Point well-taken. I shouldn’t have called Rahman a bullshit artist. An artist shows accomplishments that deserve some measure of our respect and admiration. Rahman can claim no such accomplishments and even says as much himself. For contrast, think of Henry Gondorff, the character played by Paul Newman in The Sting. Gondorff was a con artist of the first water. However much we might disapprove of him morally, his artistry gets our respect and admiration. As for bullshitting, that is a more complex business. In his insightful little book On Bullshit, Harry G. Frankfurt peels back the layers to expose some of the subtleties of bullshitting and bullshitters. Frankfurt, a professor emeritus of philosophy at Princeton University, knows a thing or two about pulling a concept to pieces and discovering its contents. He notes that all forms of bullshitting employ deception in one way or another, but it is a subtle kind of deception that falls “short of lying”: That’s Rahman, all right. But what sort of laxity is it? Frankfurt recalls an anecdote told by Fania Pascal, who knew Ludwig Wittgenstein at Cambridge during the 1930s: Why was Wittgenstein disgusted by this remark? Because, Frankfurt says, Pascal wasn’t just describing something that she didn’t know to be true, she wasn’t even trying to get things right. He later adds that “the essence of bullshit is not that it is false but that it is phony.” But here we must be careful. To say that something is phony is not to say it is inferior. A counterfeit bill can look as good as the real thing. Just ask Henry Gondorff. Rahman is faking things, a fact that hasn’t escaped the notice of many in this thread. He is no bullshit artist, and I shouldn’t have called him one. He’s just a plain bullshitter.
Hi, M.J. welcome to the group! I wish everyone wouldn't have gotten their hackles up as this is actually an interesting conversation - if it can be had without getting huffy about it. I found your work on Amazon. It's not bad but it needs work - as does mine and a lot of people on here. It's a little purple and needs to be pulled together better. I'll look forward to you posting a piece up when you're allowed. I'm notorious for doing what your doing. Examining parts and forgetting about the whole. But I'm not sure if that's the worse problem a writer can have - sometimes, I think that focusing on the whole and missing the parts can be the worse.
ditto that! it's always best to become known and establish some positive 'site cred' before presuming to tell those who've preceded you how to practice their craft...
One other comment, if I may - it is unfortunate that the matter of @M.J.Rahman not being published was brought up in such a confrontational manner, because I would like to point out something MJ should consider. The fact that his work has not been published suggests one of three possible explanations: 1) the conclusions of your analysis are not correct; 2) the conclusions are correct but you did not abide by them in your writing; or 3) the conclusions are correct, your writing was wholly consistent with them, but they are not wholly or exclusively relevant to the craft of writing publishable work and hence allow for other weaknesses to creep into the writing.
Of 5) Publishers fully recognize the work of a genius, but don't want to publish it because it won't make money for them. They want Stephenie Meyer and Dan Brown, not James Joyce and Vladimir Nabokov.
Unfortunately, clinging to the "work of genius" scenarios keeps a lot of novice writers from advancing beyond that stage.
It is a scientific fact (that I just pulled out of my ass - don't ask me to back this up with, you know, actual data or anything) that only 0.01% of people who think they're geniuses really are geniuses. 99.99% of self-styled "geniuses" are delusional.
I took an Internet IQ test that said I was pretty smart. I'm sure those things are accurate - it said so on the test.
So I really enjoyed reading the responses to the last thread I started about how much you should write for yourself and how much you should write for an audience, and got loads of good advice, so I thought I'd post a follow up discussion! I'm working on my first short at the moment which I plan on posting soon (hoping for lots of delicious criticism), something I noticed is that when I write purely, before I've done any re-reading and editing, I have a tendency towards a lot of repetition, lots of "He heard, He saw, He went.", I'm new to writing so to an extent I'm sure this is just a bad habit, but I am also musician, and I do find the bounce of sentences starting on the same words appealing, like I'm building a pulse and tempo to the peace, which means I'm in the dilemma of how much of this is bad writing, and how much of it is my style? How many of you adhere formal rules of writing, and how many break them. Do any of you have any preferred writing styles or techniques that could be considered bad writing?
I also have a lot of the 'he heard, he saw' etc. too and I think a lot of (amateur)writers do. I try to be creative when it comes to having different kinds of sentences so that it doesn't get repetitive, but it's really hard. Even though I'm aware that some things are considered bad, once in a while I will still use them. I used to do a lot of comma splices, for example. And I didn't understand why people hated it so much. Though I've become more aware of it now. I think my writing is best when I don't think too much about the rules (but not forgetting them, ofc.)
I avoid filtering (he heard, he saw, etc) and also avoid repetitive sentence structure. If I wanted repetition I'd listen to club anthems rather than read a book, and there's a reason I don't listen to club anthems. I adhere to common writing 'rules' unless I have a really good reason not to, in which to I have no qualms about doing it. I use sentence fragments, for example. Writing has to be exceptional for me to ignore SPAG errors or gimmicks like deliberate repetition. I don't count on my writing as being exceptional, so I try to make it error-free and gimmick-free.
Accepted, aye, you can't beat a bit of free willy. Plenty (rashes of odd punctation, weird grammar, hidden meter, and deliberate mucking about with tense) which, without help, will see my bigger stories untaken up (please give me correct word for untaken). I've become quite polar with my output since. Paying lots of attention to some of the better writers on here—now more self aware. I still do the selfish stuff for the sheer enjoyment of it. Along with little 'ol me there's only a niche group who enjoy it—I'll likely never submit it for publication—just blog and forget. Then there's the writing (which feels more like work) where I try my best to behave and apply proper process from draft to final manuscript. I engage with others on this to point out errors, voice opinion, and cover blind spots.
Think it relies on the genre you are writing in. Also in how light and fluffy, or intense and gritty you want to make it. As well as your style and how well you manage the story overall. Voice is also another key factor to consider, as you don't want to come off as too bland or too flowery (purple prose). Only one way to find out, is to write the story, edit it to the best of your ability, and then get some feedback on it. Good Luck.
Yeah I used to have a real gimmick problem when I wrote short horror stories when I was younger, I got into this really bad habit of giving everything I wrote a 'concept' rather than just focussing on the stories themselves, which naturally was a bad move as I began to run out of concept ideas and things got increasingly gimmicky. I guess this stuff is on my mind cause I few of my favourite authors have their own very distinctive styles. But I also remember reading Never Let Me Go and being really impressed in how subtle the writing felt, and how the beauty of the book just emerged from the narrative and characters and nothing more.
That's the kind of writing I like - where the author is invisible. Where I forget I'm reading a book, and am living the story in my head. It's also my goal as a writer. Other writers use stories as a showcase for their prose. There's an audience for that, too, though I'm not sure how large it is.
I think you need to just let yourself write when you're writing. That means that when you have just a blank page in front of you with a story in your head to get out; that's what I'd call writing in this context. I think editing is something else and needs a different approach; editing to mean reading back something as you work on it. I think that when you are just placing the words on the page you need to give yourself the freedom to just it come out how it comes out; you need to not be too critical and slow yourself down worrying if this is wonderfully polished; you need to just get the words that make the story down on the page even if it's not great. I think writing needs to be about the story, with the space to explore and try things and write it however feels more engaging and more affecting to you. And if you're trying to do that you need not to be concerned about perfection. When you are exploring and experimenting a good chunk of it is just going to be shit. I too have a habit of repeating myself; not so much in individual words (I won't use 'said' in a story just as a point of principle which helps) but in terms of getting stuck going around in circles in a scene. It'll be because it's a story point of a conversation that I'm enjoying writing and just making things bounce off each other but don't quite know where it's going as such. And when that happens I just let myself swirl around and keep trying to find what I'm looking for until it hits me like a tonne of bricks. That makes for a lot of bullshit. A lot. But that's ok. Because I'm going to edit anyway. I'm going to cut a lot out of my work. I've said elsewhere that I think the goal for writing, in a technical sense, is that it's good eventually. Your prose doesn't need to be good right now; it just has to be good by the time it reaches the reader. You can spend forever fixing it, polishing it, cutting it down so it's lean and focused and elegant, so it doesn't waste a single word, just communicates exactly what you want exactly how you want it. But that comes by iterating, by craft. Writing is something that is the art; it's about weaving narrative in a lucid, flowing way that you can't get the same way if you are stopping every three minutes to argue with yourself that mellifluous is a better word than dulcet. You need to be there in the scene with the characters and writing what you see happening, even if that means writing really ragged sentences. In most creative things there's rough work and theirs detail work and the two are totally different. You start out cutting wood to shape with a saw, then you sand it to get it perfect. You start out with a big fat paint brush and you finish up with a teeny tiny one. Same with writing. You need to start out by finding the rough shape of what you want, then you start creating the real details that you want to see in it. You can work a log into a key ring with nothing but a nail file, but that's not a sensible way to work. So; start out with finding the rough shape; just get the story on the page. Then worry about making it pretty later. As long as the finished product is good then it doesn't matter if it sucks to begin with. It's so much easier to have something to work on and sometimes you just have to accept that your first pass won't be the best anyway. That's fine. You'll get there. Trust yourself that you can and just keep writing.
Writing is an Artistic Craft; key word being craft. After one learns 'their craft' they can start putting restrictions and rules on their own writing. A basic example for this would be 'All my monsters are an Allegory for something.' Once you developed your own boundaries then you can start creating art. Art comes from understanding craft, not the other way around. -OJB.
That's certainly the very traditional view of art. But I actually think that such discussions aren't really talking about the process of writing (or drawing or whatever) as such, they are more about the high vs low art discussion. Stay with me on this. The high art tradition is very much rooted in the things that have come before and it's about creating beautiful, perfect artistic works. And that's why they emphasize studying what has come before you, because you are striving for perfection, for the very highest in that field of achievement. You should be aiming to be Beethoven, even if you don't stand a chance of being as good as him, so you need to know what he did, the techniques he used. You need to appreciate those previous works in both a technical and an aesthetic sense, even if you can't stand them. You get taught what good means. Even for those who really don't rate the old masters, you are supposed to show a respect for them, for the tradition that you are a part of. It's the reason why you are supposed to write your music on staves which is genuinely referred to by some as 'the cult of the written note' (an example of this is where music being submitted to awards panels or in exams must be submitted as written music not as a recorded performance). High art is traditional and it's about perfection. Only the very greatest classical musicians in the world can even suggest that this piece might be better with just a slight pause here or a tiny slur there, everyone else is supposed to just perfectly reproduce the music they are given. Now, this doesn't make high art bad or good particularly; that's just the way it is. It's a culture as much as it is an art form. But it's not the only art. Low art, in this context to broadly mean popular art is not about that. It's more improvisational and often completely ignorant of what came before it. If the creator does know about the old music their response is normally to react sharply against it, to make something new. And as a result low art is more expressive and more emotional. It cares about communicating it's emotions rather than working to a structure; all the structure can be cut away as long as it helps to get the point across. No-one was sitting in a class room listening to Bach to create punk. I think that a lot of the original punks would say quite directly that their craft is just a tool for their art, assuming they were pretentious enough to put it that way. More likely they'd say that what they care about is saying fuck you as loudly as they could and it didn't matter that they were shit awful musicians; putting up the middle finger was vastly more important. The art came first to them I think, the emotion, the message. The craft was a strictly optional extra and they didn't need to know that any more chords even existed. And that doesn't make the low art any better particularly. But it's a different approach to art. It doesn't care about what came before, it only cares about being itself. Anything not about itself is irrelevant. So what do I think? Well, I'm a metal head not a punk, both in the sense of the metaphor and in reality. Craft does matter to me; if you've ever tried to learn Slipknot or Fear Factor songs then you'll know that, what sounds like a cacophony is very very tightly controlled. The craft matters, you have to be good. But the art matters more, the emotionality matters more to me than craft alone. And that's exactly what I think about writing. I think that the emotion matters more; having a story that will reach out and touch people is much much more important than being able to write glimmering prose. And that glimmering prose doesn't matter even slightly to me if the story doesn't speak to me on an emotional level. You can be a master of story telling and character but the core of the story needs to speak to me in a way that the words themselves can't. If the events and the reactions aren't ones I can feel in my gut then it won't matter how well crafted it is. Art and craft both matter. But to me the craft must serve the art. The art is what turns words into a story. Words don't give you a visceral reaction. And without that, they aren't worth writing. Whatever you write you should craft it well. But I think the art has to lead you.
No. Emotional factors do not = Art. You could argue that Emotional drive + craft = Art, and I would agree with this. I am not arguing devoid your work of emotional content or drive (far from it), what I am arguing is that craft gives you the tools to turn something only matters to you, the writer, into something that will matter for people, the audience. This is why the whole Write for myself vs. Write for others debate is retarded. The themes, the subtext, the tone, and emotional weight your story has will always be you. No Craft book out there will tell you what these things need to be. What they will tell you is how to implement them into your story (craft) in order for your ideas and thoughts to reach an Audience. Since you brought Music into this, did you know that the Lead singer of Disturbed (A heavy metal band) has his roots in Classical Music? He gave a video interview on how his Classical training has enabled him to reach new heights that not even he thought was possible; the main point being was he was glad he took the time to learn the basics of his craft (singing). I understand you are not arguing against the idea of Craft, but my point is that Art is when emotion is expressed through craft. Yes, the emotion comes first, but the craft is what helps the reader remember your ideas long after you have died.
Punk music is not very well crafted though. Maybe there's a great message, but it generally sounds pretty shitty, musically.
That's definitely one way of looking at it. To me the emotional core of a piece is what makes it art. Without it you aren't making art, you're making something else. That doesn't mean that art doesn't also need craft to it. In fact I agree that art needs to be crafted too, but my bar for craft is somewhat lower. Great art doesn't have to be greatly crafted. And I firmly believe that craft without emotion cannot be art. No tears for author and all that. The tears do matter and they infuse themselves into the writing in a way that no craft ever can. In fact, they ask you to resist craft; to write to emotional truth even when that makes for ugly, disjointed writing. Really my point was that man cannot live by craft alone; that craft exists to enable an idea, a story, a set of characters; to allow you to create what you want. Your previous post sounded a lot like you were saying that craft is what makes things art, and that studying craft is what makes for great art and I absolutely take issue with that. I very strongly reject the idea that to write at all you need to go and buy books about writing and go on courses to study writing and so forth; that without your craft Yes, I did know that a reasonable number of metal musicians are classically trained. But there are vastly more that don't know a thing about music theory and who can't read music. And that's interesting, isn't it? Because the classically trained ones aren't obviously better musicians. Jimi Hendrix wasn't classically trained, while Prince was. Randy Rhoads was classically trained but his Ozzy replacements Jake E Lee and Zakk Wylde definitely weren't. I seem to remember there's a guy from a black metal band who has written some concertos. But there's plenty more people who are much more well known who never learned squat about music. If the craft mattered to the art then you'd think that classic training would lead you towards great success. And this is one of the reasons why I really don't think that studying craft matters to your work.
