How to Write Badly, in Ten Easy Lessons

A misère game is a game that is played backwards, in "misery" or "poverty." That is, it is played by the conventional rules, except that it is played to lose. The object is to lose the game, or to force your opponent to win. Misère game strategy involves reverse thinking, backwards expectations, upside-down logic. By extension, misère advice teaches us what not to do.

By that token, when we make art we can also play to lose. We can play to play, not to succeed, not to win, not to compete against any standards, internal or external. This is a potentially valuable lesson to remember for any artist. We can opt out of the usual games, assumptions, and economic-political battles that make up the commercial art world of galleries and fame. We can just ignore that.

One of the best cards in the Oblique Strategies creativity advice deck of cards says, simply, "Go outside." That is the likely solution to fully half, maybe more, of all creative blocks: just go outside. Go out and play, and forget about those usual competitive strategies we employ.

Competition is built on an assumption of lack rather than abundance: the assumption that there can be only one winner in any game. That one must dominate, and all others submit, and lose. Competitive game theory is a theology of warfare. Most games are built on competition, and designed so that only one can win.

By contrast, games which are designed to be cooperative, even confocal, strive to maximize the number of winners. Such games require team-building, trust-building, and partnership. Cooperative strategy invests in the values of power-with rather than power-over. In fact, some cooperative games are completely non-hierarchical.

Naturally there are those who think cooperation is unnatural, and not humanly possible—well, they're half-right, since if you've convinced yourself that competition is "the natural order of things," you're going to completely miss noticing other paradigms such as cooperation. This is a case study in which belief does in fact create reality, because what you believe to be the truth of human nature is going to color how you interact with others.

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I've recently run across some misère advice for writers, coming from two different sources, one for which I have no attribution, one quite well known.

I recently picked up the 1958 edition of The Langston Hughes Reader, a thick anthology containing Hughes' poetry, prose, autobiography, short stories, novel excerpts, and much more. There were specimens of writing I had not encountered before, and was very pleased to read for the first time. Of course, this volume being published in 1958, there is no post-modern-critical-theory slant to the editing; nor is there any mention of homosexuality, etc. That's not a loss, really, as those more contemporary theoretical discourses can be easily misused on a writer like Hughes; and the book is otherwise quite comprehensive to that date.

Near the back, there is a short satirical (or not) essay, originally published in The Harlem Quarterly, that I can't resist repeating here. (Note: I won't update his language here; remember this was written in the 1940s or 50s.)

How To Be A Bad Writer (In Ten Easy Lessons

by Langston Hughes

1. Use all the clichés possible, such as "He had a gleam in his eye," or "Her teeth were white as pearls."

2. If you are a Negro, try very hard to write with an eye dead on the white market—use modern stereotypes of older stereotypes—big burly Negroes, criminals, low-lifers, and prostitutes.

3. Put in a lot of profanity and as many pages as possible of near-pornography and you will be so modern you pre-date Pompeii in your lonely crusade towards the best seller lists. By all means be misunderstood, unappreciated, and ahead of your time in print and out, then you can be felt-sorry-for by your own self, if not the public.

4. Never characterize characters. Just name them and then let them go for themselves. Let all of them talk the same way. If the reader hasn't imagination enough to make something out of card-board cut-outs, shame on him!

5. Write about China, Greece, Tibet, or the Argentine pampas—anyplace you've never seen and know nothing about. Never write about anything you know, your home town, or your home folks, or yourself.

6. Have nothing to say, but use a great many words, particularly high-sounding words, to say it.

7. If a playwright, put into your script a lot of hand-waving and spirituals, preferably the ones everyone has heard a thousand times from Marion Anderson to the Golden Gates.

8. If a poet, rhyme June with moon as often and in as many ways as possible. Also use thee's and thou's and 'tis and o'er and invert your sentences all the time. Never say, "The sun rise, bright and shining." But, rather, "Bright and shining rose the sun."

9. Pay no attention really to spelling or grammar or the neatness of the manuscript. And in writing letters, never sign your name so anyone can read it. A rapid scrawl will better indicate how important and how busy you are.

10. Drink as much liquor as possible and always under the influence of alcohol. When you can't afford alcohol yourself, or even if you can, drink on your friends, fans, and the general public.

If you are white, there are many more things I can advise in order to be a bad writer, but since this piece is for colored writers, there are some things I know a Negro just will not do, not even for writing's sake, so there is no use mentioning them.
—Langston Hughes

This is true misère advice for writers. I am reminded both of some of Mark Twain's more scathing commentaries, and of similar reverse-advice pieces from other writers. I especially like Hughes' little tag comment at the end, disguised as a throwaway, which opens up whole new cans of worms only to let them wiggle free and be ignored.

Hughes' No. 6 on his list, about having nothing to say but saying it at great length, is one of the biggest problems I have with contemporary literature, both poetry and fiction. The main reason many writers pad out a novella into a novel is because publishers like to sell novels rather than short story collections; they believe that's what people want to read. But this only strengthens the tendency of bad writers to over-write. What's wrong with a great deal of contemporary literature is that it's over-written in the extreme. And there are lots of writers out there right now, some of them with shiny new MFA degrees, who love the sounds of their own voices, who are addicted to writing, but who really have nothing at all to say. Far better to be silent than to write another pointless book of poetry, or another new novel about nothing.

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From another direction, a friend of mine recently sent me a short list of advice on "How to Be Miserable as an Artist." This too is misère advice (oh whoa is miserable me!), and it's also quite funny. It sticks a pin in those self-inflated Sensitive Artist types who are all about the pose of being an Artiste, and not about the quality of the actual artistic work. I have to say "ouch" to some these quips, as they hit rather close to home (especially the ones about familiar approval), in terms of where one often finds oneself, early on in one's artistic career.

I have no attribution for this list. It strikes me as one of those Internet jokes that an artist made one day, out of frustration, and the sense of gallows humor one sometimes needs to cope with living the artist's life.

How To Feel Miserable As An Artist
(or, What Not To Do. . . .)

1. Constantly compare yourself to other artists.

2. Talk to your family about what you do and expect them to cheer you on.

3. Base the success of your entire career on one project.

4. Stick with what you know.

5. Undervalue your expertise.

6. Let money dictate what you do.

7. Bow to societal pressures.

8. Only do work that your family would love.

9. Do whatever the client/customer/gallery owner/patron/investor asks.

10. Set unachievable/overwhelming goals to be accomplished by tomorrow.

Every one of these can be painful to read, as they're all mistakes I've made, and seen other artists make. Sometimes these sorts of attitudes can take a long time to overcome, and choose to do differently. That's why this is gallows humor: it's something in which many of us can see ourselves reflected. I have to say, No. 8 really makes me both squirm and laugh at the same time: it speaks directly to truth that it's never wise to go looking for love (or approval) in all the wrong places.

I do feel the need to point out that, truth be told, in terms of being a professional graphic designer or illustrator, No. 9 on this list is in fact good advice that you need to follow—as long as the project you are working on is a commercial, marketing or advertising project. Your own personal, fine-art work should not be directed by others, but it's all right, even healthy, to let go of your ego and expectations when you're working on a commercial illustration project.

Although, true also to be told, the chances of your working for an art director with less intelligence, skills, and experience than your own are very high. Most of the time you just have to pretend not to care, let it go, and move on. There is no shortage of people in the commercial art and advertising worlds who have risen beyond their levels of competence. I've even once heard an art director say, without irony, "I'm not an artist, I'm a concept person."

So keep that in mind: for the sake of your own sanity, it is often wise to compartmentalize your fine art and personal projects away from your commercial ones. Just don't get them, or their expectations, confused.

Writing About Music

I've written before about the blind spots that writers often have about music—specifically, poets who have an apparent inability to understand how music is its own force, not merely a support for song lyrics. I have also considered before about how audio performance, for example radiobroadcast, might be a genuine enhancement for much contemporary poetry; but I suspect that the poets' blind spots will keep this from happening, too, as most poets of my acquaintance seem to believe that print presentation trumps any other form, and should. No wonder there are floating accusations of hermeticism and irrelevance circling much poetry criticism nowadays.

Geeta Dayal has written a book about Brian Eno and the making of his 1975 album Another Green World, both a history of an influential album that lies at the root of much contemporary electronic pop music, but also an examination of the creative process. (The book is published by Continuum, and can be found here.) An interesting aspect of this book about a classic album is that both of the creators used the Oblique Strategies deck of cards (developed by Eno and Peter Schmidt), which is designed to help an artist break through blocks, mental ruts, and other impediments. Eno used the Obllique Strategies cards throughout the making of his album; and Dayal used the cards to help her write her book about the album. (I love the Oblique Strategies, and have been known to use them myself from time to time.)

Author Geeta Dayal was recently interviewed on PRI's weekly arts & humanities program To the Best of Our Knowledge. (Their podcast, which I highly recommend, can be found here.) Listening to this interview was a real treat for me, because it pointed out many ways in which the arts can interface, and that creativity is a way of life, not a hobby. (Seriously, this entire program is well worth a listen. You can listen or download this program here.)

Dayal said some interesting things during this interview, but one particular set of comments really struck home with me, and clarified my thinking about writers' blind spots about the other arts, and why so many writers so often fail at conveying the experience of being involved with music, of being immersed in the process of musical creation and performance. (Rock criticism, generally speaking, is even more full of clichéd rhetoric than poetry criticism.)

In Another Green World, only 5 out of 14 songs use lyrics, sung and/or spoken. Eno has been quoted as saying that the most important thing for him was to use the texture of the voice as a musical instrument; that the words don't mean that much to him, that the lyrics aren't even that important. The song's lyrics do add up to sentences, rather than random words, and they do mean something in themselves; but they're oblique, not foregrounded the way lyrics are in most songwriting: most of which tends to be about the music supporting or enhancing the meaning of the words. This is completely the opposite of that.

Dayal comments during the interview:

[Eno] was tired of this kind of hierarchy, of the voice being in the front. You have the singer in the front of the stage, the drummer in the back, you have a guitar player and a bass player. He wasn't into that any more. What he wanted was to sort of compress everything together, have everything be on the same level, have these sorts of layers.

I definitely think that one of the reasons why Eno is a particularly challenging person for rock critics to write about is simply because rock criticism really grew out of literary criticism, and poetry, in a lot of ways. There's a reason why so many people write about Bob Dylan: Dylan is somebody where you can really analyze the lyrics, and that's a comfortable place for a lot of writers to be.

Interviewer: And you don't have to write about the music.

Dayal: Writers, being writers, love talking about words. It makes sense. And so they love people like Bob Dylan, and you see Greil Marcus has written book after book after book about Bob Dylan! There's a reason why these really gifted writers go back to people like Dylan, or the Stones, or the Beatles, or whatever. When you have somebody who's like Brian Eno, who is saying "I really don't think the vocals are that important, I really don't think I'm that interested in the lyrics," it really stumps them. [laughter] Because they're like, then what do we write about? How are we going to say anything about this?

Now, for me, I spent many years just writing about pure electronic music. And so, I love writing about the sonics, about the sounds themselves. I got it, I understood. I actually prefer writing about someone like Eno, rather than breaking down and analyzing symbolism and meaning in rock lyrics.

I completely agree with this. I think Dayal has put her finger on a fundamental weakness of much music criticism, particularly about pop music genres. Writers, being writers, love talking about words. Fair enough, because that's both the drink and the essence of what writers do. But also, it creates this blind spot I'm talking about, in which writers are often stumped when trying to write about something that is not, or cannot be, contained in words; or is not made up of words.

Music criticism about symphonic literature is often metaphorical, even poetic, if you go back and read the classical music criticism of past centuries; yet the best of it discusses what the music evokes in the listener, and is more than mere descriptions or detailed historical notes. A lot of good rock criticism (Greil Marcus included) is about the history of the music itself: its roots, its origins, its lineage and results; it makes you understand the context of what you're listening to, as good criticism ought to do, deepening your experience of the art by surrounding your experience with complementary knowledge. But the best rock criticism (one thinks of Lester Bangs at times like this) re-creates the experience and power of the music in the reader—the way a poem needs to re-create the experience in the reader. In other ways, it's somatic, not merely cerebral: gutsy, not just intellectual.

There have been some great poems written about hearing the blues, to be sure—but that's an artist writing about art, not a critic writing about art.

My own background echoes Dayal's, as a writer: science-trained, involved with experimental music, non-verbal music, and avant-garde music, in whatever genre, including rock, from the beginning. I feel like I've finally encountered a rock critic who gets it, who understands my own viewpoint, because she seems to share it. (David Toop being one of the few others who gets it, and he himself being an avant-garde composer who's worked with Eno et al.) Most rock criticism, in my opinion and experience, is definitely word-fixated, I think largely for the reasons Dayal points out.

So writers tend to focus on the song lyrics—on the words—and don't have as much to say about the music. (I can analyze the music pretty readily—but I went to music school, where they shoved a lot more music theory down our throats than you could ever imagine, or desire to know about. Trust me on that one.) This leads directly to that blind spot writers have: in which they forget that songwriting is not writing, it is not a poetic form, it consists rather of the synergy of words-and-music together. Neither one complete without the other. The best songwriters raise the synergistic combination that is the song to much higher levels than either the song's melody or the song's words could attain alone, on their own. It's the synergy that matters. And that's why calling even great songwriters Poets, and building cults around their song lyrics as Poems, is absurd. You cannot analyze the words of a song, and ignore the music, and successfully comprehend the finished effect. They cannot be broken apart.

This goes a long way towards explaining the Cult of Bob Dylan, and the Cult of Leonard Cohen, in which both of these actually very good singer-songwriters are deifed into Poets—which they are not. Again and again it must be said, you can't really analyze a song lyric, purely as poetry, apart from the context of the music, which is the other part of the song. This is why many song lyrics, when presented as poems on the printed page, simply fall flat—or seem quaint and antiquated, with endless metrical end-rhymes. Those things pass by in the context of being sung, in the context of the music, but as words alone they can be trite. (Of course, saying any of this around members of the Cult of Dylan is unpopular, but it is nonetheless true. What Dayal says about those who write about Dylan is exactly correct.)

One way around writer's block

I typically don't get "writer's block." There are times when I don't write any poetry, or essays, or haibun, or creative nonfiction—my usual writerly modes. And there are other times when all I write seems like crap. But I am never not being creative. On a daily basis, I usually produce something, because for me creativity swtiches channels readily. If I am not doing poetry, I'm doing music, or visual art, or photography, or on-site land art sculpture, or weaving. Even when I'm feeling depressed, and the bleak winter weather has me down, I can still usually manage a haiku or a decent photo, or weave a dreamcatcher while watching some movie on DVD.

My experience, and practice, has long been based on a simple principle: creativity, by its very nature, is a matter of abundance rather than lack. There is no time when one is not exercising creativity. (Some of the mystical traditions would add, we are partaking in the Divine whenever we are being creative, because we are co-creating our lives, in partnership/unity with the Creator, the Godhead, the Divine Demiurge, whatever we want to call it.) Like mindfulness, creativity is something you can practice. Having access to one's creative Self is a birthright; it's always present, always available. Practice with it makes it more readily accessible to you, as a mode and tool.

Lest this sound too new-agey—which it's not, it's a very old idea in fact—here's an analogy that I find personally useful: the creative force of the universe is like an underground river of cold, black water, that one can dip into, or sink a well through rock into, to tap, and taste the clear, cold waters of life, creativity, and power. The river's always there, always flowing, underground; sometimes, in our peregrinations, we might wander into an area where the bedrock is thicker and harder, and the water's harder to get at—but the river's always there, and always will be.

So, beyond the simple fact that creativity is a mindset, a worldview, a way of meeting the world as an equal and partner in co-creation, there are also strategies for enhancing one's creativity, and tactics and strategies for getting unstuck.

One of my favorites is the Oblique Strategies, by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt. Originally published as a deck of cards, but now available online and in a freeware version you can run on your computer, to kick yourself in the astral, as necessary, thanks to my friend Gregory Taylor's site.

Here's the original preface by Eno and Schmidt: These cards evolved from our separate observations on the principles underlying what we were doing. Sometimes they were recognized in retrospect (intellect catching up with intuition), sometimes they were identified as they were happening, sometimes they were formulated.

They can be used as a pack (a set of possibilities being continuously reviewed in the mind) or by drawing a single card from the shuffled pack when a dilemma occurs in a working situation. In this case,the card is trusted even if its appropriateness is quite unclear. They are not final, as new ideas will present themselves, and others will become self-evident.

Some sample Oblique Strategies:

Honor thy error as a hidden intention

Do something boring

Abandon normal instruments

Remember those quiet evenings

What are the sections sectons of? Imagine a caterpillar moving

From nothing to more than nothing

There are over a hundred cards now. The idea is to draw one, and let it guide you, almost like an oracle. There's nothing mystical about this: it's a way to tap into intuition, hidden intentions, and let the unconscious mind (those deep black waters) feed you.