Writing Wrongs

In its essence, my job is to put words together-in a row. Sure, there’s some syntax to abide by, a pretense toward meaning, but by-and-large robots can do it. To keep ahead, I’m on the lookout for new ways of writing. Innovations in the word-trade are rare (cut-up technique anyone?) but there’s always plenty of past from which to poach. This is what I discovered …

Asemic Writing This is writing with no specific semantic content. It may sound like social media posts but the resemblance ends there: asemic writing is usually rendered to graphically suggest handwriting and is regarded as a kind of hybrid of literary and abstract art. I learned about asemic writing when I spied a headline in An Art in America article that read: “A Recent Book Explores What It Means to Write Without Meaning.” The title caught my eye, given its unbearable similarity to my own oeuvre. If I’d known asemic writing was such a thing, I wouldn’t have spent so many bleary mornings deciphering the drunken contents of my reporter’s notebooks. I would’ve just published the wine-stained prose as “art” and let the critics do the damn writing.

Psychography A fancier way of saying “automatic writing,” psychography often turns up in horror films as a cheap form of exposition. A character, pen in hand, is overcome with a scrawling-fit only to find they’ve inscribed a dark clue belying the malevolent intentions of some spirit (not…