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Calvin and Hobbes on writing

17 September 2015 by 1 Comment

Hat tip to Malcolm the Cynic.

Calvin and Hobbes comic strip. Calvin: 'I used to hate writing assignments, but now I enjoy them. I realized that the purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure poor reasoning, and inhibit clarity. With a little practice, writing can be an intimidating and impenetrable fog! Want to see my book report?' Hobbes, reading aloud: 'The Dynamics of Interbeing and Monological Imperatives in DICK AND JANE: A Study in Psychic Transrelational Gender Modes.' Calvin: 'Academia, here I come!'

There are two kinds of people involved in this game, whether as writers, readers, or what have you: Those who agree with Calvin, and those who wish to use writing as an actual means of communication. Which is as much as to say that there are parasites, and there are hosts.

Speaking of Malcolm the Cynic, he has an interesting piece up on Superversive SF: ‘Fixing the Abrams Star Trek Movies’. Very much in the vein of what I did with elements of the Star Wars prequels in ‘Creative discomfort and Star Wars’. I like his take on the Abrams Trek reboot very much.

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This day in scribblery: September 16

16 September 2015 by 5 Comments

Another piece that may be of interest to at least 0.9 of my 3.6 Loyal Readers. This first appeared on LiveJournal on this day in 2006:

Genesis 3: Reality, responsibility, and The Eye of the Maker

Edit:

In other news, last night I returned from a three-day excursion to the interior of British Columbia. I saw many old familiar sights, and some old forgotten ones, and a few new ones, and one desultory forest fire, and met some new people (whom I shall, in all probability, never see again); and I return somewhat refreshed. I make a note of this for my own purposes, since this blog is the closest thing I keep to a journal, and otherwise I may wish to recollect some aspect of this trip and not be able to remember when I made it.

Filed Under: The Superversive

It’s not ALL about the seat of the chair

16 September 2015 by 5 Comments

Now that our Evil Alter Blogger has had his say about those who sneer at prolific writers, I figure it’s time for me to say something on the matter in propria persona. Herewith, I reproduce a comment I made over at the Passive Voice, which the gracious Carbonel thought well of.

One Scath muses aloud:

I’ve been earning a living as a writer releasing 2 books per year. Wonder what will happen if I up that to 4 per year?

I respond:

Either (a) you will more than double your income, because you are attracting more readers and have twice as many products to sell to each one; or (b) your income per book will suffer because you are rushing yourself to meet an arbitrary production schedule, and not giving the ideas long enough to cook. Or some combination of the two effects. It depends entirely on you and your internal process.

Like most writers I know, I find that the process of coming up with good story ideas is not one that happens solely whilst one is applying the seat of the trousers to the seat of the chair. I can usually come up with enough stuff in twenty-four hours to keep me busy at the keyboard for four or five hours writing it down. I find that if I force myself to spend more hours at the keyboard, I often end up forcing out rubbish just to fill up the time.

Of course everyone’s mileage differs; but that ought to be the real lesson – everyone’s mileage differs. There is nothing inherently wrong with having the fixings in your mind to make one decent book per month, or one per quarter, or one per year, or one per lifetime. (Very few of us can manage one per month. That much time at the keyboard leaves very little time for having enough of a life to feed a fluent stream of new ideas.) The only thing that is unequivocally wrong is trying to base your schedule on someone else’s idea of how much you should write.

If Patty Pretentious says you should write only one book every ten years and it will be a literary masterpiece, she’s almost certainly wrong. If Harry Hackworthy says you should crank out a book every two weeks, just as fast as your fingers can type the words, he is almost certainly wrong. If Sammy Statistics says you should write 1.21 books per year because that is the aurea mediocritas at which the average Great Writer writes the average Great Book, he is almost certainly wrong. Writers, especially great ones, cannot be aggregated in that way.

There’s a reason why Polonius did not say, ‘To the Huffington Post’s own self be true.’ Or even, ‘To thy critique group’s own self be true.’

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Advice on writing Great Literature

15 September 2015 by 30 Comments

In a discussion at The Passive Voice, one Lorraine Devon Wilke was mocked for ordering writers, ‘Do NOT write four books a year.’ She offered, as an exemplar of Good Writing, Donna Tartt, who took eleven years to write The Goldfinch. Among many other responses, Ed Ryan offered this:

I’m a math idiot so bear with me. Let’s assume (so I don’t have to look it up) the ‘masterpiece’ in question is 100k words long.

11 years means 10,000 words per year (ok that’s 110,000, see how lazy I am?)

10,000 words per year/ 365 days per year us a blistering 27.3 words per day.

We can pretend this hardworking visionary took days off from that grueling schedule and slaved over the novel for a mere 200 days each of those 11 years – an electric 50 word per day pace.

If the author rewrote the book 10 times the average jumps to a staggering 500 words per day. Being generous that’s 60 minutes of work per day.

I only hope the other 23hrs were relaxing.

Our Evil Alter Blogger responds:

Don’t be silly.

If you want to become a Major Literary Figure, you have to spend the other 23 hours in a constant flurry of activity. Hanging out in seedy Left Bank cafes, drinking absinthe with deranged expatriates. Being addicted to hard drugs. Cultivating interesting but debilitating mental illnesses. Pursuing weird sexual kinks in wildly unorthodox ménages. Kissing the bums of some of your fellow verminous literary lions, and fighting lifelong feuds with others. Going into rehab. Getting out of rehab. Writing angsty pseudo-philosophical anecdota about what you learned in rehab. Forgetting what you learned in rehab so you can repeat the process. I tell you, it’s a busy and thankless life.

The ideal literary author will write ONE book, and spend the rest of his life (it is preferably a he; if a she, she should go into pop music instead and aspire to be Amy Winehouse) desperately striving to live fast, die young, and leave a corpse that may not actually be good-looking, but will at least furnish material for hundreds of Ph.D. theses by twitterpated would-be academics.

You see, that is the ultimate goal of Literature. It’s all about the doctoral theses. Authors and books are just a necessary nuisance along the way.

(signed)
H. Smiggy McStudge

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12 years

13 September 2015 by 4 Comments

It was only in January, 2013, that I set up a WordPress blog to replace the creaky old static Bondwine site; but a lot of the material here goes back into the mists of antiquity. Today, for instance, marks the 12th anniversary of the oldest essai on this site: ‘Sturgeon’s Law School, or, Why do people with good taste create bad art?’ Upon rereading it with a cold and fishy eye, all these aeons later, I find that it stands up tolerably well. If you haven’t given it a look before, you might do today.

Filed Under: The Superversive

‘Goodbye, Radar’, Part 2

13 September 2015 by 6 Comments

M*A*S*H: A writer’s view. #12 in the series.

After three seasons on M*A*S*H, Gary Burghoff, like many Hollywood stars, was having serious trouble with his marriage. Unlike many of them, he did not give in to the easy solution of a divorce. So he renegotiated his deal with Fox; henceforward he would appear in only 14 of the 24 episodes each season, allowing him more time with his family. To keep up appearances, he was listed in the opening credits of every episode, and it is quite possible for the casual viewer not to notice his absence unless the script calls attention to it. Usually that attention-calling takes the form of having Klinger serve as company clerk pro tem.

After four more years, this half-measure was no longer enough. Burghoff’s domestic problems were becoming acute, and besides, it was becoming harder every year for an actor in his thirties to play a character perpetually in his late teens. He was becoming typecast as the adolescent boy he could no longer portray. Moreover, there is evidence that he was not popular with his castmates. At that time, Burghoff had the usual insecurities of the actor to an unusual degree. He could be touchy, thin-skinned, and temperamental; and the fact that he practised his own version of ‘Method’ acting did not make him easier to work with – though it probably contributed to the emotional sincerity of his performance, and allowed him to pass himself off as the teenaged Radar years longer than he might have done by conventional techniques. The fact that he received special treatment from Fox, being spared the gruelling schedule of a 24-episode season, probably did not endear him to his fellow actors. Everybody loved Radar, but nobody, it seems, cared much for Gary Burghoff; and in the end the contradiction was too much to sustain.

Ken Levine and David Isaacs, the story editors, also wanted out. Levine tells how he came to his decision to leave the show. They were just shooting an episode called ‘Preventive Medicine’, another script by Tom Reeder, in which Hawkeye removes a perfectly healthy appendix from a bloodthirsty line officer to get him removed from command. One day, Levine went home and saw a M*A*S*H rerun on the TV. It was an episode from about five years before, with exactly the same plot device; only that time it was written by Larry Gelbart, and consequently funnier and more dramatic. The only way in which the new episode improved on the old one was that B. J. gave a passionate argument against Hawkeye’s scheme: ‘Cutting into a healthy body is mutilation!’ Even that was put in at the insistence of Mike Farrell, who had a heated dispute with Alan Alda over that precise point. It was then that Levine realized the show was repeating itself, and he was running out of original contributions to make. It was time to go.

Before they left, Levine and Isaacs wrote one final script: the two-part ‘Goodbye, Radar’. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Essays Tagged With: , , ,

‘Goodbye, Radar’, Part 1

12 September 2015 by 9 Comments

M*A*S*H: A writer’s view. #11 in the series.

Now we come to the character that was the unquestioned heart of M*A*S*H: Corporal Walter Eugene ‘Radar’ O’Reilly, late of Ottumwa, Iowa, myopic farmboy, animal lover, Grape Nehi drinker, perpetual adolescent, and all-round débrouillard. When Gary Burghoff gave up the role after seven years, a considerable part of the show’s appeal left with him; also some of the audience, though not enough to seriously damage the ratings. When other actors left, their characters were replaced: Henry Blake with Col. Potter, Trapper John with B. J., Frank Burns with Winchester. Radar was irreplaceable.

The first thing we find out about Radar in ‘M*A*S*H: The Pilot’, in the very first scene before the opening credits, is that he hears incoming helicopters before anyone else. This ability, along with his nickname and his home town, came from the real-life Radar: Don Shafer, who served in Korea as company clerk to the 171st Evacuation Hospital. (Unlike Radar O’Reilly, Shafer went on to serve in Vietnam and eventually earned the rank of chief warrant officer.) In a 2009 interview, Shafer distinguished himself from his fictional counterpart: ‘I didn’t have ESP, obviously – I’m not sure if anyone does – but I was observant. I would listen for things… that nobody else was listening for.’

The novel MASH makes it clear that Radar does have ESP; the Robert Altman movie makes him do things that pretty solidly imply it; the TV series leaves it an open question. The TV Radar’s anticipations of events can generally be explained by natural causes, first among which is the sheer predictability of his superiors. Radar knows the official routine of the 4077th so well that he can put his hands on any needed paperwork five minutes before Col. Blake even knows it will be needed, and he is generally even ahead of Col. Potter. This is solidly established in the pilot episode, in the first scene where we see Radar in Col. Blake’s office. Radar has just come into the room behind Henry’s back, anticipating the call: [Read more…]

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Delay ended (I hope)

9 September 2015 by 8 Comments

Tuesday afternoon to the optometrist for a new glasses prescription, the old one having expired. (Steven Wright has a one-liner about that.) From there to Mall-Wart, as I affectionately call it, to buy two pairs of cheap eyeglasses, so that if I am clumsy again I can still make a spectacle of myself. Brooke, the optician, is at least a minor genius, and managed to patch up the wreckage of my old glasses (which I brought along in case the optometrist wanted to take measurements off them) so that they would at least sit on my face and the lenses would not spontaneously pop out of the frames. Both these desirable qualities were lacking before.

So it is now just shy of 1 a.m., Frozen North Daylight Time, and I am just sitting down to resume work. Sound the All Clear.

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There will be a slight delay

7 September 2015 by 2 Comments

I stepped on my reading glasses today. Stupid me. Probably no further posting until I get them replaced.

Filed Under: The Superversive Tagged With:

Pain in the neck II: The MRI Strikes Back

5 September 2015 by 2 Comments

Last night, as promised, I had my neck MRI’d. The machine is not built for persons who are fat and bulgy like myself; my elbows rubbed against the sides of the chamber when the technician shoved me in. Then, of course, there were the customary deafening noises, curiously reminiscent of very bad 1990s techno music, and made slightly worse because my right earplug came loose. On my way out, I gibed, a little sourly:

‘The floor show wasn’t bad, but the music was terrible. If you had a better band, you could probably afford to hire a bigger hall.’

I then went home and slept for a time. Upon waking, I decided I had better work on one or another of the promised blog posts. I ended up choosing the lafferty, and wrote several hundred words (interrupted by boning up on the Standard Model), culminating in the following bit of oddness:

This particle, which Dr. Boudreaux dubbed a hemion, was duly detected among the emissions of the F–V device, and the decision was taken to produce hemions in quantity and observe their interactions with normal matter.

I thereupon relayed a warning to the Psychological Correction Bureau, and prepared to observe Dr. Boudreaux’s interactions with normal humans.

Wendy sez I ought not to post the finished story for free, but see if somebody like McSweeney’s will buy it. Me, I dunno. I just write them, see?

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