From: mdhangton@gmail.com
On Tuesday, June 17, 2014 11:31:12 AM UTC-4, Michelle Bottorff wrote:
> A. Tina Hall wrote:
>
>
>
> > >> 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. That was when I thought, "Holy shit! This is like
>
> > >> another degree program." And then I knew it was ridiculous that I
>
> > >> could have ever thought it would be anything else.
>
> >
>
> > Maybe he's stuck on the things those books say 'need' to be
>
> > 'controlled'.
>
>
>
> That does seem possible. I think if I tried to think about all that
>
> stuff I would get stuck. :)
>
>
>
> But then William and I clearly work very differently. I also don't
>
> really get the whole "Do you understand what I am trying to do here?"
>
> question. Why does the reader need to understand what you are trying to
>
> do? For that matter, when am I ever trying to do anything that could be
>
> misunderstood? Not only do I not know how to answer the question, I
>
> don't seem to even understand it. ::rueful::
>
I first began to write fiction when I was 35. By that time, I had prepared a
couple journal article documents on my own, and the longest technical document
was a thesis. The level of training in English composition that the
university system in the U.S.
imposed upon me as a physical science student was minimal. Let us say the
tenses of the subject and verb agreed, and the spelling was correct, but not
much else. Probably it would be different if I were a journalism major or
something.
So from my perspective, I started from nothing, and I don't see myself as
static. Learning new things is the only thing that I'm good at.
Between about 1996 and 2000 I was involved in an online workshop. From maybe
1995 to 1998 I read about 40 books involved in writing, most about fiction and
several about poetry. Since then I tried the same kind of workshop again for
a couple months and
then quit. It feels like it served its purpose for me. I read a book about
hook openings a few months ago, maybe the first I have in a decade.
I know that a lot of people see workshops as preparing a manuscript to go to
market. But, for the most part, I looked at it in the following way. I could
write maybe 6 or 8 shorts in a year, but I could look at maybe 10 manuscripts
with some of the
same problems I had in them in a week. And I've seen 500K word novel
manuscripts where characters travel from one city to another on a map an
author drew, and there's traveling but no plot movement and not much
significant happening. And you think, ah
shit, I don't want to tell this person who spent two years on this it needs to
be compressed into a novella. What I'm saying is that, from my perspective,
the real power is to let other people spend huge blocks of time making your
mistakes for you.
That's not a nice thing to say, but that's how it is with me.
I don't say that's all there is to it. I can know a scene where a character
brings a kitten home can be as routine as a character riding a horse from A to
B, and still fail to make it interesting or fully relevant, but I know where
the problem is. It
must be there so the kitten can join the lost and the zero-self-esteem POV
character have his transformation.
I looked at TCL a couple nights ago, maybe first time in 15 years. I don't
remember "Rembrandt Comic Book" being there before. Maybe you're right -- I
shouldn't have looked at it.
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
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