Great storytelling, maybe you should write a book or something? (joke)
Replace the train with a bus and you have a fairly similar depiction of the 6 months I spent working at a tech company the summer before last. I'm not ashamed to say that I used to hate every minute of it, and kept it as fuel for the fire that led to my current situation of working from wherever I want to indefinitely,
The number 8 bus, which went from city to it's edge where I worked, was also the only bus that stopped outside the hospital, which meant that everyday I was packed in tight with the cities most sickly and sweaty, coughing and spluttering all over a poorly ventilated bus with fogged up windows and an aggressively poor driver behind the wheel.
Gives me the shivers just thinking about it.
Love the approach of this article - I could feel every bit of it as if I had lived it myself. And it's inspired a great deal of gratitude for the fact that I didn't have to get up and venture out of my house this morning, and that I'm sitting at home, at my desk, coffee machine within reach, smalltalk with coworkers a memory of the past, writing a comment on an article with no boss walking behind my desk asking me for an update on how the EMEA data processing is coming along.
So thank you for that. I'll be riding that buzz all day.
Great article as always Tom, looking forward to the next.
Glad you enjoyed the piece, I wanted to try something a little different and use it as a sneaky way of getting non-fiction readers used to the idea of my prose. According to the metrics it has been a notable failure so far. Hahaha.
But the people who I *want* to have liked it seemed to which is all that matters. I’m close to that point know where the audience here is established enough that I can maintain and try new things rather than be focused on ‘growth’ like all the other internet guys.
Anyway, thanks for the encouragement mate, it’s much appreciated.
No problem mate. That's unfortunate about the metrics, but I'm glad that your audience seems to have picked up the early stages of the snowball and you can afford to play around a bit.
I can tell from the little snippet of prose here, and from the pieces on your website, that I'll like the longer form works. I'm not a critic, but there's a wonderful flow and feeling of personality from your writing, which I imagine isn't an easy thing to cultivate. You could pick it out as being yours in a couple paragraphs.
I also appreciate that it's not written in that staccato, copywriting style that's all over the internet. Lowest common denominator prose is everywhere these days, and those that shoot in the other direction tend to shag it (looking at you Franzen).
I don’t mind about the metrics, and I have also been ignoring world events so it is quite possible that there has been something happen over the last day or so that has made more people not want to look at their emails. Who knows?
It may be controversial but I think with writing style needs to come before substance, or the substance be a result of style in a sense, so I’m pleased that my prose is identifiable. Seems strange to me how everyone has gone in for that same copywriter style. Boring. But, to spin it positively, it’s yet another chance for me to stand out and create a space for myself.
Whatever percentage of people decide to join me in that is largely immaterial, as long as it is some. And that is the way that things seem to be heading, fingers crossed.
Could well be - there's some idea behind the 18th being known as Blue Monday, otherwise known as 'the most depressing day of the year'. Where science begins and marketing ends on this one I'm not sure, but it's certainly a plausible reason for people avoiding emails and reading and going for 'comfort content' instead?
It is strange. I appreciate that people have split up their paragraphs into smaller blocks for the sake of screen readability, but most writing is business writing. Maybe it's because most of the writing people do is group chat messages, tweets and Instagram captions, who knows.
I think so, micro-communities of true fans for a small number of eclectic, individualistic authors seems to be the way it's going, and I'm delighted to see it happen in realtime.
I think one culprit is the Wordpress readability thing, whatever it’s called.
I remember once as a little challenge to myself deciding to see if I could get an outstanding score on it- green smiley faces for comprehension, paragraph length, average sentence length etc.
The resulting A* piece was pure copywriter, business fluff. I had to delete it.
Whereas conversely the piece that I’m told were my best over their all had amber if not angry read readability scores- Sentences starting with the same word (you know, like a rhetorical device. Like I know what I am doing), longer paragraphs and sentences at times, bigger words, sections over 300 words, less subheadings etc.
You have to have decker me to with such things and focus on the greater good. I believe the situation is, at least in part, yet another example of people being led astray by metrics.
Grammarly? There's another one called Hemingway Editor, but they all more or less accomplish the same thing it seems, which is to iron out all sense of individual style. Good for selling fat burner pills not for Art.
"Sentences starting with the same word (you know, like a rhetorical device. Like I know what I am doing), longer paragraphs and sentences at times, bigger words, sections over 300 words, less subheadings etc."
Precisely the point. Just stick to correcting my typos magical AI robot, I'll handle the prose. Metrics and gamification, trying to beat the "readability score" game. It amazes me how susceptible we all are to it.
Love this "novelization" approach of a mundane subject... Totally in tune with your "embrace the ordinary" ethos... It's funny how people (and writers themselves) often think that a good novel must talk about extraordinary lives and extraordinary things. The most famous living French author must be Houellebecq and he talks about stuff so mundane it even makes the "regular" mundane fun... And yet he's a great author. Lesson in there, as they say on Twitter. I can think of many other incredible authors who've done just the same... John Fante's Ask the dust for instance. Willy Vlautin, that I discovered thanks to you; Denis Johnson, etc. Even one of the most famous French novelists, Flaubert, often talked about simple persons and their mundane lives; after all, Madame Bovary is the story of an idle petit-bourgeois woman in the suburbs of Nantes - who does nothing all day. Flaubert is also famously known for having wanted to write a novel about "the nothing". What a goal, right ?
It's funny, but a few years back I was working in Paris and my morning commute would consist of walking for a few minutes to my subway station, hop in the packed wagon, travel for two stations than take a connection to another line, travel for 30 more minutes to the outskirts of the city and then walk again for 10 minutes to my job. You'd think this was such a mundane trip I'd forget about it all? Well, those trips are amongst my most vivid memories of this period. Maybe it's the repetition, I don't know. But if I remember it this well, there's no denying my brain deemed it something constituant. What's even more funny is that I was usually too fresh out of bed in the morning and too tired in the evening to do anything "productive" during this commute (motivation Twitter about to crucify me). So everyday I had about 2 hours of void, something like a pression/decompression chamber that marked out the boundaries of the day. And I feel like a majority of people are experiencing the same reality in the big cities. There's a great novel to be written that could speak to all of these people. But it's hard. You can be an average writer and write about fantasy kingdoms, dragons and sorcerers. You can be average and write a raunchy cliché story about a shop assisstant falling in love with a millionaire playboy. But to write well on these everyday subjects takes talent, creativity, a sensibility and an attention to the hidden meanings in details most do not have. When I've read this newsletter I thought you, out of all writers, had what it takes to do it.
Thanks again for these lovely weekly free newsletters, and count me in for the beer-tap squad.
The thing that I am noticing, the more I think about it, is how effectively all of contemporary reality is pretty much ‘up for grabs’ as setting and subject matter.
The market is drowning in fantasy and sci-fi and violence and escapism but the offices, buses, flats and mass tourism holiday spots where we actually live our lives go largely unnoticed and unspoken about. It’s a blank canvas, virgin territory. And as you say some great, great writers such as Flaubert made excellent use of the equivalent places of their own times.
I suppose the argument would go that someone doesn’t want to be on the train reading a novel about an identical, drab train journey but my bet is that if you can do it right you can spark recognition in the reader and thus slightly change how they perceive their own actual environment. Similar to the effect that poetry can have. Of course it takes a lot of skill. But I’m gonna give it a bash you know.
I suspect if I can marry such ideas with a style that makes you turn the page and keep the whole thing short (I think novella length works are also something that is neglected and should be reappraised in this current landscape) I may be on to a winner. Time will tell.
Writers have always chosen the format the gatekeepers asked from them; in the 19th century everyone was writing serials and short stories, because it was the required format for newspapers. Novels were less common by then.
I think novella lenghth works have only been neglected these past years because the publishing houses don't like it(bad ROI for them), not because the audience doesn't want it. With self-publishing, it is bound for a comeback; instead of one doorstop book every 4 years, you can publish 2-3 shorter ones; more revenues to the author and more stories to the reader.
Just looking at what I like as a consumer it’s clear that pocket sized books are the way, like the old orange penguins. Cheap, accessible and don’t insult your intelligence while not being afraid to entertain you like Orwell, Graham Greene, Sillitoe and all of those other mid 20th c Penguin authors. That’s the reference point to me.
And if you look at the books that most kids are made to read at school that they end up tolerating/liking- things like Animal Farm, Of Mice And Men etc- they are all novella length.
It all seems obvious and there for the picking to me...
Great writing Thomas. You're talking about something that is often on my mind. Should art reflect the norms of the day? As a visual artist/cartoonist, and more importantly as a 'traditionalist', I have a certain perspective. If I were to draw a museum, for example, would I draw a beautiful 19th century masterpiece, or some soulless modern glass & concrete box? I think it's possible to be an artist of 'the ordinary' without immersing people in yet more of the ugliness that has been foisted upon us all. I know I sound terribly black & white - and I do think I'd like to feature elements of modernity in my work and stories, but only to pillory it.
It’s all about discernment, you need to nod to the ordinary and the modern and so on without wallowing in it or drowning your audience in it. But ultimately your intuition will tell you the approach.
Have you read/ looked at much or Will Eisner’s work? His New York: Life In The Big City might be of help to you...
I've read his masterpiece, "The Contract With God" trilogy which is all stories about life in NYC in the early c20th, but I had no idea of the existence of the Graphic Novel you mention. Thanks for the reminder! And thanks for reminding me of Eisner as I'm currently looking for reference materials about the mechanics of visual storytelling, and his book Sequential Storytelling is now top of the next pile.
Thomas, only you could turn a morning commute into a Dickens-ish novel. I could picture the American perceived English dreariness but mixed with an artfulness of what we also perceive to be the ubiquitous 'charming English countryside'. Reminded me of the old Police tune Synchronicity II. Well written, Sir.
I’m a big believer in the motto ‘show, don’t tell’ both in writing and in life. I’ve been saying for a while that ordinary things can be interesting if seen in the right light. I’ve been *telling* you that. I thought it was time to *show* you.
Great storytelling, maybe you should write a book or something? (joke)
Replace the train with a bus and you have a fairly similar depiction of the 6 months I spent working at a tech company the summer before last. I'm not ashamed to say that I used to hate every minute of it, and kept it as fuel for the fire that led to my current situation of working from wherever I want to indefinitely,
The number 8 bus, which went from city to it's edge where I worked, was also the only bus that stopped outside the hospital, which meant that everyday I was packed in tight with the cities most sickly and sweaty, coughing and spluttering all over a poorly ventilated bus with fogged up windows and an aggressively poor driver behind the wheel.
Gives me the shivers just thinking about it.
Love the approach of this article - I could feel every bit of it as if I had lived it myself. And it's inspired a great deal of gratitude for the fact that I didn't have to get up and venture out of my house this morning, and that I'm sitting at home, at my desk, coffee machine within reach, smalltalk with coworkers a memory of the past, writing a comment on an article with no boss walking behind my desk asking me for an update on how the EMEA data processing is coming along.
So thank you for that. I'll be riding that buzz all day.
Great article as always Tom, looking forward to the next.
Maybe I should, Conor, maybe I should...
Glad you enjoyed the piece, I wanted to try something a little different and use it as a sneaky way of getting non-fiction readers used to the idea of my prose. According to the metrics it has been a notable failure so far. Hahaha.
But the people who I *want* to have liked it seemed to which is all that matters. I’m close to that point know where the audience here is established enough that I can maintain and try new things rather than be focused on ‘growth’ like all the other internet guys.
Anyway, thanks for the encouragement mate, it’s much appreciated.
No problem mate. That's unfortunate about the metrics, but I'm glad that your audience seems to have picked up the early stages of the snowball and you can afford to play around a bit.
I can tell from the little snippet of prose here, and from the pieces on your website, that I'll like the longer form works. I'm not a critic, but there's a wonderful flow and feeling of personality from your writing, which I imagine isn't an easy thing to cultivate. You could pick it out as being yours in a couple paragraphs.
I also appreciate that it's not written in that staccato, copywriting style that's all over the internet. Lowest common denominator prose is everywhere these days, and those that shoot in the other direction tend to shag it (looking at you Franzen).
I don’t mind about the metrics, and I have also been ignoring world events so it is quite possible that there has been something happen over the last day or so that has made more people not want to look at their emails. Who knows?
It may be controversial but I think with writing style needs to come before substance, or the substance be a result of style in a sense, so I’m pleased that my prose is identifiable. Seems strange to me how everyone has gone in for that same copywriter style. Boring. But, to spin it positively, it’s yet another chance for me to stand out and create a space for myself.
Whatever percentage of people decide to join me in that is largely immaterial, as long as it is some. And that is the way that things seem to be heading, fingers crossed.
Could well be - there's some idea behind the 18th being known as Blue Monday, otherwise known as 'the most depressing day of the year'. Where science begins and marketing ends on this one I'm not sure, but it's certainly a plausible reason for people avoiding emails and reading and going for 'comfort content' instead?
It is strange. I appreciate that people have split up their paragraphs into smaller blocks for the sake of screen readability, but most writing is business writing. Maybe it's because most of the writing people do is group chat messages, tweets and Instagram captions, who knows.
I think so, micro-communities of true fans for a small number of eclectic, individualistic authors seems to be the way it's going, and I'm delighted to see it happen in realtime.
I think one culprit is the Wordpress readability thing, whatever it’s called.
I remember once as a little challenge to myself deciding to see if I could get an outstanding score on it- green smiley faces for comprehension, paragraph length, average sentence length etc.
The resulting A* piece was pure copywriter, business fluff. I had to delete it.
Whereas conversely the piece that I’m told were my best over their all had amber if not angry read readability scores- Sentences starting with the same word (you know, like a rhetorical device. Like I know what I am doing), longer paragraphs and sentences at times, bigger words, sections over 300 words, less subheadings etc.
You have to have decker me to with such things and focus on the greater good. I believe the situation is, at least in part, yet another example of people being led astray by metrics.
Grammarly? There's another one called Hemingway Editor, but they all more or less accomplish the same thing it seems, which is to iron out all sense of individual style. Good for selling fat burner pills not for Art.
"Sentences starting with the same word (you know, like a rhetorical device. Like I know what I am doing), longer paragraphs and sentences at times, bigger words, sections over 300 words, less subheadings etc."
Precisely the point. Just stick to correcting my typos magical AI robot, I'll handle the prose. Metrics and gamification, trying to beat the "readability score" game. It amazes me how susceptible we all are to it.
Love this "novelization" approach of a mundane subject... Totally in tune with your "embrace the ordinary" ethos... It's funny how people (and writers themselves) often think that a good novel must talk about extraordinary lives and extraordinary things. The most famous living French author must be Houellebecq and he talks about stuff so mundane it even makes the "regular" mundane fun... And yet he's a great author. Lesson in there, as they say on Twitter. I can think of many other incredible authors who've done just the same... John Fante's Ask the dust for instance. Willy Vlautin, that I discovered thanks to you; Denis Johnson, etc. Even one of the most famous French novelists, Flaubert, often talked about simple persons and their mundane lives; after all, Madame Bovary is the story of an idle petit-bourgeois woman in the suburbs of Nantes - who does nothing all day. Flaubert is also famously known for having wanted to write a novel about "the nothing". What a goal, right ?
It's funny, but a few years back I was working in Paris and my morning commute would consist of walking for a few minutes to my subway station, hop in the packed wagon, travel for two stations than take a connection to another line, travel for 30 more minutes to the outskirts of the city and then walk again for 10 minutes to my job. You'd think this was such a mundane trip I'd forget about it all? Well, those trips are amongst my most vivid memories of this period. Maybe it's the repetition, I don't know. But if I remember it this well, there's no denying my brain deemed it something constituant. What's even more funny is that I was usually too fresh out of bed in the morning and too tired in the evening to do anything "productive" during this commute (motivation Twitter about to crucify me). So everyday I had about 2 hours of void, something like a pression/decompression chamber that marked out the boundaries of the day. And I feel like a majority of people are experiencing the same reality in the big cities. There's a great novel to be written that could speak to all of these people. But it's hard. You can be an average writer and write about fantasy kingdoms, dragons and sorcerers. You can be average and write a raunchy cliché story about a shop assisstant falling in love with a millionaire playboy. But to write well on these everyday subjects takes talent, creativity, a sensibility and an attention to the hidden meanings in details most do not have. When I've read this newsletter I thought you, out of all writers, had what it takes to do it.
Thanks again for these lovely weekly free newsletters, and count me in for the beer-tap squad.
The thing that I am noticing, the more I think about it, is how effectively all of contemporary reality is pretty much ‘up for grabs’ as setting and subject matter.
The market is drowning in fantasy and sci-fi and violence and escapism but the offices, buses, flats and mass tourism holiday spots where we actually live our lives go largely unnoticed and unspoken about. It’s a blank canvas, virgin territory. And as you say some great, great writers such as Flaubert made excellent use of the equivalent places of their own times.
I suppose the argument would go that someone doesn’t want to be on the train reading a novel about an identical, drab train journey but my bet is that if you can do it right you can spark recognition in the reader and thus slightly change how they perceive their own actual environment. Similar to the effect that poetry can have. Of course it takes a lot of skill. But I’m gonna give it a bash you know.
I suspect if I can marry such ideas with a style that makes you turn the page and keep the whole thing short (I think novella length works are also something that is neglected and should be reappraised in this current landscape) I may be on to a winner. Time will tell.
Writers have always chosen the format the gatekeepers asked from them; in the 19th century everyone was writing serials and short stories, because it was the required format for newspapers. Novels were less common by then.
I think novella lenghth works have only been neglected these past years because the publishing houses don't like it(bad ROI for them), not because the audience doesn't want it. With self-publishing, it is bound for a comeback; instead of one doorstop book every 4 years, you can publish 2-3 shorter ones; more revenues to the author and more stories to the reader.
My thoughts exactly.
Just looking at what I like as a consumer it’s clear that pocket sized books are the way, like the old orange penguins. Cheap, accessible and don’t insult your intelligence while not being afraid to entertain you like Orwell, Graham Greene, Sillitoe and all of those other mid 20th c Penguin authors. That’s the reference point to me.
And if you look at the books that most kids are made to read at school that they end up tolerating/liking- things like Animal Farm, Of Mice And Men etc- they are all novella length.
It all seems obvious and there for the picking to me...
Great writing Thomas. You're talking about something that is often on my mind. Should art reflect the norms of the day? As a visual artist/cartoonist, and more importantly as a 'traditionalist', I have a certain perspective. If I were to draw a museum, for example, would I draw a beautiful 19th century masterpiece, or some soulless modern glass & concrete box? I think it's possible to be an artist of 'the ordinary' without immersing people in yet more of the ugliness that has been foisted upon us all. I know I sound terribly black & white - and I do think I'd like to feature elements of modernity in my work and stories, but only to pillory it.
It’s all about discernment, you need to nod to the ordinary and the modern and so on without wallowing in it or drowning your audience in it. But ultimately your intuition will tell you the approach.
Have you read/ looked at much or Will Eisner’s work? His New York: Life In The Big City might be of help to you...
Totally agree.
I've read his masterpiece, "The Contract With God" trilogy which is all stories about life in NYC in the early c20th, but I had no idea of the existence of the Graphic Novel you mention. Thanks for the reminder! And thanks for reminding me of Eisner as I'm currently looking for reference materials about the mechanics of visual storytelling, and his book Sequential Storytelling is now top of the next pile.
No problem, Omar. A nice little bit of serendipity there.
Sequential storytelling is considered a classic, might pick up my own copy now we mention it.
Thomas, only you could turn a morning commute into a Dickens-ish novel. I could picture the American perceived English dreariness but mixed with an artfulness of what we also perceive to be the ubiquitous 'charming English countryside'. Reminded me of the old Police tune Synchronicity II. Well written, Sir.
Thanks, Chief. Kind of you to say.
I’m a big believer in the motto ‘show, don’t tell’ both in writing and in life. I’ve been saying for a while that ordinary things can be interesting if seen in the right light. I’ve been *telling* you that. I thought it was time to *show* you.
Cheers.