Reading and writing · 1:59am Jul 31st, 2012
warning, pretentious egostical angsty late-night adolescent whinging ahead along with shittons of tl;dr
It's particularly horrifying for me to read a story written by another person that's any good. A great deal of this, of course, is that particularly terrible feeling of inadequacy and uncreativity in the face of novel, taken ideas, but there's another reason I note:
So many of them have their worlds open, and I have never been able to write anything with the same feeling.
Stories, of course, can be good without ever having the sense of openness; The Glass Blower by Cold in Gardez is a brilliant example. You don't get any sense of a bright, open world; you get a marketplace and a workshop and a spot under a tree at various points in a dark corridor, the author pushing you through. And it is beautiful; most of the best stories ever written are closed.
But what is fundamentally terrifying is that I cannot write a story that gives the feeling of a world that feels truly open; it's very difficult for me to write scenes with more than one person, and that is only the most basic manifestation of the problem. The sensation of reading something open is like walking through a field, seeing what I wish to but feeling the strength of the work as a whole; I wonder about Phillydelphia's clover laws and Trottingham's sociocultural dynamics, and I can read pieces of the work from start to finish.
The sensation of reading one of my own stories is like travelling through a dark tunnel where people speak and things happen and their words echo in their own private universe, devoid of context. I have made a habit of wasting as few words as possible, and of saying only what is needed to be said, and implying many things that do need to be said; perhaps breaking this in favour of some exposition might do me some good.
Twilight Discovers Literary Analysis, I think, is an expression of this fundamental sort of terror. I don't consciously construct literature, but I apply theoretical knowledge like intuition; a simple analysis of my own work shows how damned shallow the entire thing is, how often the bits of misguided intuition show through and the defects in theory are magnified, how mechanical my intuition is; this is a simple bit of self-parody.
And a fair helping of outright parody. I have noticed quite often that metafiction, no matter how 'meta' it seems to be, rarely ever manages to be so without breaking the fourth wall in some way or capitulating in some way.
Take The Stanley Parable, where the 'true' ending takes away the entire metafictional structure and replaces it with some vague thing that is - most importantly - extant, treating the player character as anything more than someone who followed an entirely scripted path simply to be noncomformist; it treats the player as an independent actor at some point, which is a capitulation.
Or take any story where the author is spoken to; this a cheat, because they can never truly interact on any level with the author. The author controls everything; breaking the fourth wall and having the author be spoken to isn't freedom in any way. It is, to put it simply, intellectual masturbation. There are far too few stories - if any - where the characters' situations are completely helpless, bound by something that doesn't exist in their fictional 'universe', where every attempt to rebel is scripted, every attempt to accept as well. Of course, every event is scripted in every single bit of fiction, but it is often pretended that it is not, that these fictional beings exist in any meaningful way.
They don't. I've brought Twilight close to independent existence as possible by writing her in the fashion that I believe she would react instead of the way most convenient for me, but I can never bring something truly to life.
I'm sure someone's going to ask me why I'd read other peoples' good stories and leave positive comments if the experience is so horrific for me. It's fairly simple; I like it. No matter how far into despair it might push me, I learn from every single fic I read and every fic that I write. I wouldn't be surprised if the next fic that I write - or the fic after that - invalidates my fears entirely, because heaven knows that if I'm good at anything it's learning.
Case study: compare False Friends and Judgement.
Somebody might ask me 'how do you deal with this constant, soul-rending terror'; I grow a receptive organ, that's how, and I take it as hard as I want to.
And of course, if all else fails, there's usually this:
I know a similar feel, bro dl.dropbox.com/u/31471793/FiMFiction/emoticons/misc_Lyra_cry.png
I know that feel
Well, I don't feel that way as far as reading my own stories, because I write for myself, so I'm not bothered by how "shallow" it feels. Also, I don't confine my stories to any sort of literary devices; instead, I try to make the next event in the story the most logical thing that would happen, while still confining to my end objective. I will completely derail a set path for the story to go on if it doesn't help. Though I suppose your fic covers that in a way, too. Meh, maybe I just have an ego.
But being horrified by someone else's work that's good is something I can greatly sympathize with. I have to remind myself that it's not a competition almost every day, and sometimes it still doesn't get through to my head.
"I have made a habit of wasting as few words as possible, and of saying only what is needed to be said, and implying many things that do need to be said; perhaps breaking this in favour of some exposition might do me some good."
Are you another victim of Strunk & White, or Hemingway? I did the same thing to an extreme before coming to fimfiction. I learned that when readers say "I wish it were longer!" they really mean it. I learned that most of the things I thought didn't need to be said, needed to be said. Perhaps there are two classes of readers: the ones like you and I, who read for ideas, and want to get them as quickly as possible, like in an Isaac Asimov short story; and the ones like everybody else, who read for emotion, and just want to ride those waves as long as they can.
There's no good middle ground between a story and an essay. When I start writing a story because I have an idea I want to convey, people hate it. When I find the characters are going through something interesting, and refocus on that, they like it. When I write because there are one or three key scenes I want to depict - I'm not sure yet. Those things might work better as scripts.
I started one story because I was intrigued that Celestia displayed characteristics of a bodhisattva, yet the whole Nightmare Moon episode seemed capable of being explained only as BDSM roleplay between gods. So I wrote a story trying to unify Mahayana Buddhism and BDSM within Celestia. It turns out this is hard to do. Pretty soon I had a story that could be understood by someone with a background in Buddhism, BDSM, Nietzsche, control theory, evolutionary psychology, economics, and Heidegger. The only thing left was to find that person, tie them to a chair, and force them to listen to several pages of ponies talking about philosophy. This story was the fourth-most-disliked ponyfiction ever written. I know. I have a database. It was more hated than alicorn self-insert Yu-Gu-Oh clopfiction with no punctuation. And justly so.
"There are far too few stories - if any - where the characters' situations are completely helpless, bound by something that doesn't exist in their fictional 'universe', where every attempt to rebel is scripted, every attempt to accept as well. Of course, every event is scripted in every single bit of fiction, but it is often pretended that it is not, that these fictional beings exist in any meaningful way."
No, those would be bad stories, incapable of giving useful insight into real life. This one is okay because it's a meta-fiction. "The Trial" by Kafka is okay because it's a commentary on life. I think that about covers it. I liked this story, but have no need to ever read one like it, or like "The Trial", again.
A good example of an open story is "Crazy Weather" by Charles McNichols.
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>Are you another victim of Strunk & White, or Hemingway?
My current writing style - well, to be fair, only Solace - comes from reading some Hemingway and thinking "this guy could stand to be a little less purple".
That being said, I write for purpose; I use as few words as possible to convey what I must, and this includes emotion. I don't think I've ever constructed a story around an idea; I pull ideas from my stories. All I'm thinking as I actually write the story is "Imma punch you in the gut, punch you in the gut, punch you in the gut, punch you in the gut, you read my story Imma punch you in the gut".
I wrote a long comment today, but I must have forgotten to post it 'cuz it's not here. Gar.
It boiled down to "I've been struggling with something similar myself, which I call 'stuffiness.' " I've looked over a couple of your stories now and I can say that you are very stuffy and it's because of too much interpretation and too little physical imagination.
Like in Separation where you have Twilight receiving a good licking from her marefriend Pinkie and - somehow - she manages to be all dark and broody. Imagine getting a Pinkie-licking and try to tell me you can think anything coherent at that moment, much less coherently sad.
Alien Invaders would be so much better if I had a mental image of Pinkie's flying machine before Gilda starts tearing it apart.
I don't have a guaranteed solution, but I can show you what I did. I wrote a short story trying to be the complete opposite of stuffy. It's very descriptive, touches on some very big ideas (you're an idea writer, no doubt about it), and is less than five thousand words. If it only had a little conflict, it'd be a halfway-decent story. "Watching Paint Dry"
I got there by doing two things. First, I slowed down my writing and paid special attention to my sensory imagination. I actually wrote it out longhand in a notebook instead of typing my first draft. Second, I went back during revision, found the parts where I was telling the reader what to think, and cut nearly all of them. Sometimes I replaced them with even more description. Aside from the conflict being extremely low-key, I'm proud of how it turned out (description, emotion, theme, and so forth), and I'm trying to apply that lesson to my other writing now.
So an exercise like that might be a good idea. Go super purple and then adjust from there.
There's no shame in being concise. Use simple sentences. Say no unneeded word. But do use detail to root your readers in the soil of your stories.
263544
>I think there is a bit of misinterpretation with The Stanley Parable going on here, as there is no "real ending". The ending you get when you follow all of the instructions is just pure irony. At first I assumed you meant the ending you get when you follow *none* of the instructions, because there you ultimately break free of the narrative, being left without any comment or progression at all (well, until the narrator ends the whole thing after a fixed amount of time, making some snide comments how he just babbles along some words which make sense in any context you could come up with). I mean, if there would be a real ending it would be a bit more obvios which one it is, right?
I was referring to the ending taking the most effort to reach; the last ending, where the narrator pretends that he exists as an entity. The narrator does not exist; once his words are on paper, he is essentially dead to the story, unable to change any of it, and referring to himself as a being extant in Stanley's world, as a sentient entity, is just silly. I honestly think that the narrative demeans itself at that point - it wouldn't have been so bad if the screen simply went dark and the credits rolled - even if it hadn't broken down by the time he began talking about how a map clearly designed for the game, the skybox and wall textures, had never been.
I honestly think that the narrative demeans itself at that point - it wouldn't have been so bad if the screen simply went dark and the credits rolled - even if it hadn't broken down by the time he began talking about how a map clearly designed for the game, the skybox and wall textures, had never been.
I think the metafiction there works on multiple levels -- they don't come right out and literally admit that the "unfinished" map is just another preplanned story element, but that fact inevitably occurs to the player who's been paying attention. The developers have planned and accounted for literally everything you can do in the game, including standing still and doing nothing.
The nature of game design does not ordinarily allow a game player the same theoretically infinite set of choices that is available in real life, except in cases that are deliberately designed to be open-ended (like Minecraft or Sim City); in most cases, it just comes down to getting the player from Point A to Point B, and all the ways of getting there have been worked out in advance by the makers of the game in question. The illusion of choice, in other words, is what it boils down to. The Stanley Parable has the illusion of choice as its primary theme, but there are other developers and other games that have addressed the same idea in passing. Half-Life 2, in particular, likes to needle the player every now and again with reminders that Gordon "Freeman" -- much like the player controlling him -- is in fact being swept along and pushed onward by forces outside himself (which I think the creators of The Stanley Parable noticed); I don't think I need to go into any great detail regarding how the Bioshock games treat the issue. The game makers decide on the stories they want to tell in a game, and then build the stories for the player to follow; it's all railroading, however cunningly they may try to disguise it.