Me writing words for blogs, TWICE in one week? Clutch your pearls, folks!
It's all steampunk all the time at The Adventures of Cecelia Bedelia this week, and I have a guest post up today, in which I wax erratic (and maybe MAYBE a bit poetic) on the inimitable talents of Kelly Link and Libba Bray and the beauty of writing genre stories in which the genre is incidental.
Negativity—especially of the churlish variety—is not my scene. After a brilliant eureka moment in my early undergraduate life, I put away the majority of my haughty, ironic, suspicious-of-optimism, Judgy McJudgerson teenage legacy and moved on to a much happier existence. The idea of Bronies (which I just read about today) tickles my heart; the sheer joy and exuberance exploding from Jimmy Fallon at every turn on his late late show is my bread and butter.
Not for its cynicism did I spend six years studying Russian lit, nor do I inhabit the young adult and kidlit world in order to have a ready supply of lesser-than things to make fun of. Rather, I did both for the wit and humanism and fantastic use of language so often employed therein. Sincerity and optimism, that's my game.
So you can understand why I have mixed emotions taking time to write about a series of things I've come across thus far in 2012 that, well, I am feeling really negative and judgy about. Even though—or maybe especially because—the negativity comes from a place of optimism. But these things are so tied to what I hold near and dear to my heart that, well, I just want to say something. So I will say my something, and then I will move on. And we will make Mondays days of love and sincerity from here on out.
CASE THE FIRST
The first thing that rankled me I saw last week, and was the bizarrely visceral lit-snob reaction to the appointment of Walter Dean Myers as National Ambassador for Young People's Literature. I didn't take the editorial very seriously—I think it was intentionally incendiary (and willfully self-serving), and anyone even a bit clever can understand that the argument doesn't even correspond with the meaning of the actual appointment (an ambassador is not a laureate, or an instructor, or a mirror, for example).
However, I do dislike it when anyone claims that a) literature's only goal is to elevate, and b) that "to entertain, to problematize, or to instruct" cannot simultaneously elevate. I am not claiming that all —hell, I'm not even claiming that literature's only goal should be to elevate. But I do think that anytime a person chooses to read something for their own edification, they are doing themselves a service. All exercises in reading are transformative:
Psychologists from Washington University used brain scans to see what happens inside our heads when we read stories. They found that "readers mentally simulate each new situation encountered in a narrative". The brain weaves these situations together with experiences from its own life to create a new mental synthesis. Reading a book leaves us with new neural pathways. (Washington Univ. in St. Louis, via The Guardian)
…so even if Myers' work is "insipid" (which, whatever. Opinions are opinions.), the act of reading his work can do good just as well as Homer (or any number of increasingly ill-judged bawdy Old English bits) can. Either/or paradigms are harmful, especially if the result is keeping kids from actively engaging, on their own time, with literature, whatever that may be.
In any case, the guy is zany, which comes a dime a dozen, and Myers is still the one with the prestigious appointment, so, again, whatever. Also, I recognize that cultural snobbery is the Achilles Heel that brings out my cynicism. Okay. Water under the bridge.
However, today I came across two more things, in quick succession, that bit at me, and a series of three is always stronger, so. Here we are.
CASE THE SECOND
TEDtalks! Why are you doing me wrong?
For some reason, an economist got on stage to talk about his suspicion of stories. Yes, stories. That video is sixteen long minutes of your life, and I don't necessarily recommend anyone watch it, but there it is for those interested.
The takeaway is, humankind's tendency to frame everything—memories, lives, advertising—into stories is somehow…reductive? Constricting? Bad? Honestly, I'm a clever person, able to read literary criticism in Russian, but I could barely follow his argument. It was very…personal, I think. And yes, maybe I was feeling a bit ornery, my very avocation being called to task, but. Please.
Stories are used because framing the chaos and mess (which Cowen wants us to instead embrace, yet somehow not try to frame for better understanding) is how we make sense of life, how we can find meaning and move forward from the things that happen to us. I can understand the desire to be suspicious of stories people tell when selling something—obviously. Sales is a game, and you should always look outside the pitch's box. But just being human and telling stories? Being suspicious of that just promises exhaustion.
CASE THE THIRD
Being (and using) awesome.
This was highlighted in today's Shelf Talker, and it totally caught me off-guard. A bookselling dude in California has made it his mission to cull the word "awesome" from everyday English, citing its ubiquity and utter lack of real meaning as a source of physical pain.
"Saying the word in my presence is like waving a crucifix in a vampire's face," Tottenham says. "It's boiled down to one catchall superlative that's completely meaningless."
This guy is a bookseller. I don't even. I hope he learns to spend more of his time enjoying things.
ANYWAY
There ends my wind of negativity. I just didn't like seeing 2012 get off to such a cynical start. Because 2012 is going to be a year of AWESOME. STORIES. And optimism.
You know how I know? Because today, right after being bombarded by cases the second and the third, I opened a birthday package from a dear college friend, and found THIS:
Yes, that IS Minnesota running at you with HUGS.
So. 2012. Be awesome. Tell stories. Hug people. Be optimistic.
This week's Road Trip Wednesday prompt is the very open-ended How do you get past writer's block?
and I wasn't sure if I was going to participate because
a) I am, at the moment, in the middle of the ice-fragile stage right AFTER writer's block wherein any iota of attention paid to the prospect of not being able to move forward might paralyze me, and
b) I don't really know how I got there, except for just saying to my brain, "welp, time to move on."
But then I was reading that fascinating article in the NYT about decision fatigue, and it occurred to me, that is EXACTLY what writer's block is. Because what is writing, if not a series of decision after decision after decision?
The more choices you make throughout the day, the harder each one becomes for your brain, and eventually it looks for shortcuts, usually in either of two very different ways. One shortcut is to become reckless: to act impulsively instead of expending the energy to first think through the consequences. (Sure, tweet that photo! What could go wrong?) The other shortcut is the ultimate energy saver: do nothing. Instead of agonizing over decisions, avoid any choice.
So yes. We're not real-life judges choosing which prisoners get paroled or don't, but we are doing the same things for our characters, our worlds, our words. I mean, last night it took me a good five minutes to get from this:
Did she believe her now that this hungover Brandi had been forced out by the petite blonde?
to this:
Did she believe her now,now that this hungover Brandi had been forced out by the petite blonde?
to this:
Did she believe her now,now that this hungover Brandi had evidently been forced out by the petite blonde?
Tiny changes, and ones that today I'm not even sure I approve of. Which makes sense, since they were the last things I managed to accomplish before I had to give in to exhaustion and sleep, or risk feeling too overwhelmed by minutiae to go on (the second, full-stop, side-effect of decision fatigue). And that's not even considering the larger, major structural changes I was trying to work through before nit-picking that last page.
So if writing is all decision making, and writer's block is decision fatigue, then according to the article, the best way to solve it is by…
Glucose, specifically, and while I could make a joke about all that Bonnaroo Buzz I've been into lately, or about the average writer's penchant for chocolate anything*, the real advice being given by the scientists is to Just. Eat. Better. All the time. More proteins, more whole foods with natural glucose (thank goodness for peach season).
Glucose, however, isn't everything.
So how else do you build yourself a better bulldozer?
You learn not to trust yourself. Or rather, WHEN not to trust yourself:
“Good decision making is not a trait of the person, in the sense that it’s always there,” Baumeister says. “It’s a state that fluctuates.” His studies show that people with the best self-control are the ones who structure their lives so as to conserve willpower. They don’t schedule endless back-to-back meetings. They avoid temptations like all-you-can-eat buffets, and they establish habits that eliminate the mental effort of making choices. Instead of deciding every morning whether or not to force themselves to exercise, they set up regular appointments to work out with a friend. Instead of counting on willpower to remain robust all day, they conserve it so that it’s available for emergencies and important decisions.
“Even the wisest people won’t make good choices when they’re not rested and their glucose is low,” Baumeister points out. That’s why the truly wise don’t restructure the company at 4 p.m. They don’t make major commitments during the cocktail hour. And if a decision must be made late in the day, they know not to do it on an empty stomach. “The best decision makers,” Baumeister says, “are the ones who know when not to trust themselves.”
So how do we apply this to writer's block? Because writers don't want to just avoid bad decision making (that surly troll can always be cut out of—or added back INTO—the scene later), but that other wall hit by the mentally fatigued, the one where it's easier to make NO decision than risk a bad one. I'd imagine something reasonable and familiar-sounding, like
• establishing a writing schedule, and sticking to it no matter what (even better if you have a motivation buddy/crit partner to commit to something similar with you).
• writing as early in the day as possible, and making sure not to write on an empty stomach if you can't get to it until later in the day.
• make a habit/schedule of as many other things in your life as possible, to avoid having to add those decisions to your plate on a daily basis. Make a grocery list you will STICK to before shopping; make a meal plan for the week, so you don't stress about it three times a day; embrace the romanticism of chance by just reading the first book on your TBR pile instead of digging through each day and mulling, by just letting Netflix send you whatever's next instead of obsessing over what you might feel like watching in two days, even by ordering library books for hold instead of wandering the aisles aimlessly for an hour (although the joy of finding a gem in the stacks shouldn't be avoided always—maybe just when a deadline is looming). I am sure there are plenty of other things that can be turned into habit to free up mental decision-making energy, but that's at least a start.
As with anything simple, this won't be easy. Not for me, anyway. But I think thinking about writer's block in terms of decision fatigue, and trying to solve it with approaches used FOR decision fatigue, is something that I can embrace.
Now fingers crossed it works…
*my own ambivalence towards chocolate, I realize—along with the fact I couldn't feel the earthquake in MD yesterday, and watched a driveways full of shaking cars thinking, "huh, wonder why that huge gust of wind missed me"—makes me seem something other than human. I'm just going to go with Superhuman, call myself that. That sounds better (than crazy, I mean).
Happily, all of what I read regarding the WSJ article was considered and well-written – although I will admit that I consciously ignored most of the in-site comments to any of the articles in question, so I am sure my view has some skew. All the same, the vehemence with which the internet rose up in response to this issue is a good reminder (for those of us who might forget) of the sheer number of individuals out there in the world. AND THEY ALL HAVE OPINIONS.
Some are more reasonable than others.
Some, conversely, are so unreasonable that they fall in the "I couldn't make this up if I tried" category. And we creative types have field days with those.
This video falls under the second category. The author of this text, a dear soul going by the moniker Axman13, took umbrage with pretty much every aspect of a Newgrounds game called Super PSTW Action RPG, and in 2010 brought his complaints to the comment boards. What resulted was so heinously, patently bad that one of the voice actors for the game dramatized the rant, and a designer added the kinetic typography text. And the rant became golden.
So this immediately makes me think of two things.
First is the Stephen Fry speech which I posted for the inaugural Kinetic Thursday, in which he rallies against verbal snobbery, chides those "semi-educated losers" who go around sharpieing missing apostrophes onto signs and writing letters to grocery stores about "less" and "fewer," shakes his head at the idea that all that haughtiness is done for the sake of clarity. This last argument, Fry claims, "almost never holds water."
"I think," he continues, "what offends examiners and employers when confronted with extremely informal, unpunctuated and haywire language is the implication of NOT CARING that underlies it." And yet, Axman13 (and all the commenters to WSJ kershnuffle) obviously cares. He obviously cares. Cares beyond the point of "right" or "wrong" language. And his point is made! I might wince and sigh and judge at all the "resons" and "pepoles" and "blaaaaaaaam!s" used, but I still get what he means.
Proper language is wonderful, and often necessary for many kinds of clarity, but Not. Always. Communication is much more forgiving than we usage sticklers and spelling queens would like to admit.
The second thing I think of is how integrative our contemporary creative culture is, and how lucky we are for it. Just as Axman13 gave an actor and a designer the opportunity to create something bigger than the component parts on hand, the WSJ article kicked a snowball downhill that gave tens of dozens of authors a fantastic platform from which to make thoughtful, useful counterpoints. It gave a forum for tweeters – readers, writers, publishing industry folk, librarians, teens and former teens – to weave into visibility a previously invisible web of what YA literature means (#YAsaves, in particular). It created a fascinating, mostly supportive intellectual and academic dialogue in a very immediate and very public sphere.
And if that isn't what communication is really about…
Anyway, Axman13 "liked" the video.
Maybe Gurdon will end up "liking" the dialogue her odd editorial engendered, too.
Yes, I'm avoiding a particularly tricky bit of thesising doing this. Yes, it's totally irresponsible. But I found this little animated video of an astrophysics lunch discussion on PHDcomics, and I wanted to share:
So first, I love astrophysics and space and dark matter, and that is totally a direction I would take in life if I had to do my education over again. And if I didn't care about words as much as I do.
But! This is also interesting to think about IN TERMS OF writing: as writers, we spend so much time digging into the details of the details of the details of our stories, thinking that that is obviously where the heart will be, but, as the guys talking say, we really have no idea! It's by digging into the details of the details that we can get to QUESTIONS, not answers, questions that illuminate "a huge fraction of the Universe that no one's ever looked at before."
People. Our stories are exactly this. Parts of the Universe that no one's ever looked at before. We are explorers of endless frontiers, and knowing just how little we know is the best possible thing to propel us.
They, uh, go into a cool illustration of particle colliders next, and while I could extend my analysis to compare particle colliders to writing brains, I think that might be a little much.
But, what they end with is, "What should take away from all this is, we don't know what the rest of the elephant looks like… And you should be ready for some surprises."
And isn't that what all of our writing is, at the end of the day? Surprises. Not an elephant's tail. (Although…)
So any surprises for you guys lately? Mine continues to be the sudden contemporary project that popped into my head from that David Wax Museum song last week. It's been going gangbusters, and I just love it. Also, my MG stumbled into this really clever allusion/play on folklore that, even though *I* was the one who set it all up, I didn't see coming until it was on the page.
And. Back to find the elephant's tail of my thesis.
In physics, tensile strength is the amount of stress a material can withstand while being pulled or stretched; it is measured as force per unit area.
It has almost nothing to do with tense as we writers use the term.
And yet.
The use of tense in writing exerts a force on the area encompassed by the story: it allows the author to pull and stretch and pull some more on the elements in play, on the characters, on the situations contained within – pull them to the point of breaking and see how things play out. Tenses dictate the level of connectedness between reader and story; they direct how much meaning is taken from the words, and what kind.
Past tense gives you a distance that is at once safe and encompassing; you know, when a story is in the past tense, that there is an end in sight – even if it is a bad one, there is an end, and that kind of knowledge builds that much-sought after element: anticipation.
Present tense gives you an immediacy, a sense of closeness to the action at hand, and is inherently unsafe; there is no telling if the story will end, let alone how. This kind of stress gives the reader a different kind of anticipation, one more akin to anxiety that that awaiting of predicted satisfaction. Also valuable.
This came to mind as I was reading John Green's Paper Towns last night, and I was jarred (and then pleased) when the tense being used changed mid-chapter. If I have read other books which contained multiple tenses, I can't remember them, so in this case, I felt floodgates open: there is possibility here. Obvious possibility, I guess, but possibility. The way Green uses tenses pulls the reader in different directions, keeps us on our toes – there are times when the story seems safe, when there is the comfortable past-tense distance; then there are times when the unknown is made tangible by the yanking into present-tense.
I don't think anything I am writing now has the kind of presence that Paper Towns has, the kind of stressed story that would require shifts in perspective to test the tensile strength of the characters, but I like seeing the possibility.
What about you, ether? Got any tensile strength/writing anecdotes for me?
So I've seen a lot of writers just fall to pieces over Scrivener, and I get the impression that after that, most use Word. Scrivener – eh. I've tried to start using it, but it just seems like so much BUSY work to get a project established. Busy work that I am sure would pan out and more, but honestly, I am so very lazy. So very lazy, AND contrary. Getting my words out at all can be a challenge.
I won't even comment on Word.
Me? I use – and adore – Nisus Writer Express. Its laurel wreath is all made up of foreign language capabilities, which is why I was drawn to it in the first place, but it is a really dependable and totally quirky word pro for plain old English, too. I am not surprised that they offer their thesaurus for free download: it is BOMB. Simultaneously helpful and unbelievable, I haven't yet lost my amazement over the things it comes up with, even several years in. It is the genius that spat out the synonyms to tree listed at top.
Yes, it thinks ALL THOSE THINGS are more likely to be the word you might want to sub in for tree than oak, pine, aspen, wood, acacia, willow, or cedar. And if you type in a proper name and Nisus underlines it in red, and then you click learn, IT SUDDENLY KNOWS EVERYTHING.
Pushkin? Underlined in red. LEARN. Oh, you mean "Aleksandr Sergeyevich"? "Russia"? "Poet"?
Vladivostok? Underlined in red. LEARN. Oh, you mean "Russia"? "City"?
Dushanbe? Underlined in red. LEARN. Oh, you mean "capital of Tajikistan"? "Capital"? "Dyushambe"? "Tajikistan"? "STALINBAD"?
It does not, alas, no how to translate Voldemort into any real details. There are limits. All the same, I think that Nisus – or at least its thesaurus – has some crazy fun, wackadoo story going on inside its little binary brain, and every time I pause at words like tree to think where I want MY story to go next, I get jealous, and wish I could just jump inside the thesaurus and read what it has going on.
Because there IS NO SUCH THING AS A BUTTON TREE. Not in real life.
And that is NOT what I mean when I say "tree," Nisus.
In the past several years, I have become an academic cynic. I think the higher education model in use today is archaic, self-important, and unwieldy. In a world whose societies and economies have undergone change after change after change, academia has clung to the same basic framework and expectations it started with a handful of centuries ago, and it just isn't sustainable.
Yes, I'm finishing a Master's program. I hear the clanging of hypocrisy. To be fair, two years ago, this was my best option for income and health care. I don't think anyone will convince you that expertise in Russian Literature is really a necessary skill-set for the wide, wide world.
Anyway, to offset my growing resentment of the culture I have surrounded myself with, I started reading the Chronicle of Higher Education. I try to read news sites daily anyway, and I do like the idea of higher education, so I figured this was probably a good olive branch to offer to the abstract Lords of Academe that could care less about my opinion of them.
Again, anyway.
A political scientist from Duke published a writing article earlier in the week entitled "How to Write Less Badly" (under the category Do Your Job Better, no less). Easy bet I read it.
It was... good. It was good! But it was also so familiar. It's the kind of advice that floats around writing classes, around blogs, around twitter, around critique groups. You really should read the article for the elucidation of these tips, which are to the point and useful, but in short:
1. Writing is an exercise. 2. Set goals based on output, not input. 3. Find a voice; don't just "get published." (and and AND note the proper use of a semicolon, in a concise, perfectly lucid title sentence. So okay, yeah, there ARE things about academe that I do appreciate; i.e., snobby proper punctuation.) 4. Give yourself time. 5. Everyone's unwritten work is brilliant. 6. Pick a puzzle. 7. Write, then squeeze other things in. 8. Not all of your thoughts are profound. 9. Your most profound thoughts are often wrong. 10. Edit your work, over and over. (which includes the necessity of second readers/critiquers)
Familiar, right? I have just never seen it in the academic context, and that makes all the difference. Because, as much as I understand all of this innately, it still takes effort and the occasional consternation to apply it successfully to any of my WIPs – especially the second half of the list; points 8 and 9 are my very favorite, and also, the most difficult to lock down. Darlings? Darlings?
But here's the thing (and also, here is where I end up sounding like a jerk admitting it): I'm really a very skilled academic writer. I don't stress over it; I hardly even think about it. I just sit down and I do it. It's a set of conventions, a collection of expected terms and theories and modes of thought, of phrasing and arguing. It's a convention I TOTALLY GET. And so I just write it.
I am proud of what I write, on some level, but on another – I just don't really care. I see little point in contributing to human knowledge on the topics I write on for my classes, or even for my own research. I am interested in Siberia's construction of a national identity through literature that is separate from Russian identity, but ultimately, I really believe that the important thing being established by my education is my education. My brain is becoming faster, smarter, more likely to make more complicated connections. I feel more useful to greater society because I believe education makes me a better thinker, and – therefore – a better doer. I am a better writer of fiction because of of my higher ed experience, but more because I think better ALL THE TIME, in response to any piece of information from anywhere.
The difference is that I DON'T CARE. With academic writing, I am detached and a little wry, and I accept that I am working within conventions. This lets me have complete faith in myself, and I get the work done that much faster, and that much better for it.
So seeing common writing tips in a new context, one in which I don't really need to be reminded of said tips, really illumines the ways in which they can be even more useful in my personal writing. And that is both helpful, and humbling.
Amazing that a political scientist got me to see it; maybe academe isn't horribly useless quite yet.
With both the end of the regular school term and my comprehensive literature exam in less than two weeks, I am going (and have been) social networking dark, but in the absence, I leave you with this short(ish) TED talk on the future of learning, which answers the question: if, in an age of a knowledge surplus, schools are no longer the place students have to go to find said knowledge, what is the purpose of going?
The idea of allowing students to make mistakes is far-reaching, and incredibly important in the writing process: it is what the first draft (or second or third) is for. You do it once to find out how things work; you do it again to make those things work well.
That is rare. I'm not a poetry kind of girl. I mean, I don't hate it – I just don't seek it out. I'm not good at sitting with something brief and complex and mulling it over. Give me bricks of prose, that's what I want.
But today I ended up reading Ally Condie's Matched, which revolved around both the importance of poetry AND the importance of memorization and internalization. I also ended up discussing several canon Russian poems about St. Petersburg, one of which just begs to be memorized and recited. And then I remembered snatches of t.s. eliot, and snatches of Pushkin, and there I was: inside a poetry day.
Now Russia – Russia asks something different of its literate public than does America. Poetry in Russia is the be all and end all of creative expression. Poetry is king, as is rote memorization.
Bakhtin, who I have mentioned before, saw the world in binaries, and one of the binaries he focused most heavily on was of monologic versus dialogic reading.
The first is what the Russian education system is predicated on: that the text is king, and there is only one interpretation valid – nothing is read between the lines. This is a system that values rote memorization, and dramatic recitation. Studying Russian actually involves a dedicated course on intonation patterns, and a person can "read poetry" as an artistic, creative hobby. No joke.
The American system is not like this. Ours is more dialogic, it is a conversation with the text – both in poetry and in prose. Interpretation does not depend so much on the author's intention as it does on the reader's state of mind, and does not need to be universal. We are rarely asked to memorize anything.
This is a shame, I think. There is a lot to be said for memorization, even if we still allow for broad interpretation. Because you know what memorization gets you? A shorthand for cultural knowledge, a shorthand that lets you say a hundred more things than you are actually saying, that lets you make jokes and draw conclusions and paint pictures without having to lift a finger.
It is the ultimate show vs. tell, and would be even stronger in American literature – YA or not – if we had a more solid foundation for rote memorization in school.
I mean, just look!
It gets you Catherine Tate and David Tennant hamming it up for charity:
And it gets you adorable three-year olds reciting Billy Collins and making you swoon:
And it gets you dystopian societies wrapped up in pretty green silk dresses and carefully measured language, societies that can be dismantled by the single subversive act of memorizing and internalizing a long-forgotten poem.
In fact, it's almost making want to add eliot as an epigraph to my own WIP. Almost.
So, earlier this week, in the run-up to the Super Bowl, NPR.org ran a story on the "Epoch of Peripheralism" that we live in. With a headlining picture of Justin Bieber and Ozzy Osbourne in (what look like) Tron suits, they brought to the fore the idea that in an environment of social media and instant gratification, the importance of the Event has been lost:
"More and more it seems that we are caught up not so much in the event itself – the football game or the president's speech – but in the events around the event. The sideshows. The marginalia. We focus on the peripherals: the sprinkles, not the ice cream; the moons, not Saturn; the sauces, not the barbecue. In Shakespeare's day, the play was the thing. Today the play, it seems, it just one of the things."
They continue the story with a discussion of the halftime shows and commercials and players' personal stories at the Super Bowl, on how the future of big movies might like more in 90 second trailers than 100 minute films, and how Presidential speeches have value not in their content, but in the peripheral speeches surrounding them.
I recognize this feeling; I am not innocent of preferring the memory of a long-awaited concert to the concert itself (I even find myself bored in the middle of Events I've been anticipating, even when I recognize that I am enjoying it). With television, I like reading the spoiler news before shows, and I half-ruined the twist to Rory's fate in Doctor Who Season 5 by flipping through the IMDb cast listings ahead of time.
The more I get into the online culture of YA literature, both from a writing and a reading perspective, the more I wonder how this bleeds into the culture. I haven't been on board with the fandom of a major series DURING its release (HP I anticipated privately, or in small groups of friends; Hunger Games was all released before I got to the first one), but as I have been watching 2011 debuts appear, and have seen the hype surrounding some of them, I have started to think about how they fit into the Epoch of Peripherals.
Are readers more interested in the ARC contests, in the cover unveilings, in the pre-released snippets and author interviews than they are in the eventual product? That is, after all, the trajectory NPR has noticed in football and film, and those events are not rare in the YA (and lit in general) online world. It could be the case.
But I don't think so.
I don't think so, because there is something about reading, about the PROCESS and the TIME and the joy of immersing one's self in a new world that separates the experience of reading from the experience of any other type of Event, and no matter how much outside, peripheral stuff crops up in the age of social networking and obsession of immediacy, that can only ADD to the private experience of enjoying a story.
Because in all the reviews of yet-to-be-released covers, in all the early reviews, in all the author interviews, the result from the internet hive is always the same: Yes, but when can we READ the BOOK?
Because that's the thing: Shakespeare's play is still the thing. Everything else is just sprinkles.
Way to be, books. I knew I loved you for a reason.
Look. World building takes time. Good world building, exponentially so.
To say that I have been obsessing over this lately would be an understatement, as my last eureka! moment regarding the MS I was actively querying was that the world I thought I had a handle on (I have charts! and graphs! and color-coded notecards! and MAPS!) was not actually complete. Also that I have to restructure the first ten chapters and remove an entire sub-plot, but that's a different matter.
So, yeah, I've been obsessed with world building. And about the time I really do not want to admit it is going to take before I am satisfied enough to start querying again. I am feeling not unlike this:
… only I already have a golden goose, so at least I don't have *that* to complain about.
(Fun fact: I looked up Veruca Salt in Google images, and the dozenth or so picture was one that I took during our Wonka Hike at Hometown Europe in 2009, that I had put on that year's Village Page! Yes, I am pretty much famous)
So obviously, owing to the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon*, the two for-fun books I managed to get through last week were both epic fantasies (tick) with deep mythologies (double tick) that had to introduce remarkably enormous worlds in the span of 350ish pages. This fact was made all the more obvious as one of the books pulled the world building off with ease, while the other was so patronizingly dull that I groaned out loud probably two dozen times.
So of course I wanted to compare them.
[Orson Scott Card, Finnikin of the Rock, and a Damn Interesting follow-up to that asterisk after the jump]
