WARNING: EPIC RANT IS REALLY ****ING EPIC.
Thanks Mongoose and NGTM-1R; for your comments about creativity are right on spot. I would be tempted to say everybody has an equal chance of doing arts, but on the other hand I also know that a lot of people weren't born for it and would feel like lying if I did so. The question is should the hopeful be discouraged or encouraged? That one can admit to himself that he probably never can become a writer or any artist is also a feat in itself, wisdom even. Perhaps you will find the suitable art some day, for arts too are an integral part of life! Being a participant in any form of arts is not just research and knowledge, on the contrary, it is far more that cannot be put in words. Such things one will not find in libraries nor in Universities for there is no school that could teach it. Only those born in a suitable situation in a community at the right time can truly become great writers, otherwise the path they take will lead to mediocrity at best. There just is no way to write of something of which they have no experience. For how could one write about the snowy, windy coldness of Planet Hoth without having experienced cold himself? The frozen eye-lashes that cast a white shadow on everything one sees, the lying frozen toes and fingers that say it is not cold any more, or the wind with icy shards that make the skin tingle? How could they possibly write about creatures that float in the atmosphere of a gas giant planet without having soared themselves? Feel the the hot convections under you, or the gentle, invisible force supporting you while gliding through the skies!
An art critic need not be able to draw. A doctor doesn't need to catch a disease to diagnose it. A writer need not go out and freeze half to death to describe it. If they're smart, they'll do some research on the subject first.
But in a larger sense, I am engaged
every day in writing about things that I not only have not experienced, but cannot experience. I write about things that not only do not exist, but will not ever exist. But their impossibility is no barrier to their being described. You have to
think, horror of horrors. Did you honestly believe that being a writer would be any less demanding upon the imagination that being a reader? Far from it.
Make no mistake, I do not consider mediocrity in itself as a bad thing as it will always be part of life, even in myself - there is bound to be somebody who sees something that I do as sub-par, even some tiniest details. For me, it is the lack of the the truly great pieces of art that disturbs me while we are supposed to be living the best of the times and have all the resources and technology to make it happen, yet it still feels like echoing-ing-ing the great words of those who were earlier. Those who had a way of dressing their deepest feelings and thoughts so elegantly to words so effortlessly through any cultural or linguistical barriers and continue to do so throughout history, had a burning passion inside them to write.
I've got news for you.
Shakespeare? He sucks, his work is incredibly forced and dependent on narrative causality over naturally coming together by good plotting and good characterization. (And he was writing about witches and Titania and Oberon, things which not only did not exist, but never existed.) Hemmingway, oh god, don't get me started about Papa, we'll be here all week. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle! He went through the authorial decay I described above, which was part of the reason Holmes took a header over Reichenbach Falls. (For that matter, Holmes was a druggie, and a detective, and Conan Doyle never was. So much for writing what you know.)
You have been
conditioned, by your schooling, to accept these "great masters" as being truly great masters, to overlook their flaws. I went through the same thing, until I hit Hemmingway and violently rejected it. It was an eye-opening experience. A lot of the "great writers of the past" are actually quite awful and narrow in their appeal. We only read one story in all my English classes that everyone could agree on having universal appeal. It was...
Phantoms, by Dean Koontz. He is universally regarded by serious literary critics of this day and age as writer of airport suspense stories of no literary value. But his characterization and plotting are undoubtedly superior to Shakespeare, his appeal to a much broader base.
To write of their experiences and what they saw since they were born to see and listen to the world differently and were treated as such. Such was that passion that even the difficulty of methods to deliver their thoughts did not discourage them; the stories just happened, whether it was the fingers carrying a pencil or hitting the keystrokes of a typewriter. Perhaps they never were good making speeches or were treated otherwise unfairly, but the human desire of telling something to others does not go away that easily! And the person who does not talk is very good at listening. Understanding something of the human nature is the key to mastering art of writing, but no amount of studying can give that understanding. One cannot describe the self-satisfied smugness experienced after beating someone in a fair game or fight, even after having warned the opponent about the outcome, unless one hasn't actually experienced it. For this is the reason why the memorable stories must always contain a part of the writer himself.
Lies. Lies and slander. Every first novel is the author as Jesus or Faust, but to continue in that mode is a terrible sign. And be wary of writing about issues close to home, it tends to burn you. I could go on for hours about people who got their Minority Warrior on in their fiction and what should have been a subtext became text and it went south like it was powered by Project Orion.
Also, I hear you say that it is impossible to write, to
describe, a truly alien mindset. What you say is that you cannot write a human without being human; but that means you cannot write anything else without being it. No, no,
a thousand times no! I summon Battuta with a Made of Meat link to defy thee. I speak of the Ender series' Buggers to refute thee. I throw my copy of
Raptor Red in your face. I bury you beneath every story ever told about those who are not of this Earth. I demand you be sealed inside your dwelling with books about Dracula and Frankenstein's Monster, about ghosts and werewolves. I point thee to every book, every television show, every game that has ever attempted to portray the actions of psychopath or a sociopath. I direct thee unto the
non-fiction DSM-IV as the proof, the final proof, that you need not experience to describe!
Through centuries writings were controlled, since a lot of people felt something was wrong but lacked the evidence. Now that there was a written word of it, that feeling became knowledge, and with knowledge becomes resolution. The masses became angry due to writings of early protestants in Germany; thousands of peasants died in rebellions that were ultimately in vain, while seeking only justice, fairness in treatment and just the being able to feed their families. But say a wrong word in a wrong place, you lose your head! Writing is a powerful tool, and simple words resonate within the people, but this requires sophistication. One can adore the beauty of simple expressions, laugh at the contrived adjectives and images, or feel anger towards the ugly rape of literature.
First, a question. You are describing something as rape. Therefore, you are saying that you have been raped, yes? Because if it is impossible to describe something without experiencing it?
Okay, so that was a low blow. The point remains.
I direct you to my commentary on dear old Dean above. I also direct you to your own logic. Those who could get published were, in the past, very limited. However, writing is not a discriminatory skill; your age, gender, sexual preference, and birthplace do not factor; hence a lot of people who may have been good writers in the past might not even have learned to read or write. Those who could submit for publishing now are a much broader spectrum of society. We are uncovering a larger number of the truly good today, because we are reaching a larger group of people. A number of those regarded as "truly great" back in the '70s and '80s were writing about the Chinese experience, something which had never been brought into western literature before. Similar things are happening
now with Arabic and sub-Saharan African authors.
Or do you believe in some fashion that the underpinning experiences and analytical acumen for writing are factored for by being Western (or possibly Chinese and Arabic for certain periods, though I sort of doubt you've read that)?
Nevertheless, single words are the key here, but repeat one of them too much and all their meaning and power is lost! Constructing a book in a way that the writer can upset the reader in a well calculated manner in a single chapter is a start, but being able to do so continuously without thinking, just writing it, is a level that few ever achieve.
This utterly rejects the concept of escapist literature. Shakespeare no longer counts, I guess, nor Conan Doyle, nor even Homer.
Le Morte D'Arthur? Forget it.
We can't all be out there doing the Upton Sinclair thing. It'd be
incredibly boring for one thing. And Sinclair wasn't that great of a writer at holding your attention anyways. Mostly you kept reading because the book was already in front of you.
Only a few books can shatter the world of the reader so utterly that he becomes depressed, yet still being a great delight to read. Doing that does not need a plot construct that is based on shock value or detailed torture depictions, it is all about understanding of how human thinks and feels. Indeed one cannot help but wonder how do they do that. And just as easily they change the style and write a story that works exactly in an opposite way.
Crap, this is about Hemmingway isn't it? Or maybe Poe. Poe gets a lot of credit but if you truly want to freak the hell out I recommend James Patterson instead. He does it much better.
So you're saying that
censorship is good. Shock value has a place, because there are things
in reality that are shocking. There are things in fiction that are shocking too. Are you saying that the last mission of FS2 would be better without the supernova? Similarly,
torture happens. If you're now prohibiting the depiction of things that actually occur in reality, and the depiction of things that do not exist, then what is
left?And honestly, this is my third rewrite of this because it got me
angry. Since you are not writer I doubt you've even tried to understand how this affects one. (I have not yet reached the point where I doubt you can understand, since as I writer it is my creed that anything may be described accurately, given the correct words.) It's not just the shocking ignorance of what has and has not been written; the Chinese were writing what we'd class as "torture porn" back in the 1200s. It's that you're trying to
limit me, to tell me that certain things are impossible. And what the hell is the pleasure of writing, if not to live vicariously things we will never actually experience?
Such texts cause the reader to wonder if the writer had lived through the times, and cannot escape the nagging feeling that everything in their texts is true and has likely happened.
The cyberpunk genre was about doing this, in minute detail, for something that had never actually happened. A lot of relatively recent SF is.
But the goal of writing something intentionally bad should never cross the mind of self-respecting writer, no matter how badly he feels his ego or rights have been violated. For in that particular instance they were lucky that the publisher did not accept the story and sell it as a learning device with great profit margins with a stamp of "written by the professionals" and ask for a sequel.
The trollfic lives. In a way, to intentionally write something poorly actually takes more skill than to write something good. It requires both the skillset to write well, and study of what it means to write poorly. You can acquire, or simply be born with, the ability write well. You have to actually study at that point to write wrong.
Also. "No True Scotsman." Look it up.
