But I argued above that technical skills are not solely created by those specific mediums. For example, maybe it's because I am more of a visual base. But I think there are fundamental structures like grammar or spelling that should remain grounded in practice. But things like Style, and the way something is written shouldn't follow adherently to a strict code. There are a few novels that are not coming to the top of my head that come to mind. One of them was about mental health and as the character goes more psycho the more weirdly the paragraphs are written. I feel like its implied that there is only one way to write a book. A Camera shot speaks like words. The placement of objects speaks like words. I don't think that a musician or a writer gets one skill from one medium, but adapts and modernizes different mediums to influence their work. A musician isn't just a musician, but a music video speaks like a film. When I read novels or words I hear sounds, or I see the words like moving through the lens of a camera. I feel like Technical Skills only count for a small portion of Technical Experimentation.
There's plenty of musicians who don't really listen to music. Sure, there's some who do. But there's plenty who don't. It's because they focus hard on being themselves when they perform and when they record and many of them really just want to chill out once they get off stage. I remember when I was younger I was a big disappointed to see that outside of their music the guys from Metallica are actually really boring. Lars collects really horrible paintings, Kirk just sits on his ranch and is zen. And I'm sure they listen to music some amount, but they aren't the heavy metal gods that I always hoped. They don't know much about modern music, certainly not the kind of in-depth knowledge that most fans have. Because it's different looking out. It's the same for lots of people. Few game developers are actually good at the games they design. They almost always lose to the actual gamers. Because when game designers get off the clock the last thing they want to do is sit down and play games. It's work to make a game and you relate to it in a different way. Mostly you're trying to see if things actually function properly which isn't a whole lot of fun. It's the same reason why gynecologists typically don't have a great sex life. When you get home after a long day at the office the last thing you want to see is... Thing is that writing and reading aren't opposites. They are distinct things. I think for a lot of us the things that make writing engaging are what make reading dull; we want to tell our stories not read someone else's. The same way that musicians want to play their music and game designers want to make their game. And once you've seen how the sausage is made of course it makes you appreciate the finished product rather less. I agree that it can be a good thing to know what else is out there and what else is happening. It can help you stay ahead and learn from the mistakes of others. But equally knowing what else is out there can make you derivative. It's very easy to slip into emulating the things we like instead of trying to make our own things. If people feel reading helps them in whatever way, or they just enjoy it, then by all means they should. But I don't think it really effects your writing. Most music fans couldn't write a tune to save their lives. They know what they like in a tune. They know what mistakes bad bands are making. They can tell you that this track has no drive, no groove, the lyrics are pedestrian. But you only learn to write music by writing it. Even knowing exactly what you think a song should be you have to start from scratch and make all the mistakes yourself.
As long as you educate yourself you don't have to be a reader. You need to understand style, language, story and characters, and you need to be creative, even in technical or non fiction, but you don't have to be a reader. You do have to be able to read of coarse, and you need to have read, even a little. But it doesn't need to be a passion. Engineers in F1 do not drive the cars. They can drive normal cars, but it's their education, training and understanding of complex engineering that allows them to build and design race cars. Then they get feedback from drivers to make changes, fix problems, and address issues. Inversely, the drivers are not engineers. They understand engineering so they can provide useful input, but they are not able to design and build the cars. The writer / reader relationship is the same. Writers can be readers but, with a good education and instincts, and by listening to feedback, writers don't have to be readers. And, from my experience so far, many readers who think they can write, can't. And a lot of writing, even published, is shit.
Over the last twenties years of being in the film industry I've met plenty of film directors, producers, and actors who either don't watch many, or for some any, films. Their passion is to make them. Others are far more interested in theater or, strangely, music. Many directors I've met are more passionate about music than they are film, probably because it's an escape from their work, which is draining. They're also big readers. Most of the time when working on film you don't want to be distracted by what other people do. You need to focus. And also, honestly, you get sick of movies and want something else. That's why so many find their next film in a book, not on the screen. The problem is not the creatives who don't consume the product, it's the people who enjoy watching films or reading books thinking that because that's their passion, they can make movies or write books. It doesn't work that way.
I have had the same problem at times, and the main reason is because of a slight ADD issue in my brain. I also discovered that I hadn't found an author yet that I truly enjoyed, nor a book that I cared about reading. I'm not saying you have ADD, but it's always worth checking into, according to many professional opinions, even people that behave and believe they are "normal" should still be screened for minor, or even major, hidden disorders. Finding a book I enjoyed fixed the problem for the most part, I still have trouble picking it up to read, but at the same time when I do start reading I have trouble putting it down. This is just my experience. I have been told, and I strongly believe, that reading is essential to writing. It's up there with the top things that a writer should do to improve their skill. Reading goes hand in hand with writing, and I realized I wrote a lot better once I started reading. It gave me more confidence (also made me judge myself even more, but that's a different issue).
Mild ADD buddies unite. Lol. That's one of the reasons I can't sit down and watch TV. I use to be a big reader when I was a kid mainly because I was a alone and bullied a lot. But that meant I have experienced a lot of things.
I do jest a bit, but there's something to be said for learning to deal with how awful life is at a young age. Particularly learning that sometimes people are just cunts and will break the rules and will be mean to you just because they can regardless of what you do. There's something valuable in learning that you don't want those bastards to be your friends and judging yourself on your own terms not on those of others. Which is not to say that I support bullying, m'lord (and you can't prove his death was anything to do with me!) I'm just saying that teaching kids that the world is super nice and they are super special is way worse than letting them get a bit Lord Of The Flies from time to time.
I agree. I have always told people that kind of positive thinking really invalidates how anyone feels. Bullied or not. I don't ever feel the need to invalidate what someone feels by telling them to look at the bright side of things. Things will happen. Shitty, Terrible awful things. When you're a kid and an adult. So its better to acknowledge it rather than sweep it under a rug and not deal with it.
Yes, exactly. Just seeing the world for what it really is is a really important part of growing up. Just being put in the position of having to deal with something that's not fair and learning that, contrary to what you've been taught, the world isn't fair; that's something that you need to accept and learn to cope with because that's something you're going to see your whole adult life. And wrapping kids up in cotton wool and assuring them that things are fair doesn't help them in the long run. Seeing someone be mean and not get punished is an object lesson in adulthood; it teaches you that you have to look out for yourself, because no-one else cares that much about doing it for you. And it teaches you that sometimes you can push your luck and get away with it, but you have to know how to do it right. Lying and cheating and stealing is a part of you psychological defenses. You have to learn how to cope with them happening to you and trying to poke kids back into denial by telling them really it's all splendid sort of misses the point.
No. Just, no. I'm revved up on this subject because it came up recently elseforum. Learning how awful life is? No part of my life has ever been a fraction as awful as junior high was. Junior high didn't prepare me for adult life. It didn't teach me useful things about coping. It taught me that I would never have friends. It taught me that my presence was an offense to anyone near me. It taught me that I was so ugly that for me to make any effort with regard to my appearance was comically hilarious, akin to putting an Easter bonnet on a pig. It taught me that my value was entirely about academic intelligence and that I would never, ever, ever, ever have any other form of value. It taught me that I was less than human. I was well into adulthood before I could process the idea that when coworkers invited me to lunch, it was because they wanted me to come to lunch. I couldn't conceive of why they were inviting me, because that explanation just didn't form. I failed to RSVP to a coworker's wedding because the idea that she invited me because I was welcome to come similarly did not form in my brain; I assumed that she and I both understood that she absolutely didn't want me to (horrors!) actually come, and that her inviting me was a purely ceremonial gesture, one that didn't call for me to actually go through the motions of ceremonially declining. I spent most of my school days in junior high not speaking, not speaking one single word to any other human being. I cried on the way home probably every other day. (But not in school. Not in front of anyone. One, only once, in three years did anyone ever witness me crying. It's a good thing that junior high was almost over then, because once my resolve was broken to that point, I'm not sure how much longer I would have made it.) I ate lunch outside because it was just too damn risky to actually sit at a cafeteria table. I didn't dare approach my locker if anyone was near it. That's not how elementary school was. In elementary school no one tormented me, no one bullied me, no one made me cry. And, believe it or not, the fact that I was not tormented did NOT teach me, upon emergence from elementary school, that I was king of the world and that the world was all sugar-dust and pastry and that I was entitled to whatever I wanted from it. I still didn't really have friends in elementary school; I was left, reasonably respectfully, alone. Would it be so very, very bad for me to have been left alone in the same way in junior high? Was all the rest of it really that necessary? Just, no. No.
I didn't say that extreme bullying was a good thing. What I said was that kids need to have the edges knocked off them. That is not the same. I am sorry for your experiences. But please don't talk to me like I didn't go through the same thing. I was a fat kid who got made to run cross country with everyone else, I was the only metal head in my year too, surrounded by wanna-be gangstas who thought it was funny when they broke my nose. Just for nothing. Just for walking up the road past them. Fifteen years later the scars down my arms and my leg tell you that I didn't have a happy time. The ones inside my arm where I tried to kill myself are going to be with me forever. They are the reason why I don't tan, because it stops them showing up so much. My teens left a lot of marks on me. The left me as a grown man still writing books about teenagers because I still haven't dealt with most of it. In most respects I haven't really grown up. When I walk past teenagers I'm still a bit surprised that they don't say anything anymore, I'm always getting ready to get in someone's face if I have to. And yet I still think that living through that was important to me. I wouldn't be who I am without it. I don't think it's a net positive, I think in most ways it's a net negative. But that's the point. It was bad. And I got through it, just about (free advice; cut up the veins). And now there's nothing anyone can say that can hurt me. I know what I'm capable of. And I have nothing to prove to anyone else. I know that's not how these things effected everyone. And that's why I wouldn't wish it on anyway. Kids shouldn't go through that. But I do think that it does them good to graze their knees and embarrass themselves and deal with conflict themselves. I think it's genuinely bad for kids to not know how to handle someone screaming in their face or to deal with an authority figure who is being mean to them. They need to learn to be phlegmatic about it; to be stoic in the face of things not being how they want. That's a critical part of growing up. And if you think that todays kids have managed to learn it in this era where we think it's reprehensible to ever let kids fight, go and watch Youtube, go and look at some young adults bawling because Trump won the election. There is something between being wrapped in cotton wool and being beaten with a rubber hose. I think it's ok to let fourteen year old boys get into a fight over a girl or for the girls to viciously slander each other. I think that is good for them. Because someone at some point will be mean to them. And I'd rather kids learn when they're young, so at least when they are grown ups they can focus on solving the problem rather than coming to terms with how mean everyone else is.
You say learn. How do they learn? People don't learn to drive by getting behind the wheel without guidance or teaching and racing around a Mad Max arena until the survivors know enough to be allowed to leave and the dead are carried off on stretchers. If they did, I suppose the survivors might be better drivers, but it still wouldn't be worth it, when you count up the dead. People usually learn things by being taught. By getting guidance. If you think that kids aren't getting enough guidance in life skills, OK, start advocating some different teaching in schools. But Lord of the Flies destroys too many people to be worth it. A kid who can't take the "knowledge" that he is a worthless useless piece of garbage, and who checks out permanently, isn't valueless. People who can't struggle past a complete lack of support aren't people that we should just cull from the population. We're past that point of evolution. We're out of the caves. For that matter, if everybody needs misery to grow up, why are we allowing the happy popular kids to coast along? Aren't we doing them a disservice by not making sure that they get their dose of misery? Isn't there a point where someone should say, "You know, no one has set out to destroy this kid's psyche. It's time to send him to The Camp for a few months." ? If misery is essential, shouldn't it be spread around equally?
Returning to add that I'm getting hijackish and debateish. I'll try not to respond again on this thread. Except that, @LostThePlot, those kids should have been arrested and school officials should have seen serious legal action. What you describe happening to you is unacceptable, and our society should be striving mightily to make it impossible.
https://www.writingforums.org/threads/life-skills-youth-and-being-bullied.152774/ I felt it was hijacking too. If you want to continue this conversation copy and paste what was said and throw it into here.
My 2c on the OP. I don't read a lot. I have good intentions and a stack of unread books. I do read tons of articles and guides on writing, publishing and marketing. But I find that when you're writing a book and working a day job and pretty much just adulting, there isn't much time left to read for leisure. That being said, its been hugely helpful to me examining published works in similar genres to my writing and just learning from these great authors. My favorite being Tolkien.
