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1Booksloth
I just noticed that this group is the 24th most active group as the moment which, for a brand new start-up, I think is pretty good going - thanks to everyone who has joined in.
What is even better is that, so far, we've had no mud-slinging or bickering. At the risk of sounding as if I want to turn the group into 'skeptics, rationalists and smug bastards' I think everyone deserves a big pat on the back for such a great start.
What is even better is that, so far, we've had no mud-slinging or bickering. At the risk of sounding as if I want to turn the group into 'skeptics, rationalists and smug bastards' I think everyone deserves a big pat on the back for such a great start.
4pgmcc
'skeptics, rationalists and smug bastards'
I think the "smug bastards" is already in the title, but is silent.
I think the "smug bastards" is already in the title, but is silent.
5Meredy
I expect to see disagreement, and even rabid disagreement, but not, I hope, either acrimony or bad manners. However, we're just getting warmed up--maybe not on our good behavior, exactly, but we haven't yet devolved into factions, located everybody's hot buttons, or laid any minefields.
I hope an appeal to rationality would always work if things got heated.
I hope an appeal to rationality would always work if things got heated.
6MartyBrandon
One of my motivations for becoming active in the discussion group is to educate myself to disagree politely with persons I greatly love and admire, but who hold views which I think are terribly flawed, such as my Christian family and co-workers. Thanks for providing a place to exercise my civility AND critical thinking.
7Booksloth
I suspect that one reason we haven't started scrapping yet is that even if we don't always agree, it's not that hard to respect a view that has some basis in evidence and sense. I have to admit to getting unreasonably snappy with anyone who uses sloppy thinking in their arguments and my comment elsewhere about all bets being off once someone announces they believe their god exists because a book tells them so is an example of this. Admittedly, we haven't yet touched on anyone's trigger points but when we do I hope we can continue to argue from a base-point of reason rather than pure emotion - not always that easy, as I'd be the first to admit.
#6 Marty - I think you've raised an interesting point here because sometimes we can love and respect other people despite their having views we see as downright crazy. I'd suggest this could be a very good lift-off point for a new thread on how we reconcile resepcting the person with criticising their opinions.
#6 Marty - I think you've raised an interesting point here because sometimes we can love and respect other people despite their having views we see as downright crazy. I'd suggest this could be a very good lift-off point for a new thread on how we reconcile resepcting the person with criticising their opinions.
8MartyBrandon
Support for Darwin Day actually made to Congress in the US. It's a small step, but I'm still surprised.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PI19y5Nsy1s
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PI19y5Nsy1s
9olive_spread
If I may unlock the door and walk those few echoing steps across the dusty bare wood floor, I will pull open the room darkening drapes and awaken the pixie dust. Then with a pull on the window sash, I let in some light and air, not necessarily in that order, and look around at the work I have ahead of me. My writing has become something of a neglected fixer upper.
I wrote drunk and edited sober. I laughed while my characters stayed straight faced. They would asked me what I liked to read and I answered, "Anything, as long as it is a good story, with well crafted characters. I don't expect different worlds to be perfect. I can over look pulls in the tapestry because this world isn't perfect. I take my worlds and plots as they come, no complaints here. We end up agreeing that we like it best when we can shuck off our real selves and enter a different skin entirely.
Ursula K. Le Guin claims :
...fairy tale, legend, fantasy, science fiction, and the rest of the lunatic fringe. I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up; that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived. I believe that all the best faculties of a mature human being exist in the child, and that if these faculties are encouraged in youth they will act well and wisely in the adult, but if they are repressed and denied in the child they will stunt and cripple the adult personality.
My characters have taught me that you don't need to love the story, but everyone has a story worth telling. I personally like to say I experience a good story.
I am not a bystander watching.
I am there, absorbed into the text.
I may not ever be accepted in the circles I travel, but there is a saying I like to remember about what a loser a fish would be if tested on his ability to climb a tree.
That is my chit chat for today.
I wrote drunk and edited sober. I laughed while my characters stayed straight faced. They would asked me what I liked to read and I answered, "Anything, as long as it is a good story, with well crafted characters. I don't expect different worlds to be perfect. I can over look pulls in the tapestry because this world isn't perfect. I take my worlds and plots as they come, no complaints here. We end up agreeing that we like it best when we can shuck off our real selves and enter a different skin entirely.
Ursula K. Le Guin claims :
...fairy tale, legend, fantasy, science fiction, and the rest of the lunatic fringe. I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up; that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived. I believe that all the best faculties of a mature human being exist in the child, and that if these faculties are encouraged in youth they will act well and wisely in the adult, but if they are repressed and denied in the child they will stunt and cripple the adult personality.
My characters have taught me that you don't need to love the story, but everyone has a story worth telling. I personally like to say I experience a good story.
I am not a bystander watching.
I am there, absorbed into the text.
I may not ever be accepted in the circles I travel, but there is a saying I like to remember about what a loser a fish would be if tested on his ability to climb a tree.
That is my chit chat for today.
10CliffordDorset
>9 olive_spread:
Speaking as one whose characters simply get on with their lives, leaving me to watch passively with varying degrees of surprise, I wonder about writers whose characters enter into a discourse with them, such as the writers whose evidence appears here.
Are the two situations equally common?
Speaking as one whose characters simply get on with their lives, leaving me to watch passively with varying degrees of surprise, I wonder about writers whose characters enter into a discourse with them, such as the writers whose evidence appears here.
Are the two situations equally common?
11olive_spread
If I am understanding you correctly, you watch your characters inside your mind as another would watch a movie or television show but without the limits of the edge of a screen or box?
A writer having a discourse with characters in their mind is having an exchange of ideas or conversation with them?
Neither is my experience. I think of creative thought as the closest one can sit to the edge of the shade of sanity. Insanity is the emotional equivalent of sun stroke. All emotion, no thought.
Reflecting on life before I wrote stories, I was a bystander in my own surroundings. After writing, I would not say I interact with my characters, but I learn about them as a detective learns about the characters in a case, or a historian pieces together a life for a biography.
Are you also asking at the end about the experience being common? To varying degrees yes, but less common then most understand of themselves and the world around them, I'll explain, I once took a writing course and I never put down learning. When I listened to people ask how to write, how to express, how to sell a story, I thought of standing on one side of the Grand Canyon and waving at the other. It is not impossible but how will they ever come over?
I definitely have triggers to creating stories or pictures and they can be anything. (A scent, a song, a joke, another story) No story I tell is make-belief they are wholly true to me. They become part of my life. Though I feel they are dropped on me as when I am the last one to know what everyone else has figured out. Phew, that sun is hot.
;P
P.S. #10 I remember first reading a review you wrote and now, years later, I can't believe I have written to you. Hello
A writer having a discourse with characters in their mind is having an exchange of ideas or conversation with them?
Neither is my experience. I think of creative thought as the closest one can sit to the edge of the shade of sanity. Insanity is the emotional equivalent of sun stroke. All emotion, no thought.
Reflecting on life before I wrote stories, I was a bystander in my own surroundings. After writing, I would not say I interact with my characters, but I learn about them as a detective learns about the characters in a case, or a historian pieces together a life for a biography.
Are you also asking at the end about the experience being common? To varying degrees yes, but less common then most understand of themselves and the world around them, I'll explain, I once took a writing course and I never put down learning. When I listened to people ask how to write, how to express, how to sell a story, I thought of standing on one side of the Grand Canyon and waving at the other. It is not impossible but how will they ever come over?
I definitely have triggers to creating stories or pictures and they can be anything. (A scent, a song, a joke, another story) No story I tell is make-belief they are wholly true to me. They become part of my life. Though I feel they are dropped on me as when I am the last one to know what everyone else has figured out. Phew, that sun is hot.
;P
P.S. #10 I remember first reading a review you wrote and now, years later, I can't believe I have written to you. Hello
12CliffordDorset
>11 olive_spread:
Hullo indeed! Perhaps the nicest things about writing reviews is when people tell me I've been read, particularly if they've agreed with me or even simply liked or been encouraged by my words. I review a lot, if skimpily, and I enjoy it - it helps me focus on the genres of my study.
That's approximately how my characters appear to me, except that they do so at (painfully slow) writing speed, rather than at a tv-like pace. I start with a rough idea of my personae, and in describing their activities I realise they're behaving in ways which surprise me.
I've always been classed as an observer of life, even if in the style of a voyeur rather than a Colin Wilson type of 'outsider'. Your views on writing are interesting, particularly your Grand Canyon metaphor. The question of how to write for me is simple, if I may say that without suggesting that I'm any good. I write because I enjoy doing so. I guess you share this approach, from my interpretation of your list - scent, song, joke, etc. I would add 'what people do' to the list. As in the Yorkshire saying: 'There's nowt so queer as folk'.
Hullo indeed! Perhaps the nicest things about writing reviews is when people tell me I've been read, particularly if they've agreed with me or even simply liked or been encouraged by my words. I review a lot, if skimpily, and I enjoy it - it helps me focus on the genres of my study.
That's approximately how my characters appear to me, except that they do so at (painfully slow) writing speed, rather than at a tv-like pace. I start with a rough idea of my personae, and in describing their activities I realise they're behaving in ways which surprise me.
I've always been classed as an observer of life, even if in the style of a voyeur rather than a Colin Wilson type of 'outsider'. Your views on writing are interesting, particularly your Grand Canyon metaphor. The question of how to write for me is simple, if I may say that without suggesting that I'm any good. I write because I enjoy doing so. I guess you share this approach, from my interpretation of your list - scent, song, joke, etc. I would add 'what people do' to the list. As in the Yorkshire saying: 'There's nowt so queer as folk'.
13olive_spread
I do agree, about the general observations of people watching never get stale. As for character development, would it be too weird to say that I meet my characters? I get to know them, but I feel them as complete from the start. I just don't know them well. It isn't as if I can change them and make one go from bad to good. But what I learned about myself is that I can look at a 'bad guy' and understand what led them down their path.
Once, I wrote about a terrible person who took many lives, it was all tragic. When I started the story people were calling him all kinds of names; despicable, a coward, a monster until they learned people loved him and depended on him. Then they could see him as cornered and desperate. I like to sway peoples perceptions. Just when you think you know someone, they can do something completely out of character.
I do enjoy writing more then just about anything.
Once, I wrote about a terrible person who took many lives, it was all tragic. When I started the story people were calling him all kinds of names; despicable, a coward, a monster until they learned people loved him and depended on him. Then they could see him as cornered and desperate. I like to sway peoples perceptions. Just when you think you know someone, they can do something completely out of character.
I do enjoy writing more then just about anything.
