The Rhetorical Device Editorial Policy is a text by Jack Rusher, published here Monday, September 11, 2006. It is part of An Instruction Manual.
The plan, such as it is, for the future of this device.
Yesterday
I started the previous version of this website in late 2001 using a different domain name. It was a period of artistic frustration for me, and I thought that a website could work as a kind of scratch pad for music and prose that would otherwise end up stuffed in a real or virtual drawer. The contents page lists the surviving products of this activity: essays on random topics, short bits of narrative, prose poems, the occasional bit of actual verse, and a few songs.
It turned out to be more gratifying than I would have expected, but now, some years into this project, my goals have changed. I want to do a little more, something a little bigger, with this device.
Today
There’s a great deal of writing going on these days around the “blogosphere,” most of which is pretty dreadful. Some of this can be blamed on the form itself, which demands brevity and frequency. The earliest sites to build this kind of serial out-pouring were daily collections of links; many of the best ones still are.
1. This discussion leaves aside sites that are simply adjunct promotional efforts to offline businesses.
2. The best of these, like 3 Quarks Daily, The Morning News and Coudal Partners, are well-worth reading.
Amateur blogs have generally settled into two forms — naval-gaving diaries of teen angst and slap-dash, short-lived efforts to shout the latest catch phrase before everyone else does — while the more professional sites1 are a combination of traditional link-rolling with a magazine-like feature format2. There are notable exceptions, of course. Many sites are doing a good job of providing narrowly focused journalism (on food, for example), and in the general category FTrain (welcome back, Paul), Writing Static, Distorte, the Nonist, Erasing, Fireland and a few others are trying harder.
Tomorrow
Earlier this year I began to wonder if it’s possible to create a body of work online of sufficient artistic merit to warrant its survival beyond the death of the author. If this really is a new literary form, something different from a book but as full of possibilities, there must be a way to make something that good, something essentially book-like, but only possible using the unique properties of this form. The question, I realized, was essentially “what would a blog-shaped Don Quixote or Moby Dick be like?”
3. Some of them will be referred by a link from another website, some by a search engine, others by StumbleUpon (or whatever next year’s version of StumbleUpon turns out to be).
User-interface specialists, web-design gurus and the staff at McSweeney’s have all come to the conclusion that no one wants to read anything longer than 750 words on a computer screen. There’s much that can be done in that space, but it makes careful analysis and detailed exposition very difficult. Heavily compressed fiction holds up pretty well, but the longer essays I’ve tried to boil down to that length have failed. The only strategy that makes any sense to me is to subdivide longer pieces into chunks that can be read quickly in a single sitting. New readers, though, are likely to arrive randomly3 at any one these chunks without knowledge of whatever larger structure is in place. The pieces must be self-contained.
My plan, moving forward, is a series of short-form entries (both fiction and nonfiction), each of which is part of one or another of a set of larger collections. These collections will be related to their parts in the same way that a book is related to its chapters. This will require some careful user-interface finagling to help lead new readers to the other parts of a given work, and a bit of discipline and editing to make sure that the collections work as more than anthologies.
It won’t be easy. I expect to fail — repeatedly — but I hope, like Beckett, to fail better.