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Robert Deadford posted:Here goes nothing, then. The novel is called Unregistered. It's a crime thriller with lower-powered superheroes as the main characters. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BcFHvEpP7A
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Mar 19, 2023 01:28
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Sorry that's not very helpful. The 500 word one is better but still kind of overstuffed with irrelevant flimflam. I'd rewrite and focus around the three characters and their relationship, rather than plot minutiae.
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Mar 19, 2023 02:04
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Right now, it reads like a list of plot points that happen in your book. It’s missing a lot of excitement. The first few lines are so generic—you have ‘them’, ‘one of them’ repeated over and over.
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Mar 19, 2023 02:13
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Excellent, just the feedback I needed, thank you both. It is indeed just a series of plot points. Now I need to layer in character and motivations and see how that improves it.
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Mar 19, 2023 10:12
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Truth in disclosure: I read “superheroes” and rolled my eyes. This is a personal prejudice because I’ve never read superhero fiction that doesn’t sound like a Mary sue fanwank. I read your outline, and I was actually intrigued, so good on you for that. I think it’s an interesting idea. My thoughts: - if this is supposed to be a super powered mystery action thriller you need a few more plot complications and red herrings. Almost immediately Red Line suspects what’s going on. Later we find out, that was indeed what’s going on. IMO you should hide that between a couple of false starts and misdirections. Think of a card magician. They never let you see their hand and do everything they can to fool you with layers of misdirection. Good ones don’t just palm cards, they make you THINK a they are palming cards, while they do something else. REALLY good ones do a couple of layers of that. - you said low level supers, but gravity control is IMO is a megaton warhead of powers. Plus she has two other strong powers too. Up to you, but if I want to do low-level, I would seriously limit the powers, but have the characters use them in clever ways. - the Anti-Talent league is expected to be a result of the Talented, sure. But what *other* impacts would the appearance of Talented bring? Mutant/anti-mutant was done to death in XMen. Not saying don’t, but I would try to take the situation to places other works haven’t taken it. It seems you wanted to see if you are on the right path. I think it’s worth exploring. But really, the best thing is to JUST WRITE. Worry about the plot, story, and adding complications afterward. IMO it’s easier to add layers than it is to change them. GO WRITE, MOTHERLOVER!
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Mar 19, 2023 14:48
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Robert Deadford posted:Here goes nothing, then. The novel is called Unregistered. It's a crime thriller with lower-powered superheroes as the main characters. Basically what others said. There's not enough emphasis on Susan, especially at the start: there's much more about Red Line. For instance, could you change "Susan is ambushed by Red Line during the break-in and forced to become a double agent...Red Line investigates a series of murders" to "Red Line ambushes Susan during the break-in and forces her to spy on Max and investigate a series of murders"? There are some plot points this doesn't explain, like THF's motives and connection to Pyro. Also, is the Register a physical book? Why isn't it an Excel spreadsheet or something? (E: If it's called Unregistered, you should probably emphasize this, too.) There is a connection between Red Line and Susan, but no mention of what this means for the plot. The final paragraph is phrased more like a cliffhanger than a climax, to my mind. Doctor Zero posted:- the Anti-Talent league is expected to be a result of the Talented, sure. But what *other* impacts would the appearance of Talented bring? Mutant/anti-mutant was done to death in XMen. Not saying don’t, but I would try to take the situation to places other works haven’t taken it. After the THF goes on a superhero-killing rampage, it would be interesting to see if having a Talent counts as a race for the purposes of the Public Order Act. Safety Biscuits fucked around with this message at 15:36 on Mar 19, 2023 |
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Mar 19, 2023 15:33
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I'm dogshit at a synopsis, but the one thing that I have found sort of helps is reminding myself that like. It's not a technical document. More important than covering the events in your plot is making a synopsis that's interesting to read from beginning to end (without lying about what's happened in the book) and that doesn't make weird jumps. It's ultimately, cynically, part of a sales package, as horrifying as that is to say.
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Mar 19, 2023 15:37
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Thanks, Doctor Zero. You'll be pleased to hear that I have written and am finished with the manuscript in its current form. I plan to start a round of revision soon. I'd like to address a few of your comments, because I've thought about all of them. On the X-Men comparison: this is a good point, but in the setting, the Talented are not a new evolution of humanity, but part of humanity since the beginning of time. Tension between Talented and non-Talented is nothing new. The story takes place after the tenth anniversary of the atrocity mentioned. On power levels: I do mean low-powered. No laser eyes, no super-fast healing, no teleportation. A Talent might be as simple as enhanced hearing, or as strong as Susan's gravity power. But Susan is young and inexperienced and starts to explore the implications of her Talent in the story. In any event, I have done some work on the synopsis and here is the latest version: London, the year 2000. One in a million people worldwide are born with a power. In Britain, these people are known as THE TALENTED. After a Talented commits an atrocity, a pressure group, the True Humanity Foundation, persuades the government to pass laws forcing the Talented to register their identities and Talents. RED LINE, with the powers of flight and enhanced strength, is the grim, violent and duty-bound chief enforcer and lead investigator of the Authority, which has power over the Talented. SUSAN is a naïve, idealistic young law student who lost her lawyer mother during the atrocity. Although she is Unregistered, she uses her gravity Talent to fight injustices as a vigilante the way her mother fought for the innocent. MAX, a charismatic Talented gangster, blackmails Susan into stealing something for him. During the break-in, Red Line surprises Susan and forces her to become a double agent. Susan, hating Red Line’s thuggish methods, dreads this new role. Red Line investigates a series of murders of Talented. Red Line believes the killers have access to the Register of Talented. She sees connections between the cases, but no-one else does. While investigating, Red Line is framed for one of the murders and goes rogue. Alone and enraged, with the Red Line identity burned, she turns to Max, Susan, and his team for assistance. Max leads the team on a crime spree, stealing corpses and robbing banks. Susan is as dismayed by Max’s methods as Red Line’s. Red Line uncovers a vital clue – the murders are revenge for the atrocity, with the next killing expected in five days, and investigates as a civilian. She zealously works her way through London’s underworld, following the evidence, interrogating armed robbers and arms dealers. During an interrogation, Red Line is attacked and seriously wounded. Following a bloody battle, she uncovers the culprits – the True Humanity Foundation. Red Line, broken physically and emotionally, passes the mission on to Max and Susan. Max’s team capture and question their chief suspect, who reveals the location of the stolen Register before dying. Susan, conflicted by her participation, leads the team on a raid of THF headquarters, securing the Register before THF operatives counterattack. While the rest of the team escape, Susan is taken prisoner. Meanwhile, Red Line solves the final part of the puzzle and works out who the next target will be – her boss, the head of the Authority itself. Susan wakes up, paralysed and under guard. Isolated, angry and afraid, she escapes by fighting off her captors, who pursue her through the countryside. She prevails after a terrible fight in which she must use her Talent to kill. She is found by Red Line, who takes her to her boss’s home, to stop the attack expected the following morning. In the early hours of the next day, Red Line is proven right as the killers launch their attack. Red Line and Susan cooperate to foil the killers. Susan must confront the consequences of her actions and make a choice – give up using her Talent, work for Max or for the Authority. She decides to take the path her mother would have and work with the authorities rather than outside the law.
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Mar 19, 2023 15:46
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As someone who's written their own vaguely superhero-adjacent sci-fi thriller thing, I feel like I should be able to have some comments on this but... Well, I'm not sure to phrase them in manner that doesn't feel like being a jerk!
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Mar 21, 2023 01:50
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Not going to cover everything, but I'll pull out a couple moments here.Robert Deadford posted:MAX, a charismatic Talented gangster, blackmails Susan into stealing something for him. During the break-in, Red Line surprises Susan and forces her to become a double agent. Susan, hating Red Line’s thuggish methods, dreads this new role. Finally, I've read the synopsis, and I don't think you need to name Max at all. "Susan is blackmailed by a Talented gangster into stealing something, using the threat of posting her massive dick to Facebook" or whatever. He's only brought up three more times and his motivations seem to swing too wildly to be important. quote:Red Line investigates a series of murders of Talented. Red Line believes the killers have access to the Register of Talented. She sees connections between the cases, but no-one else does. While investigating, Red Line is framed for one of the murders and goes rogue. Alone and enraged, with the Red Line identity burned, she turns to Max, Susan, and his team for assistance. Max leads the team on a crime spree, stealing corpses and robbing banks. Susan is as dismayed by Max’s methods as Red Line’s. While investigating a series of murders of Talented, Red Line is framed as the culprit and goes rogue. Alone, with her superhero identity burned, she turns to Susan for assistance, revealing that she believes the killers have access to the Register of Talented. Then you'd need to put in how Susan is able to help, despite being a part of this gang, and why it is that the crime spree is somehow part of the investigation. Or, why Susan can't use this moment to get out from under Red Line's thumb, or basically how "Red Line goes rogue" connects to "Susan helps rob banks." Otherwise this feels like events are happening without cause and effect. Cause and effect is vital in a thing like this. quote:Red Line uncovers a vital clue – the murders are revenge for the atrocity, with the next killing expected in five days, and investigates as a civilian. She zealously works her way through London’s underworld, following the evidence, interrogating armed robbers and arms dealers. During an interrogation, Red Line is attacked and seriously wounded. Following a bloody battle, she uncovers the culprits – the True Humanity Foundation. Red Line, broken physically and emotionally, passes the mission on to Max and Susan. Also, it seems like she's attacked and seriously wounded, and then also there's a separate other bloody battle. Again, consider something like: "During an interrogation gone wrong, Red Line is seriously wounded, but uncovers the culprits behind the murders--the True Human Foundation. Broken and distraught, Red Line passes the mission on to Susan and her gang, who somehow are both criminals and I guess someone Red Line trusts." quote:Max’s team capture and question their chief suspect, who reveals the location of the stolen Register before dying. Susan, conflicted by her participation, leads the team on a raid of THF headquarters, securing the Register before THF operatives counterattack. While the rest of the team escape, Susan is taken prisoner. Meanwhile, Red Line solves the final part of the puzzle and works out who the next target will be – her boss, the head of the Authority itself. I'd also like to know what Red Line's doing. The last we saw her, she was broken and had handed off the work to someone else--does she solve the final piece of the puzzle from in a hospital bed, or is she out on the town investigating again, or what's going on here? quote:Susan wakes up, paralysed and under guard. Isolated, angry and afraid, she escapes by fighting off her captors, who pursue her through the countryside. She prevails after a terrible fight in which she must use her Talent to kill. She is found by Red Line, who takes her to her boss’s home, to stop the attack expected the following morning. Like I say, I'm dogshit at writing a synopsis, but there's some stuff in here that feels like you're missing important information to show whoever reads it that you know why the things in your book happen. It can't just say "there's some things in a book."
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Mar 21, 2023 14:19
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Is it ableist to have one character call another character ‘crazy’? I think he also calls her ‘nutty’ later. The character in question isn’t mentally ill or anything, just a religious fanatic type. And even if it is ableist, is it something I should avoid? Is the character’s voice my voice? It’s something one of my beta readers brought up.
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Mar 21, 2023 15:36
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newts posted:Is it ableist to have one character call another character ‘crazy’? I think he also calls her ‘nutty’ later. The character in question isn’t mentally ill or anything, just a religious fanatic type. And even if it is ableist, is it something I should avoid? Is the character’s voice my voice? Your character is not you. They can hold views you don't hold. Showing something in text doesn't mean you're endorsing it.
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Mar 21, 2023 15:37
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change my name posted:Your character is not you. They can hold views you don't hold. Showing something in text doesn't mean you're endorsing it. But what if it’s the main character thinking this, a guy who’s supposed to be generally sympathetic? And the book is written from his first-person pov? I mean, I don’t go around calling people crazy, but I sometimes think it  Should I avoid the term ‘crazy’ all together, even if it might be realistic that actual people still use the word because it might offend someone reading the book.I guess my question is: is it still acceptable to think ‘that person’s crazy’ and to write it in my book? I might just try to avoid the whole issue by just thinking of another way to describe this person, but, honestly, everything else I’ve come up with seems artificial.
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Mar 21, 2023 15:53
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newts posted:
Even if the book is written in the first person and your character is supposed to be sympathetic, no one is perfect. A character without flaws is flat and boring! Personally, I'd take your beta reader's feedback to heart and be sensitive about it, but also acknowledge that it's your character's point of view, not your own
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Mar 21, 2023 16:03
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newts posted:But what if it’s the main character thinking this, a guy who’s supposed to be generally sympathetic? And the book is written from his first-person pov? I mean, I don’t go around calling people crazy, but I sometimes think it I could write a 10 page essay on this question. I'll make it simple. Who is your audience, do they considered that word bad form? Do you the author oppose use of that word, and if yes, what is more important: The Story, The Word, or the Author? Edit: I Think all authors hit this issue, where they are worried about writing something that might offend. While I usually just barrel ahead and "just write", there are no wrong answers. DropTheAnvil fucked around with this message at 16:07 on Mar 21, 2023 |
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Mar 21, 2023 16:05
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I agree with the "your character is not you" argument, but I still think it's generally good to avoid ableist terms unless the story is about ableism. There's always a more specific, accurate term than the catchall "crazy." Perhaps the fanatic is "absurd," "ridiculous," "preposterous," a "zealot," or even "fanatic."
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Mar 21, 2023 16:10
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newts posted:I guess my question is: is it still acceptable to think ‘that person’s crazy’ and to write it in my book? If you're looking for someone to just tell you an answer: change the word to "bugfuck" or "unhinged," don't use crazy, it's clearly causing you grief and there's too much bullshit in life to bother wasting time trying to stress if you're allowed to use casual slurs.
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Mar 21, 2023 16:32
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While the pursuit of completely non-problematic writing is noble, it's the kind of perfectionist pursuit that stalls actual creativity with self-consciousness. If you want to use the term, go ahead, people will probably notice it far less than you do. Books aren't Twitter, no one's scouring your book to make a callout post. If you don't want to use the term, pick a more specific word that's closer to the non-mental-illness meaning of 'crazy' you're going for. You could call them unhinged, or obsessed, or detached from reality, or weird, or erratic. Ultimately what you do with your writing is up to you. You're the number-one person who needs to be happy with your book.
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Mar 21, 2023 22:42
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I'm coming down on "yes, make the change" because I think OP sincerely does not want their work to contribute to ableism in society, and is trying to cater to an audience that cares about the issue. If they were making this change begrudgingly just because they didn't want to get canceled online, I'd probably come down on the other side.
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Mar 21, 2023 22:49
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Thank you, all, for your thoughtful responses. I think I’ll change it. I’ll figure out some other way for my character to describe her and what she’s about. I’m a college lecturer, so I think about ableism and the way I phrase things when speaking to students all the time. As someone who suffers from a mental disorder (ADHD), I certainly don’t want to upset other people who also suffer. I, personally, don’t find ‘crazy’ offensive, but I want to give my readers the best experience I can.
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Mar 21, 2023 23:39
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There is a playlist someone has cobbled together on Youtube of 13 lectures of Brandon Sanderson on world building. Has anyone seen any of these are they any good? I feel like I could do with some help on world building so if anyone has any advice I'd be much obliged.
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Apr 3, 2023 15:44
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His lectures are fine; hardly the worst thing you can watch on writing.
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Apr 3, 2023 15:58
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bessantj posted:There is a playlist someone has cobbled together on Youtube of 13 lectures of Brandon Sanderson on world building. Has anyone seen any of these are they any good? I feel like I could do with some help on world building so if anyone has any advice I'd be much obliged. I think his ideas about worldbuilding are a hole in art, and deeply complicit in the great totalizing project of high modernity, the effort to extinguish what cannot be made clearly legible to the state. That said they're probably fine
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Apr 3, 2023 17:25
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newts posted:Thank you, all, for your thoughtful responses. You gotta do you, but IMO your characters voice is your character, not you. Assuming you aren’t using pejoratives in your writer’s voice, I don’t see the problem with it. I’ve got a first draft of a story where the MC is blithely racist, but it’s not because he’s evil, it’s because he grew up when casual racism was the norm and he quite simply doesn’t know better. No other characters are, and he gets called out on it, so I would hope a reader understands that I’m not condoning it, and in fact I am critical of it. I can’t take that out without the character and subsequently the story fundamentally changing (his ignorance is a major theme of the story). You can’t just change everything to make your writing inoffensive to everyone. Not saying you shouldn’t be cognizant of it, but people are always going to have a problem with something, so just make sure that your decisions are 1. conscious decisions, and 2. Serve the characters and the story. And sometimes, you have to do horrible things to your characters or your writing will be bland and boring. I’ve recently struggling with how much ‘abuse’ I am going to portray happening to a different character who suffers from its effects. I’ve discussed it with other writers and I’ve decided that I can’t just talk around it in the story’s case because it will cut the conflict and character motivation off at the knees. I’m just going to have to do it without sounding like a sadist, which at least I am aware of, so hopefully I can pull it off. Good luck.
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Apr 3, 2023 17:55
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bessantj posted:There is a playlist someone has cobbled together on Youtube of 13 lectures of Brandon Sanderson on world building. Has anyone seen any of these are they any good? I feel like I could do with some help on world building so if anyone has any advice I'd be much obliged. They're great if you wanna get bored listening to a mormon smack his lips and say "mmkay?" over and over. Utterly top tier content in that regard. Otherwise they're, y'know. If you need help with worldbuilding, they're fiiiine, but my god use them as a jumping off point to your own thoughts rather than a set of rules and guides that way too many people do. Like I do genuinely think there's good questions he asks in there, but overall the dude approaches worlds, people, and cultures as sets of rules and his advice comes through the lens of someone who seems to have never deeply thought about his own (or anyone else's) place in, impact on, and influence from society beyond broad muted strokes. Wungus fucked around with this message at 18:52 on Apr 3, 2023 |
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Apr 3, 2023 18:46
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General Battuta posted:I think his ideas about worldbuilding are a hole in art, and deeply complicit in the great totalizing project of high modernity, the effort to extinguish what cannot be made clearly legible to the state. I have no idea what you just said but it sounds incredibly important and I want you to elaborate!
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Apr 3, 2023 18:53
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Megazver posted:His lectures are fine; hardly the worst thing you can watch on writing. General Battuta posted:I think his ideas about worldbuilding are a hole in art, and deeply complicit in the great totalizing project of high modernity, the effort to extinguish what cannot be made clearly legible to the state. Wungus posted:They're great if you wanna get bored listening to a mormon smack his lips and say "mmkay?" over and over. Utterly top tier content in that regard. Thank you all for your input it is much appreciated.
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Apr 3, 2023 21:18
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General Battuta posted:I think his ideas about worldbuilding are a hole in art, and deeply complicit in the great totalizing project of high modernity, the effort to extinguish what cannot be made clearly legible to the state. Seconding an elaboration because if you've got something to say I've always got the time to read it
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Apr 3, 2023 22:52
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Doctor Zero posted:You gotta do you, but IMO your characters voice is your character, not you. Assuming you aren’t using pejoratives in your writer’s voice, I don’t see the problem with it. I’ve got a first draft of a story where the MC is blithely racist, but it’s not because he’s evil, it’s because he grew up when casual racism was the norm and he quite simply doesn’t know better. No other characters are, and he gets called out on it, so I would hope a reader understands that I’m not condoning it, and in fact I am critical of it. I can’t take that out without the character and subsequently the story fundamentally changing (his ignorance is a major theme of the story). Thanks for your thoughts. I’m still pretty conflicted on this. For all the reasons I already mentioned, but also, it just seems really artificial to pretend the word ‘crazy’ is not a word that most people use in a colloquial sense. I feel, even to describe people or their actions. I use it. I think it. I can’t pretend I don’t. I can’t really think of another way to describe something or someone’s actions as ‘not corresponding to what I predicted a rational person might do.’ Erratic? Misguided? Those aren’t words that come naturally into peoples’ heads. My beta reader pointed out that it was ‘problematic’ that the only people my POV character describes as ‘crazy’ are the bad guys—which, technically, isn’t true, but whatever—who they (the beta reader) assumes are, in fact, mentally ill. They’re not. And there’s nothing really in the narrative that points to them being mentally ill. Just evil. They’re part of a cult, sure, and they’re religious, but they’re not depicted as mentally ill. The character doesn’t even actually really think they’re mentally ill. They’re just weirdos. I’ve thought about what words I would use to replace this one word or any other ones with negative connotations about mental illness, but I can’t come up with a word that feels right. It feels really forced so far.
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Apr 4, 2023 03:57
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Runa posted:Seconding an elaboration because if you've got something to say I've always got the time to read it This conversation always turns into a giant fuckfest but I'll keep it brief. First, some caveats: I don't resent people for enjoying Sanderson, I don't resent his success, he literally pays for my advances, I'm not here to berate people into not enjoying him. I also haven't read more than a paragraph of actual Sanderson, I just couldn't ever get into him. All I'm reacting to here is what he says about writing and what other people say about him. I think a big chunk of Sanderson's ethos as a storyteller is 'you gotta know how it works'. This is the same as a fair play mystery - you can't write a good mystery if you don't know who did it, and how, and where, and when, and why. Readers love this, they love it when you sprinkle a bunch of clues around, and then those clues come together in a way they could've seen coming but didn't, and they're surprised and delighted. So Sanderson's like, figure your poo poo out. Know what's going on. Magic systems, built worlds, rules that can be expanded or combined in clever ways to resolve conflicts or whatever. This rhymes with a general kind of, uh, systemization of narrative, especially in nerd spaces. You've got games really pushing the idea of rules and points and systems into fantasy and science fiction. You've got versus battles, people coming up with this whole lexicon of 'feats' and 'scaling' to determine which character would win in a fight, as if characters can be separated from the story they're in. You've got TVTropes declaring itself a catalogue of "the means by which a story is told by anyone who has a story to tell." This is sort of coprophagic, because it confuses the taxonomy of consuming media with the process of creating stories. It's a declaration that everything in a story can be made knowable and assigned to a legible category. And ultimately, you've got the almost completely procedural media that sells the most—the MCU, erotica, porn, microgenres where the point is to execute a series of conventions. The vanishing point at the end of this tunnel is completely automated creation of art. So you can see the similarity here - mapping out, knowing, making things comprehensible and spreadsheet friendly, turning art into data. Now there are two books I gotta cite here, sorry. One is SEEING LIKE A STATE, which argues, roughly, that a big project of governments—especially colonial empires—is rendering people legible. You do censuses, you pass laws, you settle the unsettled, you legislate how land and urban space can be used, you make them take oaths. States need to collect data, which they use to create a model of the world, and then they make adjustments in the model to improve things, and send those adjustments out into reality to hopefully improve things there too. The problem is that the process of turning people and peoples' behavior into data is (often on purpose) lossy. You can go ahead dictate that all the indigenous people in your new colony must now farm their crops in an optimized, uniform manner to improve yield and streamline supply chains. But it turns out that the way they planted yams was actually highly tuned to the climate and soil of their home, and when they start growing the crops that looked so good on paper, the crops fail and they starve. Or you plan a beautiful new city based on architectural principles, but you forget to account for the unplannable street-level interactions in mixed use commercial/residential space that actually make a city come to life, and in fact you purposefully exclude them from your plan. And it turns out your city sucks. So it's maybe not always good to figure everything out about a system. Maybe there needs to be room for the unknown—not the unknowable, it's nothing Lovecraftian, but it's the turbulence, the detail which is not legible from outside and which doesn't really fit into a logical schema. Why are the US states named what they are? Where's the consistent naming scheme? What's Idaho, anyway? Does anyone know? I crave this stuff, this illogic, this break in the pattern. The human mind is only interested in a pattern until it's sure a pattern exists. Then it stops paying attention until the pattern breaks. I want those loose strings that you can pull on to find a new story. The second book I will cite is THE SECRET OF OUR SUCCESS, which argues that the secret sauce of the human species is not our individual brainpower (fine, but nothing special). Instead, it's our ability to accumulate huge amounts of information and survival technique, then pass it down generation to generation without any individual person needing to understand why they're doing what they do. The technique for hunting seals in Arctic icepack, for example, is so complex that if all the people who know the technique were to die, it would probably take hundreds of years to rebuild the technique from first principles. But people learn the technique, they apply it, they make a few changes or tweaks, they pass their knowledge down, and over time the knowledge itself evolves and rewards those who apply it best with success and survival and reproduction. (Some of the best chapters of the book endeavour to prove this by showing poorly European explorers with 'modern' technology and knowledge fared in the same environments where indigenous people thrived.) So in this argument, people aren't really rational procedure-creators, they're terminals for this massive pool of cultural knowledge which comes and dwells in them. And, crucially, the process of receiving culture is lossless because people do what they learn to do without needing to understand why. If you threw away the parts of these survival techniques you didn't understand, as many of the aforementioned European explorers did, you'd accidentally throw away the most subtle and ingenious parts. Because those are the parts that work even though they don't make sense and aren't obvious. They're the parts that deal with things you don't know you don't know. So you can see how an ethos of storytelling that focuses on totalizing knowledge of the world and its rules repels me. It is, in some ways, the same process that encourages use to efface indigenous knowledge and replace it with our bright new ideas. It's the same process that gave us the Four Pests Campaign and the Dust Bowl. It's the same process that feeds massive amounts of data into a machine so that the machine can learn how to spot a promising doctor, only for the machine to determine that playing lacrosse in college is the #1 marker of a future MD. The more we know, the more total our power, and the better we can use that power to fix and determine everything. Nothing important hides in the margin of error, or out on the edges of the map. Don't worry. We've got it under control. There's no slow seep of unintended consequences building up beneath it all. In one of the Earthsea short stories, there's a part where an evil wizard comes to conquer Roke, the island of magic. And when he steps foot on Roke he instantly loses all his power, because Roke cannot abide untruth, because fundamental to Earthsea is the idea that there's power in truth. And the evil wizard's goals are so untrue, so morally wrong and out of tune with the truth, that they just can't survive. It's not just that he steps on Dirt of Magic Annullment. It's that he's made to realize who he is and how false his power is, because it's power to dominate and mutilate and control, and those things aren't true. The values of the story and the power of this magic are the same. This kind of intimate connection between the diegetic, tactical logic of a story (is the hero's Spell of Weakpoint Finding potent enough to defeat the villain's Aegis of No Weakpoints?) and the narrative, ethical logic (has the hero gained a kind of self-understanding, or made a necessary sacrifice, or done whatever that gives them the narrative right to defeat the villain) is vital to fantasy, imo. If you leave no freedom in your storytelling for anything except the mechanics to determine what happens, then you leave no room for meaning. If a device or a piece of magic in your story must work the same way no matter who uses it, no matter what their intent, then...isn't it just alternative physics? I once got in a squabble with a Sanderson fan who said his (Sanderson's) work was superior to Tolkien's because it was possible to understand how the Lord Ruler, a Sanderson guy, could fight a United States Army armored division. But it wasn't possible to know how Gandalf would conduct that fight, because his powers are so unclear. And I tried to explain: Gandalf would not fight the United States Army armored division. Tolkien hated industrial warfare, and he would not write Gandalf's power as something that would be matched directly against the war machine. He would simply not put Gandalf in that position. Or he would have Gandalf make himself understood to the soldiers. Or he would have Gandalf not be there, because the creatures of the forest or whatever warned him of the enemy's approach. But that's cheating, the Sanderson fan said (actually he called it complete bullshit). Gandalf can't just decide what happens. And I tried to explain that yes, he can, because Gandalf's power as a Maiar is tied not just to a set of rules within the story, but to a concept of divine providence which is so fundamental to Tolkien's writing it determines what kind of story Gandalf can be in. But the Lord Ruler has superpowers you can put in a wiki, I guess. I don't know if that made any sense and I certainly didn't keep it short.
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Apr 4, 2023 05:37
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That was excellent, ty
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Apr 4, 2023 05:51
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General Battuta posted:I don't know if that made any sense and I certainly didn't keep it short. I think you make quite a bit of sense. Especially since anyone can see the effect that having a place online where everyone can connect their surface-level observations of media, namely TVTropes, has had on discussion on media, nerd-oriented or otherwise. There's definitely something to be said to let magic be magic. Sanderson's cosmere work very much treats magic as science and it's fun in its own way, especially for nerds with a mind for applied technologies, but it doesn't leave a lot of room for wonder or mystique. Comparing his stuff to fair play mysteries makes a lot of sense, too. I suppose it's not surprising I enjoy both. But I also enjoy your work even more, and it's nice to get some of your perspective on worldbuilding. Thanks for your thoughts! I appreciate you taking the time to lay them out.
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Apr 4, 2023 06:03
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General Battuta posted:So in this argument, people aren't really rational procedure-creators, they're terminals for this massive pool of cultural knowledge which comes and dwells in them. And, crucially, the process of receiving culture is lossless because people do what they learn to do without needing to understand why. (also yeah re everything else. While I've got no beef with Sando as a dude, he seems to have created this SF/F orthodoxy where there's no room for mystery or wonder, no space to play, where edges/quirks/obsessions are defects rather than signatures) It's not the SAME point but it feels related: Winning the Game You Didn’t Even Want to Play: On Sally Rooney and the Literature of the Pose quote:There is not a word out of place. Each sentence passes quality assurance: The above sentences are certified, not wrong. The writing of the pose is, first and foremost, about being correct, both in terms of style and content. Its foremost goal is not to make any mistakes. Its foremost gesture is erasure and its foremost subject is social anxiety and self-presentation. One never loses oneself in the writing. Rather, one admires, at a slight remove, the precision of the undertaking. quote:The enormous control of these works leaves the impression of fundamental futility: They are language trying not be language, with the combed-through feeling of cover letters to job applications in which a spelling mistake might mean unemployment. The style grows less personal even as the auto-fictional content grows more confessional. The more prominent the writer, the less individual the style. quote:I remember, at my son’s childhood birthday parties, we used to organize a game called “shark attack.” It was a version of musical chairs, in which the children dance around a blanket, and the music stops, and they all have to jump onto the blanket. Every round the parents make the blanket smaller, so that little by little fewer and fewer children can jump onto the available space until they all fall down and there’s room for just one standing. This is an allegory for the world as it is coming. There is less and less room. There is less nature, there is less humanism, there is less capacity for argument, there are fewer places to publish, there is less attention to go around. There is less space, generally, from which to affirm life. Sally Rooney is the one standing on the blanket now. “Aren’t we unfortunate babies to be born when the world ended?” she writes. “We are standing in the last lighted room before the darkness, bearing witness to something.” SurreptitiousMuffin fucked around with this message at 07:14 on Apr 4, 2023 |
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Apr 4, 2023 06:45
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SurreptitiousMuffin posted:Oh hey, I went viral and got dogpiled on Twitter for suggesting something very similar to this c.f. how modern people interact with AI and I'm feeling kinda vindicated right now. oh poo poo I remember this
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Apr 4, 2023 06:53
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I very much appreciated this post; it made me think about storytelling in ways I hadn't considered before.
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Apr 4, 2023 16:23
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Great essay, General. I don't think it's limited to genre fiction (see the Sally Rooney essay), or even books altogether since film and video games at least have similar problems. There is a single correct, approved way of doing things... which then leads to soullessness. It seems self-evident but persists anyway. It's 2023 and if I told you, in regards to style, "I read something fresh," I would probably mean I found something I hadn't read from the 20th century. Or if it was contemporary, it was in translation from a smaller country that has less media machinery to enforce. Recent examples: I am finishing up The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard (1980) and before that read Solenoid by the contemporary Romanian writer Mircea Cartarescu. They are both amazing. I couldn't imagine either of them being published first in the US today. Of course it's more complicated than that one theme/reason, but it's a big one.
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Apr 4, 2023 16:30
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General Battuta posted:I once got in a squabble with a Sanderson fan who said his (Sanderson's) work was superior to Tolkien's because it was possible to understand how the Lord Ruler, a Sanderson guy, could fight a United States Army armored division. But it wasn't possible to know how Gandalf would conduct that fight, because his powers are so unclear. And I tried to explain: Gandalf would not fight the United States Army armored division. Tolkien hated industrial warfare, and he would not write Gandalf's power as something that would be matched directly against the war machine. He would simply not put Gandalf in that position. Or he would have Gandalf make himself understood to the soldiers. Or he would have Gandalf not be there, because the creatures of the forest or whatever warned him of the enemy's approach. But that's cheating, the Sanderson fan said (actually he called it complete bullshit). Gandalf can't just decide what happens. And I tried to explain that yes, he can, because Gandalf's power as a Maiar is tied not just to a set of rules within the story, but to a concept of divine providence which is so fundamental to Tolkien's writing it determines what kind of story Gandalf can be in. But the Lord Ruler has superpowers you can put in a wiki, I guess. As to the quoted part: that's not a bug, but a feature. There are people who want to know not whether Captain America can beat Batman in a fight (a plausible discussion for comics aficionados)*, but whether Superman could beat Goku.** Or, as in an interminable YouTube video my wife's brother-in-law showed me, could Godzilla beat Ancalagon? Or could a Star Destroyer beat the Enterprise-D? Could one Raven Guard space marine have made it from Paris to the bunker and killed Hitler? You get the idea. The desire of nerd fandom to stack favorites up against each other and see who wins goes back to childhood and bashing figures against each other, in an age of innocence before we (at least those my age) even knew what polyhedral dice or hex-and-counter games were. It all goes back to mashing plastic dinosaurs against cowboy dolls and seeing who's tougher. * It's a shame that back when I played HeroClix I never sat down and posed a 1:1 match to see what the results would be. ** I'm not a DBZ fan so I can't speak authoritatively, but I've heard this asked and answered in manner somewhat reminiscent of your answer with Gandalf: Goku and Superman would realize that they're both good guys, they should be friends, and they need to team up to defeat the plans of the bad guy behind the whole problem, at which point someone says, "But imagine they don't. Who'd win?", missing the point that metatextually Superman's better stories are all about finding a solution to a problem without trading punches with the obvious bad guy until one of them falls over.
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Apr 4, 2023 18:04
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Have not read Sanderson and I do broadly agree with all the points made about him but I do think there is room, broadly, for what he does. Lord knows I'm a big fan of Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, a series full of people with abilities with clearly defined limits and capabilities where the victor in fights is the person who manages to work around their weaknesses or come up with a unique vector for their powers to win.
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Apr 4, 2023 18:42
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I think the way Branderson Sanderson writes books is fine, but he does write a specific kind of book. The comparison to shounen manga is a good one, I think, because it demonstrates both the range and the limits of the worldbuilding-heavy pulp fiction space he writes in. You can use his model to write Bleach or Full Metal Alchemist, but you couldn't use it to write Aggretsuko or Paprika. It's reminiscent of stuff like Save the Cat or the Hero's Journey, where they're frameworks for building a specific kind of story and not particularly useful beyond the specific genre they're working in. (Hollywood movies and coming-of-age travel stories, respectively.) More broadly, worldbuilding is fun, but it's a paranarrative pursuit. You can write a story without once stopping to build out the world beyond what's presented on the page. On the other hand, part of the social contract between author and reader is that you're presenting a coherent narrative which, while fictional, exists and is real within its own context. Worldbuilding helps with that, especially if the setting is fictional and thus needs the reader to suspend their disbelief for longer. It's a reassurance that there's a point to all that the author is telling you—but it isn't the point itself. It's probably fine to watch Brandon Sandon's videos if you want. It's probably better for your writing than an episode of Monster Factory. I'm still going to recommend Steering the Craft by Ursula K Le Guin as the best book on writing I've read because it focuses so much on putting Good Words on the page.
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Apr 4, 2023 20:20
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newts posted:Thanks for your thoughts. I will (once again) quote Gaiman: Neil Himself posted:Remember: when people tell you something's wrong or doesn't work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong. My take on your posts is that you reject the feedback in your heart, and you chafe at addressing it. I would say leave it the way you had it. If many people start giving you the same feedback, then it's time to be concerned.
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Apr 4, 2023 20:55
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