Weird Tales: Mark Budman on The Shape of Innovation

Writer: Mark BudmanWeird Tales Story: The Matching Pair (Issue #TBD 2008)Writer Bio: Mark Budman's works have appeared in such magazines as Swink, Mississippi Review, Virginia Quarterly, Exquisite Corpse, Iowa Review, McSweeney's, Turnrow, Connecticut Review, WW Norton anthology Flash Fiction Forward, and elsewhere. He is the publisher of a flash fiction magazine Vestal Review, the interview editor for Web Del Sol, and a book reviewer for The Bloomsbury Review and the American Book Review. His novel My Life at First Try is coming out from Counterpoint in October 2008, and the anthology he has co-edited came out in November 2007 from Ooligan Press.***Can you call it "innovation" when the form obscures the function? Is it a writer's goal to delve into the visual, to let the form shape the content, as a bottle does for a liquid?Too many "modern" stories are presented in a hard-to-read way. Consider this example:01000100 01101111 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01110100 01101000 01101001 01101110 01101011 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100001 01110100 00100000 01100001 00100000 01110011 01110100 01101111 01110010 01111001 00100000 01101000 01100001 01110011 00100000 01110100 01101111 00100000 01100010 01100101 00100000 01100011 01101111 01101101 01110000 01101100 01100101 01111000 00100000 01101001 01101110 00100000 01101111 01110010 01100100 01100101 01110010 00100000 01110100 01101111 00100000 01100010 01100101 00100000 01101100 01101001 01110100 01100101 01110010 01100001 01110010 01111001 0011111101010111 01101000 01100001 01110100 00100000 01101001 01101110 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01110111 01101111 01110010 01101100 01100100 00100000 01101000 01100001 01110011 00100000 01101000 01100001 01110000 01110000 01100101 01101110 01100101 01100100 00100000 01110100 01101111 00100000 01100011 01101100 01100001 01110010 01101001 01110100 01111001 00111111Well, some people may argue that this is not a story. I agree. It's not. It's a binary representation of this statement:Do you think that a story has to be complex in order to be literary? What in the world has happened to clarity?I am referring to stories that have such complex structure that it's hard to read them. For example: no punctuation, no capitalization and no paragraph breaks. They truly become ciphers, the English equivalent of a binary code, like in my example above.Should clarity or innovation be the aim of fiction? The best answer is: both, in symbiotic relationship, when one benefits the other.