NaNoWriMo 2013

[JohannaK]

I remember him talking about it in #nes.

 

[Evie]

Thinking about it, 1667 words isn't a lot. I mean I could do that in half an hour if I really wanted to.

But it's of course the inner editor and all those thoughts inside the head that get in the way.

Yeah. The better you get at shutting those off, the easier writing get.

And planning. Planning extensively helps.

Still don't know how the people who do 50K in one day do it, tho.

 

[cybrxkhan]

Yeah. The better you get at shutting those off, the easier writing get.

And planning. Planning extensively helps.

Still don't know how the people who do 50K in one day do it, tho.

Yeah, planning is important for quite a number of people, myself included. There's always been the debate between writers on whether you should just be free and write whatever comes to mind or whether you should plan things out, and I've always found myself supporting the latter position. Of course some people do fine with the former, but I'd be completely lost without my notes and meticulous calculations and all that. I mean, ignoring all the conworlding material for many of my settings, I still probably have hundreds and hundreds of pages of notes - some typed, some handwritten - for my stories since Middle School. And frankly though there are some drawbacks to such an approach, I find it more helpful than harmful at the end of the day.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Yeah. The better you get at shutting those off, the easier writing get.

And planning. Planning extensively helps.

Still don't know how the people who do 50K in one day do it, tho.

I think it's called "cheating."

Yeah, planning is important for quite a number of people, myself included. There's always been the debate between writers on whether you should just be free and write whatever comes to mind or whether you should plan things out, and I've always found myself supporting the latter position. Of course some people do fine with the former, but I'd be completely lost without my notes and meticulous calculations and all that. I mean, ignoring all the conworlding material for many of my settings, I still probably have hundreds and hundreds of pages of notes - some typed, some handwritten - for my stories since Middle School. And frankly though there are some drawbacks to such an approach, I find it more helpful than harmful at the end of the day.

Look at it this way - some day you could be a famous author whose work is beloved by millions of fans, and 20 years after your death someone will find your notes and the fan community will split into factions, each arguing about what the notes really mean - or if they're authentic in the first place.

(it happened to Frank Herbert...)

 

[cybrxkhan]

Look at it this way - some day you could be a famous author whose work is beloved by millions of fans, and 20 years after your death someone will find your notes and the fan community will split into factions, each arguing about what the notes really mean - or if they're authentic in the first place.

(it happened to Frank Herbert...)

You know, one of the reasons I wanted to be a writer in the first place was because I wanted to be like Shakespeare or Mark Twain. Not because of the fame, but because I wanted to torture high school kids who would have to analyze all my writing and all that. For some reason I think it's a sentiment Mark Twain would understand.

But yeah, fans (and academics involved) will argue about anything. They'll even argue with the creator of the work if they want to.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

That's the fun (and sometimes aggravation) of finding your favorite authors on the internet. I've had the pleasure of corresponding with Alan Dean Foster, Robert Silverberg, C.J. Cherryh, Mercedes Lackey, and several Star Trek pro authors (to differentiate them from the fanfic authors).

I've had the displeasure of corresponding with Kevin J. Anderson and a couple of other Star Trek pro authors who are rude, arrogant jerks (which is about the politest thing I have to say about them).

 

[Evie]

No, I mean I know people who get to 50K in one day without cheating. One of the WriMo in my Ottawa writing group did it, though usually she's more in the 2-3 days range. (I have yet to get to that level, my personal best is still 5 days)

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Is the story coherent?

 

[Evie]

I,ve never read them, but I'm led to believe they are.

But honestly? I believe her. She has near superhuman (from my perspective) focus.

The one time she got to 50K on Day 1 basically involved her sitting down in front of her computer at midnight, having her roommate bring her food, and only getting up for potty breaks. 20 hours straight of writing later, she was at the 50K mark (and then slept away the next few days, I understand).

When you put it that way, it's not the typing speed that's so phenomenal (2.5K words/hour is actually not that far outside the norm - I can easily top that while staying coherent, and I'm not that far above average on pure typing speed). What stand out is the phenomenal dedication to do a straight 20 hours run. I'd get distracted long before.

 

[Luckymoose]

I average 1,000 an hour when I'm not rushing. I've done sprints of 1,500 in half an hour, so if I had by some miracle the stamina to do that for 20 hours...

I don't want to.

 

[JohannaK]

They'll even argue with the creator of the work if they want to.

And they'll be right to do so! recently I wrote a short fanfic for a contest in this Spanish brony forum. I intended it to be so intensely dramatic over such a tiny action, one so condensed, that it was taken as a parody and deemed brilliantly hilarious.

The point is, the author sometimes manages to convey an unintended meaning which sometimes takes predominance over the intended one.

 

[Evie]

But that meaning is only in the eye of the beholder (that is, it's there because the story has applicability to a situation that interests you), and that's what many Death of the Author proponent forget.

 

[cybrxkhan]

Yeah, I don't think it's a bad idea other people find out things the author didn't intend - that's good! - but I am suspicious when they think the author's perspective is completely irrelevant or at best nothing remarkable. Whether they like it or not, the author did create the work, and understands it in a way no one else can - now, certainly, they may not understand it completely, or understand it from all perspectives, but still.

The way I see it, the work is like the children and the author a parent. Other people might notice things about the kids the parent doesn't, but generally speaking the parents will most likely still know their kid best.

 

[Luckymoose]

My work is about what I say it's about. No hipster art major is going to tell me what I meant by this or that.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

My work is about what I say it's about. No hipster art major is going to tell me what I meant by this or that.

OMG - have we been graced by the presence of Harlan Ellison?

 

[Evie]

Mind, when the profs and art major base their interpretation on a wrong interpretation of what's actually written...

I've had a French teacher who made us read a novel once. There was a girl covered in bandages, who was described as moving in the novel.

Prof: "Now that is obviously a demonstration of the mental state of the character, the girl is dead but he needs to think she's moving"

Then the author came to school, and one of the student asked him whether the girl was alive

Author: "Well, she's moving isn,t she? What else could she be? Of course she's alive."

 

[Takhisis]

My work is about what I say it's about. No hipster art major is going to tell me what I meant by this or that.

Agreed.

 

[Angst]

You know, one of the reasons I wanted to be a writer in the first place was because I wanted to be like Shakespeare or Mark Twain. Not because of the fame, but because I wanted to torture high school kids who would have to analyze all my writing and all that. For some reason I think it's a sentiment Mark Twain would understand.

That's the exact reason why I want to write.

And fwiw, re: death of the author: Misinterpretation is more of an inherent consequence of writing than a sad sometimes-side-effect. I myself find it amusing and seriously hope to be read wrong if I get something out beyond my published poetry - the interpretation has already between slightly off and abysmally wrong by the people who cared to, so it's not difficult imagining greater works to be read wrong as well.

The scholars that treat your published works with analysis have probably faced something much tougher in their earlier years, and I can assure you it's difficult to realize an author's style, especially in regards to her use of metaphors. Misinterpretation is to me part of the delight of reading.

And about the anecdote a bandaged girl: A very significant part of studying art in a class hopefully isn't to be accurate with your analyses, but to learn to discern different emphasized details from another, and gain the tools to properly analyze it if you ever, you know, pass the class and get a real position to analyze it from. It's too bad the teacher got it wrong of course, but analysis is a really, really complex process if you want to do it right with the right tools.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

... analysis is a really, really complex process if you want to do it right with the right tools.

I had the same English teacher all through high school, and we did a great deal of "poetry interpretation" and analysis of short stories, novels, plays, essays...

One exercise I have never forgotten. There's a poem called The Horses, by Edwin Muir

Barely a twelvemonth after
The seven days war that put the world to sleep,
Late in the evening the strange horses came.
By then we had made our covenant with silence,
But in the first few days it was so still
We listened to our breathing and were afraid.
On the second day
The radios failed; we turned the knobs; no answer.
On the third day a warship passed us, heading north,
Dead bodies piled on the deck. On the sixth day
A plane plunged over us into the sea. Thereafter
Nothing. The radios dumb;
And still they stand in corners of our kitchens,
And stand, perhaps, turned on, in a million rooms
All over the world. But now if they should speak,
If on a sudden they should speak again,
If on the stroke of noon a voice should speak,
We would not listen, we would not let it bring
That old bad world that swallowed its children quick
At one great gulp. We would not have it again.
Sometimes we think of the nations lying asleep,
Curled blindly in impenetrable sorrow,
And then the thought confounds us with its strangeness.
The tractors lie about our fields; at evening
They look like dank sea-monsters couched and waiting.
We leave them where they are and let them rust:
'They'll molder away and be like other loam.'
We make our oxen drag our rusty plows,
Long laid aside. We have gone back
Far past our fathers' land.
And then, that evening
Late in the summer the strange horses came.
We heard a distant tapping on the road,
A deepening drumming; it stopped, went on again
And at the corner changed to hollow thunder.
We saw the heads
Like a wild wave charging and were afraid.
We had sold our horses in our fathers' time
To buy new tractors. Now they were strange to us
As fabulous steeds set on an ancient shield.
Or illustrations in a book of knights.
We did not dare go near them. Yet they waited,
Stubborn and shy, as if they had been sent
By an old command to find our whereabouts
And that long-lost archaic companionship.
In the first moment we had never a thought
That they were creatures to be owned and used.
Among them were some half a dozen colts
Dropped in some wilderness of the broken world,
Yet new as if they had come from their own Eden.
Since then they have pulled our plows and borne our loads
But that free servitude still can pierce our hearts.
Our life is changed; their coming our beginning.

We had to split up into groups of 4 and analyze and interpret this poem. The other 3 in my group twisted themselves into mental pretzels, trying to find the religious angles in this poem, saying the horses represented soldiers returning from war, and so on. I told them that was silly - the horses were horses. And when they complained about the "seven days war that put the world to sleep" not making any sense, I told them it referred to World War III.

"Don't be silly," they said. "We haven't had a third World War...."

"... yet," I told them.

It was gratifying when the teacher came around to listen to our discussion and told the others that I was right!

And who says it doesn't pay to read post-apocalypse fiction?

 

[Evie]

On the bandaged girl incident - the funny part was that he actually pretty much said people who said the girl was alive in their paper/reports/exams (I forget. That was 14 years ago) would be marked down for not accepting the obvious point.