Being a Better Writer: Micro-Blast #7 – The Anti-Story, Sleep, Knowledge, Capitalism · 10:20pm Feb 18th, 2019
Welcome back readers! And welcome to the new readers! Life, The Universe, and Everything is over, but I can already see from the stats page that we have some newcomers! Welcome! Whether you’re here to look at my books, or here for some weekly Being a Better Writer, welcome all the same!
So then, let’s get down to business with this week’s post, which is … a Micro-blast. Number seven, to be exact. What’s a Micro-blast? Well, it’s what happens when I near the end of a list of writing topics I’ve made for BaBW, and some of them just aren’t quite worth a full post, but are still worth discussing. Micro-blasts are a good way to bridge the gap, combining several shorter topics into one post so that there’s still a decent amount of material covered. Readers get a variety of subjects, and I get to clear some shorter topics and concepts off of my list.
Sound pretty straightforward? Good! Then let’s go!
That was a fun microblast. I'll have to remember to throw capitalism at things in the future.
By the way, not all Isekai worlds are inhabited by stupid people. Overlord, I feel, makes a good number of fun extrapolations on how MMO mechanics could have tech and society stuff built around them.
"Anti-story stories don’t have that. They’re just there. No goal. No real purpose outside of “Here’s a thing I wrote about.” They’re an empty scene."
Actually, anti-stories are deliberate. Little kids rarely write anti-stories; you have to go to college to be trained to write them. There was a strain of French realist stories in the late 19th century that tried to show life "as it is", meaning nothing unusual happening. There was Brecht's insistence that stories should shatter the reader's suspension of disbelief, because suspension of disbelief is a bourgeois tool to lull the masses into complacency.
Then literary critics started borrowing from modern art, which is anti-art. The basic idea is that stories with something happening are analogous to representational art, which show recognizable and meaningful things. Modern artists were spiritualists / Platonists, who believed that meaning exists only in spiritual essences, and so drawing pictures of physical things is useless. Either they tried to convey spiritual essences, or they focused on technique, things like brush strokes. Or they tried to make the artwork be "construction", a thing in the world, rather than an imaginary presentation. Or to be "craft" rather than "art", meaning a thing put together well technically, but not intellectually interesting. Or they made conceptual art--meta-art making a statement about art.
The literary analog is that telling stories about things happening is useless and boring and representational. A story should instead be conceptual art (making statements about stories by not being a story), or constructivist (fourth-wall breaking), or deconstructive (consistent trope-breaking, or else doing something wrong deliberately so as not to be a good story and somehow imagining that is a critique of stories).
There's also a Marxist strain of anti-art which says art must be boring and bleak, in order to make people unhappy and incite them to revolution. Also, any story that is enjoyable is entertainment, which is a consumer product and hence unvirtuous.
And a post-modernist strain, which says that trying to tell a story is naive and shows your lack of sophistication--so every time your story starts sounding sincere, you should undercut it with irony or ambiguity.
Lots more, actually. Art today is all basically anti-art, and so is the literary establishment.
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Whoa ... now that you bring those up, I remember learning about them for a brief time, though I quickly moved on to more "fun" things.
Fair point though. I hadn't considered those at all when writing the post.
Someone should write a book about that.