Entries tagged with writing

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Inspired by Anime Feminist

I resent attempts to turn “female gaze” into a term for some kind of good writing. I mean, it’s pretty much agreed that something written in “male gaze” is terrible. Writing that isn’t terrible shouldn’t be “female” as a contrast; it should just be acceptable.

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writing

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To follow up on what I said about games tending not to have nuanced themes: there's this game called Tooth and Tail where the theme is spelled out as "Revolution eats her children." Across the game, you keep seeing how Revolution eats her children. There isn't a point where it gets nuanced and goes "sometimes Revolution doesn't eat her children." And my experience is that themes in games tend to be like that. There are games where I largely agree with the themes, and there are games that let you choose your own ending that flips the bird to the themes, but I'm not sure what I would even point to as a game where the themes are flexible enough to allow nuance.

(I guess Persona 4 has nuance occasionally, but that feels like scraping the bottom of the barrel.)

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There’s this thing people do sometimes where they talk about the conventions of fanfiction as if they’re checkmarks of quality. This is used as a lead-in to argue that non-fanfic writers don’t know fanfic conventions, and fanfic writers don’t know non-fanfic conventions, so therefore both are equal and you can’t say non-fanfic writers are “better.”

I detest this argument, because by that logic, any writer who doesn’t check the conventional boxes for their genre is worse than one who does! Your checkmarking fanfic about half the cast hooking up isn’t automatically better than my fanfic about half the cast breaking up. (It’s probably better, but not because of the checkmarks.)

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An old genre of post I saw a few variants of: “I want these ideas out of my head, but I hate writing. I wish the stories would just write themselves.” I don’t see these posts now that people argue about AI art.

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writing

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It’s amazing that I’ve been able to write stories people like, considering how many flaws I have as a writer. I’m good at creating basic plot structures, I’m good at creating characters whose personalities support those plot structures, and I can alternate stressed and unstressed syllables to get people to say my writing is “flowing.” I struggle with creating subplots, giving descriptions, giving characters different voices, creating a sense of place beyond the white room . . . My writing is beyond “lean” and into “skeletal,” and yet somehow I get praise.

I feel like if I can write, lots of people can write. Find the thing you’re good at, and double, triple, quadruple down on it. If the only thing you’re good at is descriptions, drown your stories in description. If your one skill is dialogue, put everything you have into your dialogue. There’s an audience out there for it.

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An aside: not all Rationalists color the curtains blue, since they can write entire stories in beige. But of all the folks I’ve read, Rationalists are most likely to have blue curtains where you actually have to think about why they’re blue. Even in college, I was assigned stuff that didn’t bother with the curtains and straight-up lectured me about how “eating meat is destroying the planet” or “America has lost its way and needs to return to Christianity.” It baffled me to go from writing where people pay lip service to symbolism to writing where people actually care about symbolism.

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bigotry,
writing

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I’ve found the words for why I don’t respect a lot of “literary” fiction, but it involves judging a book I haven’t read yet.

I found a “literary” book on the library shelves that looks like it’s about an evil spider monster as a metaphor for racism against Japanese-Americans. The kind of story I would normally be interested in would be about racism against spider monsters, worldbuilding as if spider monsters were a real thing. When you don’t think about how the world you’re creating works, you may fail to examine the concepts you’ve imported from your view of this world. E.g. you might give your monster all the negative traits you assume real-world trans women have, because the monster is “bad” and to you trans women are “bad.” When you consider what the monster does and why, you also consider why the monster is really “bad” in the first place, and what you’re really arguing against, and your argument becomes accordingly more solid. Worldbuilding is by no means proof against bad assumptions, but it’s the only way in which fiction has more insight or intellectual value than nonfictional essays.

I checked out the book. I’ll see if I’m underestimating it.

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writing

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Writing woes: I’m trying to write characters whose perceptions become true. When I write them denying reality, my natural instinct is something rapid and detail-light that emphasizes the absurdity, similar to The Unicorn in the Garden. When I write other characters observing the changes, my natural instinct is to write something more detailed and evocative, like Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed. When I look at those two styles side by side, they don’t fit together in the slightest.

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There are these four-panel comics people trot out sometimes to prove that “stories don’t need conflict,” usually bringing in Orientalist bullshit to argue that “Eastern” people are too enlightened to need conflict. And then you read the comics, and they forego internal conflict by putting the conflict directly in the reader’s mind. The beginning led you to believe X, and then it turns out Y is true instead. Meta conflict is still conflict!

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There’s this scene I read years ago in a comic called A Moment of Peace that influenced a lot of scenes I’ve written. From memory, A is in love with B and B is in love with C. B asks A something like “Do you think I like sitting here waiting for a man who doesn’t love me?” A replies “Yes.” He follows up that if she doesn’t like it, she could be doing literally anything else.

It was the bluntness that got me, the absolute refusal to play around. I’ve tried to recreate it many times.

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writing

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Okay, but what if you DO examine the problematic tropes you’re using? Is the dove pining for the fjords?

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writing

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Some heroes in fiction aren’t strong, but accomplish great things because they have the will to resist oppression. People who aren’t strong can see themselves in those heroes.

Some heroes aren’t smart, but accomplish great things through will, and people who aren’t smart relate to them.

Who do you relate to if you lack will?

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writing

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Way back when, I posted on the TV Tropes forums that I didn’t actually know what a theme was. People on Something Awful who hated TV Tropes used it as an example of how dumb we all were—we didn’t even know what themes were! And the thing is, none of those people on SA actually said what a theme was!

My current guess is that it’s kind of like a misc AO3 tag, except literary people consider it the main tag. Like, if your story is about coming of age in Mississippi in the 1950s, one of your themes will be coming of age, and another will be 1950s Mississippi culture. But people talk about “deep themes,” and tags aren’t a thing that can be deep in and of themselves. The thing that’s deep is what you do with the subject matter referenced by the tags, and I wonder if “deep themes” is a misleading term in that sense.

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writing

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Originally posted in response to whether Dark Souls should have an easy mode:

I think missing the point on purpose is a creative experience of its own. My go-to example is Lovecraft. It would be impossible for black writers to write Lovecraft-inspired fiction if they weren’t intentionally missing the point of the anti-black stuff. But they do, and sometimes it’s good. So if you want to take The Lord of the Rings, and intentionally miss the point of Frodo and Sam by making them a gay couple, make it cute or hot and it’s still a worthwhile approach. Or if you take a Grand Theft Auto game, and you miss the point of the social satire and criticism of wealth-seeking by modding it so you can play as Hatsune Miku, it’s not like the satire was very good in the first place. So folks who mod an easy mode for Dark Souls have just as much my blessing as that person who turned an Anne Rice book into a coffee cup.

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writing

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There’s this assumption in a lot of writing advice that if you care about structure and the “rules” of writing, you also care about realism. Unrealistic writing is treated as something that just comes to you and doesn’t need thought. But I think it could be satisfying to carefully and precisely engineer the dumbest Rule of Cool bullshit possible.

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writing

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Something I’ve never seen addressed in fiction criticism: just because you have story element A doesn’t mean you directly planned it, rather than putting it because you needed to fill something in from story element B. Say your minor antagonist needs to be in college in order for your plot to work. Are they a literature major? A biology major? The plot doesn’t care, but you need to fill in something, so you randomly pick biology. Then someone with a bug up their butt says you’re intentionally demonizing biologists, and you had no idea demonizing biologists was even a thing until they started ranting about how bigoted you are. In between “the curtains represent sadness” and “the curtains are freaking blue,” there needs to be room for “the curtains are just a color contrast for the green carpet that represents nature” or whatnot.

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writing

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When writing, I pretend I don’t know how much it costs to live somewhere, because I like those old books about protagonists who comfortably live single on a working-class salary. Just pretend all my characters live in that time period, but with cell phones somehow.

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I respect what N.K. Jemisin is saying about why she wrote superhuman monsters as a metaphor for black people. But she's really undermining her old argument that there's no way to write orcs without being racist.