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	bookbug87 2008-07-29 09:07 pm UTC (link)
	I don't have a problem with it being both for writing and discussion, at least to start out. For the writing group aspect, I'd be interested in it for mostly motivational purposes or for specific advice, rather than regularly sharing/getting feedback on things I've written (although I'd be happy to give others feedback on their stuff). (Reply to this)(Thread)

	issendai 2008-07-30 01:45 am UTC (link)
	nod Noted. And if you just want to comment on others' stories, that shouldn't be a problem. Writing groups tend to be short on critiquers, so a dedicated critiquer would be great. (Reply to this)(Parent)

	breecita 2008-07-29 09:47 pm UTC (link)
	I just here to cheer on the glorious act of selling out. \o/ (Reply to this)(Thread)

	issendai 2008-07-30 01:43 am UTC (link)
	grin Since you're in one of the great (and lucrative!) anti-literary genres, like to talk a bit about what you've found to work and not work in your genre? (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	breecita 2008-07-30 04:06 am UTC (link)
	Sure! :D I am getting to the point where I know the erotic romance genre fairly well. That's where all that research comes in handy. LOL I'll think about it a bit. (Reply to this)(Parent)

	clover_elf_kin 2008-07-29 11:51 pm UTC (link)
	Both might be good, simply to keep community post count up. ^^ I see too many awesome-sounding comms that update once a month or less. (Reply to this)(Thread)

	issendai 2008-07-30 01:42 am UTC (link)
	Good point. Waiting until there's a need for a second community is a good idea. (Reply to this)(Parent)

velvet_mace
2008-07-30 01:10 am UTC (link)

Hmm... when you talk about bad writing, I'm wondering if what you mean is a sporking community (in which case, I'd be pretty eh about it -- I get my sporking elsewhere.) Or if it will be more of a "take a passage of writing and dissect it for what works and what doesn't" kind of community.

I'm very eager to join a community about pointing out how to write better that's done in a high brow rather than humorous or ranting way. I'd love to have serious discussions about what works and doesn't work in writing and looking at writing styles, plots, charactarizations of various canons to see what it is that works for getting an audience.

I do a fair amount of writing essays where I discuss my philosophy of writing and how I parse what I read and watch. I don't really have anywhere to post those essays though.

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issendai
2008-07-30 01:41 am UTC (link)

The second kind of community. There's a feeling in the writing world that the only literature worth reading or writing is the "good" stuff, the work with multiple layers and allusions and sparkling prose. However, that writing is far less popular than the work that's dismissed as crap, which says to me that the literary world has something to learn from it.

Also, there are legions of people in fandom who want to make a living from their writing. Because they're writers, they tend to lean toward writerly writing--the "good" stuff--and there's an entire self-help industry to keep them there. This seems to me to be a contradiction. I'd like to discuss how to write popular fiction with an eye to getting published.

So if you want to post your essays here, sure! Sounds like fun.

tl;dr Highbrow discussion leavened with occasional snark yay! Hacks unite!

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velvet_mace
2008-07-30 01:58 am UTC (link)

There's a feeling in the writing world that the only literature worth reading or writing is the "good" stuff, the work with multiple layers and allusions and sparkling prose. However, that writing is far less popular than the work that's dismissed as crap, which says to me that the literary world has something to learn from it.

*Insert what I said here*

If you see writing as having two factors:
Appealing to intellect <-----> intellectually insulting

and

Appealing to emotions <------> sleep inducing.

The thing is we spend all our time thinking about the former, and almost none about the latter. I think it's important to discuss the latter, because it's the latter that sells books, and the best is to be on the left side of both.

I mean, sure, there is a small group of people out there who refuse to admit boredom even under the most yawn inducing circumstances so long as whatever they are reading is highly intellectual. There are also people who do the Iron Man Triathlon, but not everyone is going to sign themselves up for that. Time is tight.

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tangentialone
2008-07-30 03:41 am UTC (link)

I think you're right. To my mind, what makes a work intellectual is separate from what makes it sell... but the two aren't contradictory.

There are dreadful books that sell well, sure, but I don't think they necessarily sell because of their dreadfullness, but because of that appeal to emotion. I think if they were exquisitely written and still had the appeal to emotion, they'd sell just as well (maybe better, since they wouldn't be shunned by people who care about the intellectual aspect). So, I disagree with the bit in the userinfo about the badness being the selling point of some books; I think it would be more accurate to say that having that emotional appeal lets a book get away with a lot of badness, because a lot of people who read are just looking for entertainment or escape and are willing to ignore a book's flaws--or are so focused on the other aspects that they don't notice the flaws.

On the other hand, if shallowness counts as badness, there might be something to the idea... I do think that if a book has interesting things going on at a shallow level, then it's more likely to sell. So a very shallow book with a simple, emotionally appealing story can sell easily, while a very deep, complex book... with, perhaps, not very much going on on the surface... will only be enjoyed by people who care more about the intellectual side. But a book that has things going on at multiple levels, where you still get a good story if you just skim it and don't analyze or think deeply about it, should theoretically be as popular as if it were just shallow.

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bookbug87
2008-07-30 06:21 am UTC (link)

When I was in college, one of my friends was a composer. He was into atonal/avant-garde/experimental music, and would complain about how there was no real market for his compositions and about all the crap out there that was so popular. My question in response to this was whether he wanted to be an artist, or an entertainer. The ensuing conversation brought up many similar issues (although one of his arguments was that his stuff did appeal on an emotional level, not just an intellectual one, and that people just needed to be exposed to it more to appreciate it – but that's a topic for a whole separate post!). The two things aren't mutually exclusive, but it's important to know what you're trying to accomplish. Do you want to explore complicated moral and existential issues? Or are you just aiming to make people laugh, cry, or otherwise entertain them?

Another way to parse it is complexity versus accessibility. Reliance on cliches and stereotypes makes for easily accessible writing. Readers are preconditioned to react a certain way, so it's easier to evoke the desired emotional response. In this sense, the challenge isn't so much trying to create both shallow and deeper intellectual levels, but to find ways of adding depth and complexity that doesn't make the book less accessible.

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velvet_mace
2008-07-30 07:42 am UTC (link)

There is also the Spongebob Squarepants school of complexity, though: On one hand there is a bunch of low brow accessible stuff that even the youngest kids can get, but for the adults, there is a ton of metaphor, social commentary and allusions to other works that fly right over the heads of the kiddos (and a fair portion of the adults).

Accessibility doesn't mean you have to give up complexity, it just means you don't completely rely on complexity as the selling point of your writing.

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	velvet_mace 2008-07-30 07:45 am UTC (link)
	Also, atonal music gives me emotions all right, but they aren't good ones. (Reply to this)(Parent)

tangentialone
2008-07-31 06:06 am UTC (link)

Reliance on cliches and stereotypes makes for easily accessible writing. Readers are preconditioned to react a certain way, so it's easier to evoke the desired emotional response.

I hadn't thought of that; that's an interesting idea. I'd like to say that cliches, at least, are obvious and annoying, but it depends on the cliche, I guess, and it might be a more "writerly" thing to even notice it anyway. I mean, "grass-green" is unremarkable writing, but it doesn't actually jump out and scream, "I'm horrible!"

Stereotypes... *wince* I guess that depends on how ingrained they are, and how much the reader agrees (or at least doesn't disagree) with them.

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issendai
2008-07-31 01:30 pm UTC (link)

A cliche is an idea or element that has lost its emotional charge through repetition, which means that there are always readers who haven't been exposed to it enough to get tired of it. That's part of the secret of books that appeal mostly to younger readers: cliches that only inexperienced readers aren't habituated to. (cf. Eragon.) And cliches started as ideas with considerable power, so there's still a reward for using them if the author is aiming for the right audience; you can hit a younger audience hard, possibly even harder than authors who aren't using cliches.

Stereotypes are harder to become habituated to because they're presented to us as representations of reality. Girls really are X, so why complain when stories present them as being X-like? If the reader identifies with the stereotype, it gets worse--why complain about Bella's gormlessness when insecure girls really are gormless? *I'm* gormless. Are you saying I don't exist? Are you saying I'm just a stereotype, that I should change? Are you trying to take this flaw away from my demographic group and pin it on me, personally? Or the flip side: Insecure girls are gormless, but Bella got the perfect guy, so *I* can get the perfect guy. And I don't have to change! I just have to love really hard!

(I think this is the foundation of the "Loving/believing in someone really hard is a kind of superpower and can save the world" cliche. It's easy to feel something powerfully, not so easy to do something effectively, and while real life usually kicks the cliche in the head, every so often you do get stories of people who have been Saved by the Power of Love/Belief.)

So yeah... Cliches and stereotypes make books more accessible, and can make them absolutely irresistible to people who haven't had enough experience to recognize cliches and stereotypes for what they are.

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tangentialone
2008-08-03 06:25 am UTC (link)

...I think you're right; books for younger readers are allowed to ~~suck~~ be lazy, just because younger readers haven't been exposed to the cliche (phrases and plots/characters/tropes) enough to be tired of it. It's not just a matter of younger readers having less sophisticated/less developed tastes.

If the reader identifies with the stereotype, it gets worse--why complain about Bella's gormlessness when insecure girls really are gormless? *I'm* gormless. Are you saying I don't exist? Are you saying I'm just a stereotype, that I should change?

Ugh, yes. I hate this argument, because it's basically attacking a strawman ("This book, or this character, in particular is the problem, and members of $group are not really like that") instead of addressing the actual problem ("There's a pattern of $group being portrayed in this stereotyped manner, and this book is helping perpetrate that pattern"). There's nothing wrong with, for example, a female character needing to be rescued by a male character, but there is something wrong when it's practically always that way and not the other way around... and art doesn't exist in a vacuum.

Are you trying to take this flaw away from my demographic group and pin it on me, personally?

This.

(I think this is the foundation of the "Loving/believing in someone really hard is a kind of superpower and can save the world" cliche. It's easy to feel something powerfully, not so easy to do something effectively, and while real life usually kicks the cliche in the head, every so often you do get stories of people who have been Saved by the Power of Love/Belief.)

I think you've got it exactly, there.

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velvet_mace
2008-07-30 07:51 am UTC (link)

Thing is, we've all had our english classes where we analysed literature and learned to look for allegory and metaphor, to find parallels and dig out deeper meanings -- but we are never taught what sorts of elements make people feel happy, or sad, or nostalgic or whatever. There's nothing about how to pace in order to keep people turning the pages, or how to describe in a way that makes people experience the description, rather than go on mind tangents about what the description means.

We never study best sellers to figure out why they work, we just look at them using all the skills we are taught and school and think: "but this defies everything I know about what makes a story good. Why the hell do I keep reading it?"

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bookbug87
2008-07-30 08:09 pm UTC (link)

That's true. I was an English major and I can't think of very many instances where we discussed how a book made us feel, and in the few I can think of it was always in the context of how it influenced perceptions of meaning. Which is a shame, because I think that sort of examination could be interesting for more reasons than just trying to figure out how to write a bestseller.

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	velvet_mace 2008-07-30 08:33 pm UTC (link)
	I think it would pretty pioneering to hold a class on parsing the emotional impact of fiction. I think it would be a really useful class. (Reply to this)(Parent)

tangentialone
2008-07-31 06:13 am UTC (link)

Oh, definitely.

I think that kind of thing can be harder to analyse, though, both because it can be so personal--different people will have different reactions to the same text, after all--and because sometimes it's very much a gestalt thing. It's not just a particular sentence that invokes a sense of nostalgia, for example, but that sentence and everything that came before it. A particular sentence or passage might be a capstone but it wouldn't necessarily have the same effect if it weren't for how it related to everything else.

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velvet_mace
2008-07-31 06:23 am UTC (link)

it's very much a gestalt thing

I think one of the main differences between the two factors (appeal to intellect vs appeal to emotions) is exactly that. What makes things interesting intellectually is stopping and considering words and how they are put together. But enjoying something on the emotional level is all about looking at themes and how they build and interact with each other. To see the first you disect the sentences and remove paragraphs from their context, to look at the latter, you got to step back away and look at the whole thing, and see how each part relates to the others.

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tangentialone
2008-07-31 06:28 am UTC (link)

Yes! And with the way it's usually done in English classes, well... you're almost limited to short stories and poems (not that there isn't plenty of material there) because novels, in classes, tend to be spread out over weeks, and it's harder to look at "whole novel" things if you're not reading the whole novel at once--the latest bit is the only thing that's really fresh in your mind, and incidents from earlier in the book tend to fade--and anyway they're more distant even if you remember what happened clearly.

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	velvet_mace 2008-07-31 06:35 am UTC (link)
	I remember in a lot of literature classes thinking distinctly: You know, when I stop reading and just look at the paragraphs, this is pretty damn awesome. But I have no clue what this story is trying to build towards, it just seems like a rambling bunch of vaguely related vignettes thrown together and called a novel, where's the story?. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	tangentialone 2008-07-31 06:40 am UTC (link)
	Oh, yes. Some books are wonderful illustrations of one Good Thing, but they so thoroughly neglect other Good Things that they really shouldn't be emulated. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	velvet_mace 2008-07-31 06:44 am UTC (link)
	I think it's to be said that if you can enjoy a novel read in random order as much as you would if you read it first page to last -- it's not going to be a best seller. Unless you are one of those people who can just go "ha" to the rules like Kurt Vonnegut or Joseph Heller. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	tangentialone 2008-07-31 06:59 am UTC (link)
	Mmmm, yes. That kind of thing isn't something most people can pull off, and I don't think it's something that works for most stories... in fact, unless I'm misremembering, Heller did it again in Closing Time and it didn't work nearly as well there as it did in Catch-22. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	velvet_mace 2008-07-31 07:23 am UTC (link)
	Closing Time was pretty unreadable. For that matter The Sound and the Fury made me want to pull my teeth out. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

tangentialone
2008-07-31 07:34 am UTC (link)

~~Thank god; I wasn't the only one who thought that.~~ I actually skipped a large chunk of the book (I had to finish it; I'd chosen it for a book report--but it was just so painful after a certain point that I just stopped, skimmed the last few chapters, skimmed a chapter here and a few pages there in the middle so my quotes wouldn't be suspiciously all from the first third and the last bit, and called that good enough) and didn't feel like I'd missed anything. Normally I'll finish a book even if it's kind of bland or dreadful, just because I like seeing how things turn out, but.... D:

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issendai
2008-07-31 01:48 pm UTC (link)

Or the short stories that boil down to (as one classmate put it), "Nothing happens and it's all very symbolic." Lit classes love them because they're easy to analyze, beginning writers love them because they're Important and Meaningful and basically the only aesthetic they've been trained to write toward, people who read for pleasure... don't love them so much. But creative writing teachers are reluctant to teach students about stories in which something happens and it's not so symbolic because that would be seen as a step backward. Those are the kind of stories you assign in high school to get kids to read. College students need something more sophisticated.

At least, that's how it was in the mid-90's when I took creative writing in college. It could have changed. Considering how hidebound the literary genre is, I don't have high hopes, but it could have happened...

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	issendai 2008-07-31 01:32 pm UTC (link)
	We never study best sellers to figure out why they work, we just look at them using all the skills we are taught and school and think: "but this defies everything I know about what makes a story good. Why the hell do I keep reading it?" THIS. This is exactly what I'm aiming for. Perfect summation. (Reply to this)(Parent)

	kalika_maxwell 2008-07-30 07:59 pm UTC (link)
	Talking about writy stuff is good. Anything at all in that area is interesting. I like talking about books, the publishing industry (and how to get into it), plot and character development, fandom, whatever. (Reply to this)

	panther3751 2008-07-31 03:27 am UTC (link)
	If this is going to be a writing community as well, what limits are we going to have on what is allowed to be posted? Will we allow posts that basically say "I need a beta" or "This is my newest story, what's wrong with it?" I can see a potential for a low-dialog-entry flood, that is all. (Reply to this)(Thread)

	tangentialone 2008-07-31 06:20 am UTC (link)
	I don't know, I think it might be interesting to have posts along the lines of, "This is my newest story". I don't think those would necessarily be low-dialog posts... it would really depend on how interested people were in responding to them (and whether the same people were responding to those posts and the other posts). (Reply to this)(Parent)

	issendai 2008-07-31 01:38 pm UTC (link)
	Mmm, good point. I'm going to see what develops. I agree with you that a flood of low-dialog posts would be annoying (and could kill the community), but I want to see what kind of posts the community is prone to before adding rules. If you know of any rules for online writing groups that have worked well, please do point me toward them. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	bookbug87 2008-07-31 04:57 pm UTC (link)
	What about setting up some sort of schedule for posting writing to critique, like a certain number of slots per week that people sign up for in advance? That could encourage regular posts but also keep it from becoming overwhelming. (Reply to this)(Parent)

	telophase 2008-07-31 05:00 pm UTC (link)
	Hey, count me in. :) And I'm especially interested in the elements my friends and I call crack, which are prevalent in manga stories and in a lot of bad-but-can't-put-down novels. (I could probably work up a post on it, given time.) (Reply to this)

	lavenderfrost 2008-08-03 07:48 am UTC (link)
	I don't mind it being a writing AND discussion comm all in one, so long as the writing part isn't obligatory. There may be people here who are just around to join the discussion and not take the challenges or prompts, you know? (Reply to this)

	AmitXUMNIhTsl (Anonymous) 2011-09-28 03:02 am UTC (link)
	8ijVQY Yeah, now it's clear !... And firstly I did not understand very much where there was the link with the title itself !!... (Reply to this)

	lZUuflyzRZQtU (Anonymous) 2011-09-29 03:42 pm UTC (link)
	mqxtdu Well, actually, a lot of what you write is not quite true !... well, okay, it does not matter:D (Reply to this)