Crutches · 2:17am Nov 15th, 2013
[Summary: Sometimes, as a writing exercise, I write a story without allowing myself to use fantasy, science fiction, sex, romance, or life-or-death situations.]
In my last blog post, Horizon threw my own question back at me: Is practicing writing different from writing? I replied,
I never do writing exercises. I don't like writing prompts, either. Sometimes I think of the writing I do here as practice, but I put as much effort into it as if I had been hired to write it. I don't think that practice in which you made less effort than in the real thing could do much good. …
I do things like saying, "My scene descriptions are boring; I'm going to spend special attention to them in this next story." But I wouldn't write a paragraph of scene description to practice. Getting elements in balance with each other is more difficult than getting them down in the first place. A surgeon doesn't say, "Today I'm just going to practice cutting, without worrying about infection, or where the arteries or nerves are, or scarring," because cutting properly is doing all those things right at the same time. I think writing is something like that.
Maybe a better analogy is sports. A judoka will practice a particular throw over and over again, but would never isolate the movements of individual muscles and practice them by themselves. There is an appropriate level of abstraction at which to practice. I think that level in writing is the scene or the short story.
Now and then I think about writing a long shortskirts-style story where I update every week with little revision, to practice writing quickly. But I'm not shortskirts, and I don't think I could do it.
But then I remembered that I was planning a blog post on one way I do think about practicing writing as different from writing: what I call “crutches”.
How do you make a story worth reading? You can sit around trying to think of “something to say”. You can envision a character and a situation that makes us empathize with or laugh at that character.
But that's hard. Instead, you can throw dragons and unicorns in your story because you know some people like anything with dragons and unicorns. Or you can pick a non-Earth-like planetary system and begin listing ways that life on it would be different, and write something that might get published in Analog. Or you can write clop, or a “Ponies do X” story.
The things in that last paragraph can all be crutches. I often like stories based on those things. But when I started writing, all I wrote was fantasy and science fiction stories that relied on technical ideas, or amazing fantasy settings, and the more I wrote, the more I began to suspect that I didn’t have anything to say about normal, everyday life.
So I read more non-genre fiction, where the author can’t rely on dragons or ray guns and has to talk about people. But again I found it full of crutches. John Irving has written some great things, but he has a tendency to kill someone off when the story gets boring and hope that will liven things up somehow. The other thing people do is talk about romance, which is a worthy subject, but it’s too easy to start spinning a tale about who’s sleeping with whom, or will she or won’t she, without proving that you really know anything about humans at all. The crutches of mainstream literature are romance and death.
I want to be able to write stories that have no dragons, no ray guns, no life and death situations, no romances, and are still interesting. It’s fine to write stories that have those things, but if all of your stories rely on those things to make them interesting, you’re probably not really connecting your readers with your characters, and not writing anything more than entertainment. I would like to be able, like Ray Bradbury, to write a story about getting out of the movie theater before they begin playing the national anthem, or the pleasure of running through grass barefoot.
Sometimes a great story uses death or romance to talk about something else, like Flannery O’Connor’s stories “A Good Man is Hard to Find” (which I don’t personally like very much) or “Everything that Rises Must Converge” (which I like very much), or Charles Bukowski stories. But if you do that, it’s hard to know whether you’re using a crutch. So I sometimes try to exclude those things from a story, just to prove to myself that I’m not using a crutch. So I suppose that makes that story a kind of practice story.
It's my personal view that you are conflating crutches with content.
A personally favored line of mine, or rather of another that I like to repeat myself, is that a good story makes the strange familiar and the familiar strange. It's meant to broaden someone's experiences, so that when two people talk, one might be able to say to the other, they a soldier and the other a civilian:
"I have some idea of that anger you must have felt in that moment, when you watched that man push the button, the anger that boiled over to those you loved across the ocean."
Trying to emulate the mundane is, unless one is appealing to the extraordinary, something that I cannot help but feel is an... incorrect approach to writing.
And that's what we have with romance and death, two things that are simultaneously mundane yet alien to us. Imagine, knowing someone, caring for them so much they become a part of you. Sounds strange, doesn't it?
Finding something important to say is difficult, but rewarding. I think the key is to not be afraid of writing what you actually believe. If you believe that you can/can't fight destiny, that destiny does/doesn't exist, that immortality is good/bad for the individual/society, that romantic love can/can't last forever, write a story about that. These are important ideas to be explored, and hardly the only important ideas and mlp is the perfect background for a lot of them.
On that note, it is important to know what it is that you actually believe.
There are indeed ways of practicing writing that make you a significantly better writer; AP English in high school, for instance, greatly improved my writing abilities. But why should writing essays make you a better writer?
Firstly, there is the technical aspect of writing. Grammar, repetitive sentence structure, overuse of words, phrases, or sentence structures, and things like that. These are universal to ALL forms of writing, and practicing ANY form of writing where you and anothers apply great scrutiny to your work is a means of gainful exercise in this respect.
Secondly, writing essays means that you have to be concise. Writing five paragraph essays is actually wonderful practice for learning how to condense your ideas down and present them in a clear, coherent, and concise manner. While some folks have noticed I have a terrible tendency to ramble on, I think that this skill actually helped me learn how to present ideas a lot more forcefully; while it isn't much of a story skill per se, it certainly has helped me with nonfictional writing a great deal, both in the workplace and for fun. Note that not everything we wrote in that class was such an essay, but a lot of our work was, and I think it was very helpful to us as writers.
Thirdly, I think just general scrutiny of anything you write, where you rewrite it based on feedback, is good. In my AP English class, there was a rule - EVERY SINGLE THING YOU WROTE could be rewritten and turned back in to be regraded. This was, in fact, not only important, but vitally important, given that our writing was scored using the AP test rating scale, which went from 1-9 - and we were being graded straight up on it. So, to get an A in the class, you had to get all of your writing from the entire course of the class up to an average of 8.1 out of 9. Note that this was NOT necessary to get a 5 (the highest possible score) on the AP test; we were being vastly overprepared because the goal was not to pass the AP test, but to become as good of writers as was actually possible. My physics class did the same; a test where a score somewhere north of 50% got you the highest possible score was used as the basis for tests where only a 90% or above got you an A. My professor actually said he would be disappointed in anyone in the class who got a 4 on the real AP test.
When you have that kind of expectation placed upon you, you strive to do better. And moreover, because of the revision process in AP English, we actually learned how to (le gasp!) edit our own writing and the writing of others. We would review each others' work, looking for errors, mistakes, ways to make it better, and then the teacher would do the same after we'd had the chance to revise it, and then we would get back our papers and cry because we got a 6 or 7 out of 9 (note that a 6 out of 9 would equate to a D) and then work and hack at it until it got to the point where it was actually well-written.
I think of everything, this is the most important aspect of that class - the fact that you could endlessly revise your papers and that, indeed, you were EXPECTED to write all of your papers at least twice made for much, much better writing and much in the way of gainful exercise.
I feel like having others look at my writing, to this very day, is the most important aspect of getting better as a writer, and when you are still looking at it as a piece to be revised, you can always make it that much better.
And while it may not seem terribly relevant, honestly, I think that learning about essay structure and learning about plot structure are actually closely related - all essays fundamentally work using the same sort of dynamic as all literary works do. You start out with a powerful, gripping introduction, you have three body paragraphs in which you make your points, hitting one after the next after the next, and finally you have a conclusion, which shows how your points have demonstrated the premise you outlined in the introduction (analogous to your climax), with the conclusion being the rest of the final paragraph.
Question: What if you've never much enjoyed stories about people doing real things? What is the benefit in reading or writing something you don't really enjoy? Are things like fantasy, romance, and the like still crutches if you're using them because it's more fun than walking?
I've found that writing prompts are a useful way to stay in the saddle, as it were, when I'm otherwise stuck in a writing rut. The good folks at Thirty Minute Ponies, for instance, for you to write a prompt-based story in only 30 minutes. If that doesn't get your creative muscles moving, nothing will.
Now I'm sitting here lamenting the terrible English education I received in High School.
Largely because of what 1508662 said. There are ways to get better, and the only way to get better is to write stuff and ask someone "how can I make this better?" I don't consider myself a great (or even very good) writer, but that just means I should write more. But there's value in writing less than full stories, if your goal is to go from "can spell" to "can tell a story."
Because I don't like your sports analogy. I, at my level of skill, could learn a lot by writing paragraphs of fiction and asking for critique. I could learn, hypothetically, a lot more by writing a novel and then asking for critique, but I would need so much critique at that point that I would need to throw much of it away. Is that the best way to learn?
A quarterback doesn't practice just by playing games. He does drills. He throws. He sneaks. He studies playbooks and tapes. He talks to coaches. He runs laps. All of these thing are elements of what he does on the field. Yes, he also plays games, and even in practice he play's like it's for real.
I don't think writing is that compressed an act. It's not like throwing a ball. It's the whole game.
So I, at least, could get a lot out of writing single sentences. Out of writing paragraphs. Out of transcribing scenes. I guess my question would be: can you, anymore, get anything out of practicing the fundamentals?
1508716 "The fundamentals" seems to be a list that keeps getting longer. I couldn't even say what the fundamentals are.
1508668 I guess you don't need to worry about it, then. But I don't entirely believe you.
1508902
OKay, I'm going to guess that I'm proposing the following idea: the "appropriate level of abstraction" is not a constant across all writers, and varies, at least in part, on the relative level of practice the wrter has in the art.
1508902
Touche. I'd just never think of that as being any different from anything else I've written.
I could make an argument that that situation is just as much a crutch as romance, it's all about playing with over-sized emotion (which is, when it comes down to it, the thing I love.) I think that's why many people use love and death, because they're excuses to be larger than life (which is often the draw of sci-fi and fantasy as well), and in that case teenagers going through puberty is just a less commonly used crutch.
Stephen King talked about one of those hard sci-fi writers that wrote about plumbers in space in his book On Writing. I can't remember the name of the author, or the book though. I always wanted to check it out.
I have never ever in my life understood why the term "crutch" is a negative one. I find it revoltingly offensive when implied that it is a "lesser man" using something artificial to prop himself up.
A crutch is a tool used by those who need help to move under their own power. It is a well designed boon to many. And using crutches is not easier than walking, so it's not like relying on them is a problem unless there is an injury you are letting fester.
That aside, every single story that is not 100% factually true relies on sparks of imaginative concept. I would strongly hesitate to call these crutches. I would call them legs.
As for a greater understanding of everyday life? Said understanding is what has led me to only want to read about dragons and unicorns flying space ships to avenge the dead while falling in love and having raunchy sex.
I have two things to say on this, but I can't explain them well so I'll just write something and let you fill in the blanks.
A common problem shared by many novice programmers is that they'll often start writing programs that they have no interest in because they think it'll make them better programmers. Of course, they end up treating programming as a chore, get bored really quickly, and end up learning nothing and writing nothing interesting.
Not long ago, I thought that low-level memory manipulation without language support was difficult. I needed to do it as part of an interesting problem, and it became easy.
Now for the dogma: You should write the story you feel like writing to make the readers feel what you want them to feel. If it contains romance and death and fantasy, then that's okay. If it requires you to describe the joy of running through grass, then it will be easier when you're not forcing yourself. If you want to become a better writer, you should do it by understanding your audience and by working on your communication skill sets, and not by limiting yourself to certain genres.
You'll notice that my fic count stands steady at a staggering zero. Take any writing advice from me with a couple grains of salt.
1509015
Thing is, if you aren't willing to do things that you don't really want to do, you're never going to be able to program anything, because a lot of programming is about nitpicking over your own work endlessly. If you don't like programming itself, chances are regardless of your motive you'll give up before you get enough skill to do more than the basic.
I think it is the same with writing; merely wanting to tell stories isn't what makes you a good writer, it is actually valuing writing itself which allows you to spend the time and practice honing.
1509377
I couldn't disagree more, but that's just personal experience.
I have to really want to tell the story to finish anything (as one can see, looking at my year old incomplete fics) and as long as my writing will tell them I'm happy. On the other hand, there are some stories I really want to tell, and I just have to keep trying those and have faith that I'll continue to enjoy writing them eventually. It took me twelve years, three genre switches, and a hell of a lot of starts and stops to finish one of them, but obviously I really had to tell it. (And I wrote a bunch of ones that were easier to tell along the way.)
Like I said, that's just me. I don't think you can generalize about stuff like, essentially, why people write. (Also, I'm making no claims of being good, so maybe that's a different thing.)
1509408
Writing is somewhat different from programming in that if you try to program a 3D FPS without any prior knowledge of programming, you will not only almost certainly fail, but you probably won't even end up with anything which is usable; conversely, everyone (well, virtually everyone) is literate, so everyone has the ability to write something, even if it isn't especially good. An unpolished story is still a story, and even if it is only half-written, it is still something which can be read.
However, my point was more about why people get good at something. Having stories to tell is a reason to write something, but it isn't necessarily enough of a reason on its own to learn to write well, as witnessed by, well, reams and reams of poorly written fanfiction (and other stories) on the internet (and heck, off it too). If you don't actually like writing very much, you're much more likely to give up, even if you do have a story you'd like to complete, and you certainly aren't gong to spend a lot of time trying to improve your own writing. Given that you seem to enjoy writing about writing judging by your blog, I'd say you at least have a fair bit of interest as writing as a craft. It doesn't have to be your primary drive or goal, and I'm pretty sure it isn't given you said it isn't, but, well, if you disliked writing or didn't care about it, I have a hard time imagining you'd spend so much time thinking abut it.
*Imploding Colon. Just saying.
But yes, agree with you - I reckon that being able to make the mundane interesting is less of making a "good story" and instead becoming a "skilled author". It's almost like the Midas touch, except it's a full-on structure, approach and mindset package. I had a bout of this a few months ago, actually, which gave birth to my first serious attempt at writing original short fiction for sale. It was something called George Buys A Chair, in which George buys a chair. Except it turned out to be a bomb, but most of the writing focused on the unreal thrill of DIY and middle-aged beta male frustration (3 rejections so far, and I'll make the lead-in more apparent to gun for the 4th attempt).
Though if you were to ask me which kind of story I'd prefer to read, I'd go for the one with a touch of mystic to it. Not heavy, completely-new-world fantasy or sci-fi, and not fully stripped down RL stuff, but stuff like the Bartimaeus trilogy. Instantly relatable environment with a twist seems to classify most of the cult classics, as it's easier to pick up - HP, Twilight, and even Haruki Murakami if you want to stretch that tag to its breaking limit.
Incidentally, "A Good Man is Hard to Find" is also by Flannery O'Conner, and probably her single most famous story. As near as I can tell, Frank O'Conner never wrote a story with that title. (Though I am much less familiar with his work.)
Writing crossovers is my crutch. I'm not clever enough to come up with original plots or original characters, so I take the characters of one franchise (Friendship is Magic) and mash them up with the events of another franchise (TRON Legacy, Quantum Leap, The Rocketeer...).
Also all your talk about death and crutches makes me wonder what you think of Old Friends -- I know you read it but I don't remember whether or not you liked it, what your impressions were, etc.
1508932 Probably. At some point everyone has to parse sentences.
1509521
Woo! I finally figured this out. Okay, I don't believe in good writing. I'm going to write a blog post on this idea, because it's the second time it's come up in the past day. But here's the preview:
I believe in the competency line. That is a line where your writing is easily legible, communicates the basic ideas, and gives the information needed to convey your point or story. In the case of fiction, it means your story has consistent characters and a beginning, middle, and end.
There are some people below the competency line, and those people will need to work to get better. Personally, I read enough books in my life that I haven't been below the competency line in at least twenty years-- the understanding of how a story was supposed to look and go is something that I caught onto without working on it.
Once a writer is over the competency line, writing is all icing and fancy flavors. People like icing and fancy flavors (though no one agrees which ones, exactly,) and people who enjoy writing for various reasons might like playing with them-- sometimes because they like to experiment and see what ways they can make a story taste, sometimes because they know how the story tastes in their head and they need to figure out how to make it taste that way, sometimes just because they figured out a way a story could taste and they want to try it out. But, since not everyone likes banana, or chocolate frosting, or coconut cream, no amount of icing or flavors will make a story "good" to any given person.
And there are some people out there who like "plain" stories very much. For example, Little Women is one of the most plainly written books I've ever read, and I love it for far more than nostalgia (I've said a number of times that it's the closest thing to MLP in classic literature.) Not wanting to (or knowing how to) use fancy tricks will not make you a worse writer.
So, I personally am interested in knowing about and using certain flavors and techniques, in hopes of being able to make the story like the version in my head. Others I have no interest in, either because I don't think in that kind of story, or because I hate those flavors. I sometimes read stories that I think would be better if they knew how to use those things better, but those are my opinions and other people might not like the flavors I recommend (this is why I'm the world's worst prereader, BTW.) But for me, it's all about the story, and if someone is doing fine with their competent-but-plain stories and loves to tell them, they're just as good as me.
Now, to bring this analogy back to the topic of the post, I don't believe in writing using flavors you just don't like. If you don't like chocolate, or banana, or plain stories, then making yourself figure out how to use those flavors is probably just going to leave you with a story you don't particularly like and a distaste for writing. And there's no harm in being good at just a few flavors.
I'm unsure how to interpret this.
On one hand, it looks like the claim that "having something to say about real life" (so, realism in some sense?) is the goal of writing, so elements like awesome worldbuilding or aw-look-at-these-people-kissing! are distractions from real writing because they do nothing for realism and can actually sustain a story in lieu of it.
A few years back I was Rexroth fanboy and and got very pissy about "proper literature". But now, I'm pretty sure this is entirely false. Writing in general doesn't have a goal. A particular piece of writing can have goals, sure, but that's dependent on the author.
On the other hand, it's could be the claim that if your goal is having to say something about real life, then using tools (or crutches) that don't have that effect is pointless. This is true, but so what? You don't use a whisk to eat soup (although ...
), but that's not really an insight.
(Reading back, that sounds more confrontational that I intended. Oh well.)
1510242
I completely disagree.
Competency is a bare minimum, but there are many, many grades above that point which are just purely better storytelling. Knowing how a story should go is something they actually teach you in middle school at this point, if not earlier - I remember going over story structure in class. It isn't even hard to understand how a story should go - you can draw it on a piece of paper.
The hard part is execution. It isn't all icing after competency; there is, in fact, a great deal of honing which goes on, which has to do with story flow, dramatic tension, and all that other fun stuff. It is a universal writing skill, and in addition there are specific skills which have to do with the various genres, which make you better at writing all stories of said genre. Cutting out stuff which doesn't belong in there, streamlining scenes, making the whole story flow at the proper rate, with the proper level of tension in the reader, with chapters ending in all the right places, strong, vibrant characterization, all of this stuff goes beyond mere competency.
It isn't all icing. If you look at something like, say, Good Omens or The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, it isn't just icing that makes the book good. It isn't just icing that separates something like those books from lesser fare. The fact that the prose is wonderful certainly helps, but there is an underlying tone and structure to those books which makes them wonderful to read.
If you look at less skilled authors, like JK Rowling, their lesser writing ability really shows. The Harry Potter series starts having real problems after the fourth book and the sixth book in particular is a terrible, terrible mess, and it is all because Rowling is simply not that great of a writer. She got a good idea, she was decent enough to execute it, and then she got lucky and it got promoted and was put all over the news and it became very popular. It wasn't pure luck, but quite honestly, there were a lot of potential realities where those books weren't a huge smash hit. Rowling is never going to be able to duplicate her success with Harry Potter, because she simply isn't good enough to do so - even if she writes something else, it just won't be nearly as good.
When I talk about good writing, I'm not talking about florid prose; that is utterly unnecessary. Something can be starkly written and wonderful, or have whimsical prose and suck. The truth is that every story has its own best way of being told, and a good writer can tell it much more closely to optimally than a poor one. It is the same way that you can tell that Picasso was a real artist whereas many modern artists are hacks - Picasso could draw beautifully, he simply chose to express himself in other ways. Being plain is not the same thing as being bad or bland.
The best writer is the person who loves writing, but who isn't so attached to what he is written that he cannot go at it with an axe. If you cannot do that, then you can never really refine your story into the best story it can be.
There is a difference between quality and taste. Something may not be to your taste, but still be high quality, and if you are capable of recognizing quality, you should be capable of acknowledging this. However, something can also not be to your taste and suck and, quite frankly, if something is truly great, it should be possible for it to not be to your taste and STILL be something you enjoy.
As far as not believing in writing using flavors you don't like - that's fine, if you're happy with not growing. The way you improve is by pushing your boundaries and learning new things, not by playing things safe. Every time I do something new, I am improving my writing much more than doing something old. There is value in both, of course; honing what you already know is itself helpful. But doing something entirely new teaches you entirely new things; you gain more when you start with less. I think the real key is questioning why you don't like something in the first place. Is there something INHERENTLY wrong with a comedic story, or a dark story, or anything else? If not, then why do you dislike them? Is it because you don't think they're written well enough? How can they be made into something you DO like? Asking these questions, making things work for you, is a way of expanding your creativity.
I'm always trying to grow as a person, because if I stop growing, then what's the point? This is why I'm always trying to pick up new skills, and am interested in learning more about everything.
1509829 I made a special folder in Serious Stories for it.
That's beautiful writing.
1509761 Oops. I must've gotten confused because I just read his interview. I don't like the story because it uses dark, horrifying events just to set up a paragraph or two of epiphany, and the stuff the story is supposed to be about is overshadowed by the setup for it. And the epiphany--that we're all not so different from the psychopathic killer--is one I don't agree with, or think is at best so trite that it's more misleading than insightful.
1508690 When I try to do a 30-minute prompt, I end up with a blank sheet of paper and 30 minutes poorer.
1510325
I enjoyed reading Harry Potter. Had it been "better" in some way you think it should have, I might not have enjoyed it as much. (At the same time, there might be ways that I think it would have been better that would make you not enjoy it.) There are lots of "great" books that I would only read if you paid me, because despite how many smart people say they're good, I think they're boring or overly focused on details, or annoying to figure out. So, as a reader, I'm glad Rowling wrote the books the way she did.
Then I can honestly say I've never read a great piece of writing. I don't believe there's a difference between taste and quality, they're the same thing. I assume that if I enjoyed a work, it was well written and above the competency line. If I didn't enjoy it, that doesn't make it poorly written. I've never gotten more than a page into any of the great Russian authors without being bored, but I'm certainly not going to slam their quality. Other people enjoy their quality, I don't to the point that they're unreadable. And that is just fine, there are enough books to go around.
This assumes that you only see one axis to grow along. As if there aren't a million different ways of telling the kinds of stories you do like, and there's nothing to be said for growing in depth rather than breadth. It also assumes that you only like one thing, rather than a limited range of things that can be experimented with endlessly. For me, there are enough stories I like to read and write that I will never read and write them all, so I'd rather not waste my life trying to like things that I don't. Life is to short for homework.
1510380
I disagree. The primary way in which the later Harry Potter books were poor had nothing to do with personal taste and everything to do with structure and flow. Book 6 is really the nadir of the series, because there is a very, very long portion in the middle of the book where nothing of consequence really occurs; it just drags on and on. Reading the entire book in one plane trip, as I did, it was very obvious to me that Rowling had really lost her way somewhere in there, and didn't really find it. The book was bloated and far too long for what content it contained. Fixing this would have made it a lot better.
Books 5 and 7 don't have as good of flows as the earlier books did, either. I think the problem was that book 4 was very long but had a plot which worked, and she sort of felt obligated to keep up the length, but the later books ended up feeling a little bit bloated for it.
I also felt that the whole angsty Harry thing was rather poor characterization, and it didn't feel very natural the way she executed it, but that wasn't nearly as big of a problem.
They're not. If quality were equivalent to taste, it would be impossible to improve as a writer. It is possible to improve as a writer, ergo quality must be an independent factor from taste.
Mere repetition is actually a poor way to practice; you gain more by pushing your boundaries and limitations than by doing the same thing over and over again.
In the end, however, the ultimate thing is that all writing is fundamentally an exercise in creativity, which is problem solving. Solving new problems is how you get better at problem solving; solving problems similar to problems you have solved previously is gainful, but it is not as gainful as gaining entirely new approaches to solving problems. If you have a new approach, you gain many, many new tools for solving problems, rather than just adding one or two to your toolbox. Writing comedy isn't the same as writing tragedy, and yet by doing both you can learn tricks which apply to both which you would not have picked up on had you only focused on one or the other. Out of the box thinking is often overvalued (we have boxes for a reason), but it is still very valuable to be able to step outside of what is expected and do something new and different. Sometimes it allows you to cut knots you would otherwise struggle at untying.
Of course, I am an engineer, and it is frequently noted just how important being multidisciplinarian is - because if you can attack a problem from more angles, you're more likely to find a solution that works.
Of course it isn't homework. It is autodidacticism.
Of course, I also LIKE trying new things. I look at things I disagree with. I read stories I wouldn't have othewise read. I try out things that I wouldn't have tried otherwise, just to see what it is like, and maybe find out I'm wrong about something and that I do like other things. But I like new things in general.
Learning is fun to me. Learning ANYTHING is fun to me. Which is probably why I have so much random knowledge crammed into my brain, and do such crazy things as read court decisions and scientific papers and do random statistical modelling of stuff.
So maybe I'm just a lucky, overly pushy jerk
1510435
I think we've managed to establish, with certainty, that we look at literature with totally different (and often opposed) paradigms. And that this doesn't matter one little bit to anyone.
The only thing I can recommend at this point is that you pay no attention to my opinions, because they'll be based on my paradigm, and you'll almost certainly find them wrong because they start from a premise you disagree with (and this also won't matter to anyone.)
1510447
Aw, but I enjoy debating so.
I do understand that it is unlikely I shall be convincing you, regardless.
And we can let bad horse have his blog back.
1510348
That's true; thank you.
That's not what I was trying to talk about it all. I'm not trying to use flavors that I don't like. I'm trying to use the subtle flavors by themselves to learn how to use them, even though my goal is to use them together with the stronger flavors. If you always put hot peppers into whatever you cook, you can never tell whether you're a good cook. That's my point.
1510750
That's why I listed "plain" as a flavor. I can understand that, but I still think that if you're a fan of chocolate with fudge icing, there's no point in making yourself write something plain. If you like things with subtle flavors then yeah, stop trying to make double chocolate with subtle flavors under it and work on the subtle flavors. But if you like reading or writing for chocolate, there's no reason to give it up. It won't even make you fat.
There are a lot of excessively long comments on this page. I apologize for adding on to that.
1510548
I personally treat claims of subjectivity as equivalent to claims of willful ignorance (minus the negative connotations). Nothing can be reduced to "external facts" because no such thing can knowably exist. Your beliefs cannot possibly be validated by anything but more of your beliefs, meaning that the things you believe to be "facts" are either supported by circular logic, or by nothing. You can claim that anything is subjective, so I would not consider it a useful claim.
"JK Rowling is a bad author because her plots drag on needlessly" and "the perceived length of an object is reduced along its direction of relative motion because the speed of light is constant" are equally valid arguments to me. Both are based on a model, and there's no reason to discount the first just because it's difficult for some people to understand or verify.
The criterion for physical models is perfect predictability of certain observables. The criterion for Titanium Dragon's model is _________. If we can answer that, then we can move beyond what you call "subjectivity" and figure out why Titanium Dragon believes that JK Rowling is "less skilled" and why bookplayer disagrees, or why one or both of them might change their minds.
"It's not worth trying to find out what his model is based on" is an acceptable answer, and it's one that falls back on willful ignorance.
There's no reason to believe that everyone will accept the same model of a "great author", but I suspect that most models will be accepted by many people. For Bad Horse's model of a "great author", I'd suggest starting with "A great author is capable of making readers feel anything with any given plot and setting."
1510755
Not everyone writes just to tell a story, and I suspect that Bad Horse is one of those "not everyone"s. His posts make more sense if you assume that he wants to be able to write more persuasively no matter the situation.
My mom's an RN ( Registered Nurse--the sort of the Master Sergeant of American health care) and on her refrigerator there's one of those refrigerator magnets and it says WALK DELIBERATELY.
By which is meant: you can go to the gym and you can jog and you can participate in active sports--and all that's good--but nothing will be so beneficial to your overall health as the additional steps you take in your day-to-day routine. I've proved the truth of that to myself.
For which reason I say: WRITE DELIBERATELY.
Whatever you write during the day -- e-mail at work, blog post, forum comment--write it as a deliberate creative act. Don't just jam catchphrases and jargon together and say "good enough." Write deliberately. This doesn't mean sending your boss a sonnet: you should know your audience better than that. But--to take that as an example--your boss has a perpetually flooded inbox and everything's always urgent. How do you get and keep their attention? I find the rules of short-story pulp fiction work best: hook 'em with the first line, keep the pace brisk, and keep it short and snappy.
Intelligibility. Accuracy. Concision. Eloquence. Persuasion. Cultivate these things whenever you write, in whatever you write, and they will be ready when you sit down to your magnum opus--just as the fitness you gain by walking will be there when you decide to climb a mountain, or whatever.
This has been a very informative blog, to be certain. From the outset, it has led to various eye-opening disclosures and opinions, backed by both bright controversies and educated applications. I really want to explore these ideas, which I suppose is the point - discuss, discern, debate, then digest.
I have to say, reading Bad Horse and bookplayer blogs makes me want to choke myself on literature - in the good way, the one with a happy ending and no unexpected suffocation.
Thank you for inspiring me.
1514195 you said it better than I could.
1641706
Well, I assumed everyone was rubbing their "opinion parts" during all that raucous literary bravado. I just wanted to make plainly sure that they knew I was watching and appreciative.
Watching very closely.
With a camera. And popcorn.
... where are we again?
1642359 You really have a knack for saying ordinary things in disturbing ways.
1642880
Disturbing: dis·turb·ing [dih-stur-bing] adjective: upsetting or disquieting; dismaying: a disturbing increase in the crime rate.
I am an increase in the crime rate.
Make no mistake.
Merry Christmas, Bad Horse. You're a good and lovely soul.
1509521
Objection:
Code you can feed to the compiler, but not get out anything (useful). Maybe it doesn't actually compile, or it compiles but does the wrong thing, or it goes into an infinite loop. This'd be akin to your unpolished story.
This may be akin to bookplayer's competency line.
I think every story is a practice story, Brent.