The Meaningful Sentence

When a writer has, as I have, an irrational fear of writing without saying something worth saying or what I call prattlephobia, it is the focus of the writing exercise to create meaningful sentences. If that focus puzzles the reader, I strongly recommend Ludwig Wittgenstein's work on the logic of language and meaning in his 'Philosophical Investigations'. Otherwise, please read on.
What is a meaningful sentence? It is an approximate solution to a problem in combining idea, lexicon, and syntax. If there is insufficient idea, it is a failed solution. It does not say anything. If the dictates of the market requires a lexicon insufficient to express the nuance of what the writer is saying, it is a failed solution. It does not say enough. If the writer lacks the talent and skill to manage the manipulation of syntax, it is a failed solution. It does not communicate anything.
However one may excuse solution failures in lexicon and syntax, there is no excuse for a sentence not saying anything. If the writer has nothing to say, don't write. Read and maybe an idea will germinate. The craft of writing consists, as far as I am concerned, in creating meaningful sentences that build meaningful stories.

The Art of Saying Something Worth Saying

I'm going to begin this blog by saying that fiction is not well suited to serious thought as such. I can think of very few exceptions to this observation, Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame in which he inserts a brilliant essay on architecture, culture, and technology in media res being one of them. He manages to do this with style and success, but as far as I am concerned the exceptions prove the rule. I tried to include thoughtful digressions in my novella, 'Chances', with notably poor results.
While it is possible to have reservations about nonfiction, historians spinning facts, theory laden volumes of science, fiction is just fiction. It is a vignette frozen in time of a specific state of imagination and not a vehicle for polemics. My working definition is that legitimate fiction is a valuable vision of the possible which entertains. It is an examination and hypothesis of human conditions of existence but it should not be approached with grandiose personal narratives of the genius of the author as thinker. Genius in fiction lies in elegant, evocative sentences that say something worth saying about human beings. Fiction is, after all, the most humane of written works.

A Sketch is Not a Blueprint.

When I plan a work I want a free-form vehicle to take the story from conflict to resolution. What I do not want is a rigid structure that micromanages my prose. While the romantic image of a novelist just sitting down at a typewriter and tapping out the Great American Novel is amusing indeed, there does, if the planning is done correctly, come such a moment when one simply 'Writes'. That is the objective of proper planning.
To get to that point of 'Writing', I begin by sketching paragraph topics, scene by scene, with a sense of chapter endings and beginnings. I then develop these topics into full paragraphs and those paragraphs into pages of content draft. By doing it this way, I maximize my creativity in the moment while maintaining my narrative structure, while making sense. This content draft is the underlying structure of the book which I then transform, by 'Writing', into a rough draft of some literary merit, of some style.
A novel is a complex and difficult form but it does reduce at some point of experience to a magic mix of what the author said and how they said it. Sketching a work allows that magic to happen. Blueprinting it denies such possibility.

Method and Meaning

How one writes ultimately depends on one's predispositions and abilities. I prefer a loose structure to my writing. I may be and, in fact, am guilty of overthink but I never overplan. That destroys spontaneity and, to me, being creative in the moment defines the practice of meaningful storytelling. I could comprehensively outline a competent story with a valuable moral but, then, in writing it I would be filling in the blanks. Some writers can pull that off with style. I cannot. I like to turn the English language loose and go where it leads me. That results in elegant sentences that say something and that is my concept of excellence.
Next week I will detail how I plan a work to maximize my creativity.

A Work in Progress

Seven years ago I gave up writing seriously for a time, producing in those years only a short story, 'The Railers'. I felt at the time that, given my morbid fear of writing without saying anything, I did not know enough within the framework of current thought to write even a forgettable contemporary novel. So I delved deep into current thought, starting with 'middlebrow' compendiums and moving to source documents such as journal reports and original works. I completed that major task about two years ago and, while still filling gaps in my knowledge base, I began, as Carnap put it, 'thinking the world' with this new information. I began integrating all of this material into a coherent world view.
As I proceeded in this project, I blogged this integration as I accomplished it. The record exists in my old blogs of that integration. I am now confident enough in my intellectual processes to begin to write a science fiction adventure set in the near future, acknowledgements to Philip K. Dick's 'Blade Runner' which was written over fifty years ago.
My Work in Progress, tentatively titled 'Out of Paradiso', is scratching and clawing its way through the crystallizing but chaotic web of information in my brain and into existence. It is a slow go and I intend to keep interested readers informed of its progress.

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An Appreciation of a Postmodern Political Economy

What differentiates a postmodern political economy from a modern one? The modern political economy is defined by fixed geopolitical borders, an autonomous legal system, a societal narrative, and the evolved institutions necessary to secure these elements. The postmodern political economy is defined as a functional unit of human material existence engaged in rational optimization as expressed in a market and its purview which encompasses all products and services whose relative value is directly established by that market and is the effective range of its value calculus or currency/currencies and the narratives, conventions, and institutions necessary to ensure contract performance.
The actual result of each of these political economies resemble each other but the orientation of each differs enormously. Modern orientation is irrational and ad hoc. Postmodern orientation is rational, inscrutable, and systematic. They are different intellectual universes and they are in coincidence which causes much confusion. Even as the theoretical basis of the postmodern political economy comes into being, the narratives of the modern political economy are shown to be insufficient to conserve humankind and the universe in a satisfactory manner.
The essential difference between these two systems is their view of markets. Modern political economies consider markets incidental and temporary necessary evils to the good of the Triumph of Reason. Postmodern political economies consider markets the demiurge that creates order out of chaos. People who engage in market behavior do so in a manner of rational optimization to some end. That does not mean markets are rational. As any market maven will tell you, they do not always behave rationally. They are inscrutable.
Certain research points out that there appears to be deterministic chaos in the behavior of markets. That is no reason to write them off. That would be as hallucinatory to the human condition as considering the Invisible Hand of the market to be the hand of God. The reality is that existence is a shifting dynamic of order and chaos. Sometimes markets are models of rationality. Sometimes they're not.
The defining difference between these two lies in their intellectual cultures. The Grand Narrative of Western Civilization is in abeyance, having been found wanting in World War 1. It is inadequate to modern technology. The science that has replaced it is heuristic and ad hoc and unsatisfactory to the nature of the universe that it is in the process of uncovering. The intellectual culture of postmodern political economies holds narratives to be incidental strategies in game play. To repeat myself, these are different universes.
To engage in postmodern economics is to deny the Triumph of Reason as a human possibility and to accept the inscrutable nature of a reality forged from chaos. It is to consider society a system of individuals engaged in such tasks through the magic of markets and, like all federalist systems, subject to checks and balances.
This is a Great Age of Transition and while it is likely that we will lose our way, it is important that we keep our eyes on the prize of the greater good for the greater number while respecting human life and liberty,

A Living Wage and Rational Material Existence

First, two tenets of rational material existence:
1. Markets exist as an expression of human social existence. They are absurd in any other context.
2. Human social existence, although bounded by scarcity including a lack of meaning, is by definition humane, concerned with human values.
This being said, no market based economy can be inhumane except as an expression of the madness of crowds. Economies can be insane. This economy of the United States is by analysis and anecdote a little mad and getting worse. There is one obvious problem that is driving this maniac market.
People working 40 hours a week who cannot afford the necessities of life is lunacy. I do not care what profit margins are cited or what competition exists, this is crazy. We knew in the late 19th century that innovation and economic dislocation go hand in hand. We knew that progress has a price. We knew that a living wage defined rational material existence.
Have we gotten so technologically delirious that we have forgotten the hard lessons so dearly earned? The numbers the market is generating are funny numbers. They are so because we have no reliable gauge of real employment, the kind where the employed person can eat, can adjust to changing conditions, can afford decent housing.
Without a humane bottom to a market based economy, that economy is inhumane, that economy is absurd, that economy is insane. Funny numbers make investors do funny things. We do not need that happening in an age of innovation. It costs too much in human capital, the very measure of an inhumane economy.
The problem of a living wage is technical. What number works? Set too high, there will be excessive interference with entrepreneurs and excessive inflation. This is a solvable problem. Increase the minimum wage gradually and watch the rate of inflation and listen to struggling entrepreneurs.
We need to relearn the difficult lessons of the introduction of the locomotive and the automobile. We need to revisit the psychological space of a human value economy and set a Living Wage.