The Nevets Paradox

All---

Well, there are actually many Nevets paradoxes, but I was struck by one today.  More on that in a moment.

First, just wanted to call your attention to some of the tweaks to the blog layout.  Nothing major, but I moved the popular posts widget up, updated the features authors widget, and changed Twitter widgets.  Also, I added new widgets, one of which will link quickly to stories that have been posted on the blog, and the other which tracks some of the erstwhile educational posts I have put up. Hope these changes are positive.

Second, Nevets.QST-featured author Gary Corby is hosting a contest on his blog in which you can win a copy of The Pericles Commission with the nifty Australian cover.  If you don't have this book, you enter.  If you just like collecting, you should enter.  If you want to have a piece of Down Under, you should enter.  And, even if you don't want to enter, you should go check out Gary's blog.  He's always entertaining and has a great variety of posts about everything from his experience as a new writer to ancient history.

Alright, now onto the the paradox of the night:

I don't do sequences well.  Really, at all.  I don't think linearly, so point-A to point-H is just how I think.  The whole ABCDEFGH  thing is beyond me.  I think of states, not transitions between states.

When I'm writing that shows up in that if I had my way my book would be a collection of extended scenes with no transitions between them.  I hate transitions.  Mind you,  I'm not just talking about pedantic transitions such as, "He took the train to Chicago."  I'm talking about entire chapters of material about what happens in between.  I personally couldn't care less about how the process of development.

In life, it shows up in that I don't do the whole life is about the journey thing.  No way.  I don't do journeys.  Life is about the present moment and the destination.  Period.  Oddly enough, that's essentially how my memory works to.  I remember different things, but not the necessary steps in between them.  I remember a time when I didn't know A and then I remember knowing A, but I don't remember learning about A.  For instance.  Or, more commonly, I collapse all the states in my memory and don't even remember that at one time I didn't know A.

My emotions work the same way.  There's on and there's off.  There's no building or receding.

It's all states.  No transitions between states.

But here's the thing.

The only thing I  hate as much as I hate linear sequences is stasis.  Every state must be a dynamic state, with enough energy to change into another state.  I may not think about the changing, but I know I need there to be  change.

It often makes little sense.  For instance, I know that Rose and I are not in the living situation we want to be in forever.  We have no immediate plans of  chance, but we know we don't want to stay in our current state.  As much as I cannot think in terms of the steps required to transition into another state, I also go insane if I feel like we're not heading towards a transition.

This evening, I finally began to understand a little more how it works.  It's like how I imagine motion.  I've talked on this blog before about the fact that my mind doesn't do spatial thinking well.  One of my limitations is that I cannot imagine motion.  If for instance, I try to think about a car driving down the road, all I can do is picture the car on the road with a sense of motion that is implied but not visually apparent.

That's really how I do life, too: I need my states of being to have a sense of change that is implied even if it is not literally planned out.

In a practical way, it's also how I end up writing.  Most every scene I write, and most of my short stories and flash pieces, has an underlying sense of impending change that is far stronger than any actual transitions I write.  It's both a strength and a weakness.

I haven't really thought about it, but you can probably find traces of that tension in some of the characters and stories I've written.  

As a matter of fact, I didn't plan this, but here's a spontaneous contest: find something convincing in a story that I've posted here, or on www.Nevets-QST.com, or on FlashyFiction.blogspot.com, or one of my stories in Genre Wars, that has a character or a plot element reflecting this struggle with state and change, and I'll send you your choice something from the CafePress store or a signed, nicely-printed copy of one of my stories.  Hop to it!

.Nevets.

Soundtrack for the writing of this blog post provided by Kan-Johnny-Eight.

To Be Yourself or To Be Understood

All---

First and foremost, make sure you have read who won the Nevetsized Halloween contest!

Secondly, I've had a pretty interesting conversation with Scott Bailey in the comments of his post today on the Literary Lab.  I decided to move some of my thoughts over here before I was really hogging the comments field.

I hope I write this clearly, because this is actually a very personal post, and when I ask for your advice and thoughts in the end, it's a sincere request.

The quick and dirty version of where the conversation between Scott and me ended up: I read, write, and think in a very different way from most people, and my writing process sometimes gets bogged down by the process of trying to convert my way to the way of most of my readers.   Scott's advice was to just forget that conversion process, and write it like my brain writes it, and treat it like I'm writing it for people who read like I do, too.

That is actually a pretty amazing bit of advice, and I'm chewing it over greedily.

But there's a catch.

It runs the risk of reducing my readership.

I don't care for that risk.  (a) I like the idea of a lot of people reading my stories.  (b) I still hold onto to the pie in the sky hope of some day making my living from my stories.

So, really, my writing is caught up in the same dilemma that has perplex me most of my life.

Here's where it gets a little complicated and a little personal.  (If you've read the thread or some old blog posts, I apologize for the repetition of a few pieces of this.)

The basic challenge lies in the distinction between inductive thought and deductive thought.  Inductive thought involves reasoning from the bits and pieces to understand the whole.  Deductive thought involves reasoning from the big picture down to the particulars.

All of us use both at one time or another.  Most folks are pretty balanced, but tend to read, write, and learn inductively.  It seems to make the most sense.  You put the pieces together to get the answer.  You follow steps.  You gather clues and work out the solution.

Some people, like me, are inclined very strongly to deductive reasoning.  This is often inexplicable to inductive thinkers, because it looks like we guess a lot.  It seems like we're using our intuition.  We'll state what we take as fact, be asked how we know it, and all we can say is, "I don't know?" because to us it's just apparent and we don't really understand the question.

As teenagers, we tend to get in trouble for that one. :)

It was only in the past few years that I began to understand this.  For most of my life, all I knew was this emotionally crippling frustration with my inability to properly interact with others on matters of knowledge and expression.  To get through school, I learned how to let myself get to the answer my way when possible and then make myself go back through the inductive steps to try and show how I got there.

Often a very frustrating experience because it's not really how I got there, and I would often introduce weird "errors" into the process.  But if I didn't try to do it, people were rarely satisfied with my answers or my messages.  "Okay, that sounds good, but how do you know that?"  "I might be to understand better if you explained why you believe that."

And that's what I'm wrestling with in response to Scott's suggestion today.  It literally never occurred to me to write the way that fits my mind, because I'm used to having to translate.  It's just habit.

Now that I'm thinking about possibly doing so, it at least feels to me like I'm facing the old challenge: should I be myself or should I let myself be understood?

The former is the most appealing answer, obviously, and it's in some ways an easy recommendation to make.

But the elementary school kid in me is saying, Oh no, not that again.


So, bloggers, readers, fellow-writers, and friends, what are your thoughts on this?

Aside from the obvious fact that I'm over-analyzing myself once again. :)

.Nevets.