#u_u

artist i have gotten art from several times: hey i would like money in exchange for art

I certainly agree that many contemporary authors have similarly self-harmed by regarding themselves as too sophisticated for plot. (Alternatively, some hifalutin novelists might fancy having a plot, but they’re rubbish at constructing one. Plotting is hard.) In our household, a formally inventive novel in which nothing happens constitutes fire-starter for our wood stove. Still, I myself belong to this sidelined class of ‘literary novelists’. Someone should stick up for us a tad, and I bet no one else in this magazine will volunteer. I know we’ve an often-well-earned rep as boring, pretentious, purposefully opaque and hard to read. But none of these qualities is definitive of my camp. The sole difference between standard commercial fiction and the convincingly literary kind is the prose. It’s all about language. I hasten to add that no book that I care to read is exclusively powered by good writing. Yet I’ve no use for fiction exclusively powered by plot, either. If the words on the page are flat, lifeless and mechanical – if they merely facilitate getting Johnny from the dining room to his car – I can’t read the book. If the prose is awkward, the grammar and punctuation dubious, the vocabulary either pedestrian or embarrassingly juiced up, I can’t read the book. I can’t read for enjoyment in a state of active pain. For one of the only creative writing aphorisms I’ve ever coined runs: ‘If you don’t say something well, you haven’t said it at all.’ Type ‘war is sad’ and you have communicated exactly nothing.

Is there a reason why you’re held hostage or is it like a metaphor for somethings