Boone Spaulding
from Coldwater, Michigan, U.S.A. is reading Solarcide Presents: Nova ParadeNovember 28, 2012 - 7:37am
@ Brandon - I notice there is not yet a Semantics Discussion Catagory.
Believe me, I notice...
Brandon
from KCMO is reading Made to BreakNovember 28, 2012 - 7:52am
"I notice there is not yet a Semantics Discussion Catagory."
There fucking should be.
Dwayne
from Cincinnati, Ohio (suburbs) is reading books that rotate to often to keep this updatedNovember 28, 2012 - 8:12am
@Fly - We all have things we need to work on. Maybe try to edit these down a bit. Good content, but very wordy.
@Boone - He can join the club.
@Brandon - You do a fine job of rewriting posts.
Moderator
Utah
from Fort Worth, TX is reading Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtryNovember 28, 2012 - 8:22am
I've decided to provoke an argument with Flybywrite at some point. But in response to all of his posts I'm just going to copy-paste from random blogs I find on the internet. Entire blogs. Then he can respond with his responses to my fake-blog responses.
I feel this will accomplish a couple of very important things. First, there is obviously some minimum word-production quota that Fly is trying to hit every day, and this will help him with that. Second, I might actually read and enjoy some of the blogs, maybe find one or two to follow and share with others, so we might all get a little something out of this.
Back to the original topic of conversation for this thread: yes, I do like bacon a great deal, but I prefer beef, especially if it's grass-fed. I understand it to be a bit less toxic than pork. Something about uric acid content, but it's been years since I did any reading on it and now I'm just left with a general impression. So pork, yes; beef, bigger yes.
I hope this definitively answers everybody's questions.
Liana
from Romania and Texas is reading Naked LunchNovember 28, 2012 - 11:19am
But it's still not clear to me why wordiness is a bad thing. I mean, there are different styles still on the table, right?
Dwayne
from Cincinnati, Ohio (suburbs) is reading books that rotate to often to keep this updatedNovember 28, 2012 - 11:23am
Because time is a very limited resource, and it takes time to read all that.
JEFFREY GRANT BARR
from Central OR is reading Nothing but fucking Shakespeare, for the rest of my lifeNovember 28, 2012 - 11:29am
Brevity rules.
Utah, wtf - beef over bacon? The only way you could be more wrong is if you were wearing a skirt.
OtisTheBulldog
from Somerville, MA is reading The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot DiazNovember 28, 2012 - 11:35am
I'm the Dude, so that's what you call me. Or maybe His Dudeness, or Duder, or El Duderino if you're not into the whole brevity thing.
Brandon
from KCMO is reading Made to BreakNovember 28, 2012 - 11:57am
"But it's still not clear to me why wordiness is a bad thing. I mean, there are different styles still on the table, right?"
This is a good question, and I have no doubt that there is an audience out there for it just as there is an audience for the minimalist style and purple prose and whatever else you can think of. So the question isn't really about whether or not there's an audience for this, but rather, 'how large is it?'
As a reader, I don't care for the excessive jabbering. If you only need ten words to get your point across, use ten. No need to stretch it out to one hundred. Excessive word counts for the sake of themselves--to me anyway--decrease the quality of the work and detract from the actual story (if there is one).
From a publisher's prospective, that excessively wordy style probably isn't going to fly. There'd be so much red pen on the manuscript pointing out the unnecessary and redundant that it'd be an editing nightmare. It's probably why we don't see much of this style of writing on the shelves.
Flybywrite's posts tend to be 90% longer than they need to be, so you can imagine what pains a reader and publisher would go through hacking through this 600,000-word brick in attempts to excavate those 60,000 words of actual novel. Perhaps there's an audience that wants all those extra words, but I imagine the pool is small.
That being said, he admitted to having an overwriting problem when he first joined the site, so at least he's aware of it. His next step would be teaching himself how to self-edit.
Moderator
Utah
from Fort Worth, TX is reading Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtryNovember 28, 2012 - 12:17pm
The only way you could be more wrong is if you were wearing a skirt.
JGB, if this is wrong then I don't want to be right.
Flybywrite
from Rocky Point, Long Island is reading The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky, by Stephen CraneNovember 28, 2012 - 1:30pm
Yeah, an insecurity fit over my writing style will descend at times; I don't think it's at the core, more a reddish blue kind of mood. In either case, self-doubt attacks are a well worn circular track full of uselessly negative dramatic arts I already own an echo chamber full of, so in light of the printed evidence, recently before my face, I agree its unacceptable.
However, I shall bounce back with the strength of 2000 or so determined gorillas. The subject empathy and my over-reactive bits have me a bit worn down, so I need to add a discussion about getting started in the workshop that's been on my mind since reading the instructions, but anyway I'd like to have my fiction in the workshop and be reading other's stuff before the week's out.
I also need to get rid of the "I'm New!" since I'm not and add a face to my redone profile. I'm kind of torn between my second childhood heroes Godzilla and Popeye, but I am sure of this. If it's Godzilla, his spine needs to be lit up and fire preparing to emerge from his face; if it's Popeye, a battleship has to be firing its guns across his spinach-fed biceps. I won't accept less.
JEFFREY GRANT BARR
from Central OR is reading Nothing but fucking Shakespeare, for the rest of my lifeNovember 28, 2012 - 1:53pm
OMGNSFL
OtisTheBulldog
from Somerville, MA is reading The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot DiazNovember 28, 2012 - 4:07pm
I suggest Strunk & White's The Elements of Style - if you are into that whole brevity thing.
Profunda Saint-...
from Calgary, AB is reading Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy SeriesNovember 29, 2012 - 8:24am
By 1991, Dead and Euronymous were living in a house in the woods near Kråkstad, which was used as a place for the band to rehearse. Mayhem bassist Necrobutcher said that, after living together for a while, Dead and Euronymous "got on each other's nerves a lot". In early 1991, Varg Vikernes sent Ohlin several shells for his shotgun. On 8 April 1991, while left alone in the house, he slit his wrists and throat with a knife and then shot himself in the forehead with a shotgun. He left a brief suicide note, which apologized for having used the gun indoors and ended with: "Excuse all the blood".
LORDS OF CHAOS!
sean of the dead
from Madisonville, KY is reading Peckerwood, by Jed AyresNovember 29, 2012 - 8:43am
LORDS OF CHAOS!
Have you read that book? It made my brain explode.
Flybywrite
from Rocky Point, Long Island is reading The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky, by Stephen CraneNovember 29, 2012 - 9:27am
Don't get me started on that word insecurity. My favorite subject, lately. I guess it could be said the engine for the book I've been working on for years, is the familiar addict war between a pitiful, ashamed insecurity that can be at the root of someone's nature, but running concurrent, with the most blustering, arrogant and redundant exterior imaginable. That's a gruesome bit of paradoxical to watch in action, but certainly today I am once again a paragon of security.
Part of my reactive blurt I think came from a combination of a consensus critique, and a simultaneous realization as a result of it. I think any writer needs to pay attention and examine a consensus critique, because regardless if he or she decides to accept or reject it, it is obviously a large cross-section of the truth for others. I'm not use to communciating in a big bunch like this, but I'm getting there. The critiquing I received direct and indirect was composed mostly of heartfelt irony.
Irony's tricky. Even in its ever-so-clever jokiness irony more often refers to something important, has a half a tonal lie going on which is directly aimed at the dark side of paradox. So one can say "God is Love" with a beat red face and a fire in the heart after winning Powerball, then turn the tone around like a Janus, add a "Yeah, sure," once the tide turns black; and then the very idea of God becomes reduced to ash swirling down a black hole that nothing and nobody hears, never mind some fantastically large and in charge personification who is Love.
I liked that none of the messages sent my way and received ("You are boring us, confusing us, amusing us with incredible levels of pomposity, creating a collective headache, tempting our editorial skills, and taking up far too much time) were mean-spirited. Mostly its just I guess fun, snarking around with funny people, dodging a hatchet or two, chucking your own bright edges.
But what I couldn't look past and got me a little "Ah, phooey" (mostly that I'm still overwriting these kinds of things to do with writing about writing especially) was the heartfeltedness of so many responses that said the same things from sarcastic to direct. One thing I recognized immediately was that Brandon's (thank you) example of how to reduce I think 789 words to 70-something, was something my instructor Johnny Shaw also stressed with me in the recently gone by class The Next Draft. So that's constructive, and every second I need to remind myself to learn where to contract, where to expand, but for the most part get with the "less is more" program in terms of over-describing, redundancy, etc. of bad boy, bad.
"Clearly until God picks up a microphone anything said by anyone between Confucious and Pee Wee Herman is only partially valid, and we're all free to accept or reject any responses to our words and work. But my conclusion of this summary, especially in regards to the commodity time, was that these things were well up over the 50% mark in terms of validity. And so that's it. I need to leave this discussion and create one, about some things on my mind not covered in the instructions to do with submitting my work in the workshop. Rx, TD
Dwayne
from Cincinnati, Ohio (suburbs) is reading books that rotate to often to keep this updatedNovember 29, 2012 - 9:33am
Sigh.
Flybywrite
from Rocky Point, Long Island is reading The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky, by Stephen CraneNovember 29, 2012 - 9:50am
Brandon. A funny thing is I have that very same massive first draft created over three years your post referred to in a speculative sense, as the type that would bar the door. It's true. But if I can cut right (at least half the pages) and keep right, and bash a head into letting the characters and plot drive that omnibus to lose weight the way it needs, it might end up a good novel. So I'm in the midst or let's say my first steps into it, of that paradigm shift to structural concerns (wrote a retro-outline in that class The Next Draft; had an exrecise called "The Butcher's Block") and pacing and thanks for the help. I guess this is all driftin away from empathy and sympathy, but we've all probably about had it with them anyway.
Profunda Saint-...
from Calgary, AB is reading Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy SeriesNovember 29, 2012 - 6:45pm
@ Sean, it's one of my favourite non-fiction books ever. I can't even fathom being involved in that scene, and it takes a lot to shock me.
Varg Vikernes pisses me off so much but at the same time I really love watching interviews with him. Too bad his singing voice is so awful or I'd love Burzum.
Flybywrite
from Rocky Point, Long Island is reading The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky, by Stephen CraneNovember 30, 2012 - 10:44am
Sigh is right. That's it. I'm giving myself a 25 word limit on the rest of my posts for a month...well, maybe fifty.
Dwayne
from Cincinnati, Ohio (suburbs) is reading books that rotate to often to keep this updatedNovember 30, 2012 - 11:13am
Total or per post?
Strange Photon
from Fort Wayne, IN is reading Laurie Anderson lyricsNovember 30, 2012 - 11:19am
After reading all this, all I can think about is how much I disagree with time being a limited resource. Perhaps an individual's experience of time is limitied, but time itself... nah.
Dwayne
from Cincinnati, Ohio (suburbs) is reading books that rotate to often to keep this updatedNovember 30, 2012 - 11:27am
You could argue that it is the only limited resource. We are all going to die someday, so it is limited. We start with a little over a hundred years if very lucky and the ability to expand whatever amount left is very limited.
Brandon
from KCMO is reading Made to BreakNovember 30, 2012 - 11:35am
Oh...please...please God...please let this turn into an argument about time. Please.
R.Moon
from The City of Champions is reading The Last Thing He Wanted by Joan Didion; Story Structure Architect by Victoria Lynn Schimdt PH.D; Creating Characters by the editors of Writer's DigestNovember 30, 2012 - 11:40am
Oh...please...please God...please let this turn into an argument about time. Please.
- Agreed
fport
from Canada is reading The World Until Yesterday - Jared DiamondNovember 30, 2012 - 11:44am
This brings to mind the nine billion names of god and the monks busy scribbling into their scrolls all of them attempting to list them and bring the end of the world about. Time indeed.
Dwayne
from Cincinnati, Ohio (suburbs) is reading books that rotate to often to keep this updatedNovember 30, 2012 - 2:34pm
Okay, semi serious question here. Do you guys really think you can go online and avoid pointless arguments? I can't do that in real life by hanging out with intelligent people who mostly like each other, much less online. Is there some logic I don't see or is this just another example of optimism?
avery of the dead
from Kentucky is reading Cipher SistersNovember 30, 2012 - 2:36pm
Do you guys really think you can go online and avoid pointless arguments?
Yep! Wanna fight about it?
JEFFREY GRANT BARR
from Central OR is reading Nothing but fucking Shakespeare, for the rest of my lifeNovember 30, 2012 - 2:39pm
I create pointless arguments everywhere I go, because I enjoy it. Everybody needs a hobby.
Dwayne
from Cincinnati, Ohio (suburbs) is reading books that rotate to often to keep this updatedNovember 30, 2012 - 2:44pm
Only if you'll support my efforts to have our fine commonwealth reinstate the fine tradition of duelin'. Otherwise I'll admit I was wrong. Or insist I was right or whatever you don't want me to do.
@ Brandon - I notice there is not yet a Semantics Discussion Catagory.
Believe me, I notice...
"I notice there is not yet a Semantics Discussion Catagory."
There fucking should be.
@Fly - We all have things we need to work on. Maybe try to edit these down a bit. Good content, but very wordy.
@Boone - He can join the club.
@Brandon - You do a fine job of rewriting posts.
I've decided to provoke an argument with Flybywrite at some point. But in response to all of his posts I'm just going to copy-paste from random blogs I find on the internet. Entire blogs. Then he can respond with his responses to my fake-blog responses.
I feel this will accomplish a couple of very important things. First, there is obviously some minimum word-production quota that Fly is trying to hit every day, and this will help him with that. Second, I might actually read and enjoy some of the blogs, maybe find one or two to follow and share with others, so we might all get a little something out of this.
Back to the original topic of conversation for this thread: yes, I do like bacon a great deal, but I prefer beef, especially if it's grass-fed. I understand it to be a bit less toxic than pork. Something about uric acid content, but it's been years since I did any reading on it and now I'm just left with a general impression. So pork, yes; beef, bigger yes.
I hope this definitively answers everybody's questions.
But it's still not clear to me why wordiness is a bad thing. I mean, there are different styles still on the table, right?
Because time is a very limited resource, and it takes time to read all that.
Brevity rules.
Utah, wtf - beef over bacon? The only way you could be more wrong is if you were wearing a skirt.
"But it's still not clear to me why wordiness is a bad thing. I mean, there are different styles still on the table, right?"
This is a good question, and I have no doubt that there is an audience out there for it just as there is an audience for the minimalist style and purple prose and whatever else you can think of. So the question isn't really about whether or not there's an audience for this, but rather, 'how large is it?'
As a reader, I don't care for the excessive jabbering. If you only need ten words to get your point across, use ten. No need to stretch it out to one hundred. Excessive word counts for the sake of themselves--to me anyway--decrease the quality of the work and detract from the actual story (if there is one).
From a publisher's prospective, that excessively wordy style probably isn't going to fly. There'd be so much red pen on the manuscript pointing out the unnecessary and redundant that it'd be an editing nightmare. It's probably why we don't see much of this style of writing on the shelves.
Flybywrite's posts tend to be 90% longer than they need to be, so you can imagine what pains a reader and publisher would go through hacking through this 600,000-word brick in attempts to excavate those 60,000 words of actual novel. Perhaps there's an audience that wants all those extra words, but I imagine the pool is small.
That being said, he admitted to having an overwriting problem when he first joined the site, so at least he's aware of it. His next step would be teaching himself how to self-edit.
JGB, if this is wrong then I don't want to be right.
Yeah, an insecurity fit over my writing style will descend at times; I don't think it's at the core, more a reddish blue kind of mood. In either case, self-doubt attacks are a well worn circular track full of uselessly negative dramatic arts I already own an echo chamber full of, so in light of the printed evidence, recently before my face, I agree its unacceptable.
However, I shall bounce back with the strength of 2000 or so determined gorillas. The subject empathy and my over-reactive bits have me a bit worn down, so I need to add a discussion about getting started in the workshop that's been on my mind since reading the instructions, but anyway I'd like to have my fiction in the workshop and be reading other's stuff before the week's out.
I also need to get rid of the "I'm New!" since I'm not and add a face to my redone profile. I'm kind of torn between my second childhood heroes Godzilla and Popeye, but I am sure of this. If it's Godzilla, his spine needs to be lit up and fire preparing to emerge from his face; if it's Popeye, a battleship has to be firing its guns across his spinach-fed biceps. I won't accept less.
OMGNSFL
I suggest Strunk & White's The Elements of Style - if you are into that whole brevity thing.
Have you read that book? It made my brain explode.
Don't get me started on that word insecurity. My favorite subject, lately. I guess it could be said the engine for the book I've been working on for years, is the familiar addict war between a pitiful, ashamed insecurity that can be at the root of someone's nature, but running concurrent, with the most blustering, arrogant and redundant exterior imaginable. That's a gruesome bit of paradoxical to watch in action, but certainly today I am once again a paragon of security.
Part of my reactive blurt I think came from a combination of a consensus critique, and a simultaneous realization as a result of it. I think any writer needs to pay attention and examine a consensus critique, because regardless if he or she decides to accept or reject it, it is obviously a large cross-section of the truth for others. I'm not use to communciating in a big bunch like this, but I'm getting there. The critiquing I received direct and indirect was composed mostly of heartfelt irony.
Irony's tricky. Even in its ever-so-clever jokiness irony more often refers to something important, has a half a tonal lie going on which is directly aimed at the dark side of paradox. So one can say "God is Love" with a beat red face and a fire in the heart after winning Powerball, then turn the tone around like a Janus, add a "Yeah, sure," once the tide turns black; and then the very idea of God becomes reduced to ash swirling down a black hole that nothing and nobody hears, never mind some fantastically large and in charge personification who is Love.
I liked that none of the messages sent my way and received ("You are boring us, confusing us, amusing us with incredible levels of pomposity, creating a collective headache, tempting our editorial skills, and taking up far too much time) were mean-spirited. Mostly its just I guess fun, snarking around with funny people, dodging a hatchet or two, chucking your own bright edges.
But what I couldn't look past and got me a little "Ah, phooey" (mostly that I'm still overwriting these kinds of things to do with writing about writing especially) was the heartfeltedness of so many responses that said the same things from sarcastic to direct. One thing I recognized immediately was that Brandon's (thank you) example of how to reduce I think 789 words to 70-something, was something my instructor Johnny Shaw also stressed with me in the recently gone by class The Next Draft. So that's constructive, and every second I need to remind myself to learn where to contract, where to expand, but for the most part get with the "less is more" program in terms of over-describing, redundancy, etc. of bad boy, bad.
"Clearly until God picks up a microphone anything said by anyone between Confucious and Pee Wee Herman is only partially valid, and we're all free to accept or reject any responses to our words and work. But my conclusion of this summary, especially in regards to the commodity time, was that these things were well up over the 50% mark in terms of validity. And so that's it. I need to leave this discussion and create one, about some things on my mind not covered in the instructions to do with submitting my work in the workshop. Rx, TD
Sigh.
Brandon. A funny thing is I have that very same massive first draft created over three years your post referred to in a speculative sense, as the type that would bar the door. It's true. But if I can cut right (at least half the pages) and keep right, and bash a head into letting the characters and plot drive that omnibus to lose weight the way it needs, it might end up a good novel. So I'm in the midst or let's say my first steps into it, of that paradigm shift to structural concerns (wrote a retro-outline in that class The Next Draft; had an exrecise called "The Butcher's Block") and pacing and thanks for the help. I guess this is all driftin away from empathy and sympathy, but we've all probably about had it with them anyway.
@ Sean, it's one of my favourite non-fiction books ever. I can't even fathom being involved in that scene, and it takes a lot to shock me.
Varg Vikernes pisses me off so much but at the same time I really love watching interviews with him. Too bad his singing voice is so awful or I'd love Burzum.
Sigh is right. That's it. I'm giving myself a 25 word limit on the rest of my posts for a month...well, maybe fifty.
Total or per post?
After reading all this, all I can think about is how much I disagree with time being a limited resource. Perhaps an individual's experience of time is limitied, but time itself... nah.
You could argue that it is the only limited resource. We are all going to die someday, so it is limited. We start with a little over a hundred years if very lucky and the ability to expand whatever amount left is very limited.
Oh...please...please God...please let this turn into an argument about time. Please.
This brings to mind the nine billion names of god and the monks busy scribbling into their scrolls all of them attempting to list them and bring the end of the world about. Time indeed.
Okay, semi serious question here. Do you guys really think you can go online and avoid pointless arguments? I can't do that in real life by hanging out with intelligent people who mostly like each other, much less online. Is there some logic I don't see or is this just another example of optimism?
Yep! Wanna fight about it?
I create pointless arguments everywhere I go, because I enjoy it. Everybody needs a hobby.
Only if you'll support my efforts to have our fine commonwealth reinstate the fine tradition of duelin'. Otherwise I'll admit I was wrong. Or insist I was right or whatever you don't want me to do.