From: A_Tina_Hall@kruemel.org
wrote:
> On Friday, June 13, 2014 6:46:00 AM UTC-4, A. Tina Hall wrote:
>> William Vetter wrote:
>>> The first time I tried to write fiction was a bit into my second
>>> doctoral program, and I generated a complete novel manuscript that
>>> was (you can imagine) a sort of adult juvenilia.
>>
>> What's adult juvenilia?
>>
> Juvenilia is what children write when they start at 8 to 12. What I
> call adult juvenilia is what adults write when they start older, and
> later are too embarrassed to show anybody.
I can't imagine what a child would write. (Maybe I could for a story,
but I'd have to 'be there' and write it.)
>>> And then I found some of those books about writing fiction and it
>>> dawned on me that there were a catalog of things that needed to be
>>> controlled.
>>
>> ?
>>
>> Which things, controlled how?
>>
> Suspense level
> Character's inner struggle
> Science fictional idea
> Description of setting
> Realism and accuracy
> Prose rhythm
> Hook to force editor to read it
> Impart reader with enough info in understand early enough without
> slowing down opening Make sure reader isn't blitzed with info
Ah, ok.
For me, 'control' may not be the right word in all cases. It's more like
watching out to get it how you want it (like I would want NO
'Character's inner struggle', and 'suspense' is just unpleaseant tension
to me), and accuracy would have to be replaced with consistency when it
concerns something made up (magic and anything it touches).
I would not cling to books making statements on how these things need to
be done. The 'rules' I've seen mentioned are usually plain out wrong,
not just what I'd like in a story, but how writing feels that's done
that way.
Maybe these 'rules' work for people who know when to ignore which one. I
just go by what reads right. (Though not always do I know how to fix
something that reads wrong/boring.)
And some things I can't know (as in, what someone else would think).
> I could make this list much longer, include a lot a other things,
> like everything in Turkey City Lexicon or whatever, but they all need
> to be handled and integrated.
I don't know what Turkey City Lexicon is, and not every writer works in
that way (ticking off a lists of things to do).
Are you sure you're one who does work that way? (Me, I'd not be able to
write at all if I were to go by a list.)
>>> And I was involved in critters.org for a while then and I'd see the
>>> different levels there, and it became clear to me that somebody who
>>> was older than around 28 would need to spend something like four
>>> years doing it full time to have the control to reliably produce
>>> manuscripts that were publishable full time.
>>
>> How would four years full time writing change anything? (Except how
>> 'having to' write full time may affect a person.)
>>
> The bottom manuscripts in online workshops like critters with no
> entrance requirements are totally incoherent. The next level is
> these narratives of what happened the last time somebody played Doom,
> or me and my buddies buy a case of beer, take our AR-14s into the
> state forest and hunt Bigfoot. The next level they begin to be
> readable, but the author is having a conversation in his head that a
> reader can't follow. The next.... It is a cross-section of a
> magazine slushpile where semipro authors are at the top. I would say
> that it would take a full adult four years to work his way up if he
> writes pretty consistently. Many won't stay with it that long.
You list different people, then say you'd have to go through being them?
That's like saying everyone who writes on Usenet started with a
fullquote top post "Me too!" and worked their way through different
stages to finally do comprehensible posts.
I don't think so.
>>> And the teenagers that write these stories where all the characters
>>> interact like people in a freshman dorm are going to take a lot
>>> longer.
>>
>> Oh, so they are who write all the published books, and all TV
>> series.
>>
> I don't know what you're saying.
I'm saying that published books are full of charcters behaving like
idiots, and TV series are too. ;P
(It was half, what's the word, not ironic or sarcastic, but a small part
was joking - small because it is all too true for too many things.)
> I don't believe that doing what some staff screenwriter for Warehouse
> 13 or whichever does is gonna get anybody on Nebula ballot.
Yeah, stuff like that. Or what I call Kindergarden CIS.
>>> Does anybody know anyone who sat down at a keyboard and never went
>>> through that process,
>>
>> What process exactly?
>>
> What I described some of above, where they go from writing stuff
> that's unpublishable, and they don't know it is, to a level where
> they can reliably produce potentially publishable manuscripts.
I don't know if what I write would be publishable. I never wrote what
you listed above. 10 years ago I started with a vampire story (not the
Mary Sue/teeny schmaltz that you get everywhere, but what I would want
such a story to be) that was killed by so-called 'advice' here when I
asked how to write better (as in, arrangements of words) and was told
what to put in the story (things that had no place in what I wanted to
write, what with wanting to do something _different_).
Oh, and that one poster who's fortunately gone who jumped on everything
I said like a pitbull (and claimed me saying "as far as I am concerned"
does not mean it's my opinion).
After that I started some space thing that had far too many normal
characters to keep me interested.
So I wrote (most of) the Seasons and Elements trilogy, with a non-human
species on another world with no humans in sight, but after starting the
third book I got distracted into writing the Magic Earth series;
alternate Earth with magic (for everyone) and _naturally_ a totally
different history ever since the first people used magic (one of the
things I disagree with when people plonk magic/funny critters into the
real world and no explanation how it got exactly where we are despite
that), and with what I consider an evil overlord (who soon turned out
not to be the only evil overlord).
The end of book 6 of that was reached 8 years ago. I tried to start
other stories, but that didn't go anywhere, so I just reread and polish
that and the S&E (and hope to continue the latter at some point).
[continued in next message]
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* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
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