Because I am clearly not busy enough, I'm wondering about starting a dialogue series in which commercial writers (VG critics to begin with, I guess) discuss the formation and purpose of their and each other's styles - for example, whether you're conscious of having "a" style; whether your style reflects some bigger idea or principle; how things like class and education bear on how you write; how "marketable" you think you are; what your style tends to omit or struggle with, etc. The idea would be to understand and be understood, to point to the specificity of each other's writing, rather than praising or criticising one another. The way I see it working is that two people independently decide to write/record a conversation, perhaps excerpting pieces to discuss, then together choose a third to edit the transcript, which is published on a barebones wordpress blog or whatever when everybody's happy with it. As laidback and gentle a process as possible. Anyway, I'm off to bed now but am interested to hear thoughts about how this could run, and whether anybody's done anything similar.
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in reply to @EdwinEvansThirlwell's post:
I’ve thought a lot about doing a project like this! I really wanted to do a podcast back in the day a la “Waypoint Reads” where critics would come on, read something they wrote, and then we would talk about it and the craft. I do feel like there is a lack of this kind of discussion, at least I don’t have it much, and I would like to participate in more things like it whether on my own or with other people. I like the ideas of how this would go and the specificity being the point, rather than praising or criticizing. The big question I think is how “sustainable” this would be in terms of effort etc.
I'd certainly love to read/hear your thoughts on your own methods as a writer! Yes, making it sustainable is the big challenge. It could be crowd-funded to pay participants and hosting fees, though I doubt it would cover everybody's costs. I think it would need to be pretty informal and not at all target-driven - not to be deeply predictable in my choice of videogame metaphors, but I'm thinking of a Dark Soulsy critic's bonfire in the woods that is fundamentally open to everybody (with a tiny amount of gatekeeping to keep the trolls at bay), where people meet now and then to swap stories.
I like this as a panel format. Tricky, because it's more intimate than a reading group, which is already very intimate. I wonder if the moderator of a synchronous discussion isn't also in the room, because of that.
I'm reminded of a Substack I can no longer find whose author bluntly stated: pieces of writing with no identifiable genre will almost never be marketable, i.e. that genre pieces outcompete them. I found this reassuring; of course, experimental writing spoils discoverability, and desiring both is futile. Then there is a lot to be teased out about what any given genre or style is; the bulk of it being an oral tradition (!) that changes slowly, over decades and generations.
Yes, I think having an agreed third party sit in on a live conversation and moderate could be one way of doing it. I think it should be up to each set of writers to decide how they want to handle the discussion, but it could be that the archive includes some simple advice about e.g. how to ensure that privileged people who are more accustomed to being heard don't absent-mindedly talk over others.
I very much like the idea of style as a tradition and collective exercise myself - I'm aware that my framing above silos it off as a set of individual choices. I also don't mean to offer "marketability" as a positive - I'd like to hear people discuss their ways of interacting with market entities and how they think their work exists as part of commercial genres and power structures. For example, I think a lot nowadays about how my own commercial writing expresses or maps out the different sets of time constraints I have to work within to make a living. I guess one of the challenges this project might face is avoiding it becoming a "how to sell your writing" workshop! I've positioned it as for commercial writers, but it could absolutely include discussion of what people consider to be their experimental writing.