The fun part about the Master of Fine Arts program is that you hear fun, profanity-laced catch phrases. This semester I’ve been introduced to “Make shit up” as a technique for fiction; “That shit better be true” as the barometer for non-fiction; and “Slow the fuck down” as it relates to the writing process.
Slow. The fuck. Down.
Apparently there is a school writing, pre-dating the blogosphere, where the words are considered art and not “content.” Where writers pour over text for days, months, weeks, and years; tweaking, editing, scrapping entire manuscripts and starting over, before even an editor (let alone an audience) can get a peek at what they are working on. The late David Foster Wallace said in the 1990s that television had produced a kind of lazy reader. One who didn’t want to do the mental work that came with slow reading of texts. With the lazy reader came the lazy writer, who produced solely for the sake of consumption, abandoning the art in favor of easy entertainment.
I wonder what Wallace would have to say about the blog and social media culture.
