21st Century Writing Styles:

If you are not illiterate, which I think it is safe to assume, you have probably already given some thought to the best manner in which to go about writing. If you are hyper-literate, you most likely have tried one or two of these styles in order to get away from the difficulties of the particular one most exercised by you. Each has advantages and disadvantages. I recommend rotation between them, as they can have a profound effect on your craftsmanship.

Here are some of the more common approaches:

Position #1: The Perpendicular

 The most common stance for any form of computer-based writing, The Perpendicular is generally considered as the accepted style for office work and casual drudgery. If you do it right, it can be quite effective. A large desk means you can spread out several reference books, while your computer monitor rises up from them like an obelisk, suitably compounded upon as the metaphorical summation of all their worth. While in The Perpendicular, it is important to pay attention to three factors: the temperature of your feet, your access to liquid sustenance, and how often you stop writing to check what’s happening on the internet.

The first two are comfort modifiers. It is very difficult to write with cold feet. Every few seconds you’ll find yourself thinking, “Hey, my feet are cold, maybe I should stand up and get a blanket or a pillow or something.”

UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES SHOULD YOU DO THIS.

It’s a slippery slope, dear reader. Once your feet are warm, you will begin to feel sleepy. Then as your eyes flutter, you will begin to think you should have ‘just a quick nap’ so you can concentrate better. Then you will wake up hours past your deadline feeling groggy and bamboozled, as though you’ve just been mugged by polite and persuasive unicorns. It is not a nice feeling.

The trick is to prevent your feet from being ‘too’ cold. Place something hard beneath them, so that your legs are perpendicular to your torso. Adjust the room temperature, not your personal temperature. When you feel the sneaky sense of frostbite in one of your feet, tuck it underneath the other one until it gets warm. Then cross over. You may even find, from careful application of pressure, that if your feet are on something with a sharp edge it helps to drive your bottom foot into it a bit. Pain helps to focus the senses. And if your feet are itchy the sensation is magical.

Liquid refreshment is very important. Tea is great, as is coffee, but you don’t want to let it control you. It’s very easy to slip into a refreshment cycle, wherein you drain a cup, get up to go to the bathroom, fill another cup with your choice beverage, and hurry back to your desk, only to repeat this cycle every twenty minutes. By the end of the day your teeth will feel like tree bark, and your tongue will taste like it has been dumpster diving. It’s gross, and the grosser you feel, the easier it will be to crawl under your bedcovers and cry about how no-one loves you and you’ll never make it in the real world. Stop it. You are not an animal, you are a human being.

Tea is not something that sustains you, it is a reward for work well done. Once you manage to separate the need for tea from your ability to write, you have broken the refreshment cycle. You can still have tea, but only as much as 3 or 4 times a day, while reading or staring at nature, in between periods of writing. Water is different. You should keep a supply somewhere near but not at your desk, so that a careless nudge does note deluge your notes and keyboard, and so that you have to stand up to take a sip . This way you will not drink every time you are thinking of what to write next, and avoid unnecessary bathroom breaks.

Access to the internet is a devilish thing. It’s very useful to have around as a fact-checker, encyclopaedia, dictionary, thesaurus, and jukebox – but it is also evil and soul-sucking. So long as it is around, you will think of all the things that you could use it for. You will look at pictures of funny cats, read blogs, check what computer games are coming out and indulge in all your personal fancies. And if, at the end of the day, you have written more than a page, it is practically a miracle. It feels like you’ve been doing a lot, it feels like you’ve been learning loads. But when you look at what you’ve actually produced the next day, you will be astonished at how little you can remember of what you actually did while you were sitting at your desk, ‘working’. There is something you need to remember for using the Perpendicular:

Input materials should always equate with output materials.

For every word you read, you should produce a word. For every picture you see, you should write a thousand words. For every video you watch, you should write an essay. If you are not doing this, you need to break out of The Perpendicular. It isn’t working. Move on to another style. Cut off your input, and assume a more focused stance.

Even an experienced master will suffer without flowing into another form of writing after spending too long in The Perpendicular. Your eyes will water, you will get sores on your posterior. Your spine will slowly curl over until your head is on your desk, and if you’re like me you will sit there ingesting tiny bubbles of air that you will slowly deliver for the rest of the day in the form of micro-belches. It is a horrible, horrible point to reach. So don’t demand it of yourself. Move.

Position #2: The Composer

This is an especially focused position that comes in handy if you have a piano, best supplemented with a laptop or a handwritten journal. Sitting at a bench demands a certain rigidity of the spine, which makes you feel super-fancy and thus hyper-critical over the quality of your work. Also, because you don’t have space for anything on the piano, you will have to make do without your dictionaries, guidebooks and the Internet. Essentially, The Composer forces the writer to ‘wing it’, constructing a work of art in the moment as though piecing together a melody. This style works particularly well for poetry or thought journals, which can suffer a foul tempo if they are not written in a single sitting.

If you are a Renaissance person, and you take to writing music and building houses in-between committing your intellectual frolickings to paper, then The Composer can also serve as a means to focus your thoughts through music. While this does drive distraction through the roof, especially for novices such as myself, a simple stroking of the keys can help capture the emotional register of your work, and leave inspiration trilling about the earlobes. If you are not, then it’ll still make you feel fancy if you care to pretend.

You probably won’t ever be particularly inclined to hold with The Composer for extended periods, but that’s okay. It is intended for short, intense bursts of writing – a break of pattern just long enough to pull one out of the slump of a Perpendicular quickly slipping into a parabola.

Position #3: The Horizontal Flop

This position is best when coupled with a laptop and a futon, or some other kind of low cushioned area. The trick is to position yourself in such a way that your chin and arms dangle off the edge of a comfortable surface which holds your prone body. The laptop then lies on the floor in front of you with its screen pushed back as far as it can go. This style works best for those suffering from sore muscles or laziness, or extreme vertigo. It can be quite enjoyable, as pushing buttons from this angle is likely to make you feel like some bizarre space-bug who is just now learning how to type things. There is a profound sense of achievement attained through every typed word.

The Horizontal Flop is great for those who suffer insomnia. One minute you’re typing and thinking out a particularly complex phrase, and the next you’ve drifted off, partially asphyxiated by the edge of your bed pressing into your throat. You will wake up dazed and confused sometime later and read your work, possibly a little overwhelmed by how overwhelmingly crappy your writing is when you are sleepy. You do get points for trying.

THE HORIZONTAL FLOP IS NOT A SERIOUS WRITING STYLE. You will lose consciousness many times. You will spend half-an-hour on a single paragraph. At some point you will need the bathroom, and you will not get up to use it when perhaps you should, leaving your work with a backwash of sloshy associative metaphors. The Flop is for depressed writers who are attempting to salvage a small modicum of professional credibility during a creative dry spell. It can sometimes be a great help in pulling a writer out of a depression by convincing them that they aren’t ‘totally’ worthless. But once that point has been reached, another style should be attempted at once.

The Flop is a good position to sleep in if you are a dreamer, because upon waking you can immediately type out a list of all the important details of the dream. It’s also great if you know you are going to be grilled by your colleagues the next day:

“The article? Oh, yeah, it’s getting there! I was in front of my keyboard all night.”

Position #4: The Rembrandt

At some point you have to admit that you spend way too much time sitting down. Generally because there are small sores sprouting on your otherwise lovely derriere, and occasionally because when you stand up your legs topple over sideways. It’s the 21^st Century, so we get it – working is done from the seat of your pants, whether you are flying an aeroplane or working as a corporate wage-slave in one of those cute little white boxes.

Some highly odd research has recently suggested that standing at a desk rather than sitting at one is enough to classify as exercise over extended periods – as much as three marathons a year for a full-time job. With this in mind, it is important to get your exercise done, even while you are writing. Stand at your desk. Lift your monitor/journal/IPad up in front of you (on a stack of digest novels, if necessary) and gaze at it as if it were a painting. Hold your keyboard as you might hold a paint pallet, or rest it hip-height in front of you. This, esteemed reader, is The Rembrandt, and aside from feeling fancy it counts as physical labour. In between typing you shall no doubt fill your moments of deliberation with arm stretches and leg bounces which would otherwise be restricted by attaching a large and comfortable object to your posterior.

What is immediately apparent about The Rembrandt is the sense of energy and motion it lends to its user. No longer are you a slouching pen-pusher – you are an Earth-being! You can stand proud and tall on your Earth-legs and declare to the world that nothing shall keep you cowering in your chair! Your life has VALUE!

For a few hours at least. Time wounds all heels, and eventually you shall sit and rub your aching feet. But surely that brief flirtation with gravity counts as a jog. Well done, you.

Position #5: Couch Garnish

Lacking a desk, the most comfortable place to write with some sort of lumbar support is on a sofa, or a bed. In all honesty I have never had much success with this style, and generally end up sliding into a ‘The Thing That Lurks Beneath the Coffee Table’ position. But I know many people without desks who must use this position regularly, or, if it is really as impossible as it seems, fib about working to seem more interesting. Placing their writing tool on a lap (when sitting) or a knee (when lounging), they gain the paradisiacal comfort of relaxation coupled with diligent scribbling.

Doing this dances with danger, however. The only difference between couch garnish and a couch potato is a single bulbous nodule deeply rooted into position. As comfortable as being couch garnish is, it is imperative to get up frequently if one is to avoid abandoning one’s writing as one’s limbs fuse into the crevasses of the surrounding cushions. Because of this, behaving as couch garnish is ideal for when you know that you are going to be interrupted. Use this style for those lingering periods when you are ready to head out of the house but still suffering the whimsy of an unpunctual companion. Use it when you are slowly elegising food as it is cremated in a nearby kitchen. Use it when your parents are around, so they can see that you are actually doing something with the life they so callously granted you.

Position #6: The Thing That Lurks Beneath the Coffee Table

After extended periods of writing, it is common to morph into something not-quite solid that feels gravity more intensely than other beings. Like cheese exposed to the midday sun, writers begin to seep into their surrounding environment, and without making an effort to periodically lift themselves up, they shall find themselves lying flat on the floor, where there is no truly effective style of writing to follow.

All is not lost! Even when gravity has you pinned down, there are steps you can take to stay productive. You need to find yourself a coffee table. When you are sitting on the floor, a coffee table gains qualities comparable to a desk. By propping your flaccid spine up against the foot of a sofa, you are ready to resume working despite the cruel tug of your mortal coil. Stretch out your legs, and pad your butt with a reachable cushion. You could be here a while before someone comes to rescue you.

Oddly enough, some of my best work has been written from beneath the coffee table. Perhaps it is the lack of distractive influences, or that a brief nap may be had without fear of encountering true sleep, leaving me forced to focus on assembling verbiage when I lie down sideways and close my eyes. Perhaps it is that from the floor I lose all pretense of okayness, and may dip my reservoir into my exposed and quivering heart for the words I require.

Whatever The Thing That Lurks Beneath the Coffee Table is, it is an decent writer. And so its rather tortuous epithet need be included in this list.

Position #7: Antithesis

Antithesis is the tie an office worker wears to a barn dance. They may not be a particularly well-to-do person to begin with, but by taking their professionalism to an unprofessional local, they suddenly have the smarting appearance of wearing a tuxedo to a dinner party, without having to go through with the dangerous act of renting an actual tuxedo. In short, it makes the writer look good by comparison.

To perform Antithesis, move your office to a coffee shop, busy street corner, or pub. Continue to write. Shake your head at the frivolous shenanigans undertaken by those around you in an attempt to escape their work. You love your work. The thought of leaving it at home would very well spoil your evening. By preparing for an outing with Antithesis, you can very easily avoid all the slow parts of a night out, and quickly snap shut your journal to uptake any amusing lark that may present itself. It is the last trick of a relentless writer, who remains unchanging in their desire to capture their ideas despite their constantly changing location.

Antithesis does have its limitations. Moby Dick was not written from the top of a volcano, and if it were there is a good chance lava and sulphur poisoning would have seriously damaged Melville’s ability to think of good sentence structure. So don’t write important things while sitting on a social volcano. Take along a journal for planning things: use it to write flexible descriptions from the perspective of a character, preparing to get inside their head. Write out a plot outline, or a profile for a character or setting. Pay attention to all the bustle around you, think the things that come into your head, and take the chance to write them down before they escape you. All this stuff will make your end-work better, and it needn’t take up the valuable time you spend sitting in your personal Fortress of Solitude.

Naturally, people are likely to bother you. This is a wonderful time to work on synopsis. Say they ask,

“So what are you writing?”

(Which they, whoever they are, will.)

What are you writing? Can you put it into words? Because you will have to at some stage. Possibly when you are confronted with a publisher. Antithesis gives you the chance to test-drive your work in a real world environment, and ensure that though you have been doing everything in your head, it hasn’t become a pitiful, unreadable abstraction sensible to your mind alone. It’s oral writing, which in most societies is simply called ‘talking’. It is also important.

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There are many more writing styles waiting out there to be discovered. Some involve dirt. Others involve pillow forts. These are just the basics. Try them out. Invent your own. Bathe regularly, and tip the service staff at cafés.