bookplayer's Manifesto · 6:33pm Dec 6th, 2013
This is a 4000 word blog post.
This is me trying to set down my view of writing, of how I understand the writing of other people, of how I understand my own writing, and why I write.
This is in response to conversations I’ve had over the past several months with Bad Horse, Titanium Dragon, and HoofBitingActionOverload, and First_Down. It’s also an apology to people who asked me to look at their stories, a suggestion to critics of my stories, and an explanation of who I am as a writer.
This is divided into five parts, so here’s a quick index of what’s below:
Art -- Where I argue that we can’t define art, and we sure can’t define good writing.
Drives -- Where I suggest, if there’s no good art, what writers are actually aiming for.
Goal -- Where I talk about how different drives mix to make each author an individual looking for totally different things in their writing.
bookplayer, Quality, and You -- Where I talk about how the fact that we’re all looking for individual things makes criticism something I’m equally bad at giving and taking.
bookplayer -- Where I try to explain, as best I can, what specific things drive me to write.
Let’s go.
Art
Let’s say for a moment that you could make a piece of art divorced of any context of good or bad. It just needs to be art. What could you make? What couldn’t you make? Is there anything that can’t be considered art, if it’s being presented as art?
Probably not. Especially considering what artists regularly present as art of various types-- performance art and post-modern art being famous for this sort of broad view. And in writing, we have our Joyces and our Burroughs and our Vonneguts making a mess of any attempts we might make to define what a novel should be, or what a story should look like.
Or, perhaps you give them a pass because they were dealing with innovative ideas in creative ways, and would rather dismiss trite plots that rest on cliches, coincidences, and sentimentality. Entertainment, sure, but art? Well, in that case, we have Shakespeare, Austen, Dickens, and Twain to show that pushing boundaries doesn’t make a good argument for art.
Those folks are geniuses (YMMV) and we generally have an invisible “don’t try this at home” warning slapped on there for lesser artists. But still, they stand there, proving that we can’t define the art of writing without casting out someone who is undoubtedly and without question a writer with a huge influence on the art.
But what makes good art, when it comes to writing?
It’s not good grammar… aside from our old pal Joyce, many great authors have written first person stories with accents that cast aside grammar and common spelling to enhance a work. In addition, grammar and spelling rules have shifted over time and place, and I’ve never heard anyone bashing Chaucer as being bad simply because of a lack of modern spelling and grammar.
Now, obviously today’s “bad writers” do not have the excuse of using language that’s been outdated for hundreds of years, but I hold this up to show that people read and enjoy The Canterbury Tales and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Poor grammar doesn’t often make a story unreadable, nor does it, by itself, make it bad. A good story can have bad grammar.
It’s also not an original plot. I think we can all agree that if that was the case, we’d all be screwed. People have been writing stories for a long, long, long time, and there are very few plots that someone hasn’t done before. Now, we do kind of try to cycle through them so that not every generations gets the same plots, but especially in this day and age, when we have access to more stories online than people a hundred years ago could ever hope to see in their lifetimes, originality is probably not going to be synonymous with quality.
How about just a good plot? I doubt it. Writers have been fighting that one since the 1920’s, at least, trying to see just how pointless or incomprehensible they can make their plot. And some have clearly succeeded. People don’t read Breakfast of Champions or Naked Lunch for their plots. Even before we purposely started trying to mess with the idea, Moby Dick likes to take chapter long breaks from the plot to talk about the 19th century whaling industry, and the plot of Oliver Twist is no where near what people mean when they talk about good writing.
Prose? Pinning it on good prose just takes us farther down the spiral. What’s good prose? There are great writers who aren’t descriptive. There are great writers who aren’t evocative. There are great stories that have silted dialogue. There are great writers with a distinctive voice, and great writers with a mechanical voice. Agreeing on what makes great prose is a topic for another conversation, but chances are there’s a certified classic book out there with prose you hate, so it probably can’t make a book “good” by itself.
Ideas, maybe. We’re getting a little closer here. Many great books have creative new takes on morality or philosophy or values. Certainly, this has elevated a lot of books that fall down in other places we’ve looked at so far. But at the same time… I’m not sure it’s necessary. The ideas behind To Kill a Mockingbird are pretty tried and true, and were even when it was published. In many ways To Kill a Mockingbird doesn’t say much that wasn’t said in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and as important as it was historically, I’m not sure people would classify Uncle Tom’s Cabin as good novel.
Okay, if not creative ideas, what about good ideas? Well, since good fiction can convince us of divine right of kings in The Lord of the Rings, and make us root for abusive relationships in Taming of the Shrew or Wuthering Heights, I’m going to go with no. Yes, there might be some people so completely turned off by an idea that they refuse to acknowledge a work as good, but most of us are capable of suspending disbelief enough to accept what would logically be a bad idea for the sake of a good story.
What about resonance? The idea that a good story affects the audience somehow, however that might be. But here we come to a different problem-- there are many people who were affected by Twilight, who felt it resonated with them. And there are a hundred variations a year of hero’s journey fantasy books, and whichever someone read first will probably resonate with them-- for example, I’ve known handfuls of guys whose affection for Raistlin Majere or Drizzt Do’Urden rivals many girls deep affection for Bella Swann and Edward Cullen. Are we prepared to say that Twilight, Dragonlance, and the Dark Elf Trilogy are “good books”? They are clearly resonating with an audience-- people don’t just like them, many people deeply love these characters and books.
What I personally see from writers and people who tend to be critical of fiction is this idea that it’s some balance of these things, though they can’t say exactly what. Je ne sais quoi. And bad fiction is a story that falls down in one or more of these areas… unless it was good.
And so, every single day I talk to writers who are aiming their craft at this nebulous target; shifting words around, adjusting pacing, trying different things to hit what I seriously believe is a mariage -- “good writing.”
But wait-- I post writing advice all the damn time. Why would I care about that, if I think good writing is about as well defined as the laws of physics in Equestria? Don't worry, we're getting there. But next you need to understand...
Drive
Creating art, good or bad, is one thing. But writers have a reason they choose writing as their art, and a reason they keep doing it. They have a reason they write each specific story they write. Those reasons are a personal bar they’ve set for themselves, it defines their conditions for success.
From what I’ve observed, those reasons seem to be some mix of:
Telling a story/seeing if they can: Telling a story is probably the number one reason people start writing fiction. They thought of a story, and they want to tell it. What’s more, they want to tell it in a way that makes people understand all of the reasons they wanted to tell it-- how awesome it is, what a brilliant idea it is, how much they love this world or these characters.
Related to that, and common among more jaded writers, is writing something to see if they can write it. They want to see if they can make people feel a certain emotion, if they can write a kind of story that they normally don’t write, or that no one normally writes.
In both of these cases, some learning is important-- not to be a good writer in some elusive general sense, but because you’re trying to learn how words manipulate emotions, how characters and stories feel important or real to people, and how to communicate what’s in your head via a limited medium. You can do all of these things and still write something miles away from whatever good is, and have it be a rousing success. But doing that takes a set of skills that writers build up over time from a million different places.
Building an audience: Almost every writer in the world wants an audience. After all, if they didn’t care about someone, somewhere reading their stories, why write them down in the first place?
The general public likes certain things. These things are not mysterious, and many an author has made themselves famous in whatever arena they happen to be working (and occasionally rich besides) by just giving people what they want. There are certain sets of skills to build for this too-- people aren’t as stupid as you’ve been lead to believe, but they’re smart in different ways from writers. Things that writers think get them closer to good often move them away from what the public wants, and the public can see that and will be more than happy to ignore their genius.
This is further complicated by the fact that different parts of the public like different things. This is why we have genres and age categories; because we recognize that each has its own audience with its own qualities it defines as good. A mystery writer might be godawful at fantasy, and no where near what people mean when they talk about good writing, but that doesn’t mean that millions of people don’t want to read their books.
So why don’t all writers write for, ya’ know, the readers? Because sometimes that conflicts with their other reasons for writing. If the story they want to tell, or the thing they want to try, just isn’t something that most people want to read, they’re kind of screwed. Or, as I will talk about below, some people are aiming for a select group of readers who are looking for something good.
Some writers will work towards a balance -- arguably, this is Stephen King’s greatest trick -- but in many ways that’s almost as hard as aiming for good writing. Staying true to yourself and to everyone else usually takes luck, a really good understanding of other people, and skills honed to take advantage of that.
Prestige: This is where people aim for good. But, not actually good, because no one can tell them what that is. They aim for the standard of good set by a certain group of people who have positioned themselves in a way that they get to declare things good. This can be college professors, critics, awards committees, EqD, Seattle’s Angels, “those guys who comment on Bad Horse’s blog,” or any other person that they think “knows a good story.”
This is often the direction writers are trying to go when they move away from things readers like to read. And there’s nothing wrong with that. There’s just not really anything right about it either. Writing a story ten critics enjoy is about the same as writing a story ten random people enjoy. If the writer was aiming for the critics, and he got them to enjoy it, it’s a success!
Goal
So, a writer’s goal is the way those drives mix. It’s possible to write only for one of those three reasons, but… I’ve never met someone who did. Honestly, I’ve never met someone who actually didn’t care about all three of those things. We just all care different amounts about each of them.
I know people who live for prestige. If the right people don’t think a story is good, that story is a failure. They still want views, they want to make the feature box, and they want to tell their story well. But they could have told it well in an entirely different way, if they were looking for the feature box. They place a priority on prestige.
I also know people who chase the audience. "What does the audience want and how can I give it to them?" is the first consideration for a story, and everything else comes after. Some are successful. Some were successful then ended up hating it, because secretly they wanted prestige. I’ll get to their problem in a moment.
One might think the most pure goal in writing a story is to write the story the best way you know how. That is at least difficult, and maybe impossible, because without knowing your audience, you don’t know the best way to write it-- you almost automatically have to decide if you’re writing for prestige or for the general audience, and even what subsection of a general audience you might be writing for. If a story is best told as, basically, a romance novel, but the writer doesn’t want to write a romance novel, they’re probably going to ignore what would be the best way of writing the story because of the lack of prestige in romance writing.
And here is where we come to dissonance. These drives can work for an author’s goal for writing in general, and the goal for writing a given story, but they might have different priorities for each. Maybe a writer whose goal is prestige tries to sell out with a story meant to capture a larger audience. Or maybe a writer who usually enjoys a large audience for writing things with mass appeal want to do a smaller prestige work. Or maybe either of them have one story that they want to tell exactly the way they want to tell it, and damn the audience.
This is sometimes a recipe for disaster, because no matter how well the work does at what they intended this work to do, it often does nothing to fulfill their personal goals as a writer. And that’s assuming the work does what they want it to do in the first place; it’s entirely likely that they have the wrong skill set to be successful at it. But, that doesn’t really matter, because writers often have some idea that the grass is greener for people with different goals, so they’ll keep trying to shift their goals to match what seems to be a more tempting option. I’m pretty sure as long as there are writers, there will be people trying to write things that don’t make them happy.
Anyway, these goals are the reason I offer advice on writing. Since most authors have some mixture of all three drives, most authors will be at least vaguely interested in a mix of ideas and tools for writing. And many tools can be used in different ways towards different goals.
Personally, I’m mainly trying to help towards telling the story you want to tell. I occasionally offer tips towards building an audience, and I rarely do anything towards prestige except point out why people who offer it might be wrong. That isn’t because those tools aren’t worth knowing, but rather because those “rules of good writing” are the first things everyone else will tell you. You can find people all over explaining why you should show, not tell. I'm here to tell you why you shouldn't.
But the things I talk about aren’t meant for good writing. They’re meant for whatever kind of writing you feel like doing. I’m currently working on a series of fluffy holiday scenes with barely any plot. Is this going to be a prestigious story? Oh hell no. But I’m still using everything I know about writing so that it will feel as fun as I can make it feel.
But it’s important to realize, in terms of goals, where a writer is hoping for separate things. Writing the story the best way for that story might be something that’s unlikely to win prestige. Trying to write something good might not be the best way to build an audience. And all of this is fine depending on how the author is trying to succeed.
bookplayer, Quality, and You
People sometimes ask me for help with their stories, but I don’t know how.
This is because, as stated above, people have different goals. If you feel that your story hit those goals you were aiming for, in the correct proportions, I’m happy to call it a success no matter how I personally feel about it. What do I know? All I can personally tell you is if it meets my own goals for writing, and how you could do that if you wanted to. But more often than not, that’s not really going to help you. (Unless your goal is ‘I’d like to write this like bookplayer” and in that case… I guess I can help?)
This is especially true because I’m really, really bad at the somewhat-objective parts of writing, like grammar, spelling, word use, and confusing sentences. I don’t notice those things, so I am completely and totally useless to other people in terms of that. So, for these reasons, I often read things people ask me to look at and have nothing to say about them.
Now, where I am useful as a prereader or critic is as a specific problem solver. If you tell me “this scene doesn’t feel right,” or “I’m trying to make this suspenseful/funny/mushy” I can probably give you some tips. I’m also pretty good at characterization, and can let you know if anything is OOC or could do more to show the character, if you care about that kind of thing.
In terms of people prereading for me, or leaving critiques on my stories, it kind of works the same way. I don’t mind people mentioning that I messed something up technical. Sometimes I don’t care that I messed it up, especially if it involves a sentence reading the way a character would speak or think. But I don’t mind being told that it’s wrong, it might actually help me learn so that when I do want to be correct, it will be.
I’ll also happily take critique in what I consider the critic’s field of speciality. If I know that someone is good at action, or plotting, or world building, or what have you, I like to know what they think about that aspect of a story. Even if it wasn’t what I was focused on this time, it never hurts to learn from someone who’s good at using a certain tool.
As for the story as a whole… there are a few people I either trust totally to understand my goals in writing and how they’re playing out in this particular work, or I trust to understand when I tell them it’s fine the way it is because it met my reasons for writing it. Those people give criticism that I treasure, they are helping me towards my goals, or at least not getting me off track. On their advice I will cut, write, or rewrite scenes, or even write or scrap whole stories. Often, if they display that understanding in comments, it leads to me asking them to preread for me.
But, if someone leaves a negative comment without caring or demonstrating that they understand the story I was trying to tell, or the goal I had in mind for writing it… I don’t take their criticism well. Oh, I take it well publically, I either answer politely or don’t answer. But it doesn’t matter if it was bookended in compliments, the best they’re going to get behind the computer screen is a raised eyebrow and a shrug. Because they’re almost always trying to tell me where I went wrong aiming for the mirage, or where I fell short of their goals for my story, both of which I kind of resent for their self-importance.
There are rare occasions where someone offers criticism without understanding me or the story that just happens to be something I recognize as helpful. This happens about as often as I hit that mirage of good writing that I don’t believe in. And like me writing something good it’s more likely to happen by accident in an offhanded remark than by someone who was actually trying.
bookplayer
So, why do I write? How could you offer criticism that’s helpful to me?
I have no idea. While I know those drives are there in my writing, it’s not as simple as “30% A, 40% B, 30% C.” I write, when it comes down to it, for reasons. And those reasons themselves are a mix of those drives. And while they’re almost always there, they shift into and out of focus in different works.
Here are the reasons I write, make of them what you will:
I write because I love characters; my own and the ones I use in fanworks. I love the different ways they think and react. Some I love more than others, there’s something about their headspace that I just find amusing. Some characters I can just write about what they think about a subject. I love dialogue, because I love how the way characters talk says so much about who they are. Not just what they say, or their accents, but the words they use, the things they wouldn’t say, or the way they would phrase something. And I love the ways characters bounce off each other, the way they change the ways they talk and act around other characters. I love the things they understand and the things that go over their heads.
And, specifically, I love to make characters happy. Sure, I love to make them sad and distraught and especially frustrated (frustration is my favorite negative emotion. Seriously, most of my most dramatic scenes stem from frustration more than any other emotion. Probably because it’s often the result of another character or the world not conforming to the way the frustrated character thinks.) But in the end, I love characters too much to leave them miserable.
I write to amuse myself. My stories are often full of very subtle references. They’re supposed to be subtle, you aren’t supposed to notice them or comment on them. That’s the game. If people noticed, they might be distracting. But for me they refer to a different story that isn’t written, or a piece of headcanon, or some other fandom or bit of pop culture that is probably too obscure for anyone who isn’t my age, or was never exposed to various things I was, to find worth me writing. And I write them anyway, because I read my stories, too. My stories are slightly better if you happen to be bookplayer. Sorry.
I write because I’m happy. In some ways, I feel like I found something lots of people seem to be looking for, a way to be happy, and I want to share that through stories. Not in some direct, instruction-manual sense, but in a more subtle, emotional sense. Because it truly is a subtle, emotional thing. It’s not a series of events that happen to you or don’t happen to you, it’s a way of looking at the world and at other people. It drives me crazy when people who don’t seem very happy criticise certain aspects of my stories. Because I don’t want to say “well, maybe if you tried to actually understand this, you’d be happier,” but...
I write for attention, but not just any attention. I write to feel important. If I had a thousand new views on a story, but no new likes or faves or comments, I’d be disappointed. I want to know I made someone happy. I want to know that someone really enjoyed what I wrote. I’d love to know that a story changed the way someone saw… anything really. A character, a genre, a concept, me. I’d like my story to be remembered by someone. And, more than anything, I want to maybe make a new friend, because that would be someone I could continue to be important to.
I write to live up to other people’s expectations. This is a destructive cycle sometimes. The harder I try, the more they raise their expectations, and I know that someday I won’t meet them. This is especially hard when people have expectations of my stories being good, because of that whole not believing in good writing thing. I end up aiming at what I think the mirage looks like to other people, and I’m often confused when I landed slightly to the left of where I thought it was, and it turns out I hit it. Then, of course, they expect me to be able to do it again…
If you made it this far, congratulations. If this thing worked, you now understand my views on writing as much as it’s possible for me to express them. I’m happy to answer questions. I’m not that interested in debate; these are opinions, and while they are seriously considered and I feel I could defend them, I also have no problem if other people have different ones.
I hope you found this interesting in some way.
I did! Yay
Must... resist... urge... to respond... at length...
At least until tonight.
I have only one thing to say about all this:
You, bookplayer, make me happy through your fiction and through your thoughtful posts like this one. I might have more to say at a later time, but that's the tidbit that stuck with me the most as I read through this.
Thank you.
Light and laughter,
SongCoyote
Celestia preserve me! We've become The Establishment!
Anyway. Yes. Very intriguing. I won't debate--not much point, as you say[1]--but I will try to condense your point, if I may. It seems to me that you hew to the idea that writing is really communication or like communication insofar as good and bad communication isn't absolute but depends--as you say--on the target audience and what you are trying to say (the goal). How does that sound?
[1] Though of course I want to kvetch. It's what I do. Verbose bastard and all that.
1578187
Hey! You are alive!
Daymn. That was an impressive read. Glad I read through it all.
I think your points can be extended to the whole of fiction. Somewhat. Most things in the realm of fiction are subjective and therefore cannot be considered definitely 'good' by everyone, but some things are objective. Grammar and spelling is one, unless it can be justified in the context of the story (for example: older works and stories written from a child's perspective). But go past those minor objective details, and art is something entirely subjective.
Art, at least to me, is something made by a person that has emotional investment in it, even if the only one getting it is the person who did it. A child's first story probably won't be considered art by many, but it will be the child who wrote it. They put their heart and soul into it, thus an emotional connection has been established. For more popular works of fiction, the author put emotional investment into their work and their story was such that it resonated with many people all over the world. Both examples are art, but have different levels of how their affect people.
If that makes sense...?
When people say some art is bad, what they probably mean to say is that 'I did not care for it'. That piece of art may not be awful, but clearly it failed to form an emotional connection with the reader/viewer.
... unless they hated the piece. But hate is an emotion, and if a piece of art can get a person riled up like that, weren't they successful in some form?
This is probably sounding more like inane rambling than actual explanation. Such is myself.
I write to entertain. Getting an audience and prestige would help with that. Improving as a writer would hopefully serve to make me better at striking an emotional connection between the reader and my stories. I also love shaping worlds and directing characters, taking them on journeys, but ultimately I do that for the reader's benefit. But also my own. So... by entertaining myself, I'm personally succeeding on at least a small level.
That's why I write. If it makes sense.
Before I end this ramble, one more thing:
That sentence was dripping with sincerity. And there's nothing more I adore than sincerity.
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Write on, bookplayer. Write on.
I love the honesty in this one simple line.
I actually found this very interesting. It feels good to me to see that there are people out there who view writing as more of a personal art form, and a way to express themselves and their desires. Reading the part where you say that you get enjoyment off of character play excited me, not only because that's the kind of story I like to read, but also because that's the kind of thing I like to do myself. Knowing that someone I respect has similar desires as me is nice, somehow.
I enjoy writing because it feels to me like a more productive use of my time, and it allows me to take an intangible idea and make it into a substantial presence in my life. I enjoy learning more about my characters and how they feel about themselves, as well as how they react to certain situations, because it allows me to look back on these characters and prove to myself that I can empathize with an idea not only in theory, but in practice. To me, that's something I've often had cause to worry about. Writing also gives me an excuse to put my vocabulary to the test, and I'll commonly find myself assigning certain terms and wordplay habits to a particular character and withholding them from another, which to me feels like a good way to define the characters as individuals. to me, an individual character is a more fulfilling one, because they can not only interact with another character, but they can learn from them as well.
However, characters alone aren't the only thing that I like to define as individual entities. I spend a lot of my time creating worlds, places, and ideas for these characters to interact with as well. I'll admit that most of these ideas never make it to the written word, but reading your manifesto has comforted me by allowing me to recognize that it's alright to not put down every idea, because I don't need to. Having my work seen isn't really a part of my personal goals for writing, because I'm not doing do to be recognized, or to be loved. I'm doing so to feel emotions that I wouldn't normally feel in my everyday life, and to remind myself that the world is still a place full of opportunity and promise if I just bother to look for it. I write to feel good, and that's just fine by me.
However, I also like to flaunt my knowledge of these things, which I suppose is the biggest reason I became a part time editor. I wanted to be able to show the world that i could do these things, but it isn't in my personal drive to show them my more private inclinations, such as the emotional tides of my conceived characters and ideas. I've realized that there is a reason I haven't yet put myself into this path with the fullest of convictions, and that's because I really don't want to be that person. This helped me look into myself and admit that I do seek out people struggling to get on their feet with their first works and offer myself to them, to teach them the structural tools I think they need to get a better grasp on their own desires (Namely, grammar, punctuation, and structuring, along with other tools viewed as basic literary staples). I've been searching out beginning hopefuls aiming for prestige and giving them a better chance at achieving it, because it reminds me of how I felt when I was younger. I would aspire to something, simply so I could feel good about having a goal, without ever trying to achieve it. All throughout my life I've switched dreams to reflect what I was most intrigued by, and prided myself on thinking "Someday I'm going to do that thing I like". The only constant that has remained with me, always, is the act of communication. Be it writing for entertainment, to prove myself to myself, or to others, to help someone get a better grasp on their own goals, or to simply pass the time, I am a writer.
Thank you for giving me a reason to look at myself from a new perspective.
1578205
I'd say that very much sums it up, in some strange combination of truth and metaphor. After all, writing is clearly communication. That's probably the number one all time use for writing. It's very hard to make an argument that writing is anything else.
At the same time, I would probably agree with the idea that all art is communication, that this is it's primary purpose, to find the most creative and interesting ways of communicating an idea. A blog post was one of the easier ways of communicating my thoughts here, but had I chosen to do so through interpretive dance that would have been even more interesting (had it been successful.)
And I do worry a bit that the lines about not wanting a debate might have discouraged opposing views, which wasn't really my intent. Feel free to kevtch, and to state your own opinions and how they differ for other people reading the comments. I'd just rather people didn't do it with an eye towards convincing me why I'm wrong.
Mostly all I can say to this is a whole lot of yes.
Especially on the criticism front, though. This sort of thing is why I could never be a reviewer*, EQD pre-reader, or editor for a publishing house. I find it impossible to make pronouncements about a story's quality as if they were objective. I can talk about my emotional reaction to a story, and I can sometimes tentatively suggest fixes. But to go and say something like "this story fails because it hasn't got enough x" just feels irresponsible, especially on here where there are so many writers just starting out who looking for the one true path.
*Well, I tried being a reviewer on here once, but I didn't enjoy it at all, and I wince to think of the couple of reviews I did come up with.
We're nearly in direct opposition here. Me? I'm almost useless for the problem solving portions. Ask me to tear a sentence apart though? Watch me rock and roll ;)
1578187
I should've said this in my previous post rather than being all spammy. But yeah, what Ghost said. Yay!
1578305
You are a wizard to me.
long blog, long replies. We've got ourselves a linear relationship of sorts. Hopefully after I finish reading this I can add my own.
I'd like to comment on the second to last section. I find this rather interested when I compare it to how I think about my writing. Over my time on this site, I've proven to myself over and over that I'm big on the anylitical thinking - that I can go above and beyond as a prereader and write essay-length lists of problems in nearly flawless stories - but I often fall short when I have to actually write a story. Those things don't come naturally to me. I'm a musician, not a writer. I have to think about all those sorts of things if i want them in my story. How you feel must be how I feel when I play music; it comes more easily to me, yet I can't often explain why I played a note one way or how I phrased a particular motif. It just does. Sometimes I wish I was like that with writing, but then again, I wouldn't be a good prereader if I was.
And now I know exactly why I didn't like Maiden's day. It aimed at a place I had no interest in going.
And that difference, to me, is the hardest part of reviewing. I can parse a sentence fairly well, I'm good at word choice, and I usually can tell pretty clearly why I'm writing such-and-such a story. But when reading someone else's work, I need to respect their goals and their style. (assuming they have one) It takes a special kind of headspace to help someone write something with goals that are not your own. Only when I know why Comet Burst (or whoever) wants to write this story can I help him write the story he wants to write.
Sometimes I wonder if the editor's real job is to coach the writer into an understanding of the writer's own goals, and the grammar crap is just an added service.
Also: what 1578205 said. again. That guy's been saying what I mean all week!
1578319 I'm on my phone so here's what you need to do: go to YouTube and search for "daffy duck behold the wizard." Because I'd be posting the clip if I could ;)
1578521
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1578272
I'll kvetch then, but probably via blogpost. I need time--a scarce commodity for me--to gather my thoughts into a form worth reading, if only marginally. My key quibble with your take on the whole matter is that I keenly feel the difference between a bad story and a story that's not for me. But how can that be if I've no clear knowledge of what the author's audience was or what their goals were? Is it delusion to think you can tell apart bad from, ah, misaddressed? Then why is the delusion so common?
Dang son, when you write blog posts, you WRITE blog posts. I don't think I average even a quarter of what you put down when I make an effort to blaugh. It's impressive in it's own way. If I can remember, I'll make a meaty comment on this when I get off of work.
1578591
Ghost, your grocery list is probably worth reading. I mean, I, for one, have never seen a grocery list with footnotes.
Just to offer more to think about, my thoughts are that this very common phenomenon comes from several places.
The first, and most clear cut, is when the author is attempting to communicate in a way that it's difficult to imagine being understood by most humans. In this case, while a universal judgement of bad is still iffy (if only because maybe the author understands it perfectly,) one can use the word "bad" as a short hand for "not likely to be understood by anyone else, ever." This usually speaks to something I didn't go into here which I call the competence line, which is basically the point at which someone is capable of communicating a basic story in English to an English speaking audience.
Then, sometimes it is possible to understand what the author was attempting to communicate and who their audience is, even without knowing them. I mentioned that there are people who let me know in criticism that they got it, but I failed in certain ways. That can happen, you read a piece and you see where the author was trying to go even if they made a mess of it. Just because writing that wasn't meant for you can still be successful doesn't mean that all writing you don't like is successful writing that wasn't meant for you. Sometimes you don't like it because you know you should like it, and don't. I prefer the term failed to bad for this, only because it makes you think about what it was supposed to be doing that it failed it and can sometimes clear up that "was this meant for me" question.
The last one, and one that happens a lot (though I doubt it's your problem, from what little I know of you) is that people justify not being included in the intended audience by calling something bad. I think this is what's at work when a lot of people talk about something like the writing in Twilight. This is the real delusion, though I think it's more self-deception mixed with arrogance -- convincing yourself that because you were excluded, it must be bad (which is easy, because the exclusion happened by way of writing in a way you don't like.)
Of course, this is just more of my opinion, so take it as you will.
I take it this must be the "response" or "thoughts" you mentioned?
I must say I was extremely intrigued by this, and at the risk of seeming to blindly follow everything you say (I was unaware that the term "bookplayer's sheep" was a thing until recently), I'd have to agree with most of it.
Most of it. I generally agree that the idea of "good writing" is very nebulous, but I'm going to have to fall back on an old SCOTUS trick and say, while "good writing" my not be easy to define or pin down, "I know it when I see it".
This may seem selfish, and may very well place me in that very same group of "critics" and the like who think they know what is good and what isn't. But I stand by it. I like to think that, aside form my own biases (reading a particular story that I don't think is technically very good because it has a thing (read: Appledash) that I enjoy), I like to think that I'm a fairly accurate judge in what is "good writing" and what isn't. That's also why I tend to be my own strongest critic. I write primarily to please myself, and in doing so, invariably come to seek an audience of people who think like me, so that I may please them when I write what I write. That's why I often get so bogged down in reading my own material, especially my old material--I just readily notice so many things about my own work that just doesn't strike me as "good".
It also bothers me when readers don't comment on those things that I myself feel I have messed up. When people give me short, trite compliments, I usually take it with a grain of salt (even when I know I shouldn't) and dismiss it as "blind appreciation" (even when I know it's not). I suppose the ultimate selfishness in the way that I write is that I want to write for people who think like I do, who analyze (some would say over-analyze) every single detail and become critics of everything. That's why I relish those choice few readers and choice few commenters who really give me a run for my money, pick apart my stories to the bare-bones and strip away all the prose to motivations lying beneath.
In short, when considering what works of literature I "like" reading, and what works I myself will write, I'm most often looking for intellectual stimulation. I want to be moved to think, to think really deeply, to have a story challenge or provide insight to my view of the human condition, morality, or what have you. That, I think, is what I mostly strive to do for others with my own work as well, I want to have readers who will seek to be moved by my work and then have intellectual conversations with me about it, because that's ultimately what I find so stimulating.
That may be also why I am my own harshest critic--because, try as I might, I often find my own attempts to appeal to my own intellectual ideals (and thus, my own inner sense of what is "good writing") to fail handily at that.
I hope that made sense. As usual, I've let your words incite me to entirely too much self-introspection. I'll leave you with one last bit of praise: Among those I have met here who engage me intellectually, either through stories or conversations, you're one of the worst offenders. Thank you for that.
1578772
Gosh. I'm all with the blushing now.
Hmmm... I agree that what you wrote here resonates sweetly with your original point and, indeed, can be said to follow directly from it, but I find myself unsatisfied somehow. I say 'bad' of course as a shorthand of sorts for all manner of failed stories. Perhaps a taxonomy of badness might be in order. Two species of bad can be discarded easily--the story that communicates poorly in purely technical term and the story sufficiently well-crafted that it is obvious what its goal and audience were but poorly-crafted enough that it had missed both. But there's an elusive third sort (at the very least)...
...hmm...
Let's say that it is a story that's well-made enough that the communication works as it should but that doesn't feel as if it is worth the time? As in, other stories do much the same, but do so with greater clarity, greater impact, or greater efficiency, and the story under scrutiny doesn't distinguish itself by fresh material or greater facility in handling it?
But then again, that means that the story is now considered within context of other stories and an economy of time & attention, too, and that complicates matters grievously. Agh, My mind is all kinds of muddled on this issue. Needs more thinking.
1578840
I have a problem with calling this "bad." It's essentially saying that because something else is better, that this thing is not as good.
I might write a perfectly competent story about... the magically created rebirth of Nightmare Moon. It could be exciting and moving and really well-spelled, and a perfectly good story that all sorts of people who didn't read Past Sins would find fresh and interesting.
But it might not be quite as good as what Pen Stroke wrote.
That, in no way, makes my story any worse. My story could still be "good." (possibly ill-advised if gaining an audience is part of the goal)
I guess what I mean is: I don't like the idea of calling a story "bad" based on how it compares to other stories. I'm certainly willing to accept "Past Sins did it better" as a comment (provided there is more meat to it.), but to say that something else is better means that a thing is bad would be like saying there's no reason to write fantasy anymore, because Tolkien. Or some such nonsense.
1578840
1578827
As far as I can tell (and correct me if I'm wrong here), the issue is that we perceive a scale of quality for stories that is independent of:
a) How much we enjoy a story; and
b) How skilfully the story appears to be executed
So in principle you could have a story that we think isn't very good even though you really like it and know the author achieved exactly what he or she set out to do. (The reverse might not hold: Perhaps some degree of skilful execution is a prerequisite for high quality. Perhaps these scales are only partially independent. But this is irrelevant -- let's take the ideal case for now.)
Now, we can take it as a given that our subjective reaction to a story is complex - fun, scary, sexy, profound, and so forth. Those reactions and our reactions to those reactions are mostly subsumed under enjoyment in the scales above.
So where does that leave the scale of quality? I'd wager it's just another aspect of of our complex subjective reaction. Or maybe it's several aspects in working in concert. Whatever. But, for some reason or other, this reaction comes with a little tag that says "this stuff is a factual observation!" -- we feel like we're observing a fact of the matter even though we're not really.
Why does this happen? No idea. But it has precedent. We run into this sort of thing talking about morality (which I'm gonna lightly skip over 'cause this is not the place for arguing with moralists) and about semantics. Loads of people get really pissy about the "true meaning" of a (sort of) arbitrarily assigned tag. As it is for true meaning of words, so it is for true quality of stories.
1579045
I explained myself poorly, perhaps. You interpret the 'done already' too broadly, to my mind. When I said that a story brings nothing new I really do mean nothing new. Or to within some epsilon of nothing, I guess. You could write a story about Nightmare Moon reforming herself magically and it could be a worthy tale indeed even though Pen Stroke did it first and, very likely, 'better.' All you'd have to do would be to approach the matter with ingenuity and have new ideas, fresh insights that sort of thing.
What I'm describing as 'bad' there is the sort of story that while superficially unique really does nothing that isn't done in other places. A story that helps kill time, not invest it. Think of those extruded book products you find in airport bookstores. That sort of thing.
But as I said, I am muddled in my opinion about this. I need to think more.
1579053
I think you're on the right track, but ultimately I don't think it is possible to make a "scale of quality" that is independent of how much we enjoy a story.
Let me put it like this. As I said above, I do feel like I have a pretty good sense of whether a particular story that I happen to be reading (or writing) is "good" or not, but I also will freely concede that numerous other people also must believe themselves to be an accurate judge of quality, and must believe themselves capable of discerning good from bad, or knowing "good writing" when they see it. And certainly, I don't expect their ideas or their perceptions to match mine.
So, I don't think it's really possible to fully divorce "quality" form "enjoyment", as both are going to be subjective based what each person is judging their stories on, be it a strict criteria of "I like x, I don't like y", or a gut instinct, or what have you.
You bring up a good example (to continue to press the point) with the idea of morality, in that every single person on this planet has a different idea of what morality is, and whether or not some specific act is "moral" or not. Indeed, I'd wager that's the root of most political disagreements throughout time. e.g., is it moral for a government to seek actions and expenditures that most benefit its people (i.e., beneficial for the "greater good"), or is it moral for all individuals to act solely in a way that benefits themselves and those closest to them?
I think people's different perceptions of morality ultimately mirror people's different perceptions of art. What is "moral" or "good artwork" to one person may be the exact opposite to another, or may mean something entirely different to yet another, and therein lies the crux of the problem. If all ideas are subjective, how can we be sure of what is "right" and "wrong" or "good" and "bad". That's what makes the whole issue so utterly nebulous in the first place.
This was very interesting. I've not a response because I've just barely gotten into my own study of what makes literature "tick," so to speak, but I would like to present my own opinion on something, if you don't mind:
I don't think writers ever truly know what they do in terms of craft. By that, I don't mean they don't know the words and grammatical techniques they're using; I mean they don't know if what they're doing will be successful or not. Going off of the playfulness of modern literature, I'm assuming that people are looking at literature and seeing what they can do with it, with bravado but not with a hard confidence. For more traditional literature, people use certain characters and stereotypes, use different places, and use a certain conflicts, words and sentences in the hope that what they want to say will get through.
For me, writing stories is a gamble. It's putting on an illusion for an audience—no matter how grounded in truth it is—and trying to make the illusion as entertaining as possible. When I say entertaining, I don't meant fun; I mean more captivating. I'm not sure what you mean when you say some good authors aren't evocative (I both can't imagine it and don't know any examples of how it can be so), but for me, all good stories are captivating. Finding what tricks one can use in a certain situation is a hard thing to do, and I suspect each word used, each character created, each conflict dealt with is a gamble to see if the tricks come together to grab the potential readers.
I'm not too far into my literary studies, but I suggest that one big reason that critiquing stories is hard is because every story is its own entity, with different morals it wants to portray, different characters it wants us to support, and different storytellers. There are no rules that can be applied to any one story that will make it better; as far as critiquing goes, what may apply to one story (or even a situation within a story) may not apply to another. I think one big responsibility of a critic, one that's judging a story for its power as a story, and apart from any social/political/moral mold it may fit into, is to take each story as it is, to temporarily attempt to get lost within the world, and to see where the story breaks its illusion. An author can use some techniques for some stories, but not all of them for all stories; it doesn't work that way. Taking the analogy that stories are like our babies, babies need different things in order to grow to the best of their abilities, and stories should be treated the same way.
At least that's how I view it at the moment. Again, I found this manifesto very interesting.
I used to think about this sort of thing a lot, when I ran the Vault. I finally decided that "good art" is like pornography: I know it when I see it. (And I find I'm nervous showing my own to the world at large!)
That's quite the eclectic grouping of writers. Also, I'm not sure if I should be honored or not to be on the list.
Though I have to admit it always makes me puff up my chest a bit when someone says they wrote something in response to something I did, even if it is only in part.
I think that there's actually a trick to this, and it has to do with your ability to read the story out loud. Even if your grammar sucks, if you can read it out loud and have it make sense, then you're okay. It is okay for your grammar to be terrible as long as it is what I might call "humanly bad". It is poor grammar which isn't like what humans produce while speaking or writing intelligibly which causes trouble.
So while imperfect grammar may not hurt you, it depends on exactly how you went wrong. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn may have atrocious grammar, but it is the sort of atrocious grammar that the person telling the story might have. You can just imagine how it sounds, and it works. You can tell what they're saying, even if they "ain't speakin' proper English."
I think the interesting thing about Moby Dick is that, when I was reading it, the chapter-long breaks which went into the specifics of 19th-century whaling didn't hurt my enjoyment or engagement with the story at all. I think this is part of immersion - I don't know anything about 19th century whaling, and the book is about 19th century whaling. The asides, thus, felt like part of the whole of the novel. When you're reading the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, or Good Omens, the various asides in those books which are not part of the plot STILL add to the experience of reading the novel. They aren't part of the story, perhaps, and yet at the same time they fit in perfectly. There is an entire, ridiculous chapter in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy told from the point of view of that whale which was suddenly brought into existence. The chapter is silly, and ends with the thought of the bowl of petunias, and yet, somehow, the whole thing makes perfect sense in the context of the story - the galaxy is completely absurd, and so the chapter, while not tied into the story per se, still works wonderfully because it fits into the novel which is being crafted.
The real underlying principle, then, is not unity of plot, or of story, but of unity of purpose. When you talk about a novel as a whole, there is a great deal to it - if you look at, say, The Lord of the Rings, there is a vast appendix which isn't part of the story - at least not directly. And yet, I feel that appendix is still a part of The Lord of the Rings in a very vital and important way - it is a part of ther greater whole of what Tolkien was doing, and indeed, the appendices of those books is actually more interesting than the entire sixth book. Why is that? Because, I think, a big part of what he was trying to achieve was not telling the story of Frodo Baggins, but telling the history of the ending of the Third Age of Middle Earth, of which Frodo was a part, but not the whole. The Hobbit is a story about Bilbo Baggins and his adventure in a way that The Lord of the Rings is not.
Engagement is vitally important, but I think engagement is merely an attribute of a work (or anything else, for that matter). So when you talk about the resonance of some stories with some demographics, that's certainly a thing... but that doesn't make Twilight a great work. There are many ways to make things addict people which aren't actually "good" for them - in fact, in game design, this is quite common. There are ways of making very empty experiences, like Cookie Clicker, which engage some number of people for extremely long periods of time. A work may be engaging without actually being good. Resonance is just a form of engagement, I think.
Ah, the old pinning down what "good writing" is thing. You make some good points, and consider pretty much every angle that you could come at such a topic from (at least, I can't think of anything else, but I'm not sure if that's saying a whole lot considering its super late and I should've been asleep hours ago).
Basically if I like something, I think its good. I categorize it as "good" writing because it made me get invested in the story or characters (probably both) and made me feel something. Pretty loose criteria, I guess, but hey.
Also, some of your comments about people saying a story is bad because it doesn't meet their expectations reminded me of why I always try and leave a disclaimer if I leave a cranky comment - usually it goes something like: "I didn't like this part, because this, but I understand that this is not my story, you wanted to do something different, and this is just an opinion, so feel free to ignore the crap out of it." I'm not sure if that comes off the way I want it to, or if it just makes me seem pretentious for wasting their time with the comment in the first place, but sometimes I get so into blabbering my thoughts on something that no amount of common sense can be like, "girl, this person does not want to hear your waffle, shut your face-hole before you make an ass outta yourself."
1578827
What's wrong with being a sheep? They're fluffy.
So yeah, another fabulously thought out bloggy thing. I always find it interesting to hear your opinions, so thanks for sharing. (I may or may not have been procrastinating on an essay earlier, then seen this post pop up, then decided to read it later as a part of my reward for finishing said paper. No regrets.)
This right here was why I stopped bothering with EQD's featured fics. It wasn't based off of grammar, plot, or anything else. Most of their pre-readers boiled down to "is this what I want to see from this title or feel like reading today? Yes/No? Admission/Rejection." Which lead to a certain type of audience, but not that much I considered impressive.
This is a pretty well written manifesto, and it does sum up quite a few things that most people don't seem to get. Proper grammar doesn't make a story good (in fact, it can make it worse). Nor does a particular style. While I would have expressed my own position in different words entirely, that doesn't change the fact that I agree with it (in fact, it is why I would have expressed it in an entirely different manner). Well said.
Interesting read. I agree with that bit about the 'what is art?' question. I've always thought it was a little silly when people tried to define art or divide things out and say 'this can't be art because...'. I just go with the criteria that if whoever made the whatever it is claims it's art, I'm willing to accept it as art. Or really, if anyone claims that it's art. I'm not going to argue something so abstract.
Interesting point on prestige. It's tough to work for prestige with fanfiction, though, not just because it's such a lowly considered form/genre/whatever of writing, but because there's not any worthwhile standard of good to work towards. We have EQD, but that's sketchy at best. I don't think anyone can deny that plenty of stinkers have gotten on there, and also that there are a lot of good stories that are never one there (the fact there's nothing on there by you is evidence enough of that). What else is there? I guess you could aim for specific readers or reviewers, but that seems tough to do, unless you're purposefully throwing your stories at them to get an opinion.
Anyway, I'm having a tough time seeing how any of this is related to any conversation I've had with you in recent memory. Unless it's this paragraph
and then you're just making me feel bad. As well as making me want to say something about how it seems worthwhile to get as many different viewpoints on a piece of writing as possible, including those that completely miss the point, because it's probably worth knowing other people's goals for your story, if only to understand why they didn't enjoy your story. That seems like something worth understanding.
1584316
It was indeed that paragraph that was inspired by our conversation, but not in the sense that I'm accusing you of that. You just made me consider why I don't consider all criticism useful, and why I don't often give criticism (because I don't feel it would be useful.) Which combined with the other conversations I mentioned and turned into something a little bigger than a PM. So, please don't feel bad.
You make a good point about seeing where people didn't understand the goal, but the caveat to that is that if the piece succeeded at the goal, it's not all that important. For example, if I write a fic with the goal of "I want to write a piece of fluffy AppleDash for DbzOrDie and my followers who enjoy fluff," then a comment like "This story had no dramatic tension" isn't going to help much. I know there's no dramatic tension. If I had wanted dramatic tension, I would have written it that way. But if the people who like fluff like it, the story is successful no matter how much other people don't care for it because they don't like that kind of fic anyway.
And those are the comments that really irk me, because they assume that I don't know what I'm writing, rather than that I made a choice to not pay attention to some aspect of writing. A lot of people can't even understand the idea that you might not pay attention to some part of writing, that "good writing" in every area isn't the goal of every fic, which was the reason for this manifesto in general.
In other words, if the goal of your fic is to appeal to as many people as possible, then by all means listen to as many people as possible. If your goal it to appeal to AppleDash fans, then listen to a bunch of AppleDash fans. But don't expect AppleDash fans critiques to help you appeal to as many people as possible, and don't expect the opinions of a bunch of people who don't really like AppleDash to help you write a beloved AppleDash fic. This is a flaw I actually see a lot in shipping stories, in both directions, I can point you to specific examples in PM if you cared. Listening to the wrong critics can steer you wrong when you don't pay attention to your own goals (and waste your time when you do.)
I tend to write because I see a "hole" in the existing story that I just need to fiddle with, just the same way a loose thread on my coat drives me crazy. It started with the extremely low amount of cartoon attention that was paid to the aftermath of Luna's purging of Nightmare Moon, and her emotional state as time went on, progressing to an exploration of the strange dark pegasi who showed up in one episode, the strange tendency of shippers to mate an OC with a M6 character in ten seconds flat, and lately to a line of "What If" stories including "Monster in the Twilight" which caught fire and exploded. A year and a half ago, I had only shown my writing to three people. Now it's over five thousand. I'm still in shock. But my wife still makes me put out the trash, so I'm keeping my humility.
1578205
Actually the Illuminati, but who's counting.
One of the things that I've discovered about my style of storytelling is that my reluctance to draw out more than a skeletal framework of the surroundings (i.e. I'm not very descriptive without getting overly-verbose) makes the readers fill in certain gaps in the background as they read, leaving multiple readers with multiple interpretations of story events. I'm claiming it as a style instead of a flaw because it leads to some of the most interesting comments that head off in directions I had never seen before.
1580711 I had an interesting discussion with a EqD pre-reader about the topic of a seemingly disconnected chapter in the middle of "Traveling Tutor" much like this. The story follows Green Grass and Twilight for 33 chapters until chapter 34 where suddenly it is exclusively the three alicorns and Shining Armor. The pre-reader said cut it. I said no, it blocks out the end of the "Green Grass as Prince Consort" plotline and it's funny. I won, and I'm glad of it.
1582674 Two of the most difficult characters to get past EqD are Pinkie Pie with her run-on sentences, and Applejack with her accent.
1578187 Brevity is the soul of Wit. (Hey, you're alive.)
1584434
One of the problems a lot of game designers run into is the fact that, by and large, your audience actually has no clue about game design. People may express their dissatisfaction with your work, but very frequently they have a great deal of trouble pinpointing exactly why - they will frequently cite things which seem like the problem to them, when the actual problem is something else which underlies it.
People generally have more knowledge of story structure than they do of game design, so are more likely to give actual, "real" feedback, but on the other hand, most people aren't actually experts at it, and as such are fairly likely to leave useless feedback because that's the only feedback they know how to give. If you read a fluff story, and you don't like it because it lacks conflict, well, that is a reason not to like it, but that isn't necessarily something valuable that you're telling the author. That being said, sometimes it is difficult to tell what the authorial intent was in the first place - so if I read a story that seems like it was supposed to have real conflict, and it doesn't, then I might comment on it. I might comment that I didn't enjoy a fluff piece, too, and honestly it really shouldn't bother a writer to get such feedback - yeah, they're missing the point, or they read something that they weren't going to like... but well, is it really better than them downvoting and not commenting?
1584434
Examples might help, only because I'm not totally sure what you mean. You mean writers who listen to feedback that isn't in line with their original goal for a story? I'm not sure what affect you're implying that could have on a story. I can see how it might cause the story to become unfocused, but I can also definitely see how getting an outside influence can be a good thing for a story, especially in a genre as overcome by tired tropes as shipping.
I didn't have a lot to say when I read through this, but I did want to make sure I at least spoke up and thanked you for writing it: it outlines some very sensible ideas, and making sensible ideas look effortless is no small thing indeed.
I wish you'd split this up into a few blog posts.
>Well, in that case, we have Shakespeare, Austen, Dickens, and Twain to show that pushing boundaries doesn’t make a good argument for art.
Shakespeare & Twain pushed lots of stylistic boundaries. I don't know about the others.
>Are we prepared to say that Twilight, Dragonlance, and the Dark Elf Trilogy are “good books”?
I am. They're good for someone. And the greatest works of genius humans have written are likewise moronic drivel to someone, if only someone as yet hypothetical. We've been over this some, though I still don't know if we agree.
>Things that writers think get them closer to good often move them away from what the public wants, and the public can see that and will be more than happy to ignore their genius.
*cough* the featured box
>This is why we have genres and age categories; because we recognize that each has its own audience with its own qualities it defines as good
Caveat: Fimfiction has taught me that readers don't like things in genres as much as things that combine genres. Genres are designed for marketers, not for readers.
They aim for the standard of good set by a certain group of people who have positioned themselves in a way that they get to declare things good. This can be college professors, critics, awards committees, EqD, Seattle’s Angels, “those guys who comment on Bad Horse’s blog,” or any other person that they think “knows a good story.”
No, no. It's me.
>If a story is best told as, basically, a romance novel, but the writer doesn’t want to write a romance novel, they’re probably going to ignore what would be the best way of writing the story because of the lack of prestige in romance writing.
But this would imply that literary authors would deliberately avoid writing anything exciting or suspenseful... oh. Never mind.
.
>Telling a story, Building an audience, Prestige
Douglas Adams said he wrote the Hitchhiker's Guide radio series out of a desperate need for money.
Sorry, I'm out of time today. I'll try to get back to this someday.
For me a "good" story is one that isn't boring.
People say that what stories are and aren't boring is subjective, but I believe that it isn't as much as everyone thinks. What is subjective is people's tolerance for feeling bored. There are people who have read Atlas Shrugged cover to cover despite being bored out of their skull by it. And then there are people like me, who have sat through so many stories that they realize if they're too tolerant of boredom, they're eventually going to completely lose interest in storytelling altogether.
Of course there are exceptions. There's plenty of people who found Atlas Shrugged just fascinating. But if you were to ask a bunch of people to list a bunch of stories that they hated, very few of the stories mentioned would be ones that they found boring. (The live action Hobbit film is the only one I for me, and that's really only because it made over a billion dollars.) I suppose there are people who love the lands of Middle Earth so much that they will gladly sit through anything in that setting, just as there are people who love Applejack so much that they could read about her kicking trees and still find it enthralling.
Those readers are not worth writing for. They will feel exactly the same about the story regardless of what the author does. In a similar way, I love every Rainbow Dash pairing equally, but because of that I don't have any Dash ships that are special to me.
I feel that the readers to write for, besides yourself, is sort of in this happy medium between prestige and the mass audience. These are the people who have read the genre a ton, the people who will tell everyone they know when they find something they feel is amazing. They're also the people will often drop a story without any sort of hook in the opening (three paragraph to two pages depending on the length.) Sure, it's unfair; maybe the story "gets better" later on. But life's too short and sacrifices must be made. There's a kinda nice feeling that one gets from clicking away from a story, lowering the read it later list by one. The job of an author is to make sure that whatever's happening in their story is so interesting that the reader doesn't want to click away.
This is a big part of why I'm planning on getting advice from people who hate RariJack for my RariJack story, instead of asking people who do like the pairing. Sure, I'll probably end up ignoring much of what they say, but I feel that the knowledge they give me will help me to write a story that RariJack fans will just love to pieces.
Also, when people talk about "Bad" grammar, they really just mean that something within the prose took them out of the story, reminded them of the fact that they are in fact reading a book, that none of this is actually happening.
1599776
I was just telling MonstersUnderYourBed why I feel this is dead wrong, in a PM, with examples. I do recommend getting people who hate RariJack to preread... assuming you want to appeal to people who don't love, or even like RariJack. And that's a worthy thing to do. But if you want one that RariJack fans will love, talk to the RariJack fans, too (or be totally in love with the ship yourself.)
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Hmm, it seems that we've got a bit of a misunderstanding here. I meant that I was going to make a thread in ISD asking for people who don't like the ship to say why feel that way about it. There'd be no point in asking RariJack haters to actually read the story, since they'd just tell me to cut all the shipping parts.
What I want is to write a story that acknowledges the criticisms people have with that pairing, and then shows Rarity and Applejack overcoming them. I don't know yet if it will be possible, but I figure that it's worth a try.
1578319 Hey! I just remembered this!
Beware his Powerrrrrrs! Unspeakable powers!
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To be fair, I think if you can make a RariJack hater like your story, then it means you've done a bloody good job with it, assuming it is actually a RariJack story.
I mean, that's kind of why Twilight's List is so popular - it converts people to the ship.
1601509
Euthanasia is the standard approach for people who don't approve of TwiDash.