I Hate My Writing

Should be "I had poor grades . . ."

I think that Hemingway wrote 10,000 words a day to keep his juices flowing, seems a bit much. Someone one directed me to a website that had a big collection of writing warm-ups that were about 30 words or less than 100 words and were funny, the exercise had a funny name, but I forget what it was, so no help. Maybe I'll find it later, or someone else knows of it. Several of my friends have written books, and I've talked to writers because storytelling seems a sort of magic. One friend wrote a book called, "Losing My Mind;" he'd been a writer, and now has early onset Alzheimer's. Another friend told her life story to a writer, but I thinnk that she'd have done it better herself. One writer I know lived in Washington, DC in an old house that he swears was haunted by a colorful character who was killed while attempting to hold-up a liquor store in 1948. I think there are a lot of writers in Narlins. You could be a mirror walking down the street, certainly New Orleans and Louisiana abound in stories waiting to be told. I think that Poppy Z. Bright writes about New Orleans some. The history of New Orleans Rum seems like it would be a whole book.

I don't know what the hell I'm talking about.

nah you do HB (know what you're talking about). I think the most profound thing you said, was:

"You could be a mirror walking down the street,"

YES!! Writers are mirrors, aren't they? SOme writers are clear, clear mirrors (they reflect life Warts 'n All): the realists, the George Orwell "Down and Out in London + Paris" the Chekhovs, the Ivan Turgenevs. Other writers are flawed mirrors, who, though their writings are somewhat fantastical, still at the very essence of their writing reflect the truth about the human condition. Nickolai Gogol, Franz Kafka, Michael Bulgarkov. And Sci-fi writers must be included, but I only know the Russians.
Andrewsarchus, I didn't think "I hate My Writing" was a piece of cheese sanger or 2% milk.

Mirror walking down the street is from something someone said about poets. But I agree with you about some being clear mirrors and some not, most not. I have thought that over the years since I read of Charles Horton Cooley's "Looking Glass Self." Cooley is supposedly the father of social psychology, and his Looking Glass Self posits that we get our self-concept from what we see reflected from others. This is totally fucked, due to the fact that, as you say, some are flawless mirrors like looking into a pool of clear, calm water; while most are bent, warped, and distorted and we end up feeling like we've just taken a walk through a funhouse of mirrors mistakenly thinking that's what we really look like, who we are.

That's why you gotta read Kerouac, man, KEROUAC! Or, Ginsberg had a nice mirror on his ceiling from what I've heard.

Many times I have thought about such things, and alas have come to the conclusion we can't all be genius's, we can't all create original work. The creator of such pieces of literature, are few and far between, and the rest are just scavengers whose work uses the derived products of the original originality to varying degree's, perhaps with a splash of their own unique style.
And anything created can always be argued as a derivative of something that came before.

My personal skill is to create things that provoke people, perhaps the exact definition of art, but whats more important is that I first try to provoke a positive response and then a negative, and the more positive one is and the more negative the next is the better. I like to try and do it in creative ways that make people think, this usually doesn't work as people are too busy wanting to kill me. Which ends up as a wonderfully ironic juxtaposition from the works original intent.

What it comes down to is either be original or be a good plagiarist.

Provoking through juxtapositioning or unusual harmonies reminds me of Herman Hesse's "Das Glasperlenspiel." Some people play this game in all seriousness, with factions for music and various branches of science, or eclectically just for amusement. When I first read Das Glasperlenspiel I never thought that people would actually try it.

HB spoke of mirroring reality, and Andrewsarchus of H.P. Lovecraft weaving wonders with words. Here is one of my favorite Lovecraft quotes which ties into both:

Kuranes was not modern, and did not think like others who wrote. Whilst they strove to strip from life its embroidered robes of myth and to show in naked ugliness the foul thing that is reality, Kuranes sought for beauty alone. When truth and experience failed to reveal it, he sought it in fancy and illusion, and found it on his very doorstep, amid the nebulous memories of childhood tales and dreams.

I once heard that the three main Christian virtues are Faith, Hope, and Charity. Not being too inspired by these, I was glad to find the three Roman virtues of Strength, Beauty, and Wisdom. You have to remember that the Romans used to have a good time by throwing Christians to the lions and setting baboons on their virgins. Those guys sure knew how to party!

Don't ever be a writer. They're a wicked, faithless lot, all of them. Every writer I know is a bad review and divorce away from getting busted for masturbating in front of old ladies in the park, sobbing, "Don't ignore me!!"

I ate my writing!

That's Adaptation. See it if you haven't--maybe it will help. Writing about writing is good. One time I was sitting around with a bunch of friends, all somewhat silent, and one remarked that we had nothing to talk about. I said there is always something to talk about. He joked we could talk about talking. That seemed like a good topic to me.

One time I did a study of Latin American political media using glottochronology and lexicostatistics, and a 34-category verb classification system.

Lateral fricatives seem sort of interesting.

i like Neil Gaiman. it's ocasionally dark and creepy, and funny as hell if you take a moment to think about it

I was thinking about writing on my home town, Louisiana history (revisionist), and my family history. Examples of the latter:

The orginal Cheramie brothers came from an island off France, St. something or other. The burned a city down.

My great-grandfather was a bootlegger during the 1920's. His son was a Shrimper King who served in the Pacific Theatre. My dad is an intelligent college dropout (paradox!) earning a slight income offshore.

On my city: there's a corrupt group of millionairs who actively create an oligarchy; an aristocracy that rivals the Slaver Ownsers.

I would not be so bold as to call myself a good writer, but I am at least a better writer than I used to be. Here is what I found helps:

- Study grammar like mad. Read old British grammar books; learn computer programming if you haven't yet; read your Orwell and Lovecraft and Adams _slowly_ to pick up how they structure words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs.

- Write tons of email, and _pay attention_ as you write. Be sure to rewrite each email at least once.

- Eliminate style. Remove every idiosyncracy, every feature that reveals a bit of yourself. You can put them back in later, consciously. Minimalize. Consider a euphonic effect or a rare word to be "expensive" the way RAM and CPU time are expensive to programmers; use them as jewels in a setting of good clean prose.

Now, here's the part that baffles me. It's one thing to learn to 'write' in the sense of making words, but how does one go about learning to tell stories? I have all these great half-formed images in my head -- a face, a person, a situation, a scene -- with no idea how to flesh it out into a dramatic whole. I read the great plays, especially Shakespeare, to get some idea, but come out baffled all the same. Any suggestions?

I usually try to get a beggining middle and end. Any concept that I can't sqeeze those three out for I just don't think of as being able to hold up a whole story. Of course this means kicking out a great deal of ideas but it's the only way I know the write a decent story.

The one thing I really want to write is an entire history of the galaxy from a fictisious (sic) date I set. I started on it. I noticed that Heinlein and Asimov (as well as Herbert) created a Universe (whther as they went along or not) that a great deal of work took place in. The Current in Space mentions Trantor as the largest force in the galaxy; in the Foundation series (read it), Trantor is the Galactic Empire.

I'm doing something similer, I have treaties, technologies, histories of different worlds I want to "sew" together into one very large story on which I can base all sorts of things (I wouldn't mind getting into game developement, but I think I'll end up in Behavorial (sic) Science).

I think it may be dyslexia or poor brain power, but I had one bugger of a time reading Origin of Species and The Dissent of Man, as well as a collection of Ben Franklyn's (is it spelled English or American?) stuff.

I notice that Adams writes very conversational (well, he rights like I talk, anyway). Lovecraft wanted to be English (Victorian or Elizabethen, I believe), and it shows in his choice of words, phrasology, and spelling. He does traditional English things like colour and one old grammer rule I notice in Shakespear; he puts "an" in front of some words that start as hx, where x = to a vowel (usually a long vowel, I think).

I know that computer programming teaches you to think logically. Am I write in assuming that is why you offered that amoung your other great pieces of advice?

just write. practice. you lazy slob! that's all you need. you have the talent and the ideas (and if you don't, you can just pretend you do like all those other writers).

are you dyslexic or what?

Get some thick, tortoiseshell glasses, wear a cardigan sweater, and smoke a pipe.

Computer programming teaches you how to think _grammatically_. Grammar really comes down to the imposition of logic on language, just as poetry is the imposition of music on language.

I usually think of syntax for programming, but I guess that grammar and syntax are the same. Language is more flexible. I remember once seeing in the Encyclopedia of Computer Science that there were more than 2,000 computer languages. There was a proposed computer language based on English, but each word could only have one meaning. I suppose that with advances in language processors, eventually we will be able to ask the computer a question, or tell it what kind of output we are looking for, and it will take care of the internals. There is a program that will scan music, by Bach for instance, develop rules and generalities, and then write more of the same. The same could likely be done with one of the Perl writing programs and applied to literature.
logic-->syntax-->semantics

semiotics

Grammaticaly as in English or just getting my mind to follow a set of rules when composing something? I think it's the latter.

Dyslexia runs in my family, so chances are, I have it. When I write, I usually write the wrong thing. For instance, if I need to right a "5," I could end up writing a 4. Same with 2 and 3, 7 and 9, and a lot of letters. I also skip words when I write. I have a speech impediment, which many people think is linked with dyslexia. I also have trouble reading sometimes, and have to go over paragraphs several time to soak in everything. A lot of times, if an author is describing something, I cannot visualize. I don't know if this is because I think verbally or not (I'm also an artist).

This language processor is supposed to improve language skills and help with dyslexia.

DaVinci was sort of dyslexic, wasn't he? At least he could write backwards and stuff. They used to make left-handed people write right-handed. So, maybe dyslexia is a trait that should be built upon rather than "corrected" and suppressed.

de Vinci
Einstein
Terry Goodkind

Some more: http://www.dyslexia.com/qafame.htm

Some people think that dyslexia allows people to view the world from a different angle. In my words, almost like a genetically "accepted mutation" in the mind that let's it asses a situation a "normal" brain could not. Like some people with autism (maybe all) do not have the filter that we do.If we look at a plant, our brain dosen't focus on all the leaves at once, but only a cetain point; an autistic person may not (or flat out doesn't) have this, so s/he sees the entire bush (in fact, everything) at once. I've seen some sketched bye mildly autistic people, and they indeed see something an artist with a nominally functioning brain dosen't.

Remember the part in Rain Man (I have it on VHS. I love it) when the toothpicks spill? "64 64 64."

I wonder about people with unusual math abilities, or memories, or perfect pitch. I found what is called "the rusty compass problem," which supposedly Napoleon could do in his head in an instant, and it came in handy when he was a corporal in the artillery. If you have a rusty compass (dividers) that are stuck at a fixed spread, and a circle of a known diameter, Napoleon could tell you in an instant how many times the compass must be walked around the circumferance to again touch the starting point. This enabled Napoleon to establish what elevation to set the cannon barrel to hit a target of an estimated distance. Elliptical trajectories aren't quite the same, but close enough for artillery.

I was always told that each story has three parts, a beginning, a middle and an end, ideally you should try and work these into your story somewhere. I prefer to try and miss out at least two of the above, because it makes the reader do more work.

You have taken a very reductionist view of writing, and one which I am impressed by, perhaps you should take it further and write a story by stepwise refinement or apply a story life cycle. Start with the aims and objective you wish to reach with your story, analyse this, the ways and means to get there, check the feasibility, then implement it. All you need to do then is to review the story, decide whether it has reached it's aims and objectives, if not then you make a change by starting from the beginning of the cycle again.

I think many people have a flair for story telling, I always tell people I have a boring life but I manage to make simple things (like the time a girl did a bmx jump off my bikes front wheel and landed on her face) sound more interesting and exciting than they really are.

But perhaps that is not the issue, perhaps you can tell storys well, but you can never find one to tell. In which case you should tell storys about nothing.
About the time you went to the post office and an old lady stole your shopping. Perhaps if you can look at why these storys about nothing are good you can discover the real essence of a story, because the story doesn't exist only the very essence of it.

Of course maybe you are talking about good storys, after all a bad story is still a story, in which case what does make a good story? I would imagine it would have to appeal to someone, which makes you have an audience, selects your genre, gives you a frame to work around.

Whilst I dream of writing in one Genre my true talent probably lies in another. I am probably the finest writer of period novels, but I choose to focus on science fiction novellas that fail to get published in magazines.

Perhaps the greatest secret is to feel emotion when you are writing, the easiest is perhaps joy, satisfaction and such, and this will be evident in your writing, I have also written in anger, and depression, apathy, etc.

That's some excellent advice -- thank you for taking the time to write it. I'm going to spend this weekend trying out your suggestions.

Actually programming languages have syntactics and semiotics just as much as syntax. In JavaScript (to use a simple example) both window.alert("Foo") and window.quijibo("Bar") are correct syntax, but the later is semantic gibberish (unless you've elsewhere defined a quijibo function, just like the word Vogon was meaningless until Adams got his hands on it). A word may also have a different meaning in different contexts: in the expression window.alert(document.mainForm.alert) the first "alert" is a method call (essentially a verb) while the second refers to an element on a form (essentially a noun).

There's really no feature of human languages that can't be mirrored in computer language -- even slang, idioms, and exceptions have their place. The difference is of degree: computer languages are far more rigid and logical than human ones, and with a much more specific vocabulary. Exactly the elements one should strive to master for a vigorous plain-English style.

I meant "semantics and semiotics", not "syntactics and semiotics". Syntactics and syntax are the same thing.

When people are reading, there is likely a reduction to a sort of machine language, but different readers derive various codes. Any literary piece might be rewritten in a machine language, so as to be less ambiguous, but I think it is the ambiguity of language that gives it subtlety, nuance, coloration and shading. An example might be the expression of color by a computer with red, blue, green--RBG. While RBG ratio statements would arrive at the same spectrum frequencies, where is the Raw Umber, the Burnt Sienna, the Prussian Blue, the Chrome Yellow? A rose by any other name might smell as sweet, but Rose Lipshitz smells like gym socks.

yeah?

How's it hangin'?

we all want a new Zirealism but really, Short attention span much?
Reminds me of an old joke a friend of mine tells,
How many kids with ADHD does it take to screw in a lightbulb...

...

Wanna go ride bikes?

Why is this topic still up?