But it does seem a very internet-age thing. Intertextuality is everywhere; isn’t that what hyperlinks are a manifestation of? Even in the first paragraph of this blog post I’ve referenced, and linked to, two other websites, and two other books. The Internet doesn’t work without links; the web falls apart if we don’t constantly keep building it.

When Julia Kristeva coined the term “intertextuality” in the 1960s, she was using it to describe how “any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another.” A few years ago I started writing a book which is based entirely on this idea; the words and the story were all mine, but they were nothing without the framework given to me by the excerpts and ideas of others, from Dorothy L. Sayers to Gustave Flaubert.

I use the internet a lot. At work, at home, in between. I exist almost constantly in the online space even as I concurrently exist in the physical world. And what I can’t tell is this: do I write the way I do because we’re in a digital era? Or do I so enjoy the digital era because it adheres to the way I think ideas should function?

Chicken, egg. Either way, I think that hyperlinks and intertextuality – whether online or in print – are what makes ideas come alive.

Literature – by which I only mean consumable words, be they in books or articles or blog posts – polarises people, and because it’s consumed so voraciously, so constantly, and so publicly, opinions are expressed vociferously, and often as articulation of fact, not belief.

The question as a writer – and indeed as a consumer of writing – becomes: who do you trust? The critics who say writing should be about writing? The critics who say that it’s all about telling a damn good story? The critics who say it’s all about message and meaning? Or or the ones who say a piece of writing must have all of these components, and more?

Surely it shouldn’t matter – write what you want, says the voice of reason, and let the world be judge only after – but the truth of it is that it does matter. I’ve written about this before. It’s easy, even natural, to feel compelled to take some opinion or advice under consideration. No man is an island, as the saying goes, and what another man feels can be integral to the development of a piece of writing. The difficulty comes in discerning what, after all that, you actually feel about your own work. The storm that results when two opposing opinions converge upon a paragraph of yours obfuscates your own beliefs.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently. In a Books blog post on the Guardian website from 13th May, Andrew Gallix examines the work of Alain Robbe-Grillet, writing, “The reality of any work of art is its form, and to separate style from substance is to ‘remove the novel from the realm of art’. Art, Robbe-Grillet reminds us, is not just a pretty way of presenting a message: it is the message” (a sentiment which calls to mind Marshall McLuhan’s famous assertion that “the medium is the message”). In this case, simply by choosing to write, the author is making a statement – and a commitment to that statement.

Gallix ends his piece with these thoughts: “Whenever an author envisages a future book, ‘it is always a way of writing which first of all occupies his mind,’ which leads Robbe-Grillet to state – provocatively – that ‘the genuine writer has nothing to say. He has only a way of saying.’ Creative writing classes should always start and end on that note.”

There are several interesting points in these concluding sentences, the most obvious of which is Robbe-Grillet’s “provocative” suggestion that writing itself – not the message or the story – is the true form of art. I’m not sure how provocative this is really – when we read books and poems in school, aren’t we (ideally) taught to look at phrasing, structure, word choice? Literary criticism itself rarely begins with what an author is saying, but rather discovers what the author is saying by first investigating the author’s method – Joyce’s stream of consciousness, for instance, becomes a window into his work.

But it is provocative enough – even radical – in the context of popular culture. Story is often heralded as the be-all-and-end-all of “good” writing (good writing on its own being empty of meaning), or at least publishable writing. So perhaps to be reminded of Robbe-Grillet’s statement that “the genuine writer has nothing to say” is alarming indeed, for it indicates that we have lost our sense of what makes a novel a novel, or even a poem a poem or an essay an essay.

The key is in the second part of the assertion, that, “He [the genuine writer] has only a way of saying.” A way of saying. Superficially, a voice. But contained in that way of saying, that voice, is much more. Meaning, story, urgency. Recently I read a review in the Observer. “There are poets who have nothing to say but a feeling for words,” begins the the author. “There are poets who have something to say but no capacity to say it. And then, rarely, you read poems…that have a tremendous, unshowy intent. The feeling is that they needed to be written.” As one commentator on Gallix’s piece writes, “Style over substance? Affect over story? Count me out.”

For my part, I certainly would not be inclined to argue that we should write simply because we like the sound of our own voices, or that we find a particular phrase too pretty not to share – but to ignore the importance of pretty phrases in the context of a writer’s way of saying would be an enormous shame, because it would be to ignore the medium entirely.

A further interesting point in Gallix’s conclusion comes with the seemingly arbitrary inclusion of “creative writing classes” in his final sentence. In a way it reads as a glib jab at those would-be writers who want to “improve their craft” – a phrase which, by the way, I generally despise, but feel is appropriate here. Certainly the very first commentator on the post, who simply quotes Gallix’s “creative writing classes should always start and end on that note” and adds, “can’t they just end?”, seems to have read it that way. This interpretation seems to be validated by Gallix’s own response to the aforementioned comment. “That would be a more radical solution!”, he writes.

The meaning is appropriately ambiguous – radical in a positive or negative way? a solution to what? – but it does bring up some interesting ideas about the study of writing itself. Classes and courses around creative writing are easy to dismiss as pointless, even harmful. “Can’t they just end?” is a common enough sentiment, often spoken with a tone of intellectual superiority – which may be deserved, I don’t know. The implication here is, again, that writing should come naturally, that it shouldn’t matter what others say about it – write what you want in the way that you want, and it will either be good enough or not good enough.

But this is rarely the case. Good writing – whatever I may mean by that, and however you may interpret it – is rarely a completely isolated enterprise. On top of the fact that we are often heavily influenced by circumstance, context, experience, and other writers, there is also the simple fact that any author will edit and revise his work, often a number of times, and for better or worse, before publication or presentation. Sometimes, amidst all this, advice – an exchange of ideas, a reminder that we are not alone – can be immensely useful, especially before we have learned to completely trust our own instincts. Moreover, practice itself is valuable, and there are those (myself included) for whom a class or a writing group or a degree is a way to grant themselves permission to practice.

I have my own reservations about creative writing classes – and I say this as someone who holds a masters in the subject. But my reservations are different, mostly rooted in experience. It can be dangerous, for instance, to let too many vultures feast upon the carcass of your confidence. Helpful suggestions are not always helpful when they come too frequently, and too frequently unmediated. Furthermore it is not always productive, as an artist or an advocate or whatever else a writer may be, to overthink things. Too much time wallowing, too many conflicting opinions shared liberally, too much consideration, will ultimately only help you produce a work which is ambivalent at best. So I understand reservations about creative writing classes – I live those reservations.

But still such classes are not something to be eradicated. Consider what Gallix has written about Robbe-Grillet: “Every novel, according to Robe-Grillet, is a self-sufficient work of art which cannot be reduced to some external meaning or truth that is ‘known in advance’. ‘The New Novel,’ as he put it, ‘is not a theory, it is an exploration.’” And if we start to look at writing as an exploration, it starts to make sense that some of us choose to explore our writing in an exploratory context.

What this all really means is simply that, as a writer, you’ll never win. You’ll never be immune to hard-hitting criticism (though why would you want to be?). If you’re too rooted to the past, too ahead of your time, if a sentence is out of place or a particular word not exact enough, you’ll have someone saying so.

The interesting space is the space between these criticisms – and this, I think, is probably why we should write. Between one extreme and the other is a whole world ripe for exploration. It may be that Robbe-Grillet’s “New Novel” has progressed again – “far from representing a rejection of the past,” Gallix writes, “the quest for a new novel was…very much in keeping with the history of a genre which, by definition, must always be renewed”. The new “New Novel” is not necessarily the novel itself but the area around the novel; indeed, the novel has been flattened, expanded, and democratized. Maybe it’s the internet – I can go online and read a blog about a French writer and filmmaker I’d never before heard of and in a matter of hours create and “publish” my own response. We all have a say now; we’re all in a creative writing class, and even those of us who wish such classes could “just end” are participants in it.

So I say again: writers have it pretty hard. They (we?) are standing at the centre of a battleground. It’s noisy and nerve-wracking – but I can’t imagine a more exciting place to be.

Casting yourself as a victim is the antithesis of doing your work. Don’t do it. If you’re doing it, stop.

(From The War of Art by Steven Pressfield)

I have a lot of things running around in my slightly achy head today (in addition, of course, to snot). I’ve been picking through my newsfeeds, discovering articles I’d marked to read six months ago, and remembering why it is that I read stuff online: because reading stuff online is like a choose-your-own-adventure book.

It’s like this: you read someone’s blog, and there are so many links you could possibly click, so you choose one, and then that takes you somewhere else where there are still more links to click, or things to investigate, and you go on choosing until you find you’ve made a journey in your mind. That’s a good feeling; I’ll never give up reading books, and I like to peruse the weekend papers over a pint of cider in my local pub, but the beauty of internet-based reading is that special level of interactivity. I often feel like an explorer, an Egyptologist in a forgotten tomb, wandering down corridors and dusting off artifacts and forming an new picture in my head of how the world is.

So, let’s talk about blogs, and the internet. Because here we are in this funny world where these things are important. They’re important in new and exciting ways, and we’re all learning how to use them, and in the process, sometimes we mess up a bit. We become over-dependent, or rebelliously under-dependent. But there’s a lot of interesting writing happening around this idea.

Are there rules to blogging?

Apparently there are. In a roundabout way, via Academic, Hopeful, I arrived at this post by Penelope Trunk, of Brazen Careerist fame. In the post, she quotes Phil van Allen, a faculty member of the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena: “The most interesting blogs,” writes van Allen, echoing Trunk herself, “are focused and have a certain attitude.”

Trunk and van Allen also seem to agree that a blog is essential, “a way to let people know what you are thinking about the field that interests you.” Here’s Trunk at her tough-love best:

Each day you have to wake up and do something. So you have to guess where to aim. We are all just guessing. Make your best guess and keep going in that direction until you find something else. And your blog is an expression of that commitment to yourself to have direction, even as you doubt it.

I guess that if there are rules to blogging, and these are them, it’s safe to say I’ve broken them and maybe I’m breaking them now. Not deliberately, not maliciously, but because I haven’t been paying much attention to where I’m aiming. Sometimes it’s here, sometimes it’s there. No wonder I sit and stare out my study window so often feeling stretched thin.

But two comforting points also come from Trunk:

Blogging is about self-discovery
Blogging is about connections

When I wrote the “about” page for this blog, and I said, quoting the poet Louis MacNeice, that it was “incorrigibly plural,” I think in a lot of ways that I meant exactly what Trunk has said: it’s about self-discovery and about connections. And not necessarily in that order; usually, the self-discovery comes after the connections.

And why do we blog, anyway?

I spend some time–not a lot, but enough to notice it–trying to mentally defend blogging to myself. If something is public, you can’t just do it because you enjoy it, and I know that if all I enjoyed about blogging was the writing bit, I would write in a journal instead and keep it locked away.

But what I enjoy is the fact that in this weird internet world where I can spend an afternoon on the couch exploring other people’s virtual caves, it’s all about drawing links between ideas. We can do that now! All of us! Once it was a thing that only academics did; they wrote dissertations and books and gave complicated lectures. And now blogs have democratized this playful aspect of academia.

We may not all be as qualified or as educated but, in a comfortable online forum, we can play with ideas, and have conversations (overt or implied) about them, and through all of this play, maybe we go a little further down the path of self-discovery and maybe we figure out where to take aim and maybe we eventually figure out what it is we’re meant to be doing; or maybe not, maybe all that happens is that we have some fun and see the world a tiny bit differently, if even for an instant. It hardly matters; whatever happens, it’s powerful stuff.

But?

But maybe the best part of my monkey-mind afternoon is this: having read and thought all this stimulating stuff about the wonders of our age of connectivity, I stumbled upon Alain de Botton’s recent essay on distraction at the School of Life. “The past decade has seen an unparalleled assault on our capacity to fix our minds steadily on anything,” de Botton writes. “To sit still and think, without succumbing to an anxious reach for a machine, has become almost impossible.”

And that’s the tricky bit, isn’t it? The tricky bit is learning to absorb all this information, connect all these ideas in our heads–and then to step away, to unplug, to sit and to stew or to go for a good old fashioned brisk walk along the river or clean the kitchen or simply to have a drink and a hearty laugh with some mates. We’ll find the balance eventually.