Why I rarely outright give advice · 2:41pm Mar 25th, 2013
If you’re reading this, Pashoo, I swear to God I’m still working on an answer to your question.
If you’re all wondering where I’ve been the last week or two, in any case, I’ve been screwing around on Blacklight under the name Hashul on the US/AU servers; it’s not a perfect game (okay it’s super bad), but the voice chat is the funnest thing ever invented.
(yes I do in fact have an addiction to social interaction why didn't you ask)
I wrote the following in like thirty minutes, because fuck proofreading.
Holy contradictions, Batman: taking advice and being it
I once took advice from someone.
See, I was told that the story had too much banter. I was told that a person was too frivolous in the face of impending doom, and should instead be serious from the start. I was told that the action came too late and had no real lead-up, and that since he should spend all his time serious he should have a reason to be serious at every point.
So I fixed it.
This I did in thirty minutes; the entire transformation of the story’s character was complete, simply and utterly.
I took a look at it soon after.
It was good. The entire first bit was cut. There was nothing before the action: the entire thing was action. It read like an ending instead of a beginning or a middle, because in medias res is all the rage. There was emotion all throughout; not human emotion, of course, but deep, dramatic emotion, the horror of betrayal and the grudging acceptance and the bitter humour without its frivolous echoes.
One could go down a checklist of literary excellence and find acceptability at every step, and I vilified it.
It was to writing what knighty is to web design: it was the speech of a mediocre writer without a voice desperately trying to become as good as the people he’d read, making in the process something that might technically be defined as good but in the end turning into another arsehole with a fetish for Frank Miller’s narration and a giant pair of eagles taped to his arms.
In the shortest terms, for all its technical excellence it was a copy; there was no casual world-building, no enormous dialogues on the tribal norms of ancient pony society compacted into single words, nothing that I could have done that I would be satisfied few others could; there was everything good but nothing in it I wanted in it that might have made it brilliant, and for that I hated it more than anything else I’d ever written because I had from the very start made the simple promise that I should make an endeavour to make everything I’d ever write the best thing I’d ever written and that little mark of approval from the person who gave the advice—that ‘oh, this is better’ or ‘eh, it’s okay now’—was worse than any other unhelpful criticism because it was something that actively undermined that and turned it into another story, something to read and then not really care about further on and nothing to recommend it save its potential premise.
It turned something I liked, in other words, into something I didn’t.
And I know that that advice must have been given in the very best of intentions, no matter how horridly American it was. I know that that advice was given in the hope that I might improve as a writer and not in the hopes that I would think that I should find myself hated by myself for listening to it.
If bad advice can hurt you, good advice will ruin you, because if bad advice will make you memorably bad good advice will make you nothing but another good writer whose greatest award is the fact that someone’s bothered to read his story to the end.
That is why I will say ‘the spacing of a paragraph is its mood’ instead of ‘stick a space here’: you have to solve your own problems and make your own rules, and in doing so you will create something far more beautiful than anything anyone will ever make for you.
I may not be a professional quote-maker,
Pictured: not a professional quote-makerbut allow me to eschew poetic echoes and cute one-liners in favour of condensing my point into that sort of horrible platitude aspiring artists make up for themselves after having been rejected from die Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien for the second time:
Take everything you can.
Just never give any of yourself for it.
25th April 2013
Yishun, Singapore
(yes I know there are at least three phrases in this essay more quotable than that but motherfuck I’ll be right and yes I know this is advice in itself but only the Sith deal in absolutes and if Yoda can do it so can I)
I am a professional quote maker, that is to say that I make professional quotes. I do not get paid for my services, however, and am therefore an amateur professional quote maker and just what in the Sam Hell were you doing on r/atheism?
For shame
945541 Presumably professing profane personal preferences.
Also quoting.
945541
Probably linked by MSF et al
Eh?
Thank god, I almost thought I had bared my soul to the scrutinizing gaze of everyone who ever checked your comments section, for nothing. Good to know this is not the case.
But yeah, your advice here really applies to musical culture, nowadays. A lot of the most popular artists make their music with the express interest of appealing to a major demographic and gaining a following. Most people strive to achieve that level of fame and try to do so by imitating the popular styles rather than understanding what makes them good. Case in point, youtube is full of terrible amateur dubstep made by people who don't really know what they're trying to make.
945541
945564
945848
>find reference in random thread
>google
>r/cringe
>that thread
>mfw
i.imm.io/10HiR.png
946048 Ooh! Ooh! I came up with a good one once!
"This is not a quote?" - Archonix
Originality's for the birds.