The influence of e-mail is probably also making authors squeeze and flatten their writing. Even the most academic branch of Water-stones is full of miniature books, magazines made up of extracts and novellas by novelists with demanding agents and time-pressured readers. Blimey! has line spaces between every paragraph, and splits every chapter into sub-sections. And when things get a bit too stream-of-consciousness, white space is a great redeemer. Sauntering from subject to subject, transcribing your thoughts, taking your sentences wherever you fancy. and the next thing you know it’s in a vitrine in a white gallery with intellectuals peering at it. There’s one where a teenager makes a sandwich. It’s in Benson & Hedges ads and in rock promo videos and TV ads. Now it’s full of art by young people who are in Vogue and on TV all the time. That’s the well-known restaurant in Dean Street that Damien Hirst recently redesigned. This is the first paragraph of Blimey!, a recent book about young British artists by Matthew Collings: Instead, the spareness is playful, a mocking of literary craft. But these new writers are not trying to be Hemingway: their sentences do not hint at hard, manly hours of paring down. One characteristic of this style is that it leaves things out – similes, imagery and other literary devices aren’t used, physical description is kept to a minimum. There is a kind of modern writing, mostly found in books by young novelists and books about young artists, that tries not to seem like writing at all.
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