on Slantbooks.com, is scarce except in places where high academic standards persist. But reading it demands as much education as creating it. There’s no money as it’s rarely marketed.
Much more to be said about other kinds of writing, like ghosting or business writing, case-studies and police reports, on and on.
