(no subject)

[jlh]

Why isn't anyone on googlechat? v. odd.

I am actually NOT going out tonight which means you will get AI goodness at a reasonable hour, particularly as the show is an hour long again. S will be annoyed by this; she doesn't like being left hanging at 9pm and I don't blame her, but an hour long it is I think until the finale which will be bloated to high heaven. Also re tonight: songs of the twenty-first century?

I was going to make a post about how much I was not down with all those "what I've learned from writing" lists until I read Holly's and Katie's. But in general I've noticed things like this to be much similar to when people try to make rules of etiquette posts. Those who are courteous, respectful and considerate will behave accordingly and therefore often respond to such posts with alarm, so if you post one you spend a lot of time going, "Darling, not you, you never do that." Those who are discourteous, disrespectful and inconsiderate will also behave accordingly and therefore often discount such posts as being not about them. Too many of the lists I saw basically boiled down to, "Don't write. Be an accountant." I certainly was discouraged by them and I'm about to make my living writing and teaching, so that's not particularly helpful.

However, I will say the one thing that I've learned in the last few months: writing is writing. I know we want to separate fiction and nonfiction, essays and criticism and storytelling into these neat little segments, perhaps so we can say that the only true writers are novelists in their garrets or something (for separate never is, nor can it be, equal; see Brown vs. The Board of Education of Topeka, KS). But I've found that skills I picked up in writing fanfic are translating to writing all this original research. I'm still trying to tell a story; I'm just finding the story in a different place. I'm still trying to craft a good sentence. I'm still mostly sitting down to write, getting up to pace, and then sitting down to write again. I'm not saying this would be true for everyone but for me, thinking of fiction writing as such a completely different creature--and one that if I'd had any talent for it I should have been doing from the age of seven--kept me from doing it for years.

Comments

[ali-wildgoose.livejournal.com]

As I said the other day, I'm really with you on the "writing lists that explicitly discourage writers" front. Bad writers are bad partly because they don't LISTEN -- if they paid the slightest bit of attention to what people said, they would eventually become better writers. So endless lists explaining to me that only fiesty geninuses who can crank out 3000 words every evening should even BOTHER writing.....yeah, you know, not terribly useful.

[mahoni.livejournal.com]

I'm still trying to tell a story; I'm just finding the story in a different place. I'm still trying to craft a good sentence. I'm still mostly sitting down to write, getting up to pace, and then sitting down to write again.

I have nothing to add except: yep.

[jlh.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

Awesome icon.

[annearchy.livejournal.com]

Are you on Googlechat? I haven't tried it yet. Should I?? I've already get AIM and YM. So what's better about Googlechat??

[jlh.livejournal.com]

Well, what I meant was that no one was around at that moment, which was some kind of glitch I think.

I don't know that anything is better about it. There are just people on it and so I end up using it, but there are still plenty of things about YM and AIM that I like better. Though to be honest I do everything through one of those multiplatform programs (I'm on a Mac so I use Adium) so it's all the same to me really.

[annearchy.livejournal.com]

Aha. I use Trillian, which plugs me into YM and AIM simultooneously. YAAY.

[dejaspirit.livejournal.com]

Yes. Exactly.

[sisterpandora.livejournal.com]

Books written at seven or before tend to be completely uninteresting to anyone other than the parents of the child who wrote it. The child will cringe at it's memory.

[jlh.livejournal.com]

I feel there is far too much worship of the wunderkind and the hyper original. I like a late success myself. Obviously.

[sisterpandora.livejournal.com]

Wunderkin worry me, not because they're fabulous, but because of the pressures our modern society exert upon them. But yes, late success is probably five to a thousand times better because you get that expanse of years wherein you can live as quietly or loudly as you please without J. Q. Public (in any form) looking over your shoulder.

[jlh.livejournal.com]

Well, also, because it puts a lot of pressure on the rest of us, as though just deciding on something very early is the point of the thing, rather than sort of, I dunno, living LIFE?

I'm not sure that success and having a life have to be in such opposition. This portion of late capitalism worries me a great deal.

[imaginarycircus.livejournal.com]

I just finished teaching a class and we talked about how writing is writing is writing. And working on creative writing will help your essay writing skills. Though I would say that in terms of teaching writing it is a little different in terms of craft. I feel barely qualified to teach fiction writing, but poetry? I don't feel nearly qualified to teach poetry. I love it, I read it, but I have not made the same sort of critical study of it.

Otherwise I totally agree with you lady.

[jlh.livejournal.com]

You have an excellent point; I think poetry is totally different.

I mean, clearly these things have differences. But I had always thought of myself as someone who, though a good nonfiction writer, was a hopelessly horrible fiction writer. I think it just was that I wasn't that stereotypical girl in the fiction writing class. There are other more personal reasons but that really kept me away from it for a long time. There's also, I think, a sense on some people's parts that nonfiction writing is derivative in a way that fiction isn't. I think when I was writing more criticism I was more willing to buy into that. But now I'm doing original research and I'm realizing that it's far from the truth.

[imaginarycircus.livejournal.com]

Yeah, making a decent logical argument is the same for both fiction and non-fiction. I think the importance of logic in fiction is highly glossed over and it drives me mad. People think fiction is a license for bullshit sometimes. And that makes me crazy. A good story should have the same clarity and sense that an essay does.

Fiction and non-fiction are obviously not the same, thank you James Frey--but they are sort of like fraternal twins.