Tones of Voice, Types of Talk

Why no one reads your poems, while everyone waits on a verdict - a system with a chart.

The blank page is a place where anything can happen. The world is a place where very specific things have happened. The writer stands between the two and negotiates.

A writer is a bullshit factory. Or a bullshit fountain - it depends on how the day is going. Historically, for the writer, it’s worked out about as well as you might expect. There’s a lot of suffering, a lot of madness, a lot of bewildered loved ones, a lot of suicides.

It’s not entirely the writer’s fault. Some of it has to do with the material itself, language. Working closely with the substance that also shapes your own mind is full of risks. It’s like how the alchemists of yore would die of mercury poisoning. Language is corrosive. Language is perfidious. Who could build an apartment block out of sulfuric acid? Or a shopping mall out of weasels? And if they did, how well would they be doing afterwards?

Who do you think you are?

Writing is a dangerous business. To survive, you have to stop what you’re doing and ask, what am I doing? Who am I doing it for? What am I trying to effect? And lastly, who the hell do I think I am? The last question is more important than it seems.

The answer to all those questions, especially the last, can be found in what one chooses to write.

To help, I’ve developed the beginning of a chart of all forms of public written expression. And as you’ll see, I’m garbage at charts.

What defines every utterance

The scale below divides each category of public written expression in terms of how it operates in the social world (America, 2024), based on essentially two things

1. What the reader is putting on the line:

   1. the time that each type of writing assumes the reader has for it

   2. the amount of interpretation the piece asks from the reader

2. What the author is putting on the line:

   1. their personal responsibility for writing it

   2. their personal culpability for sharing it

Copyright 2024 Colin Dodds. - nohomework.substack.com - not for reuse without attribution

The staircase above could have more entries, making it more of a scatter chart. A street sign, for example, could perch in the upper-left-hand area. Religious scripture on the other hand, might land in the lower-right-hand area. But I wanted to start the conversation with as near to a clear hierarchy as possible.

The taxonomy of genres

I will start from the genres that allow the least time allowed for the reader, offer the least room for interpretation and come with the most responsibility taken by the author. This end, you could call fatal.