Dying of tuberculosis in Rome, the poet John Keats requested his epitaph: ‘Here lies one whose name was writ in water.’  

Television has always been a medium that brings people together. Even when watched alone, it is simulcast into millions of locations, bonding far-flung audiences in a shared zeitgeist. The idea of ‘water-cooler TV’ captures the sense in which we’ve understood TV as a medium experienced simultaneously and reflected upon immediately, among people whose social ties are otherwise loose. Digital technology has multiplied and amplified these loose ties.

Juvenilia is frequently bad, but charmingly so; it seems emotionally lucid and unembarrassed of its own literary shortcomings.

‘Loud’ writing attracts attention with its zeitgeisty theme or high-concept plot. An ambitious, edgy approach to form or genre that demands to be read as spectacle. A punchy, fast-paced writing style that doesn’t so much invite you into the story as hustle you along with it.

When I was sixteen, I wrote a romance short story by stringing together clichés from Jean Kent and Candace Shelton’s The Romance Writers’ Phrase Book, a kind of thesaurus for expressions such as ‘his strong hands roamed like carefree mustangs over the melting softness of her body.’ Now, as I reread ‘The Dark and Stormy (And Writhing with the Raw Sensuousness that Pressed Them Together like Soldering Metals) Night’, the story sings with supercilious delight at my own cleverness. You can tell I felt no stake in this story. It was not about me, or for me.

The field of ‘writering’ – writing about writing – conceptualises the uncertainty before writing as a hostile territory to be hacked through as efficiently as possible using either mindfulness or careful planning. The pedagogues would have you approach writing with the ruthless efficiency of an army invading hostile territory.

The English language isn’t what it used to be. Migration, colonisation and trade encourage the borrowing and stealing of foreign words and phrases; internationalised stylistic choices seek common ground with speakers of multiple dialects. New technologies require new ways to discuss them, rendering older terms irrelevant. Moral standards change, meaning some euphemisms are no longer needed, while new ones arise.

I find the craft of writing drearily effortful, and both yearn for and resent the fluent, ecstatic altered states of consciousness that the ‘writering’ industry holds up as peak experiences. Leaps of imagination. Synaptic flashes of intellectual connection. The feeling that a story is ‘telling itself’, or that characters show up, fully formed, to narrate their own plots.

Wave 1 – Annoyer (25 points) Crystal Quest is a 1987 action game for the Apple Macintosh. The word ‘quest’ implies some kind of drawn-out chivalric expedition in search of an elusive goal, but this videogame’s design is simpler: moving the mouse, you pilot a hockey-puck-like spaceship around the screen, collecting star-shaped crystals.

The fact I wondered what ‘experimental’ meant was probably a sign I am not very experimental. A bad sign. The literary industry so often valorises experimenting with form, genre and voice as something bold and revolutionary that I felt small and conformist for finding the whole field of ‘experimental writing’ intimidating, and not knowing how to enter it.

Literary audiences can’t help asking, ‘Where do you get your ideas?’ It’s as if an idea is a magic bean: something precious from which stories grow. A thing that can be got, somewhere. Neil Gaiman says people don’t like it when he reveals, truthfully, that his ideas are made up in his head. ‘They look unhappy, as if I’m trying to slip a fast one past them.’

It’s gauche for a writer to admit to being externally motivated. We’re meant to tap some deep well of feeling, or write for the joy of the craft. Sally Field is still lampooned for her 1985 Oscar acceptance speech: ‘I’ve wanted more than anything to have your respect … you like me right now, you like me!’

One thing writers love is hanging shit on other writers. Lord Byron mocked John Keats’ ‘piss-a-bed poetry’. Baudelaire called Voltaire ‘the king of nincompoops’. William Faulkner sniffed that Ernest Hemingway ‘has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary’ – to which Papa retorted, ‘Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?’

I’ve noticed that criticism today is both offered and received in increasingly emotional terms. Descartes, that mean old robot guy, may have proven his existence using thought, but these days it seems toothless to stake intellectual claims by saying ‘I think’ or even ‘I believe’. Instead, it reveals much about the current state of criticism that we might begin a critique with ‘I feel …’

Recently I stumbled on a tweet that claimed to ‘love’ my podcasting appearances because ‘her lush plot summaries save me ever needing to read the book or watch the film’. The accusation of prolixity stung: I’ve always felt ashamed of writing, speaking and being … too much. As I considered the excessive lavishness of my descriptive powers, my blue-grey eyes grew luminous with tears, smearing my eyeliner into wings of woe.

Horror is the shock and revulsion of apprehending something sickeningly awful. In literary terms, it’s often distinguished from terror, a creeping dread of something yet unseen. Terror is the build-up; horror is the reveal. ‘Horror is an emotion,’ American author Caitlín R Kiernan told Weird Fiction Review in 2012, ‘and it’s an – increasingly unsuccessful – marketing category.’

I don’t know what English bluebells smell like, and it’s driving me crazy. As part of my novel-in-progress, I’m researching the folklore and mythology of plants. According to every source I’ve read, the scent of bluebells is sweet, delicate and unforgettable … for those who have actually smelt it.

I’m worried I’m an over-writer. Look, I just really like adjectives, okay? My worst stylistic habit is stringing them onto my sentences two at a time, like perfect glossy beads. I can see myself doing it, but can’t stop. Adverbs, too. And when I write descriptively, allusively, using grammar rhythmically, I sense my meaning sharpening a little more with each detail.

In Australia – and elsewhere – writers navigate a literary landscape marked by a colonising ‘centre’ and colonised ‘periphery’. While AA Phillips coined the pervasive term ‘cultural cringe’ in 1950, the phenomenon itself is older. Prefacing his 1894 Short Stories in Prose and Verse, Henry Lawson wrote bitterly that a writer from the periphery might produce excellent work for years, yet be dismissed as ‘an imitator of some recognised English or American author’ until he or she succeeds in the US or UK.

Perhaps I feel embarrassed to meet my favourite writers because I cringe at the whole literary cult of personality. Charisma may be the stock-in-trade of politicians, actors and musicians, but what makes writers heroic to me is their writing. That’s all. I don’t find their lives romantic, or seek to emulate their tastes or personal qualities.

The author bio briefly summarises an author’s life and achievements, usually in the third person. Buried in a publication’s contributor pages or tucked at the end of an article, the bio can seem vestigial: a mere convention or afterthought.

The jocular internet expression ‘Too long; didn’t read’ reflects the demands on our attention from an abundance of information. It’s an impatient dismissal of anyone who clutters up online space by using too many words to express themselves.

One of my favourite genres is the ‘intellectual clique novel’. In these stories, talented outsiders are drawn into small, elite groups whose insularity is enthralling yet dangerous.

Late last year, in his widely shared essay ‘On Smarm’, Tom Scocca introduces the concept of writering: ‘We have a whole word here at Gawker, “writering,” to describe the tribe of writers whose principal writerly concern is being writerly, and who spend all their time congratulating one another on their writing and promulgating correct rules for writing.’

By this stage in my freelance writing career, I fret that I’ve made myself unemployable in the ‘regular’ workforce because I struggle with the panoptical logic governing most jobs. By ‘panoptical’, I mean the ways in which employers require their workers to perform their work as if always observed.