How Do We Know If We're Good Enough? · 4:49pm Jan 19th, 2021
Blog Number 129: "Writer's Philosophy?" Edition
Full disclosure that I am deliberately getting myself to write more blogs, more often. It helps me feel more engaged in the online community here.
Have you ever considered just how... horrifyingly complicated the world is?
Like, you start with wanting to write a story. OK, fair enough. Stories involve characters. Characters involve psychology. So you think: If I get better at psychology, I can get better at characters.
Crack open a book on psychology. Over a thousand terms.
Uh oh.
And that's the state of mind science according to one particular field, as represented by one particular book which is probably a few years out of date by now. Anatomy of the mind, sort of. And the mind is, simply put, the most complicated thing in the known universe, other than Calvinball.
So you dial it back a bit. Let's try something simpler, yeah? The mind-body division always suggests the body is just this simpler vehicle carrying around the complicated master, right? So let's look at human anatomy and physiology, as a sort of warm-up.
Crack open a book on the human body.
Eleven body systems identified: skeletal, muscular, nervous, endocrine, alimentary (digestive), respiratory, cardiovascular, urinary, integumentary (skin, hair, nails), lymphatic and immune combined, and reproductive. Lots of terms for each, anywhere from dozens to hundreds. To say nothing of the anatomy of molecules and organelles within a typical body cell (I still can't get my head round the complex chemical functions in a single mitochondrion; that's only a small portion of the whole).
Keep in mind that this is the snapshot view. We haven't even seen these things in their myriad of motions yet. The heart has enough atria, valves, and aortas and venas to keep track of before you figure out how beating works in diastole and anastole and whatnot.
So how about chemistry? Try something smaller, and that should be more manageable.
Crack open a book on chemistry.
Oh my word. There's a reason it's one of the most open-ended subjects around. Organic chemistry alone is a field unto itself. All those methanes and ethanes and ethanols and ethanoic acids... I looked up DNA's component parts once, and I'm still trying to keep the pyramidines and purines straight.
Crack open a book on basic elements.
There are how many of these things? And ions!? And isotopes!?
Crack open a book on physics.
Holy fuck.
Crack open a book on mathematics...
OK, maybe this is all because I'm going the wrong way. Instead of diving deeper into the obviously material side of things, we get back to the mind and society and so on. OK, OK, so look up the different fields of the mind sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities including philosophy.
Get:
Psychology, sociology, economics, archaeology, anthropology, world languages, culture, law, politics, geography, history, religion, ethics, epistemology, aesthetics, architecture, linguistics, cosmology, mythology, technology including medicine, the arts visual, performative, and literary...
It's just: there's always so much. And I've got this nagging feeling that these subjects must be by far the most complicated of them all, not least of all because most of them involve this thing, the mind, that's got to be the most complicated thing in the known universe. So what would come out of that but more complication?
Somewhere in all that, I'm trying to write characters, which as has been stressed to me before, should be unique, interesting, and convincing.
That's only characters. I haven't mentioned worldbuilding/setting and all that entails, genre conventions and whether to play them straight or muck around with them in some way, logical narrative POV decisions and plot structure editing, composition of prose, checking (and keeping straight) grammar and punctuation and spelling, trying to make quotable dialogue, multiple complementing layers and subplots, intertextual allusions and reference points, consistency in themes and concepts, and the ever-nebulous tone and attitude that's supposed to inform each sentence as you go and give it its "flavour".
It all feels like trying to take the super-mega-hyper-complicated real world as it is, and then add on this whole new complexity to make something ultra-super-giga-hyper-complicated. In thousands of words.
Oh, and it has to entertain people in a scenario where you can't even predict they'll show up, much less which way individual opinions will swing.
All while struggling for hours just to muster up the nerve to write something, anything, nearly every day for years and years, to say nothing of the massive novel projects so desperately craved, and yet so impossible to achieve.
Don't get me wrong: a lot of this complexity can be wonderful. All these subjects full of riches... I haven't even gotten into my favourite parts of biology, or the never-ending fascinations of astronomy and the earth sciences.
But sometimes - especially when my motivation completely collapses and takes days just to finish one measly scene out of an entire act of one fic among many written and many, many many many more planned - I feel woefully inadequate.
I'm not even suggesting I should tackle every one of these. Of course not: I can see the reckless overambition in that "Hard Mode" approach. It just would be nice if I felt I could handle "Easy Mode" too.
I only had to look at what I'd tried over the last couple of years to wonder where I'm going with this. Published stories 2019-2020: about 25, excluding flashfic anthologies. Stories I'd tried to write in that amount of time: 86, excluding flashfics. Those are the ones I tried to write anything for, excluding concepts and notes. And a lot of the fics I want to finish aren't the ones making it to publication.
I just feel so lost and unfocused. It's like there's this dull mist in my head when what I really need is sharp concentration. I don't even try remembering things anymore: they don't stick. I jot down stuff if I think it's important.
And that's why I want to publish blogs more often.
Some things I don't think I can talk about: even confining ourselves to the less-private aspects such as writing fanfiction for a publicly available show, I'm wary of sharing project details that'll either get people's hopes up or spoil a concept/plot point for them.
That said: looking back, I think I've been way too reticent this past decade. While I've surprisingly been better during 2020, I don't think I've been good enough. There were still long periods when I felt disconnected from any immersive writing community, and potentially thus from my own writing. It's hard to muster up the energy to finish a project if you've half-convinced yourself no one would actually care.
So that's what I'm trying to do with these blogs: put a system in place that helps me engage more with the creative writing project(s). Whether it's prospecting for tags, cobbling together character profiles out of canon scraps, tracking down fountains of inspiring trivia, keeping track of progress, noting milestones, or just bluntly asking about something pony/EqG, it'd just be nice to feel this was all coming together at last.
I don't know. Maybe I'm overthinking things. It's just what's on my mind at the moment. I haven't been feeling on top form lately, and I'd like to get to the bottom of it. This seems like a crucial part of the puzzle.
In any case, that's all I've got for now. I'd dearly love to have a fic out before the month ends, but so far it's not looking all that productive, so no promises.
Until next time. Impossible Numbers, out.
And this is why writing is so hard. I sympathize, empathize, all of -pathize, because I KNOW HOW THIS FEELS.
And not only do you have all these, there's... Writer's Block.
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Tell me about it. It's like trying to tame a wild animal without a specialist guide.
"The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne."
I've always seen it as a balancing act. There are Surface Writers that can accurately depict the complexity of an observable world without understanding the mechanisms behind it. They will often make howling mistakes when going beyond their own direct personal experience.
There are Head Writers that have their own extrapolated universe deep inside there that leaks out onto the page. Sometimes fascinating and entertaining in a trippy way.
Then there are the Scholarly Writers who do an immense amount of research on their subjects without bothering to observe them "in the wild" overmuch. Their worlds and characters are deep and complex, but often mechanistic and sterile-feeling.
The best way to go (in my demonstrably correct opinion
) is to try to balance all those approaches in the service of telling a good story.
There are many who would argue against that. There are non-narrative pieces that are highly regarded.* But for the vast majority of people, and certainly the members of this site, it's the storytelling that counts.
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* Never have I ever curled up by the fire with a good tone-poem.
Yuuuup.
Suffice to say, we've long passed the point where it's possible to know everything about everything, or even everything about anything, unless you have a very narrow definition of "anything." It's a big, wide, wonderful world out there, with a body of knowledge to match. Focusing on what matters for a given story is important... but that leads into the slippery question of "What matters?"
So yeah, I feel your pain. All I can tell you is to embrace those times when the fog lifts. And know that you're not the only one who can get lost in it.
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Hm, so let me check I understand those elements you mentioned. Surface Writers: have a kind of impressionistic style?
Head Writers: not sure what you intended for this one, but... worldbuilding-focused, mythopoeic style?
Scholarly Writers: effectively essayists/dissertationists using literary trappings? Didactic style? Teaching/Showing their work?
I find the phrase "good story" hard to pin down, sorta, and not just because of the whole "people's opinions" issue. "Arc" is the closest match I can think of, when thinking of what it'd look like: a single thread wherein characters do something in a discrete series of caused events, and it has major consequences. Just that, in a big epic, lots of arcs weave together and each is expected to make sense in its own right.
I'm not trying to be funny or anything; I'm just the sort to try and take things apart to see how they work. "Story" seems like an obvious thing until you try to unpack it, to say nothing of what a "good" one looks like or how to make one.
Figure most of the important stuff is about minds and social matters. I remember Pascoite saying the consequences had to matter for it to be a good story, and from what he was saying, I've come to think that mind/society side of it is key. Hence the psychology stuff for character.
Yes, I believe you're right. "Balance" is something I've had to invoke a lot myself trying to understand things, and not just storytelling issues either like pacing or dramatic weight (not too much, not too little). Pretty soon, I'll be calling it the Goldilocks Principle.
Heh, thanks for reminding me of that bittersweet Chaucer quote. So true, and yet so hard to stomach.
Actually, I should say thanks in general. You've given me food for thought, no doubt about it.
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Figures you'd zero in on that.
I think Richard Feynman had a pertinent quotation re: understanding something like quantum mechanics.
It's a sobering thought. I used to dream I'd grow up to be a polymath, and even now that I know better, it's a hard dream to let go.
Hmm... a question worthy of Optimal Foraging Theory, perhaps? If you treat resources/story opportunities as food, then somewhere between "swallow anything" and "minutely analyze everything" must be some happy optimal condition. Perhaps we just have to discriminately seize opportunities when they appear, pragmatically.
Thank you.
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Yes, that's pretty much what I intended in those categories. Of course, any actual individual usually combines elements of those three, and there are probably more. (Almost all categorizations are oversimplifications!)
As for a "good story," I'm tempted to cop out with "I know one when I see one."
However, I think it can essentially be summed up as a relating of events that progresses and concludes in a satisfactory way. This covers everything from a "Three Xs walk into a bar" joke to a 19th century Russian novel. I suppose that I ought to explain that by "satisfactory" I include tragedies and horror stories. i.e., satisfying the reader's expectations for a nice, tidy arc. I think this covers Pascoite's observation, because consequences that don't matter are inherently unsatisfying.
Real life is chaotic. Fiction takes that chaos and shapes it into a form that satisfies people's desire for narrative, for meaning behind the random BS that the universe throws at us.* Arcs are for stories, not reality.
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* I think this is why conspiracy theories are so popular. It's more satisfying (and comforting) to imagine that there are people out there controlling events. But that's another (but related) subject.
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Hm, sounds like a "meaning" focus with a specific agency bent. Like, stuff doesn't just happen: someone has to want it, have their own worldview (or opinion/judgement/what-have-you) on it, or is using it to gain something else. They're agents getting stuff done for a (personal) reason. Act has consequence that means something to someone.
So, "Quickdraw John came into the bar and shot the Sheriff" isn't a story, unless you add: "because that bastard had mocked his manliness for years", or "thus fulfilling his commission for One-Eyed Jake, who was fixing to set up his own 'Sheriff' and thus tighten his control over the town", or "which got everyone else in the bar interested enough in the new Sheriff post to start fighting over who'd get it". Something like that.
I got Westerns on my mind lately.
Interesting you mention those genre-specific versions. I wonder if... there's a worldview built into each type that shapes what counts as "consequential" or "meaningful". And if so, what the cross-genre spectrum/spectra would be...
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Yes, your example perfectly expresses what I meant. The first is an incident, the others... at least the beginnings of a story.
I've heard official wisdom that to start a story, one must have a character in an action... but I disagree. A character opening an envelope isn't a story. But aim something at that character... let the reader know that that envelope contains the results of his HIV test, and you've got something!
My exceptions are to call out that the critical satisfaction is the reader's not the character's! A lot of horror movies (I hardly ever read horror) seem to be about a series of ever increasingly gruesome deaths. That seems to satisfy a certain group of people. So... good story, I guess?