Solid gold creativity

I’ve been excavating the internet without realising it.  Actually it’s the “blogosphere,” but I refuse to use that word.  Conjures up visions of a lot of hot gas circling in a screwed-down dome.  And accuracy alone is not a good enough raison d’etre for a word.  So I’m sticking to “internet.”

A few weeks ago, you may remember, I found myself in the primordial swamp of crafters.  All moist and humid, and populated by single-celled organisms bent on reproduction.

Well, the other night I found myself in the Shale Layer.  This is the layer occupied by the hard and flinty types selling their ideas, their books, their writing advice.  People like the Seth Godins and the recently-crowned winner of the Best Writing Blog for the fourth year running, Brian Clark of CopyBlogger.  What’s remarkable about this realm is the sameness and quality of the writing.  Whatever the product, the writing is uniformly spare, tensionless and utterly pragmatic. 

Take CopyBlogger as an example.  This is a site chock full of “how to” and articles like:

• The 7 Deadly Sins of Blogging
• The # 1 Conversation Killer in Your Copy (And How to Beat It)
• Ernest Hemingway’s Top 5 Tips for Writing Well: “Use short sentences … Use short first paragraphs …”

It’s all good stuff if you’re on a mission to increase sales or blog hits or whatever.  Provided you only read it for 10 minutes.   Tops.  Because if you read this kind of stuff for more than 10 minutes, you’ll feel like you’re having your brain vacuumed out.  It’s the flatness, the smoothness that’ll kill you. 

I think it was George Orwell who talked about the pre-fab language that gets knocked together like the sides of a chicken coop or hen house.  He was talking about cliché at the time if I remember rightly.  But he could just as well have been talking about a new kind of pre-fab.  A type of writing so pre-fab, so pre-masticated, that it leaves the reader with absolutely nothing to do.  It might move the reader’s eyeballs from the top of the screen to the bottom in the fastest, most inexorable way, but does it engage the reader?  Does the reader actually care?

I wonder if some of this writing could not achieve better results if it also incorporated a dash of what the early 20th century linguists like Jakobson and Shklovsky called “de-familiarisation” or “making strange.”  Because to my mind, the writing that works best for galvanising an audience is fast and smooth, yes, but it also needs to stick in the craw a little.  It’s writing that gives the reader just the right amount of something to do.

There are a few nuggets of rose quartz amongst the shale.  People who are in the marketing game, but who give a little and take risks as well.  People who do use a dash of making strange.  I came across one the other day called Havi Brooks of The Fluent Self (“When you need some destuckification.”)  You’ve got to admire the chutzpah of a young woman who looks no more than 25, who can “download a whole system” of therapeutic thought via a “series of meditations” and cross the world to sell it in the US.

As for an antidote to an excess of the Shale Layer, well, this time it’s not Nabokov.  Haven’t worked it out yet.  All I know is that it’s got to be English.  Deeply deeply English.

*****

Image: Louise Psihoyos/CORBIS: Graduate student fills in locations of dinosaur bones found in quarry