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Repent, [Brainstorming], said the [Chat]-tock Man
takyris
Registered User
Registered User
Hello, everyone, and welcome to your new chat thread. For the next 100 pages, I, nobody in particular, will be your guide through this land of literary foible and folly.
I will add more to this post, but really, I just want people to have a chat thread.
First random question: What's the most annoying MacGuffin you've ever encountered in fiction, and/or have you ever used one yourself?
I will add more to this post, but really, I just want people to have a chat thread.
First random question: What's the most annoying MacGuffin you've ever encountered in fiction, and/or have you ever used one yourself?
takyris on
Dox the PI wrote:takyris, Greek God of blowing shit up.
This discussion has been closed.
Posts
It was a book.
A book full of evil.
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It was also a book.
And it contained something that could be perceived as evil, if you looked at it from the right point of view.
(The point of view of a bastard).
- slam poetry is not something i'd be comfortable sitting down and analysing, but i've seen some brilliant slam poets and am close friends with one, and like any artform it can be shaped to be effective. it's not there to be pored over in its density - it's there, almost like a song, or a story passed down through tribes, to be most effectively remembered. this will happen if it combines clever wordplay with good rhythm and meaningful images and narrative. i've seen it happen.
- it's a fallacy that technical focus exists only to the detriment of storytelling itself. it's really far from the truth. it's possible that theoretical focus can dissolve good fiction, but technical craft is the heart of being able to shape written narratives, and any good academic approach to the subject of writing will have covered that broadly. it comes into play a bit when graduates of english literature think they are the next Joyce without any nuts-and-bolts teaching of the tools, but in general good writing would happen in spite of not having any academic history, not due to its absence
- this is a noble aim for a poet but as a writer of fiction my purpose is to tell stories that need to be told, and that often involves consciously using language in ways that are not new. it is a hard pill to swallow for my inner-poet and i haven't really gotten the hang of it, but at some stage you have to choose your priority, and for me that's the story as a whole
also, YAY Harlan!
@oldmanhero tumblr
I agree, completely, but I also believe that we need to exit these concepts of "prose" "poetry" "essay" etc. in relation to art.
In some creation, story will be of paramount importance. In other works we will be exposed to the rawness of ideas. It doesn't end there.
Well, yeah. Most extreme statements like that are fallacious.
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i think i broke a bit trying to say what i was arguing. i probably meant 'it's a fallacy that academia is poised at odds with the practicality of writing'
(not that that's much better)
I would argue that a "poet who just wants to tell a good, accessible story" doesn't need to write in poetic form. That's not to say they can't, but it's the difference between Murakami and Stephen King.
Poetry's scope has shrunk, as necessary, in the face of accessible storytelling as seen on television, in film and in the modern novel.
In the end, I find the distinctions between "poetry" and "prose" somewhat unnecessary (as exemplified in "poetic" artists like Stewart and Carson and Forche and Bidart). Instead, this dichotomy is better represented in terms of (for lack of better titles) "academic" and "popular" arts.
I get what you're saying and I still agree. I will say, on a related note, that the more I studied literature, the harder I found it to write. Make of that what you will.
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Before I chickened out, Psi Academia was originally going to be a soapy tale of character development that just happened to be set at a psionic academy in a world rife with political tension. Instead I introduced the usual threats and dangers to keep the plot moving along. Sigh
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My best writing and the majority of my growth took place outside of my creative writing program, in peer run workshops for ourselves, without any professor and without any credit. My professor hated that we ran them on work we then later presented for class. I don't know why she objected to the fact that we wanted outside opinions of our work from people not in the class with us, but she did.
The other thing I experienced in Academia was the insistence that I must add sex to all short stories or else they are boring.
After I graduated, my work improved ten-fold at least.
Forged by Fate, March 5, 2013! (And it's on Goodreads!)
The whole series of books counts as a please don't mention it again I'm puking up blood
That is certainly one approach. o_O
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I think this is an example of pretty short-sighted and subjective views.
Just because we have bad singular experiences doesn't mean that the entirety of the profession is in the toilet. In fact, that sounds like an absolutely horrid instructor for many, many reasons.
EDIT: I straight up have yelled at instructors before.
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I was equally insistent about not adding gratuitous sex. But by then she'd found out that I wrote genre fiction, and she pretty much gave me up as a lost cause.
Because you know, Genre Fiction isn't REAL writing. It's what the people who can't write do.
Forged by Fate, March 5, 2013! (And it's on Goodreads!)
"Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but it dies in the process."
Imagine all of my posts being spoken by Alec Baldwin
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I'm sure there are some very good programs out there. Mine was not one of them. That said, it didn't ruin me. So, that's got to be some kind of success.
Forged by Fate, March 5, 2013! (And it's on Goodreads!)
I did a NYSSWI course with Henri Cole awhile back. The man made us write sonnets for eight weeks. I mean, there are better ways to create structure. I felt suffocated, and I still haven't forgiven him. We've run into each other a few times and it's still awkward.
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Most sonnets require a good hiding place.
We used to (in high school) do "three minute sonnets" for kicks.
AHAHAHA IT IS TERRIBLE
LOOK
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach...
--Elizabeth Barrett Browning
I never liked love sonnets anyway.
Depth, breadth and height are all so… relative.
Can your soul reach Uranus? Uraguay?
The Marianas Trench? Please, try to give
a better ballpark figure of desire,
a more concrete example of your lust.
Say, "Stars are tiny flames beside the fire
that burns inside my heart..." Only, I trust
you'll find a metaphor more personal
and less clichéd; it is love, after all.
No mediocre store-bought Hallmark card
will work, if your intent is to impress
a true poetic palate with success.
For goodness' sake, Liz, love sonnets are hard.
* * * *
*
Who will believe my verse in time to come,
If it were fill'd with your most high deserts?
--William Shakespeare
For goodness' sake, Will, love sonnets are hard,
and yet you wrote a hundred fifty-four—
I guess it's fair to label you The Bard.
With all your complicated metaphor
you probably got nowhere with the dames;
it must have been their dresses, sutured traps
around the busty dun-skinned chests, the game
offhanded fainting due to lung collapse.
Your hairline was receding, your moustache
could have been bigger, clothes with extra flair—
I'm only trying to help, give you a flash
of inspiration, female savoir-faire.
Clean up, stand straight, use your imagination—
make sex, not poetry, your main vocation!
* * * *
*
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.
--John Donne
"Make sex, not poetry, your main vocation"
was something that you picked up rapidly.
While lesser men felt cold courtly frustration
your pants could hardly stay above your knee.
Somehow you turned a nasty parasite
into erotic imagery, so now
despairing English majors can recite
your work, and sound much sillier than thou.
Alas, you left your sweet success behind
to marry, get a job in ministry,
and write for God—were you out of your mind?
Perhaps a bout of syphilis was the key.
I hope you found some heaven, bright and blessed—
you couldn't be content with all the rest.
* * * *
*
Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show,
That she, dear she, might take some pleasure of my pain…
--Sir Philip Sidney
You couldn't be content to write like all the rest;
you had to add two syllables, you evil man.
You married, and what's more, you wrote for your mistress—
a hundred and eight sonnets in your master plan.
A courtier, ambassador, you travelled dressed
no doubt in frilly clothes, perhaps a feathered fan
to complement your tights, your ruff—all were impressed,
I'm sure, until your Protestant preaching began.
Maybe you loved your queen, Elizabeth, and yet
you couldn't have her, pale and distant on her throne
surrounded by a hundred others like you, Phil.
You might have outpenned Shakespeare if you weren't dead set
on fighting with some Spanish troops—you should have known
if you make love, not war, then you'll have time to kill.
* * * *
*
Where whenas death shall all the world subdue,
Our love shall live, and later life renew.
--Edmund Spenser
If you make love, not war, then you'll have time
to write a hundred sonnets for your wife,
at least until you marry her. Then rhyme
tends to become a bit more true to life.
You had a fascination with the way
Geoff Chaucer spelled things, so you added vowels
and said to hell with uniformity
as poets everywhere threw in their towels.
I have to give you credit for one thing
at least; of all the guys who vowed and raved
that their sonnets would last after they died,
you are among the few who weren't wrong.
You got the immortality you craved,
your love's name wasn't washed out by the tide.
* * * *
*
...ché bel fin fa chi ben amando more.
-- Francesco Petrarch
Your love's name wasn't washed out by the tide—
the Black Death was enough to stop her clock.
Some wrote weird plays, some merely reeled in shock;
you crafted poems, and babies on the side—
not with your famous female, not some bride,
but unnamed women, both out of wedlock.
Perhaps it was a kind of writer's block
that kept you off the altar, maybe pride.
Or maybe love, to you, was merely art,
the fit and proper subject for a sonnet,
and Laura was a name out of a dream.
Whether it was your brain or bleeding heart
that came up with so many lines, I'll bet
sometimes you wished you'd picked a different theme.
* * * *
*
I tried to write a sonnet about love.
It ended as free verse about spare tires.
--Me
Sometimes I wish I'd picked a different theme;
love is so trite. A thousand years of work
applied to figuring out this evolved quirk,
how mindless glands and hormones froth and teem
and end up with a sweet and sour sauce
that people gobble up until they puke.
Much better to ignore this horrid fluke
than end up dazed, confused, and at a loss.
But here I am, at night, alone, and you
my Romeo, oblivious to this muck
are fast asleep a million miles away.
Those long-dead poets taught me nothing new
except that being in love will always suck.
I never liked love sonnets anyway.
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The peer critiques drove me nuts since it really seemed like other students didn't care while I would write all over their pieces giving them advice and correcting grammar. Usually my stories would come back with a sentence or two at the end that doesn't tell me anything except that the person reading it doesn't care for the genre I write.
{Twitter, Everybody's doing it. }{My Rambling Blog}
One day.
Man we have a lot of stuff already come to think of it
"Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but it dies in the process."
Imagine all of my posts being spoken by Alec Baldwin
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I think it means it was successful.
I'm serious.
The best technique is the absence of noticeable technique: back to Quoth's "Man behind the curtain".
This is really what I was trying to say earlier re: academia. I'll elaborate further when I'm not on an iPhone, which are great devices as long as you're not trying to write anything longer than a text.
I don't think any of us disagree.
But I'd encourage people not to equate "popular" technique (to which there is no qualm) with "technique". In many cases it is the very use of language which "academic" poets seek to highlight. Carson, as a classicist, is very guilty of this, specific, "technique".
Then again, there are many "academic" poets who show little to no inclination toward "exposing the man behind the curtain".
In fact, I'd say that that is what many of these poets are attempting to do: "expose the man behind the curtain".
Depending on the tone you're going for you could try fawning, ingratiation, cajolery or wheedling.
The issue is that you can pinpoint what should be the correct family of verbs, yet they don't really follow the correct path. In fact, what you're looking for may be the subversion or perversion of these ideas of flattery. This isn't a "nail on head" question, and there may be a "good word" out there, but hopefully this gives you another route to follow. I think "subverting [with object]" would end up awkward, so I doubt it is the final word.
"Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but it dies in the process."
Imagine all of my posts being spoken by Alec Baldwin
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If there's a growing poetry crisis in our culture (and there is), it's rooted in the growing divide between "sound (or slam) poets" and "intellectual (or academic) poets". I think this has much to do with the academizing of poetry.
Both sound and content are integral elements of good poetry and the willigness of many (not all) to sacrifice one or the other is why so many slam and spoken word poems lack depth and nuance and why Anne Carson is a bore. The really great poets don't sacrifice one or the other -- they find inventive ways to keep poetry fresh and relevant and rooted in its oral history while also infusing it with layers and intellectual integrity.