As promised, this post is going to
summarize some of the odd things that OSC criticized during the writing course,
and discuss why his personal views shocked me so. But before I go into that, I
do want to list a few more pieces of writing advice, in bullet form. These have
no particular order.
Crafting a story is about deciding
what matters and what doesn't.
Conflict drives a scene, but struggle
drives the story. These are different, because struggle doesn't require an
antagonist.
Don't bloat your writing with
unnecessary description. OSC likes to include the bare minimum necessary for
comprehension, and let the reader's imagination fill in the rest.
The author should always know what
the struggle is, and what the characters are trying to achieve (on every
level).
Do not TRY to include symbolism or
foreshadowing, and lecturing is something to especially avoid.
Don't be narcissistic. The story is
not about ME as an author, is about my protagonist, and my protagonist is not a
writer.
Intrusive narrators are annoying.
Fiction is NOT for preaching. The
choir doesn't like being preached at any more than the non-choir members. (I'm
still really trying to learn how to stay away from that).
Don't write an essay in the middle of
the novel *cough* Rand *cough*, only relate character's views as they matter to
the story. If world causality is believable and works, then the writer's views
should come across anyway.
Don't assume the reading audience is
a community of shared attitudes.
Fiction is nice, because we get to
live in a world where things make sense, where people do things and we find out
why they do them (usually).
For dialogue, concentrate on being
clear. You have to approximate the way people talk, because you can't actually
write dialogue the way people truly speak.
Clarity of writing comes from clarity
of thought.
Withholding information is bad. You
can't have the character knowing something that the reader doesn't know.
Characters do withhold information from other characters. (This tends to drive
stories, especially in TV shows. "Imagine how a TV series could keep going
if everyone just told the truth all the time."
Don't worry about recycling ideas. No
idea is truly "new", there's always been something like it.
With regard to stories - reasonable,
good people respond differently to the same situation.
The fewer supernatural/magical things
that there occur without a good explanation, the better. He gave the example of
Lord of the Rings, where there isn't actually that much overt magic, and magic
is almost never the solution to a problem. (me speaking: )My suspicion is that
Harry Potter works because Rowling does such a good job creating her 'magical
system'. You get a wand that has some very specific characteristics, you learn
the correct words, and you wave the wand in the proper patterns. Alright, I'll
buy that that's a reasonable way to do magic. In other words, there are
magical/fantastic/supernatural phenomenon, but they all have reasonable
explanations.
Show don't tell is really dumb. When
you're little, you don't get shown why not to run in the street, they tell you
not to run in the street. 99% of story telling is telling. Showing is what you
do when you want to extend a scene. This is a powerful choice. You decide which
things to show, and then tell the rest. If you could never just say "they
drove to the store", you would never get anywhere in the story, because
you'd be trying to describe the entire process of getting the car keys, walking
to the front door, opening the door, stepping outside, closing the door,
locking the door, walking to the car...etc
I think a lot of this advice is
really useful. There are exceptions to every rule, but for the most part, I think
many of the truly excellent stories I've read adhere to these ideas. What makes
George Martin so successful? The themes aren't unique, in fact, they're quite
the opposite. He's writing about a war in a fantasy land between kings and
other kings. As Fallout so aptly stated "War ... war never changes."
No, George Martin just does a truly stellar job of telling a complex and
interesting story with absolute clarity.
Then we get to what OSC said about
anything other than writing. I think bullet form works for this, and keep in
mind, not all of them are ridiculous.
"There is just a pile of crap in
every movie."
"College life is artificial.
It's not a real life, and you can't write productive stories about that
environment. I'm so tired of writing professors writing the story about the
aging writing professor falling in love with a co-ed." (um, aren't there a
lot of successful stories with the main character in some kind of school or
university? Rowling even made SITTING IN CLASS exciting...)
"Clearly you have to decide on
clarity."
"We don't care who governs
us." (For all the focus we, as a society, put on our political leaders,
I've been wondering if this might actually be true. Sure, we say we care, and
we certainly have opinions and feelings, but in our individual lives I'm not
certain that that much changes from president to president. Eh. Interesting
thought experiment, but I'm not sold on it by any means.)
"George Lucas is an idiot, as
he's proven over and over again."
"The hangover just made me embarrassed."
"His Dark Materials is an evil
and hateful work. Phillip Pullman must have been raped by an
Episcopalian." I was especially confounded by this one, because I freaking
LOVE His Dark Materials. Then again, my beliefs aren't at stake when I read it.
"I just had to flush and get
off." (regarding readings something he didn't like)
"If you want to be a writer,
taking an English-writing course is the worst thing you can do.
Writing teachers, when they say
"I don't know much about plot, so we're going to focus on style." are
telling you that they are going to teach things you don't need, and critique
the things instead that flow from your soul. What they are really saying is
"I'm not capable of teaching you something you can use."
With regard to those sites that make
fun of people at walmart: "Poor, ordinary people do not deserve your
ridicule" I kind of agree with this actually...
"There is not a single kernel of
truth in any of Elements of Style."
"Most human behavior is baboon
behavior with a good story."
And then there is the gigantic list
of items he can't stand: Wikipedia exists to mis-represent things. He really
can't abide: Lady Gaga, Kraemer, Anthropogenic Global Warming, culture of waste
and overpackaging, Peter Jackson and the LOTR movies, baseball statistics,
freud, star wars and star trek are the same thing and are both disgusting
(specifically he mentioned that the concept of irresistible grace is what's
disgusting: the idea that Darth Vadar can murder an entire planet and yet be
redeemed at the end.
What was most shocking to me about
all of this is how intolerant he sounded when talking about these things. We
all have opinions on these things and that's great, but his closed-mindedness
was so inconsistent. He did say that you can't get to know someone by reading
their writing, but still, if you write an entire series of books where one of
the themes is the folly of human bigotry and intolerance, I don't understand
how you can also hold these other views. Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, and Children
of the Mind are the books I'm thinking of specifically. It's all about how
humanity's tendency to reject what we don't know/don't understand, and do this
to extremes, leads us to disaster. This manifests itself in many ways in all
three of the books.
Anyway, in the end, I loved taking
the class. It was really interesting getting to know OSC after reading Ender so
many times, and the writing class portions by themselves were beyond helpful. I
loved hanging out with the other writers too, it was so much fun to be around
other people who appreciate my sense of humor, and who enjoy talking candidly
about absurdly nerdy topics. At the end of the course, I found myself wishing I
could keep meeting with all the other students.
With that, I think I'll conclude this
topic thread! Hope it's been interesting.
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