The Crucible · 1:45am Mar 14th, 2015
I am not referring to the 1953 play by Arthur Miller, some adaptation of which many of my generation had to read as part of public school curriculum. If that is what you were hoping to read about, you will be disappointed though I make no apology for that.
Like Miller, I am making reference to one of these things as a complex metaphor.
A crucible is a container that can withstand very high temperatures and is used for metal, glass, and pigment production as well as a number of modern laboratory processes. While crucibles historically were usually made from clay, they can be made from any material that withstands temperatures high enough to melt or otherwise alter its contents.
As I'm most familiar with the metal-working side of things, I'll be focusing on that aspect. I will especially be focusing on the process of smelting, the process of removing impurities from metals by using a crucible and some other stuff.
For your listening and slight distraction entertainment purposes I offer this. I’d recommend tiling the blog in one window on one side of your screen, and the gifsound on the other.
So, the topic of this blog is writing, the motivation to write, the goals of writing, and most importantly, the reception of feedback and treatment thereof. As the imagery of a crucible and the process of smelting is pretty vivid, I'm sure the character of my attempts to express these things is something you can probably already guess at. However, it has been my experience that this topic is not intuitive to most, it is not common sense, and it seems like some value can be extracted if we press on.
Now, since you clearly don't already have enough studying to do to fully come along with this blog, have another 4,000 words to read to bring you a to a common level of understanding with me. In order to avoid reinventing the wheel, I will be using Bookplayer's terms and ideas as I understand them, and present my ideas as they agree or disagree with hers.
Telling a story is probably the number one reason people start writing fiction.
I agree, but I would take it a step further. Any artist in any medium has something inside them, some dream or idea or vision, some emotion, or some primal, abstract, simple, complex, contrived, weak, or vivid thing they want to share. It is frustrating to define art because it is so various, vague, and nebulous and stands in defiance of lines and categories or labels. Writing is no exception to this maelstrom of art of which it is but one medium. It may get a little confusing, but I’ll be interchangeably referring to any medium’s terminology. I feel all art is unified on a fundamental level, and the concepts of any medium can be applied to another. The topic of this blog is on that fundamental level where the medium itself is irrelevant.
What is art is not the important part, but the desire to share it, whatever it is. Rather than stay alone and quiet, the arts wishes to speak. To communicate. In literature, this is done both literally and metaphorically through language, through words.
Bookplayer's sections on Drive and Goal help layout and define things as I see them in an eloquent way. What an artist is looking for in an audience and why they may seek to speak.
Taking a step back from her blog though, I see something that is assumed that I wish to focus on. The artist speaks to be heard. The artist speaks to her audience not just so their eardrums vibrate and synapses fire in their brains to register that they heard something, but so that the audience reacts in some way. It might be a fleeting response barely strong enough that they depress their mouse button on the thumbs-up or down buttons in Fimfic or clap, or it might be the sort of response that moves the reader to think about, speak about, and discuss this idea that has been wormed into their brain by the author. Or to stand and clap. Better still, that response might be widespread love, willingness to part with currency, or a desire to have other people share in the experience of having heard the words. To leave the theatre and tell their friends, "you have got to watch this."
Where Bookplayer struggles is in the concept that a particular piece of art is good or not. I think many of us intuitively understand some subjective sense of "goodness" of a piece. Like art itself, this "goodness" defies proper lines and categorization. But it still exists. She presents it as a personal failing of hers to be able to effectively give this sort of feedback to others, though I am sure this is merely modesty. Others on the site, such as Titanium Dragon, JohnPerry, myself, PresentPerfect, or groups like EqD or Seattle's Angels attempt to meet the demand of many artists. They seek to satisfy the craving for feedback. The voting system, comments, and the feature box all try to satisfy this hunger. All these things come together like peanuts, caramel, nougat and milk chocolate for the ravenous author hordes. Be your motivation for prestige, followers, or personal satisfaction the audience is here and willing to give it.
The flaw is in the attempt to define any of this as good. Iron and steel are not good, evil, positive, negative, harmonious or malicious. They just are. As humans we desire iron. We can do a great many things to it and with it. We can make swords to kill with, bridges to cross rivers, shovels to destroy the landscape with, places to live, and scalpels to heal.
As an artist, it isn't inherently good to make a beautiful sword. If you need some sharp bit of metal to cut something or someone with, a poorly made sword, with low-quality metal and lots of impurities will do the job, and be infinitely better at it than your bare hands. You can, of course, see improvements in performance and aesthetic quality in the sword.
If you have some story to tell, you can do so without sharing a language with your audience, with no skill in grammar. It isn't difficult to get some kind of audience and some kind of feedback. In this day and age of the Internet, it is almost impossible to be completely ignored if you make but a token effort to get attention. However, enjoyment of this process usually comes with better effort and more skill.
No matter what you write, sing, paint, carve, or forge, and no matter how skilled you are, no matter how much quality is in the material, the tools, and any other factor important to the craft, no matter how "good" the execution results, there will always be negative reactions. Some people just don't like swords. Some people think Twitter is TL;DR. But the goal is not the ideal; ideals generally, by definition, are impossible to actually reach. The goal is to approach them, to land closer to that target than the edge.
For writing, like any medium, there are skills you can learn to be a “better writer.” Grammar and language serve as the agreed upon common convention that allows us to make sense of an otherwise arbitrary collection of marks. Style, format, and voice serve to let us work with those words within the options available to us to ultimately present our idea in our head to the heads of the audience. As a fandom, we have an interest in a common intellectual property and with it some common ground for characters, setting, theme, and tone. All these areas and more are related to skills you can improve, and resources for doing so exist in abundance all over the internet, on-site in places like Bookplayer’s or other noteworthy authors’ blogs, schools, and from personal trial and error.
Gaining skill is a change. You make yourself a different and better person, as you define better, in order to achieve your goals and desires. I see the world as an audience and that audience as a crucible. It is hot and melts you, the ore, so that you can remove the impurities. You come out of the process better suited to do as you please. The goal is to become a more pure ingot of metal, to be further shaped and hammered into whatever beautiful shape you wish.
We may all enjoy praise, and not enjoy negative feedback and insults. Both are in plentiful supply though, and some are offered dishonestly. As artists, we should welcome it all.This too is a skill that lets us better do art. No matter what, feedback is going to be there anyway, so adapt to it and use it. The harshest and most insulting and demeaning of criticism is a learning experience. The vaguest of praise is a learning experience. As an artist, we should be not dwelling on the pain of an insult, but in the musing over what motivated the insult. Why does it hurt? How does it align with our artistic drive and goals? How can it help us become more refined? Was the feedback honest and are we being honest in our reaction?
I'd say "good" exists in relation to art, and I'd say it is difficult to really pin down because it is not strictly tied to the art, it is not strictly tied to the artist, and it is not strictly tied to the audience. It is something that overlaps and exists between the three. It doesn't exist strictly in a binary state. It isn't a number line or grayscale. It is more like an RGB scale. As an artist, you're maybe trying to be more red (or read). Maybe the audience wants more blue (or to be blown). It might be good to create something purple, but that’s your decision. Good in art is not black or white, it's the whole color wheel. That is what makes it hard. People are not used to thinking in non-binary ways, which makes it all the more fitting a concept to relate to art.
I'm rather fatigued of the discussions regarding "quality" and attention (whether how to get it or things that are supposedly deserving of it) that's been going on as of late, and you already know my opinion of how this fandom handles "curation" and "criticism." There's a lot of bellyaching by kids and/or OCD nerds about all the wrong stuff.
This is one of the better (crap, qualitative statement) blogs on the subject, though. When it comes to improving one's creative craft, the audience are tools. And as with any endeavor, the right tools are required for the right job. Acceptance and examination of every presented tool in relation to your personal goal (in this case, what do you want to be better at? A good rule of thumb is to make that goal something that will fulfill you personally as opposed to others, since it's you breaking your mental back here) is a good idea, to determine whether it belongs in the box, your belt, or your hand for the task you're zeroed in on...
...or, alternatively, thrown the fuck out, no matter how eloquently it may express itself.