What Makes Writing Artistic?

Plus, a hypothetical scenario about a being a diehard Canadian Football Fan

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Following up from last week, I’m continuing to send out this form to gather some feedback on this newsletter. If you’ve got 2 minutes to spare, I’d appreciate anything you have to say!

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A Question For You

A while ago, I got a gift called Hypertheticals by Chuck Klosterman, a collection of 50-something large index cards to foster engaging conversation about insane but ultimately controversial hypothetical questions. Here’s one of them:

Anyhoo. Before we get into it, I’m curious to know what you think. Knowing your inevitable future, do you watch the CFL game? Leave a comment below (or reply to this email) on what you’d do and why!

I’ve posted most of these Hypertheticals on my Instagram story, and this question’s no exception. Here are some of the answers I got:

The No’s:

Lmao knowing myself I feel like I’d just be curious of trying to go against what my future holds idk y

Nah, I have an upcoming full lifetime to do that

I’m curious to see how my destiny plays out since it’s static and absolute

The Yes’s:

Maybe it’s the life changing game for me. If not whateva I watched a game

There were 4 votes for yes, and 4 for no. I didn’t vote, but if I did, I would’ve voted No, because A) I don’t enjoy sports, and B) I’m far more curious to see what would happen if I didn’t take the path of least resistance. How would I become a die-hard Canadian Football League fan without watching this game? So many possibilities. Of course, the least interesting is that I again randomly come across a CFL game and this time, I watch it, but I’m curious to see how destiny outsmarts my deviations.

Is Writing Art?

Now that I’ve lulled you with an innocuous hypothetical, we can get down to business. I, as many other disgruntled museum-goers, have wondered before, “What is art? What defines it? What’s it’s value?” The question resurfaced lately in the context of writing when I read a this in a recent post of Maybe Baby, a worthwhile newsletter about hard-to-describe feelings that I highly recommend:

If you feel like a writer deep down, you have to allow yourself to be one, no matter how shitty. Anything short of that will probably be unfulfilling. Art is self-indulgent, but it can also be a life force if you let it.

While I found this quote personally inspiring, it got me wondering about whether or not writing is really even art. Historically, I’ve never thought of writing as anything but writing. It’s in its own class. It’s not aesthetic like images and music. Writing—that is, choosing words, varying sentences, organizing ideas, describing people and places, shifting perspectives—has always felt more like a skill or a craft to me, like knitting a sweater or styling hair, neither of which I’d outright label as forms of art.

I thought about what it would take for a work of writing to be an art and came to realize it depends on the kind of writing.

Poetry

Poetry is nearly always artistic. Every poem to me is a work of art. Some of it’s good, and some of it makes me want to rinse out my brain with an NBC sitcom. Because yes, just like with any art, there are bad poems. There are many bad poems. There are, even, too many bad poems. But there are of course also fantastic, beautiful, insightful poems, both written and unwritten, the latter of which lay buried in corners of our own minds like gold, ready to be mined with the proper tools.

Poetry is art to me not because of how much I like or dislike it, but because it’s one of the more aesthetic forms of writing, usually playing with cadence and conjuring unusual imagery. Plus, it’s meaningful. Not just to me, but to the writer. When I read it, I get a glimpse into somebody’s inner world. I see what they see. Few poems earn their keep by sharing information. Everything about poetry is a rebellion against form—abstract descriptions, experimentation with grammar and syntax, unorthodox points of view, and more. I must bend to its will if I’m to understand it. What I love about it is that poets probably pore over their work over and over, sculpting it carefully, but it always reads to me as casual, almost flippant, like it just tumbled out of their brain onto the page.

Here’s a quote by James Joyce about poetry:

Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality. It speaks of what seems fantastic and unreal to those who have lost the simple intuitions which are the test of reality; and, as it is often found at war with its age, so it makes no account of history, which is fabled by the daughters of memory.

Fiction

Fiction’s also art. A writer cobbles together a few characters, makes them want things, and follows them around for a few hundred pages until they win or die. The structure of narrative differs from poetry, but even within this different format, the two resemble each other. They abound with imagery, motivation, conflict, and more.

When we read a work of fiction, we become a part of the writer’s world. The allure of this world is paramount. I recently read The Art of Fiction (a title that sort of gives away my stance), in which the author, John Gardner, calls the immersive reading experience the “fictional dream.” Keeping the fictional dream alive requires an understanding of the reader’s experience and prowess with relevant writing strategies. In that way, it’s all the best parts of a Twitter feed, using information about what people want to read to guide them through a seemingly endless stream of text. Authors who do a good job maintaining the fictional dream will hook you in a way you won’t even notice, like when you skip paragraphs to get to the good part, when you can’t pull away from the book after finishing a chapter, or when you find characters and events from the story creeping into your mind during other activities.

Compared to when I was a kid, it seems that my peers now read nonfiction more than fiction. Many cite this new preference because nonfiction is more “real,” which is a reason I don’t share. I find that stories that never happened are more personal than those that did because they let you wonder how things could be, and they spur the imagination.

And that’s just the reading side. When you write fiction, language suddenly becomes therapy, the blank page your counselor, and your brain dances with possibilities. You give a character a job, or a dream, and some obstacles, and you let that initial setup grow. Maybe you come up with a name, and then a physical description, then a job as an astronaut, but, no, actually as a NASA mission controller, but they want to be an astronaut, and they’re afraid to because of some insecurity, etc., etc. As you keep running with it, you settle on a direction, and your story takes shape. Few things are as simple and thrilling.

There’s definitely crap fiction out there, but it’s hard for me to judge whether or not to consider it “art”—what readily comes to mind are those spy novels you pick up at the airport before a five-hour flight. But who’s to say that those books don’t strike a chord for someone else? Maybe the author of such lukewarm thrillers finds deep pleasure in crafting that kind of story, and perhaps it touches the heart of a frequent flying business consultant as he leans back into his lumpy neck pillow and the jet engine roars. It makes me wonder whether the definition of “art” should even be objective. It’s almost easier, and more productive, to avoid looking into the word and treat it as as grab-bag for any sort of authentic, aesthetic self-expression, in which many forms of writing would easily fit.

Personal Essays

This newsletter, by contrast, is neither of the above. I do not (and could not be persuaded to) write poems weekly, and while I embellish phrases with imagery, none are fictional. It lives in that blurry personal essay territory, which to me is about as artistic as building a bookshelf—which is to say, functional with mild aesthetic value.

Not to bash bookshelves and their hard-laboring craftspeople—I think that woodworking, like writing essays, can be artistic. Usually, though, an essay is meant not just to move or inspire, but to make a point. There’s a concrete end goal. I took a course in college called The Art of the Essay, which was taught not by John Gardner but by Fritz Swanson, a stout flannel-clad man sporting a long brown wizard beard and a disappointing lack of brothers named Ron. In it, we read essays by several famous writers and critiqued each other’s papers to learn to structure a personal narrative, nurture our voice, and make a point.

One project that I do remember was to record an event in our own lives, transcribe it line-by-line, and then use it as material for an essay. I chose to record a mundane evening in with some friends, where we idly passed time playing a cheap electronic keyboard. It sounds stupid, but inspecting a simple everyday circumstance like that yielded some of my best insights on what we expected out of life, what we liked about music, and how our friend dynamics worked.

Yet, I still hesitate to label this essay, or even any of the other essays I’ve written, no matter how personal, as “art.” I think my vague personal litmus test for art comes down to these three questions:

1. Is it meaningful to me?

2. Is it meaningful to the creator?

3. Is it beautiful?

All three of these questions needs to be answered positively for it to count. Art is something meaningful to the maker and the consumer, whether or not they know why, and it must have some intangible yet aesthetic value that moves both parties. Something being “art” doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s also “good,” and vice-versa: there are so many amazing, beautiful creations in the world that mix form and function to serve a purpose or improve human life, but perhaps they just lack some semblance of humanity and are mechanical, functional, or uninspiring, like a machine. Conversely, there are also garbage paintings.

If you’d asked me what I considered art a few years ago, one of the things I would not have included are video games. Then, I played a few beautiful, narrative-focused games (Life is Strange, Tales from the Borderlands, Breath of the Wild) and my mind was opened. So who’s to say that my definition of “art” won’t change for me next year, or next month?

And on that note, what are some under-appreciated forms of art? What are some overrated forms of art? Reply to this email, or let me know in the comments below!

Leftovers

• If you don’t agree, listen to Shia LaBeouf, who feels that art is anything that moves you, including memes.

• My book club is reading the essay Militant Resistance from Bell Hooks’ collection Killing Rage for our next virtual get-together. Here’s the first sentence:

  I am writing this essay sitting beside an anonymous white male that I long to murder.

  You can find it at the Free Black Woman’s Library.

• I’ve been reading a ton of the Strange Planet comics by Nathan W. Pyle. They are cute and hilarious. You can find them on his Instagram, or buy the compilation books online:

  nathanwpylestrangeplanet

  

  d i r e c t i v e s

  July 29, 2020

• The Art of Fiction by John Gardner. I finished this book a few weeks ago and have been doing a few of the suggested writing exercises with a friend. If you have some skill writing fiction, I highly recommend this book, even if the cover looks like a out-of-the-box PowerPoint background:

  

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