This board is unfortunately flooded with hordes of godawful, no-talent hacks who wouldn't know good writing if it hit them in the mouth and stole their wallets. Page after page of trite, juvenile garbage; a perennial infestation of bad poetry, puerile rants and narratives replete with netspeak and grammatical holes. Reading these physical manifestations of word-vomit and literary acne cause me pain. I'm not talking about an intellectual pain either; I'm referring to an actual physical pain over my sternum that feels a little like heartburn. It's not heartburn though, no no - it's the feeling you get when you die a little bit inside. So I'm here to help. This isn't going to improve your grammar, your punctuation or your body odour (if you're still struggling with the first two, it's probably time to resurrect the crayons and Little Mermaid colouring book), but it will help you to create work with complexity and subtext - two things that are sorely lacking in the vast majority of the literary output of teeny-boppers and maladjusted adolescents.
This is a diagram based upon the literary theories of a certain Sloan (a large version can be found here) that was drawn for me by my old English teacher at the end of year eleven (at the time of writing, I am in my second year of university). I was already a fairly accomplished writer at the time, beginning to discover the joys of competent phraseology and other such textual flourishes that make a work not only competent, but memorable. At any rate, I found it to be useful, and I would hope that you do too, once I have explained it.
You will notice that the dichotomous relationship between Innocence and Experience dominates the diagram, and it is a schema by which all narrative texts may be interpreted. Associated with Innocence are positive concepts such as comedy and romance, culminating in the societal model of the utopia - itself a marker for the Promised Land/Heaven/Paradise/idealised past (id est: The Garden of Eden, the Golden Age of Man, Atlantis, Satya Yuga etcetera). These markers (comedy, romance, utopia) operate as exemplars, bereft of subtextual complexity. Texts that correlate to these exemplars include I Love Lucy (comedy), Sonnet XVII (romance) and Island (utopia).
Conversely, associated with Experience are the negative aspects of those aforementioned exemplars - irony, tragedy and dystopia (with associated symbols). Once again, these operate as idealised metatexts, into which other texts slot into (completely or not). Examples include Variations on a theme by William Carlos Williams (irony), most of the bullshit on this forum (tragedy) and Brave New World (dystopia).
However, the texts I have mentioned, though all classics of television, literature or poetry (with one notable exception), lack something crucial. Subtext.
I'm sure a lot of people are going to have apoplexy at the suggestion that such hallowed and exalted texts are one-dimensional, but it is true. But there is a secret to complexity. To write something that has elements of complex and ambiguity, one must traverse the canyon that separates Innocence from Experience. Truly (and I mean truly) great pieces of literature blend genre and form, thereby giving substance and weight to otherwise rather yeastless narratives hopelessly bound by genre.
And thus were born the tragicomedy, the black comedy, the tragic romance and the ironic romance.
I have little doubt that scores of you little munchkins eternally lament why your work is never quite as good as equivalent work in the public sphere - and I can guarantee you, that this is a factor (along with being functionally illiterate, of course). Life is not diced nicely into discrete units, so there is no reason why art should not be a similar goulash of genre and form. Don't be afraid to take risks. Remember Sturgeon's Law (90% of everything is crap) when writing - it's okay to write garbage. Just make sure no one sees it. Learn the rhythms and sighs of the language. Have an affair with words. Be creative.
Finally, I must advise you to read and write, read write read write read write readwritereadread writewrite read (and I don't mean reading Goosebumps and The Baby-Sitters Club either. I mean meaty texts with taste and extra gravy - Hemingway, Tolstoy, Heller, Grass, Marquez, Camus, Mann. Go crazy). Down the right hand side of the schema is a list of texts, each with a very distinct voice and tone. Learn to emulate and ape these styles. Make them giggle. Tweak their nipples occasionally. Write 100 000 words of your own, then burn them.
Now, you are ready to be good.
(Edited by chalkboard sonata at 9:45 am on Aug. 2, 2006)
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