First, Mind Your Own Business

All---

Bear with the martial arts talk.  There's a pay-off. :)

When I was taking aikido, I like to worm up with some basic kung fu exercises.  I've never had formal kung fu, but I've studied enough longfist shaolin to know some a handful of basic forms, techniques, and exercises to a beginner level.  I selected a few that seemed to stretch appropriate muscle groups.

One of my favorites was the toe kick, in which you extend your foot  and kick upward, striking with the toes to the opponents groin.  As with any kick, during practice you kick higher than your target, so that in actual striking you would kick with sufficient speed and power.

With me so far?

Kicking up with my foot stretched out and pointed.

Note that our form of aikido itself included no kicks at all.

So, one day while I'm doing these kicks, a senior student came up.  Speaking to me from his taekwondo experience, he corrected my kick.  Never, he said, kick with your toes.  You'll break them.  He wanted me to do a snap kick with the ball of my foot instead.

I tried to explain my kick, tried to explain what I was stretching --

-- and he was having none of it.  "Just do some other stretches then," he demanded. "There is no point in practicing incorrect kicks."

To summary, I was practicing a kung fu kick before aikido class.  My aikido senrior corrected and scolded me in fully, righteous confidence drawn from his taekwondo experience.

Let me take out all the martial arts mumbo jumbo:

I was doing something.  Somebody who was more experienced in something else corrected me based on knowledge of yet something else.

I was ticked off and offended, and it still sort of riles me up.

But how often do I do the same thing to people?   I think it's really tempting with something like writing especially to jump in and correct people.  Even if you're not a jerk about it, it could be a misfire.

Advice can be correct, well-intentioned, and kindly delivered and still off-the-mark if the context is overlooked.

I did a beta read for a writer whom I'll allow to remain anonymous.  The book itself was outside my genre and my reading level, but it was in a dark tone.  I was asked specifically to look at voice and character.  I tried really hard to do that and not to stray with my comments into things that are really outside my own "expertise" (such as it is).

It was a strange experience to keep reminding myself, "Don't forget, you know next-to-nothing about this genre and you don't want to assume that such and such is the same."

The experience really brought it home for me, though, how often I do that just casually when I'm talking to other writers.  I offer suggestions or comments without thinking, "Hey, wait, what is they're writing?  Does this comment actually make sense for someone writing that?  Do I even understand how such and such works enough in that genre to make this comment?"

I try to do better about that.

I also try to keep that in mind when I receive comments from other people.  I didn't need to second-guess my shaolin toe kick because a senior student gave me an out-of-context tongue-lashing.  It's okay to say to myself, "You know, that comment from such and such is a great idea, and I know they were trying to help, but honestly it doesn't really have any bearing on my style or genre or reading level or topic."

So, here are your rules for tonight, put bluntly and harshly so they're memorable:

1) Mind your own business when you don't really understand someone else's.

2) Don't sweat it too much when other people break rule number one. They're not jerks, they're just trying to be nice.  But that doesn't mean they're right.

.Nevets.

Literature, not Journalism

All---

You've heard these kind of things before:

• Make your diallogue realistic.
• Create characters who are real.
• Tell stories that are real.

I'm hear to tell you today that, to a large extent, that's hooey, if you're writing fiction.

You want to write in such a way that your dialogue comes across as realistic and that your characters come across realistic.  That's not actually possible by simply recording real life.  Anyone who has been involved in theater knows, the actors wear stage makeup and exaggerate their motions -- so that they come across as realistic.  When you look at the up close, they look silly.  When you're doing the acting, you can feel silly.  But when you're in the audience, these things are necessary for things to feel real.

It's the same in other media as well: in photography, in painting, in sculpture.  There are things you do make representations of people seem more realistic than a simple of transcription of reality would seem.

There are a lot of intellectual and psychological and even physical reasons for this, but I think it can become quickly obvious.

First: try transcribing some conversations, literally, word for word, sound for sound, pause for pause.  Notice how little sense people actually make.  If you don't have ready access to conversations, try typing down sportscasters' commentary.  People change sentences mid-way through.  They say, "um," a lot.  They have words they say that mean next to nothing.

Second: try truly describing, in detail, the interaction of a group of people.  Write about all their twitcheing and fidgeting, and staring off into space.  Include their coughs and sniffs and sneezes.  Describe the sound of their voices, their full appearance, the smell of their breath and their bodies.  Talk about how they rearrange their social space.

When you try to record real people behaving as they really do, it's not only daunting, but the product is annoying and difficult to relate to.

Obviously, we make choices.  We choose what to describe and what to talk about, based on what will communicate important character traits or story elements.  We convert people into symbols of people so that the readers can actually relate to them as they might to people.  An information dump merely forces them to engage with  a lot of facts they typical filter, ignore, or subconsciously manage.

Most of you are probably with me up to this point.

Here's where it gets challenging.

I can recall in painful detail countless fights I've gotten into over the years with editors, critique partners, fellow writing class students, and beta readers, in which the gist was this:

THEM: Blah blah blah.  This part doesn't work.


ME: You're so wrong it's almost laughable!  Of course it works.  That's how it works in real life.


Or like this:

THEM: Hoo haa huu.  I can't really follow this part here. It doesn't make sense.


ME: That's on you, not on me.  I can introduce to you two or three people for whom that is precisely how things went in their real lives.


The readers were telling me that something in my fiction didn't work.  I was defending myself and my writing by calling on real life.  Makes sense right?

Actually, I've decided that it doesn't make sense.  When you're writing, and readers don't get it, it doesn't matter how faithful you're being to reality.  We're not journalist -- we're authors.  We already make other choices, right?  We deal with people symbolically.

If there's something you want to get across in your story, don't just show it.  Show it in a way that, as written, your readers will understand it.

I used to hate impressionist paintings.  I still do, but for different reasons.  I used to think they were unrealistic.  Now I'm able to see that they are sometimes more realistic than so-called realistic paintings -- because they communicate something about the very real light and the color that I can understand and experience.

That's what we do in writing.  We create impressions of characters and actions so that our readers can understand and experience.  It's literature, not journalism.

.Nevets.