This post replicates (for Instagram, the bane of my current life) the style notes set out on my website detailing out the fundamentals of the recovered/replenished literary style I call Hypnogogic (Hyp) Prose.
I developed the rudiments of the style in around 2002, and I had my major breakthrough in 2009 with Lightbringer, a work that (without much conscious input from me) laid out its fundamental elements.
The two volumes of From the Chronicles of Lupa really round out my take on Hyp Prose, and may well define the limits of my own ability to take the style much further, although I probably still have a few years left in me.
My long-term hope is that future writers might see some value in the New Scripture project, and that they may be able to take Hyp Prose past the limits of my own talent. I think it is a powerful tool, and because it involves words there should be no practical limit to the things it describes or achieves.
For now the job is trying to get a few people to have a look at the style and to consider it, hopefully proving that the effect it has on me - a profoundly hypnogogic effect - might be the effect it has on other people as well.
P. Julian
15 October 2018
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Here is the full text from the relevant page on my website:
Notes on Style
Hypnogogic Prose
1. Hypnogogic (Hyp) Prose is prose imbued with various features of poetry, the stark metre and strange run-on rhythms of poetic and scriptural speech.
2. Hypnogogic: from the Greek hupnos (sleep) + agogos (leading). Lulling the critical mind, awakening the receptive Heart (cf Song of Songs 5:2).
3. The mechanism of Scripture: Hyp Prose wedded to the deepest themes. Love, death, love as stronger than death.
4. The language of the unconscious, the sensibility of extreme and elevated states. Writers must go back to this source, then bring the Word back down from the mountaintop.
5. Hyp Prose waxes dense but depends upon the brevity of the whole. Short books stripped of modern dilatory techniques. Narrative rendered in linear, old-timey “straight-telling” of the story.
6. Detailed description reserved for movements of the spirit. Intricate interior action (cf the dense interiority of the Psalms) making profound passion plain.
7. Hyp Prose works through familiarity: poring over the same chapter, the same verse. Repetition reinforcing the hypnogogic effect.
8. Hyp Prose should move the spirit, in sensitives towards tears. Scripture as empathy training, New Scripture designed to heighten and democratise this effect.