Thursday, November 6, 2014
Uncreative Writing
In Uncreative Writing, Kenneth Goldsmith's basic argument is that digital technologies have fundamentally changed the way we produce, consume, interact with, and thinking about writing, and that our ideas about the poem should change accordingly. That's his basic argument. In your response, fill out that basic argument with detail. What exactly is he saying? Quote specific key passages and explain them. Point to three specific and meaningful ways in which his argument about "uncreative writing" challenges ideas you have about the poem. Be specific. Argue with evidence. Focus on your own critical thinking.
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"Uncreative Writing"
ReplyDeleteI have no idea what to write here. All I really know is that I can agree with the practice of retyping five pages of material because I used to do that all the time. I would copy the exact dialogue of a videogame for a fanfiction, and alter either the material or the character who said whatever the quote was to fit in my original character (which often times was simply a patchwork piece constructed of the paper that was the canon characters and the glue that was my current mental and emotional state). I know that the importance of that was that I was simply copying, feeling free as I read off the page and occasionally changed things as I went along. I think that's what he means by "uncreative writing" because by writing fanfiction, I'm copying an "original" story; by parsing the dialogue and my character itself as it developed, I was copying the words that I read, the characters that I hated or loved or didn't really care about at all. And I would ask whether there was really any purpose to all of that--especially since I deleted the whole story when I realized I didn't know where to go with it--except that the whole purpose was that I had that realization, that I actually did it and figured out the point of the whole 185 pages of it was to notice that it was all just a bunch of by-hand copy/paste. And since no one else has posted, I think I'm safe by just posting this word-vomit. At least I posted something. Sort of on topic. But not really. Which is also a thing that I'm technically copying, since I heard it a million times and it's not actually my own unique thought. Yeah.
Goldsmith brings up Lethem talking about how plagiarism is becoming common of the younger generation especially with their access to technology like the internet. Lethem says, "younger writers who take his exercise one step further by boldly appropriating the work of others without citation" (3), this is a cause of stress for many people because creative writers, and all writers in general are taught that plagiarizing is always wrong. The poem in the beginning of the reading refers to famous writers and turns down wanting to be a writer similar to them. Goldsmith thinks that limiting the writer to an idea that must be new and unheard of can be bad for the writer, "literature....is in a rut, trending to hit the same note again and again, confining itself to the narrowest of spectrums, resulting in a practice that has fallen out of step and unable to take part in arguably the most vital and exciting cultural discourses of our time" (7). Having grown up being told constantly that plagiarism is wrong, it has been more difficult reading poems that take from other writers. Goldsmith answers a question I was thinking of, since there is access to other peoples works, why doesn't everyone just use/plagiarize everyone else works? He answers this with, "If it's a matter of simply cutting and pasting the entire Internet into a Microsoft Word document, then what becomes important is what you--the author-- decides to choose. Success lies in all knowing what to include--more important-what to leave out" (10). The idea that this may actually be more difficult makes sense to me because you are able to challenge yourself to write stronger and better.
ReplyDeleteGoldsmith is referencing the same thing we talked about in class the other day: there are no new ideas. It's this idea that every story had already been told, so anything 'new' is just a different version of those stories. Just about all the information and ideas in the world are all compiled and scattered across the internet for anyone to read and use and experience. The difference with writing now, says Goldsmith is "How I make my way through this thicket of information--- how I manage it, how I parse it, how I organize and distribute it--- is what distinguishes my writing from yours" (1). So since it is not going to be new ideas we see, Goldsmith wants us to look at how the writers shape and present the ideas instead. He also adds that in modern creative writing, people are being taught that unoriginal or plagiarized ideas are bad, but Goldsmith presents that by attempting to always be creative and original in this sense, we are smothering our own capabilities as writers. He elaborates this by talking about his class in "uncreative writing" where "students are penalized for showing any shred of originality or creativity" (8). Surprisingly, this is extremely effective because, as Goldsmith states, "the suppression of self-expression is impossible. Even when we do something as seemingly 'uncreative' as retyping a few pages, we express ourselves in a variety of ways" (9). Goldsmith is trying to explain with this whole argument that while there may not be completely unique story ideas, there is always room for creativity and unique expression. He is saying that we should not be afraid of using the ideas that we see on the internet, but that we should embrace all the ideas floating around and use them to create expressions of our own.
ReplyDeleteGoldsmith says "writers [of uncreative literature] function more like programmers than traditional writers." This metaphor makes a lot of sense. Just like programmers, writers of so-called 'uncreative' literature (more on that later) work within a system with bounds. In computer science the system is the programming language you are using. You can combine the verbs, adverbs, nouns, etc. of said language in an almost infinite number of ways, but you can not bring in anything new; you must exclusively use the tools given you by the language. At least not without altering the language, but that's a different matter. Similarly, uncreative writers use existing material in their works, putting it together, or 'coding' if you will, to produce something new. It is at this point that I question the name 'uncreative', since, yes it is a different sort of creativity, but it is still making (or creating) something entirely new. Some might consider it plagiarism and a complete lack of creativity if I, like some of the people mentioned in the article, were to copy something from a famous poet. I might agree too, unless I did the copying in such a way as to create something different. For instance, if I printed in sharpie the line "shall I compare thee to a summers day" onto a toilet seat, the affect of the poetry would suddenly become something entirely new. Am I saying toilet seats aren't actually gross? Am I comparing a toilet seat (or perhaps other related things) to a summers day? If so, then am I a plagiarist? Shakespeare wrote those lines in tribute to an individual. I've now rewritten them in tribute to ... humor, toilet seats, or perhaps both. The point being that the actual words themselves might not be the important part. It is how they are used that defines them. "How I make my way through this thicket of information [preexisting literature]-how I manage it, how I parse it, how I organize and distribute it-is what distinguishes my writing from yours", wrote Douglas Huebler. Accordingly, uncreative writing is the process of utilizing existing literature in new ways. After all, why reinvent the wheel when you can simply think of new uses for it?
ReplyDeleteThe funny thing about writing, that my I remember one of my high school teachers saying, is that no literature is truly original. In today's electronic easy-access world, that has, according to Goldsmith, become even more true with "uncreative writing." He plays on the idea of our ability to absorb information, especially through our laptops and cell phones. In our easy-access world, there's a sense of liberty in what Goldsmith calls "patchwriting, a way of weaving together various shards of other people's words into a tonally cohesive whole." He mentions that students use this trick most of the time through wikipedia and the like. He mentions that sometimes, this comes from subconscious absorption of information.
ReplyDelete