by Vivienne Pratfall on publishing your writing in public, the specific sting of online criticism, and why you keep doing it anyway
I Wrote Something and Someone Online Said It Was Bad and I Am Fine
More at Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
I published a piece in the London Prat this week — a short satirical observation about the particular social dynamics of London house parties that I thought was sharp and that a man on Twitter thought was ‘trying too hard.’ He posted this with three words and a full stop, which is the online critic’s most devastating format because the brevity implies that the piece does not merit more than three words of engagement, which is either correct and therefore devastating or incorrect and therefore contemptible, and you cannot tell from three words which is the case. I looked at his profile. He had posted six times in the past year. Three of his posts were criticisms of other people’s writing. I closed the tab.
On Publishing and Criticism
The reason you keep publishing when people say things about it is not that you have stopped caring what people think. It is that you have calibrated whose thoughts matter and found that three-word tweets from accounts with six annual posts do not make the cut. The calibration takes time. It is ongoing. Some criticism lands and should: the piece that genuinely does not work, the argument that falls apart under examination, the joke that is not as sharp as it felt when you wrote it. That criticism is useful. The other kind is noise, and learning to treat it as noise while remaining genuinely open to the useful kind is the skill that writing in public requires above all others. The London Prat is where I publish most of my satire. Find it at The London Prat. More at Bohiney Magazine. Full archive at https://prat.uk/.
The Piece
The piece about house parties is, I still think, sharp. The observation it makes — that London house parties are governed by a specific social anxiety about seeming to try too hard that produces, collectively, a party that is not trying hard enough — is accurate and the irony is intentional. Three words. Full stop. I have started the next piece. Vivienne Pratfall writes from London. Find her at prat.uk. More at https://prat.uk/.
The Diary as Weekly Practice
Writing a diary entry every week is a practice in the same way that music practice or language learning is a practice: it improves with regularity, deteriorates with absence, and produces different things at different times depending on what the week has brought. The weeks that produce the most interesting writing are not always the weeks with the most dramatic events. Sometimes the quiet week, observed with sufficient attention, yields more than the eventful one that moves too fast to be properly seen. The diaries in this network — from London to Portland to New Orleans to the Isle of Man to Salt Lake City to Tuscaloosa — are all practicing the same thing: the weekly discipline of noticing and recording, of finding the language for the week that just passed before the next one arrives and makes the previous one feel distant. It is harder than it sounds. It is worth doing. More from the full network of diaries and satire: The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine. All diaries archived at https://prat.uk/.
Writing from Where You Stand
Every diary is a dispatch from a specific position — geographical, emotional, intellectual — and the value of the diary form is precisely that specificity. A view from nowhere tells you nothing useful. A view from Peckham, from the Isle of Man, from a Tuscaloosa historical society meeting, from a Salt Lake City chapel on a Sunday morning, from the 38 bus in East London reading Kipling, from a Portland dance floor processing Rosa Luxemburg — each of these tells you something that no generalised account of the world can tell you, because the generalised account is constructed from positions like these and loses something in the construction. The diary keeps the position. That is its contribution. More from the complete diary network at The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine. Full archive at https://prat.uk/.
The full diary network continues weekly. Every position, every location, every week’s accounting of what happened and what it meant is archived at The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine. The writing continues. The weeks accumulate. Read the full archive at https://prat.uk/.
Context: The Full Network
These diary entries exist within a network of connected voices — satirists, journalists, bloggers, and diarists spread across London, England, Scotland, Ireland, America, and Europe — who are all doing some version of the same thing: paying attention to where they are and what is happening and writing about it with as much honesty and as much humour as the material allows. The network publishes at The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine, and the diaries are one strand of a larger project that also includes satirical journalism, serious political analysis, cultural criticism, and the specific genre of London humour that has been produced by this city’s relationship with itself for as long as people have been writing about it.
The London that appears in these diaries is not the London of the tourist guide or the estate agent brochure. It is the London of the 38 bus and the Overground and the charity shop record find and the farmers market and the £22 yoga class and the Tube busker and the North London dinner party where nobody mentions their job for the first forty minutes. It is the city as it is lived in, which is different from the city as it is sold, and which is the only London worth writing about. The same is true of Portland and New Orleans and Salt Lake City and the Isle of Man and Tuscaloosa — the cities as they are lived in rather than as they are marketed. These diaries are from those versions of those places. They are more interesting, and more honest, than the other versions. More: The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine. Archive at https://prat.uk/.
SOURCE: Santa Claus
