Post by Kristal Rose on Aug 1, 2007 5:28:44 GMT -5
Take this post as an exxageration to bluntly get my points across. I don't have any great problem with your writing. If you didn't already show some promise as a writer, I wouldn't be wasting my time here.
Not all famous authors write well in every regard.
I'm not certain what point you are making about the writing in 1984, which I did believe was well written. I can say this about it, the main character in 1984 was not a person at all, but the political system, and true to my formula of twisting something to the extreme, and slowly revealing it with hints of character, it takes the breadth of the novel to reveal just how messed up and twisted that character is. The really scary thing about 1984, and it's parallel in real life, is the sublime point it makes that not only will this stuff happen, but no one will know or care that it has happened, or even embrace such a tragedy to the free soul of humanity.
Heinlein's 'Stranger in a Strange Land' is one of my favorite novels. I can see a similarity in his style with yours, but he does not describe things as you do in a third person editor observor voice, rather descriptions come almost through the vehicle of dialogue or being within the protagonist's thought processes. When the reader needs more background information than that, the author hands it directly and almost personally to the reader like an arm-chair psychologist on a poetic rant. Heinlein did succeed in coveying different states of mind. Techinque and style figure heavily into achieving that.
Your descriptive style is bit more like Michener's voice, whom personally I can't stand, though obviously he has a huge following.
The whole way you go about setting up a story is nearly particular to the sci-fi genre, or perhaps historical novels, which, since you wish to write sci-fi, makes sense. Fantasy would deal more with the non-logistical story energy configurations.
In sense though you are laying all your cards on the table. Things don't exist until you say they exist. Even if you were so blunt as to have a character say "Hey, I'm deeply disturbed, but you'll never guess why" your reader is somewhat obliged to respond "Very well, I'll drop the matter then until it comes up again". If instead, the characters do curious things, the reader wonders "What's up with that? Perhaps..", but more importantly they have cause to try on the mind-set of the character in question, feel first-hand what would drive a person to do such a thing. The way you write, a character could go through a tantrum and we would witness it without ever having cause to get in their head, to experience the tantrum from the inside; We are passive observors and you will present whatever we need to know. That style of writing was pushed to it's refinement three centuries ago. Good ancient Irish folktales though managed to evade that and fill both character and plot with inviting compelling mystery rather than merely describe: Grimms more than Anderson, which have has all the same subject matter, but has all the life of a diorama or a lithograph, far far away. Grimms is more in your face, not described, but alive with hidden horrors.
You think the bugs in the bed didn't have a purpose? Reading your paragraph on putting together cohesive cues, I see why you write the way you do, because you are mimicing your own comprehensive objective logistical thought process. Let me forewarn you, people all think differently, and while most everyone has some capacity for that sort of thought, it doesn't predominate with them as it does with you. In all likelihood most of your readers will quickly forget such details, and take them in just long enough to add to their subjective or conceptual flow of the story. Even in most sci-fi, the objective stuff exists just to build up a conceptual paradigm, not to form concrete building blocks of any greater complexity. Some murder mysteries are objective in such a fashion, but generally even they slant instead towards building up subjective hints at character motives. Typically when one brings in something objective like a girl with violets, that they were violets is meant to be forgotten, and that she carries sweet things is the impression the reader builds without recollection of a single fact.
Your typical reader will reduce your story to intuitive subective conceptions as they go along: They are at war, this person isn't trustworthy, this guy takes things in stride.. and will forget any objective particulars.
The bugs in a bed describe what a person will endure for the sake of love. You have to get nitty-gritty about the bugs if you want your reader to understand that sufferening. Are the bugs part of the story? Absolutely not. Is suffering for love part of the story? Certainly. ..and 'just how much' is a deeper part of the story. As I said in the prior post, it's about directing your reader, putting their mind through the motions. If you don't want to do that, you'd be better off as a game designer.
Your writiing only feels slow because it's descriptive, which equates to the reader not being engaged. You could bore someone with a description of a flower or intriguinely spend an hour with it opening, depending on how you write it. It's just like your own life experience. You could easily the grains in a piece of lumber as possibly complex, but not worth a second glance, but if it's your job to sculpt that lumber, you become aware of huge variety of grain formations, subtle contrasting color saturations, and delicate formations of shimmering in different lighting. No matter how rich and in depth your characters are, if all they ever do is open up and gradually reveal themselves, the reader is never engaged in opening 'them' up, and hence just glosses over their richness like that piece of wood. These character were interesting to you because you were engaged in everything they did by creating them. The reader doesn't have that privelege, so you need to offer methods of engaging them.
I don't think anyone here had any problem with plotholes. There was no complaint that wolves and goblins weren't explained, and needed answered, rather 'What's that about?' was an expression of some intrigue, not a call to have things answered.
You and Kiwi make quite a pair of writers, she opens up things continually as she goes along, and you close up things as you go along.
Even if you keep writing just as you do, there's a place for such writing, but in my opinion it currently lacks the magic required for broad appeal by sake of the writing quality alone.
I've just now paged through a huge collection of famous sci-fi/fantasy authors and only a couple, like Anne Rice or Huxley approach the amount of non-dialogue description you offer, and when they do, it's about ambience, mental states, mysteries, speculations, musings, and relatively little of the objective description you offer.
It's not that good authors don't write with the same techniques as you employ, it's a matter of degree, and that they offer qualities that you still need to recognize and work on.
I went through the first 27 years of my life thinking that every one had more or less the same thought processes as I did. I took a psychology class in relationship communications, and learned that people think predominantly through different senses like feel, sound, vision, smell. I read a passage where the author asked the reader to try imagining operation of a four-stroke motor without use of words. I though couldn't imagine why one would even use words for that all. I do my thinking in visual schematics. Some people think in visual kinesthetic motions. When I took theater classes we were asked to recall prior life experinces, to dredge up those feelings, and it was only then that I found out that many people have a capacity I would call emotional memory (where one can actually feel emotions from their history, and not just detachedly know or deduce intellectually what feeling they had at the time). When I had my spiritual awakening, I found a radically different way to perceive every even that met my senses. That's what really opened me up to recognize how differently a person could think, and actually inquire as to how people thought, and stop presuming they thought like me. As a writer, or any type of effecetive communicator, you have to be aware of the different ways people think, if nothing else, should you fail to emulate such thought processes, to at least roughly understand the nature of your communication failings.
I'm guessing that most people structure their universe (file and process their thoughts) around emotions, followed by physical behaviour processes and patterns. My universal rubric is structured in concepts and patterns, hence I'm great at phyiscal engineering design and software architecture. Chronology is perhaps a huge divisionary issue; half the people attach a firmline timeline to most of their thoughts and experience , while the other have little faculty at all for time and sequence. It appears that you think in visual objective details and landscapes.
These sorts of cognition divisions are not only inter-personal, but also inter-cultural. America leans on noun emphasis, while Europe leans on verbs. The American Essay format (as you will probably find in your first semester of college) is rather drab. The thesis is presented, then arguments are made to support it. In the European format, which I find far more sophisticated if one wishes to be psychologically formatted, is to present your supporting material, and then draw your thesis as a conclusion.
btw, I'm not just making this stuff up as I go along. I rank in the 98th percentile amongst college students for English mastery. I suppose one would hope so, since I'm a genius, have been attending college for 28 years, and then listen to lectures on the radio all day and night. I risk sounding formidable in the suggestions I offer because you folks are entry level college age, and I'm nearly presenting advanced concepts that Masters in English would discuss. I'm hoping though to present it all at a Junior level to give you all a head start against the competion.
That's why I often mention that it might take ten years of writing for you to master such techniques in your writing, because they are often techniques that aren't even discussed until you've had six years of college English. That doesn't mean they don't figure into good writing (whethar the authors know what they are doing or not). I've been of help if I've even introduced the concepts such that you might muse over them yourself over the years.
I mention this in part so that you don't imagine you need to defend your position. Unless you are some sort of prodigy, it's not to be expected that your writing has crossed such bridges yet.
I heartily recommend that you check out lectures on tape or in books by Natalie Goldberg, not because she explains any of this material, but rather because she is complementary and explains much that I never pass on, even though I've been listening to lectures of hers on writing weekly now for a decade. I think she's kind of kindergardenish, but she has her place in advanced writing if one hasn't done their own huge quantity of contemplation on the basics of physical descriptive writing. She offers many writing exercises with a zen bent to them. her current lecture series, if you want to pick it off kpfk.org (Roy of Hollywood, I forget which nights, but it's listed) is on writing memoirs. She goes into things like the process and philosphy of writing memoirs young as is done now as an ongoing life review process, vs. writing them in retirement as had been done until the 60's.
ok, enough for now.
Not all famous authors write well in every regard.
I'm not certain what point you are making about the writing in 1984, which I did believe was well written. I can say this about it, the main character in 1984 was not a person at all, but the political system, and true to my formula of twisting something to the extreme, and slowly revealing it with hints of character, it takes the breadth of the novel to reveal just how messed up and twisted that character is. The really scary thing about 1984, and it's parallel in real life, is the sublime point it makes that not only will this stuff happen, but no one will know or care that it has happened, or even embrace such a tragedy to the free soul of humanity.
Heinlein's 'Stranger in a Strange Land' is one of my favorite novels. I can see a similarity in his style with yours, but he does not describe things as you do in a third person editor observor voice, rather descriptions come almost through the vehicle of dialogue or being within the protagonist's thought processes. When the reader needs more background information than that, the author hands it directly and almost personally to the reader like an arm-chair psychologist on a poetic rant. Heinlein did succeed in coveying different states of mind. Techinque and style figure heavily into achieving that.
Your descriptive style is bit more like Michener's voice, whom personally I can't stand, though obviously he has a huge following.
The whole way you go about setting up a story is nearly particular to the sci-fi genre, or perhaps historical novels, which, since you wish to write sci-fi, makes sense. Fantasy would deal more with the non-logistical story energy configurations.
In sense though you are laying all your cards on the table. Things don't exist until you say they exist. Even if you were so blunt as to have a character say "Hey, I'm deeply disturbed, but you'll never guess why" your reader is somewhat obliged to respond "Very well, I'll drop the matter then until it comes up again". If instead, the characters do curious things, the reader wonders "What's up with that? Perhaps..", but more importantly they have cause to try on the mind-set of the character in question, feel first-hand what would drive a person to do such a thing. The way you write, a character could go through a tantrum and we would witness it without ever having cause to get in their head, to experience the tantrum from the inside; We are passive observors and you will present whatever we need to know. That style of writing was pushed to it's refinement three centuries ago. Good ancient Irish folktales though managed to evade that and fill both character and plot with inviting compelling mystery rather than merely describe: Grimms more than Anderson, which have has all the same subject matter, but has all the life of a diorama or a lithograph, far far away. Grimms is more in your face, not described, but alive with hidden horrors.
You think the bugs in the bed didn't have a purpose? Reading your paragraph on putting together cohesive cues, I see why you write the way you do, because you are mimicing your own comprehensive objective logistical thought process. Let me forewarn you, people all think differently, and while most everyone has some capacity for that sort of thought, it doesn't predominate with them as it does with you. In all likelihood most of your readers will quickly forget such details, and take them in just long enough to add to their subjective or conceptual flow of the story. Even in most sci-fi, the objective stuff exists just to build up a conceptual paradigm, not to form concrete building blocks of any greater complexity. Some murder mysteries are objective in such a fashion, but generally even they slant instead towards building up subjective hints at character motives. Typically when one brings in something objective like a girl with violets, that they were violets is meant to be forgotten, and that she carries sweet things is the impression the reader builds without recollection of a single fact.
Your typical reader will reduce your story to intuitive subective conceptions as they go along: They are at war, this person isn't trustworthy, this guy takes things in stride.. and will forget any objective particulars.
The bugs in a bed describe what a person will endure for the sake of love. You have to get nitty-gritty about the bugs if you want your reader to understand that sufferening. Are the bugs part of the story? Absolutely not. Is suffering for love part of the story? Certainly. ..and 'just how much' is a deeper part of the story. As I said in the prior post, it's about directing your reader, putting their mind through the motions. If you don't want to do that, you'd be better off as a game designer.
Your writiing only feels slow because it's descriptive, which equates to the reader not being engaged. You could bore someone with a description of a flower or intriguinely spend an hour with it opening, depending on how you write it. It's just like your own life experience. You could easily the grains in a piece of lumber as possibly complex, but not worth a second glance, but if it's your job to sculpt that lumber, you become aware of huge variety of grain formations, subtle contrasting color saturations, and delicate formations of shimmering in different lighting. No matter how rich and in depth your characters are, if all they ever do is open up and gradually reveal themselves, the reader is never engaged in opening 'them' up, and hence just glosses over their richness like that piece of wood. These character were interesting to you because you were engaged in everything they did by creating them. The reader doesn't have that privelege, so you need to offer methods of engaging them.
I don't think anyone here had any problem with plotholes. There was no complaint that wolves and goblins weren't explained, and needed answered, rather 'What's that about?' was an expression of some intrigue, not a call to have things answered.
You and Kiwi make quite a pair of writers, she opens up things continually as she goes along, and you close up things as you go along.
Even if you keep writing just as you do, there's a place for such writing, but in my opinion it currently lacks the magic required for broad appeal by sake of the writing quality alone.
I've just now paged through a huge collection of famous sci-fi/fantasy authors and only a couple, like Anne Rice or Huxley approach the amount of non-dialogue description you offer, and when they do, it's about ambience, mental states, mysteries, speculations, musings, and relatively little of the objective description you offer.
It's not that good authors don't write with the same techniques as you employ, it's a matter of degree, and that they offer qualities that you still need to recognize and work on.
I went through the first 27 years of my life thinking that every one had more or less the same thought processes as I did. I took a psychology class in relationship communications, and learned that people think predominantly through different senses like feel, sound, vision, smell. I read a passage where the author asked the reader to try imagining operation of a four-stroke motor without use of words. I though couldn't imagine why one would even use words for that all. I do my thinking in visual schematics. Some people think in visual kinesthetic motions. When I took theater classes we were asked to recall prior life experinces, to dredge up those feelings, and it was only then that I found out that many people have a capacity I would call emotional memory (where one can actually feel emotions from their history, and not just detachedly know or deduce intellectually what feeling they had at the time). When I had my spiritual awakening, I found a radically different way to perceive every even that met my senses. That's what really opened me up to recognize how differently a person could think, and actually inquire as to how people thought, and stop presuming they thought like me. As a writer, or any type of effecetive communicator, you have to be aware of the different ways people think, if nothing else, should you fail to emulate such thought processes, to at least roughly understand the nature of your communication failings.
I'm guessing that most people structure their universe (file and process their thoughts) around emotions, followed by physical behaviour processes and patterns. My universal rubric is structured in concepts and patterns, hence I'm great at phyiscal engineering design and software architecture. Chronology is perhaps a huge divisionary issue; half the people attach a firmline timeline to most of their thoughts and experience , while the other have little faculty at all for time and sequence. It appears that you think in visual objective details and landscapes.
These sorts of cognition divisions are not only inter-personal, but also inter-cultural. America leans on noun emphasis, while Europe leans on verbs. The American Essay format (as you will probably find in your first semester of college) is rather drab. The thesis is presented, then arguments are made to support it. In the European format, which I find far more sophisticated if one wishes to be psychologically formatted, is to present your supporting material, and then draw your thesis as a conclusion.
btw, I'm not just making this stuff up as I go along. I rank in the 98th percentile amongst college students for English mastery. I suppose one would hope so, since I'm a genius, have been attending college for 28 years, and then listen to lectures on the radio all day and night. I risk sounding formidable in the suggestions I offer because you folks are entry level college age, and I'm nearly presenting advanced concepts that Masters in English would discuss. I'm hoping though to present it all at a Junior level to give you all a head start against the competion.
That's why I often mention that it might take ten years of writing for you to master such techniques in your writing, because they are often techniques that aren't even discussed until you've had six years of college English. That doesn't mean they don't figure into good writing (whethar the authors know what they are doing or not). I've been of help if I've even introduced the concepts such that you might muse over them yourself over the years.
I mention this in part so that you don't imagine you need to defend your position. Unless you are some sort of prodigy, it's not to be expected that your writing has crossed such bridges yet.
I heartily recommend that you check out lectures on tape or in books by Natalie Goldberg, not because she explains any of this material, but rather because she is complementary and explains much that I never pass on, even though I've been listening to lectures of hers on writing weekly now for a decade. I think she's kind of kindergardenish, but she has her place in advanced writing if one hasn't done their own huge quantity of contemplation on the basics of physical descriptive writing. She offers many writing exercises with a zen bent to them. her current lecture series, if you want to pick it off kpfk.org (Roy of Hollywood, I forget which nights, but it's listed) is on writing memoirs. She goes into things like the process and philosphy of writing memoirs young as is done now as an ongoing life review process, vs. writing them in retirement as had been done until the 60's.
ok, enough for now.