Another way in which writing resembles a shark
as I suggested earlier
is that if writing doesn't keep moving forward
it will die.
Now, there are a number of ways in which this death can occur.
One of them would be "the golden rut", as I call it.
This is when a writer is lucky enough
to have a huge success with something
and at that point, for purely practical reasons
the writer might decide that they will stick
with this winning formula
for the rest of their career.
Which means that it will probably be
diminishing returns for the readership
but they will have enough of a readership
who just want the same comforting book every time
presumably to keep on with their career.
However, their writing will have stagnated.
All of those other books that they might have written
will now never exist.
I think that it is massively important
to not rest upon your laurels
to not stick with a winning formula
however much the temptation is to do that.
I'd suggest
and if you remember, at the very beginning
of this course, I suggested that
this wasn't a commercial course.
In commercial writing.
That I didn't know what that was.
And, in fact, if you follow some of my advice
you will definitely not have any commercial rewards
for your writing.
And this is possibly one of them
so I'm giving you a warning here.
But the tactic that I have found most useful
is to immediately drop a device
as soon as you become aware that you are using it.
As soon as you think, "Oh.
That's something I've done in my last two or three stories.
Maybe I should drop that device."
This will mean that you will have to go
to all of the trouble
of coming up with new devices
for every story.
Which is a tremendous amount of work.
And who knows
whether the audience will like it or not.
However, you will be progressing.
You will not be still and dead in the water
like the shark that we were talking about earlier.
When I say a "device"
I am generally talking about
the necessary tricks
that we come up with as means to tell a story.
For example, in my own work from Watchmen.
A very simple early device that I worked out
was that scene changes
could be accomplished by an overlap of dialogue
by an overlap of imagery
even by an overlap of a colour
between one scene and the next.
This is a device.
It carries the reader through the changes in the narrative
at a furious pace, and it's aesthetically pleasing.
I was doing that throughout Watchmen.
I noticed that when I did a Batman book after that
The Killing Joke
I was still using the same techniques.
That book is probably...
I mean, I've largely abandoned most of my comic material
but that one in particular
I had abandoned almost as soon as I'd written it.
It seemed to add nothing new to my writing.
It didn't seem to extend it in any way.
So, that was the point at which I abandoned that device.
And with my next works
I was trying radically different things.
And when I'd finished with those works
I tried to abandon those things, as well.
Of course, you will learn things in doing any work
and you should retain that learning.
That you can do this effect, that you can do such-and-such
er, a device.
But it is important
to just keep moving fast in evolving these things.
As well as the need for an individual writer
to be continually progressing and moving forward
it should also be said that writing itself
needs to be constantly moving forward
or, like the shark, it will die.
This kind of underlines the need
for an avant-garde.
You need to have a cutting, progressive edge to writing
that is constantly moving forward
but it is perhaps worth saying
that there has been a fairly comprehensive failure
by most of the avant-garde
to actually engage the readers.
To actually engage the audience.
Because much avant-garde material
is deliberately alienating...
deliberately dissonant.
And this is all perfectly legitimate
for an artist to want to do these things.
But it is not going engage the audience.
I believe that there are ways to use avant-garde techniques
that will greatly enrich a story
without turning the audience away in droves.
There has to be a way that
these techniques can be used to genuinely extend literature
by which I mean writings that ordinary people can enjoy.
One of the reasons why an avant-garde
or progressive attitude to writing
is absolutely necessary
is because of the world
that we happen to be living in at the moment.
The rate of change
is, itself, accelerating.
I believe that there is a thing
called "period information doubling"
which, if you started with the first hand-axe
back in Palaeolithic times
and then, as an arbitrary date, you decide upon 1 AD
which was kind of right in the middle of the Roman empire
and then you see how much human information
we've accumulated in that time.
Then you see how long it takes for that to double
and as opposed to hundreds of thousands of years
in that first period of information
we find that human information doubles
in about 1,500 years.
Which is to say, around about the time of the Renaissance
we had twice as much information.
It then doubles...
over the next couple of hundred years.
I believe it doubled between 1960 and 1970.
And I believe in the present day
it is...
round perhaps a year
that it takes for us to have more information
than has existed in the whole of previous human history.
So, that's quite a fair lick of progress.
The world around us is changing all the time
so it is important for you, as a writer
to actually stay on top of that
to continue to progress and to move forward
in your thinking and in your writing
if you wish to actually survive
the evolutionary changes that are already upon us.