I just found Stephen Diamond's blog Disputed Issues, which is about writing legal briefs. His insights apply to any writing. In "A rare shortcut to better writing", he claims there is one simple thing you can do to improve your writing.

Learn to type faster.

The idea is that the more automatic typing is, the less you think about it (even subconsciously), the more you can concentrate on your writing. It makes sense.

You can visit this wonderful housing development. (<- Click)

Looks nice, but to get in, you have to wait for one of the current residents to go away on an adventure. Also, I hear the homeowners association is very strict about lawns, outbuildings, and pet dragons.

Here’s a couple of tricks taught by my strange hero Jack Bickham in his book Setting.  I don’t recommend Setting, because it spends most of its time telling you obvious things like “Don’t set your story in the old west if you want to talk about urban slums.” But it gives a few specific techniques, the kind Bickham excels at and great writers never mention because they are too pedestrian and make writing sound like bricklaying.  I haven’t tried these myself, but they sound reasonable.

You can only change so much at one time

Specifically, when you change from the point of view (POV) of one character, back to the POV of an earlier character in a place we’ve already seen, do not describe anything in the earlier setting that we haven’t seen before until the reader is re-oriented. Specifically mention things that the reader has already seen, to help them figure out the transition. If you really want to talk immediately about the clock tower when you switch back to an earlier setting, mention that tower in the previous scene in that setting.

This doesn’t apply only when changing POV. Any time that so much is happening that the reader is in danger of becoming disoriented, reduce the confusion by turning new things into old  things, by planting references to them in earlier scenes.  That includes references to the setting. Recently I read a famous pony fiction that the author began with two long action scenes [1]. In the second scene, the protagonist walked through a strange setting to meet a villain, then ran back out the way she came in while fighting. I could have visualized the fight more clearly if the author had described on the character’s way in everything that the character saw on her way out, because the fight on her way out was fast and confusing.

Casting against setting requires using stereotypes

Bickham says that fish-out-of-water characters, like Gene Wilder in The Frisco Kid or Dr. Fleishman in Northern Exposure, must begin as stereotypes of people from their original setting. If your point is to show how the character’s background clashes with their present circumstances, making a realistically complex character who does not exactly fit the expectations of their background blurs the distinction between adjustments the character makes to the new setting, and the character's original idiosyncrasies.

[1] Don't do that.

This is an incredible time-saver.  Watch all of seasons 1-3... at once!

Theoretically, you could watch this and figure out what the typical dramatic structure is for a my Little pony episode.  In practice, your brain would melt.

(Unless you are Pinkie Pie, in which case this is probably normal.)

  2376   The Star (Arthur Clarke)

  2500   spoken words in a typical My Little Pony episode

  3789   The Sentinel (Arthur Clarke)

  6845   Neutron Star (Larry Niven)

  8093   We Can Remember it For You Wholesale (Philip K Dick)

14205   The Roads Must Roll (Heinlein)

29026   The Stranger (Spanish translation)

29698   Of Mice and Men

30141   Animal Farm

30273   Apocalypse Now (screenplay)

30644   Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

32807   The Time Machine

33069   Star Wars: A New Hope (screenplay)

36363   The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

46118   Fahrenheit 451

46938   The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

47180   The Red Badge of Courage

47094   The Great Gatsby

48523   The Outsiders

49459   Slaughterhouse Five

56695   As I Lay Dying

56787   A Separate Peace

59900   Lord of the Flies

61922   All Quiet on the Western Front

64196   Brave New World

66556   The Color Purple

77325   Harry Potter & the Philosopher’s Stone

95022   The Hobbit

103491   Ringworld

109571   The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Admujica (Adrian Mujica) writes about one story review per week. He's working on a review of my story "The Detective & the Magician". I looked at his previous reviews. I think he deserves more than 10 watchers for them. Check them out and see if you agree.

Also, did I tell you to read Fugue State? Read Fugue State. In fact, read The Lotus Eaters while you're at it. Don't think of horizon as that "My Harshwhinnial" guy (or, as my speech recognition software calls it, "my harsh when Neil".) In his actually good stories, Horizon, like Ray Bradbury in "The October Country", has a knack for writing things that are sweet, funny, and creepy-sad at the same time. And he doesn't waste your time — these stories are just as long as they need to be.

I’m reading Talking Heads frontman David Byrne’s book, How Music Works. The book is largely about his claim that context is the most important thing in determining musical form.

The same music placed in a different context can not only change the way a listener perceives that music, but it can also cause the music itself to take on an entirely new meaning. Depending on where you hear it— in a concert hall or on the street— or what the intention is, the same piece of music could either be an annoying intrusion, abrasive and assaulting, or you could find yourself dancing to it. How music works, or doesn’t work, is determined not just by what it is in isolation (if such a condition can ever be said to exist) but in large part by what surrounds it, where you hear it and when you hear it. How it’s performed, how it’s sold and distributed, how it’s recorded, who performs it, whom you hear it with, and, of course, finally, what it sounds like: these are the things that determine not only if a piece of music works— if it successfully achieves what it sets out to accomplish— but what it is.

Byrne, David (2012-09-12). How Music Works (Kindle Locations 44-50). McSweeney's. Kindle Edition.

In a sense, we work backward, either consciously or unconsciously, creating work that fits the venue available to us. That holds true for the other arts as well: pictures are created that fit and look good on white walls in galleries just as music is written that sounds good either in a dance club or a symphony hall (but probably not in both). In a sense, the space, the platform, and the software “makes” the art, the music, or whatever. After something succeeds, more venues of a similar size and shape are built to accommodate more production of the same. After a while the form of the work that predominates in these spaces is taken for granted— of course we mainly hear symphonies in symphony halls.

Byrne, David (2012-09-12). How Music Works (Kindle Locations 90-94). McSweeney's. Kindle Edition.

He explains that different types of music, including African drumming, Gregorian chants, Mozart’s chamber music, symphonies, jazz, and rock ‘n roll, should not be seen as part of a progressive evolution of music towards some higher form, but as designed for the spaces that they were played in. Drums are loud enough to be heard when played outdoors. Stone cathedrals have too much reverberation, at too large time-scales, for anything with rapidly-changing notes. Mozart could play trills and add frills because the private homes he played in had plush furniture and tapestried walls that absorbed sound. Improvisational jazz developed so that musicians could accommodate the whims of dancers. The crooning of Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby was only possible because they had microphones. Disco isn’t bad, unless you’re trying to listen to it instead of dance to it. Hip-hop is music designed as an acoustic weapon [my interpretation] or as a way of participating in a re-performance [his interpretation] by blasting it at people from cars.

But none of this seems to apply to fiction. There are hipster graphic artists who say that the font or the paper make a significant difference to them. They don’t, for me; and I’m inclined to believe that readers who are strongly affected by presentation are poor readers. The text is supposed to disappear; the story exists in your head, whether you read it on Addison’s Walk at Magdalen College or on the subway. Awareness of your surroundings while reading means the story is failing.

But Byrne says this is true for all kinds of art!  “Context largely determines what is written, painted, sculpted, sung, or performed.”  Is that right? I’m uncomfortable disagreeing with him, because he’s a genius. (And I don’t just mean a musical genius. This guy could have done well in semiotics or nuclear physics.) So what role does context play in fiction?

Story, Byrne suggests, can emerge mystically when the space of possible stories is restricted by some artificially-imposed constraint:

Writing words to fit an existing melody and meter, as I did on Everything That Happens and many other records, is something anyone who writes in rhyme does naturally and intuitively— every rapper improvises or composes to a meter, for example. I had been encouraged to make this process, which is usually internalized, more explicit when I was writing the words for Remain in Light. That was the first time I tackled a whole record of lyrics this way. I found that, remarkably, solving the puzzle of making words and phrases fit existing structures often resulted, somewhat surprisingly, in words that have an emotional consistency and sometimes even a narrative thread, even though those aspects of the texts weren’t planned ahead of time.

How does this happen? With Remain in Light and even before that, I would look for words that fit pre-existing melodic fragments that I or others had come up with. After filling lots of pages with non-sequitors, I would scan them to see if a lyrically resonant group emerged. Phrases that would hint at the beginning of an actual subject often seemed to want to emerge. This might seem magical— claiming that a text “wants” to come into being (and we’ve heard this said before), but it’s true. When some phrases, even if collected almost at random, begin to resonate together and appear to be talking about the same thing, it’s tempting to claim they have a life of their own. The lyrics may have begun as gibberish, but often, though not always, a “story” in the broadest sense emerges. Emergent storytelling, one might say.

Byrne, David (2012-09-12). How Music Works (Kindle Locations 3103-3114). McSweeney's. Kindle Edition.

That’s interesting, and might be an effective way of writing, or of developing a theme. But it’s internal to the story, so I don’t think it’s context.

Maybe the context for fiction is on a larger scale: The culture that you live in, the life experiences that you’ve had, and your view of what the world is like. Frank Miller’s graphic novels work best for people who believe that the world’s problems have simple, often violent solutions, and are caused because men are too weak and corrupt to implement them. One of my favorite stories is Jorge Luis Borges’ “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" (even though it was the fore-runner of most pretentious post-modern literary critcism). Borges describes an author who rewrote Don Qixote line-by-line centuries later, and then reviews this work, finding it to mean something very different from the original by Cervantes:

It is a revelation to compare Menard’s Don Quixote with Cervantes’. The latter, for example, wrote (part one, chapter nine):

. . . truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor.

Written in the seventeenth century, written by the “lay genius” Cervantes, this enumeration is a mere rhetorical praise of history. Menard, on the other hand, writes:

. . . truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor.

History, the mother of truth: the idea is astounding. Menard, a contemporary of William James, does not define history as an inquiry into reality but as its origin. Historical truth, for him, is not what has happened; it is what we judge to have happened. The final phrases—exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor —are brazenly pragmatic.

I briefly had the ambition to write a children’s story that would seem charming to a child, and dark and chilling to an adult. Unfortunately the market for such a book is probably small.

But these games with worldviews seem unsatisfying. A musician can switch from concert hall to subway platform, and adapt to the new surroundings. Neither a writer nor a reader can switch, within a day, into the worldview of another culture and another life-stage. The kinds of contexts that Byrne is speaking of are alternatives that can be used creatively; the context of a story is a mental straitjacket.

Genre is a context. It creates expectations. But it doesn’t seem to be a context the way Byrne talks about them. If someone reads your fantasy as autobiography, you can say that they are wrong. You can’t change a story by moving it into the wrong anthology; you can only mislead the reader. And it would be very hard to take a story that was a good example of one genre, and rewrite it in another genre.

Am I missing something? What good can it do an author to imagine the circumstances of the reader? What is the context for fiction, and how can an author use it creatively?

Apollo 11 ground control, possibly during a training run.  The guy leaning forward and about to fall off his chair is Gene Krantz, flight director and interesting guy.

I was once in a lunar landing LARP.  Three astronauts sat in a mock-up of the Apollo 11 capsule, linked by audio to three controllers at a mock-up of ground control, and we simulated a moon landing.  It was very cool.

This is just as cool:  The air (okay, vaccuum)-to-ground chat, controller chat, out-the-window video, attitude data, and Neil Armstrong's heart rate, all synced up. See Neil's heart rate shoot up to 150 after the fourth system alarm.  Did you know they landed on the moon with about 3 seconds of fuel left?  I didn't.

.

                                                             FLIGHT: Go/no go in 10 seconds.

CAPCOM: Brony, open your computer's audio mixer and shift the balance toward the right speaker.

LMP: Roger. Balance shifted right.

                                                             FLIGHT: Going round the horn.  CONTROL.

                                                             CONTROL: Go.

                                                             FLIGHT: RETRO.

                                                             RETRO: Go.

                                                             FLIGHT: TELCOM.

                                                             TELCOM: Go.

                                                             FLIGHT: CAPCOM, we are GO for awesome.

CAPCOM: Brony, you are GO.  Click for 17 minutes of awesome.

Silly human.  That was a pegasus.

I recently made a post about bad advice, in which I ungraciously called out suggestions some readers had made as bad advice.

In the first place, I don't know that it was bad advice.  As Echo Four pointed out, all I really know is that the story as a whole didn't work as well after I tried to implement that advice.  There might be a trade-off between their advice and the story's overall dramatic structure.  I'm still going to rewrite the story to be more like it originally was, because I don't know how to make their advice work.  But that doesn't mean it was bad.

In the second place, I like it when readers take the time to think about my stories and explain what they don't like about it, and it was stupid of me to discourage that by very publicly saying it was "bad advice".  I've rewritten that part of the blog post to be more careful to say only what I'm justified in saying.

(This is a purely selfish act on my part, to get more feedback.  So don't accuse me of being civil.   )

EqD pre-readers are still fair game, because they're anonymous and because they're The Man.