Story on the Brain

Not to force kids to read anything they don't want to read, right here . I'm not sure everyone resists the books that are forced on them, but no doubt it's extremely common. Since I just got done making up, oh, my syllabus, I've been kind of thinking about this anyway. The classes aren't literature, fortunately. But even with rhetoric and composition, it can be really hard to get students past "I hate this" about any given piece of reading, to get to the interesting analysis, or even to the point where they can extract the content. "I hate this" is where resentment of the process carries over to the subject itself. I don't know if any of us ever grow out of that. There are movies I've hated purely because I was on a hideously uncomfortable plane when I saw them. How is that any different? So at that point I lose a movie that I might have liked otherwise, no great loss. But when it's my own writing I have to work on, dear oh dear. Edit...

Read this and this . But I have to argue with Sarah's argument about character A and character B in The Demon's Lexicon. Because one of them is a deeply awesome person in complete control of his environment and the other is a wannabe (nothing wrong with being new to something, but it's intrinsically less awesome than having mastered it) who switches her affections from one person to another person and seems to toy with both of them and hurts at least one, yet somehow without any panache, which might excuse it. Sarah argues we don't like the second one because she's a girl, but actually it's for the reasons I just stated. So there you go. Except she's ABSOLUTELY RIGHT about everything else in the whole article, especially Harriet Potter. Writers punish and/or undercut awesome girls. It's a fact. There is also a scene where the other three all mock that character for her admittedly silly outfit and laugh at her and put her down, and she gets embarrassed, ...

Okay, so, yesterday I wrote a whole giant batch of book and I am VERY VERY pleased about that. I'm doing all my usual things wrong, of course. Understatement is the worst. Would you have predicted that was a writing flaw of mine? Well, it is. I'm a criminal understater in third person. I'm not entirely sure I know how to write at all in third person, though I think I've got it pretty well in first person. Blah! In third I go back and look at it later and think, "Oh, that's nice, except I left out everything important because I didn't want to bonk you over the head with it." Must learn to bonk you over the head with it! Okay! But I'm still extremely happy with what I wrote. You can't fix it until you do it in the first place. I mean, criminy. Essentially everything turned out awesome and great except you have not the slightest idea what the main character is thinking or feeling about anything, or what motivates her, or what she wants or plans or...

Isn't that a miraculously apropos subject to find? This article was pretty eye-opening. I don't know how anyone can generalize about teaching writing--this author doesn't, by the way--because it's all so very specific. What one person needs is completely different from what another person needs. And even if they need exactly the same thing, you might have to use completely different techniques to get there. I remember a student who wanted to write novels, who already had a contract to write for some kind of cookie-cutter series of fantasy novels. He was doing great, right? But he had not the slightest idea how to do anything more. Fortunately he knew that and came to me for answers, so we had a semester-long running battle over it because he was so utterly frustrated. It sounds absurd now, but he couldn't see what made one book better than another and wanted to know how to tell the difference. It was like teaching color to the color-blind. And then to try to d...

Reading Roald Dahl's book The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, which I read a million times when small and which of course had me staring into candle flames and trying to see what was on the other side of playing cards. I got pretty good at it, too! As far as I remember. The book ends with the first story he ever wrote, but right before that is his novella (or something) called Lucky Break, the story of how he became a writer. Basically he had not the slightest intention of doing so, was flying fighter planes and all but got injured and sent to some embassy, but one day C.S. Forester walked into his office to ask questions about the war, and they went to lunch and couldn't eat and write things down at the same time, so Roald Dahl offered to write up notes for Forester to use in his story. Easy, right? C.S. Forester gave him only these directions: "Please, let me have plenty of detail. That's what counts in our business, tiny little details, like you had a broken shoelac...

I like figuring this out. You have to know exactly how the science/magic works in your SF or you are going to make incredibly stupid mistakes all the time and also nothing will make sense or hang together. I like it when it costs. I mean in the sense that if your spaceship flies from point A to point B, somebody has to foot the bill. Fuel costs, maintenance costs, there are cranky people at the docks, there are taxes and inspectors and all sorts of annoyances. I like when magic costs. If kayaking knocks me flat for a day, then surely exerting any other kind of force should also. And it should change you, just like kayaking, which builds certain muscles (no, I'm not wearing linebacker shoulder pads, that's just me) and supposedly burns off other things (I see no evidence of this but what do I know?) and you get sunburned and there's sand in the car and now you have less Jungle Juice and sunscreen and your hat is icky. I am a big fan of the consequences. Maybe that's why ...