I think that's a good sentiment, and good advice. Thanks for sharing that.
edited 20th Dec '11 5:05:34 PM by Gault
yeyI would never write about my own life.
Does this make me a bad person?
edited 20th Dec '11 5:10:49 PM by ohsointocats
Everything you write is about your own life, it's inescapable. Nobody knows anything else.
This isn't some sort of inane Yoda-ism. Your own experiences, reading, and research shape your authorial voice. Even if the events of your own voice aren't the narrative of your story, your own perspective inherently shapes your writing.
edited 20th Dec '11 5:12:54 PM by AManInBlack
It's beautiful and so full of deep imagery that it doesn't surprise me to find that it has gone WAY over your headI think you are missing the finer points between "about" and "from".
You talk about a story, about a guy having marriages and divorces and struggling with depression and having a shit job. That is stuff happening. There are many people on this forum who have nothing worth writing about happen with their life. When I say nothing, I actually mean nothing.
edited 20th Dec '11 5:16:37 PM by ohsointocats
I think even a relatively 'boring' sequence of events such as a one's life can be made interesting through good writing, but I live my life everyday, I have no desire to write about it, too. I prefer escapism when I'm reading or writing, which at the very least requires a story not about me.
SPATULA, Supporters of Page Altering To Urgently Lead to Amelioration (supports not going through TRS for tweaks and minor improvements.)@Man In Black: I understood what you meant, and I agree - it was simply an easy phrase to poke fun at.
I'm not sure if there's really anything to be done about that, sadly. We all know what they say about troper demographics, and quite simply, if no one is interested in your story's genre then it's just not going to get that much attention, regardless of quality.
On the other hand, it does mean you'll have an easier time standing out here then the two dozen people writing urban fantasy* . So there are advantages to working in an uncommon genre here.
edited 20th Dec '11 5:17:09 PM by nrjxll
I mean I don't want to read about yet another highschooler. Maybe I'm sick of guitar and love songs.
Two genres I really love that are underrepresented here are historical and horror fiction. And by horror, I don't mean "vampires and how cool they are."
I think it should be noted - as I had this same problem earlier - that A Man In Black seems to be largely talking about writing exercises. I would never want to read a story about my life or the life of anyone similar (though I actually might prefer a story about my high school career to standard high school fare), but writing one could be useful for improving my writing skills.
edited 20th Dec '11 5:22:17 PM by JHM
I'll hide your name inside a word and paint your eyes with false perception.No, I'm obliterating them. They don't exist.
I don't care what TV Tropes says, People Sit on Chairs is a trope. Your fiction is inherently unconsciously informed by the life you live, the time you live in, the language you speak, and the world you live in. You sit in chairs, so your characters sit in chairs. In fact, it may be so obvious to you that your characters sit in chairs that you may not even point out that they sit in chairs. That is your life, pouring into your writing, consciously or unconsciously, and because of this, your stories will always be about you as much as they are about whatever it is that you intend for them to be about.
Because people sit in chairs.
Read Welcome to the NHK. And seriously, read American Splendor. Most of the issues, he goes to work, talks to people at work, goes home, and listens to records. Harvey Pekar was a depressed loser nerd. His life was boring, and sad, and empty, and glorious.
Well, I have two arguments.
For one, writing about your "boring" life will is a great writing exercise. It will make you a better writer because it is writing stripped of all artifice. It is about the simplest things and requires introspection and observation.
For another, I think people on this forum sell non-genre fiction and nonfiction short. Master your pen and your life will be interesting. I want to know about Oh So Into Cats's "boring" life. What got into his (her?) head and convinced him that his life is so uninteresting that nobody would ever want to know about it, but still drives him to write? There's a story there, untold.
Maybe it'll get written.
edited 20th Dec '11 5:29:26 PM by AManInBlack
It's beautiful and so full of deep imagery that it doesn't surprise me to find that it has gone WAY over your headPeople Sit In Chairs is indeed a trope — it's just way too prevalent to be worth noting. It's kind of like the way one doesn't index the common words.
A brighter future for a darker age.They do exist. If they didn't, I would not write at all.
edited 20th Dec '11 5:23:57 PM by ohsointocats
@Man In Black: Read Then We Came To The End. Read Revolutionary Road. Read Lush Life. Read Election, The Corrections, A Visit From The Goon Squad, You Remind Me Of Me ,White Teeth. The list goes on and on; those are only a few things on my closest bookshelf. Now, if I turn around...
edited 20th Dec '11 5:29:42 PM by BetsyandtheFiveAvengers
I also think that writing things that aren't spec fic is good even for the SF author — because, at root, our stories are populated by people (sometimes very unusual people, but still people) and learning to write a story that's interesting and "true" without all the distracting other stuff is a valuable skill.
My non-SF story has had me pause because it involves the BDSM scene, and my worry that I'm writing my kink for titillation (self- or reader-). I'm coming around to the realization that I want to write about it because that's a world I inhabit and understand, and deliberately not writing about worlds in which I live is self-censorship, is writing non-"truth".
A brighter future for a darker age.I don't know. The Sci Fi Ghetto pisses me off. It makes the sort of sci-fi that I enjoy into "literary".
I'd also add that beginning visual artists think that their lives are too boring to paint or draw. Yet the skill of an artist is often in taking things we see and don't see in our everyday lives and bringing them out.
A brighter future for a darker age.Science fiction ended up ghettoized for the same reason that TVT is something of a ghetto: it's easy to mistake the symbols for the meaning. (That's exactly why it's so dangerous to think in tropes and build stories out of tropes.) There isn't anything wrong with science fiction; just don't fall into the trap of including SF "stuff" because it's "cool". Science fiction is the realm of ideas that don't fit into the world we live in yet.
The ones I've read are excellent, the ones I haven't I should. (Everyone should read White Teeth. Everyone.) It makes me sad that some of them are redlinks, though.
It's beautiful and so full of deep imagery that it doesn't surprise me to find that it has gone WAY over your headWhereas fantasy is the worlds we can't live in. Which is why it depresses me that all it seems to accomplish half the time is faux-medieval.
A brighter future for a darker age.I agree with this and think the same can be said for Fantasy.
SPATULA, Supporters of Page Altering To Urgently Lead to Amelioration (supports not going through TRS for tweaks and minor improvements.)I love Kurt Vonnegut. Margaret Atwood is also Sci-Fi, no matter what she says.
The last good book I read was Crime And Punishment. I put down so may sci fi and fantasy books by the middle because they're boring.
I am mostly just a hypocrite.
I'm not sure I'd be capable of holding myself to my own standards when writing about the most interesting things in my life. I consider my neutrality and objectivity to be one of my greatest strengths, but whenever I try to write about the time I nearly fell when rock-climbing, I find myself awash in emotion. I suspect I'd have even worse results when writing about my school experiences and my resultant time in therapy.
Besides, lit-fic usually does bore me, and while I suspect that's a result of recent publishing trends rather than something inherent to the genre, I don't want to have to be the one who works hard to change the trends when science fiction publishers are openly looking for fresh ideas. (Of course, the Medieval European Fantasy bores me even more, but I do try to get my more science-fictional works rather than my more fantastical works published.)
edited 20th Dec '11 6:22:45 PM by feotakahari
That's Feo . . . He's a disgusting, mysoginistic, paedophilic asshat who moonlights as a shitty writer—Something AwfulI think emotion is what writing needs.
SPATULA, Supporters of Page Altering To Urgently Lead to Amelioration (supports not going through TRS for tweaks and minor improvements.)Depends on the kind of emotion, though broadly speaking, I agree.
Reason why I like fantasy:
I'm a (socialist) professional writer serializing a WWII alternate history webnovel.
That works.
I can see this has gotten pretty derailed anyway.
And for the record: there's nothing wrong with speculative fiction. It's just that its prominence here, even though yes, it seems inevitable, is bothersome to some, myself included. While, as I've said, I adore fantasy and speculative fiction in general, at a certain point, it gets boring and tired, because it's everywhere, and it's constantly talked about.
I also liked the idea I saw in another thread of having a subforum here for actual excerpts. That would actually be really nice. For my part, I'd likely be encouraged to post more. I feel like non-fantastic works get drowned out here, uninentionally.