Subject: Re: [VP] Writing for Praise?
Date: Tue, 04 Jul 2000 09:52:43 -0700
From: "jat (Jane) " <jat_sapphire@my-deja.com>
Organization: My Deja Email (http://www.my-deja.com:80)
To: Venice Place <veniceplace@jbx.com>

On Tue, 4 Jul 2000 10:23:37    StarGalE wrote:
>Let's go back to my question
>that broke up the list: Why write poorly--AND SHOW IT PUBLICALLY--by
posting
>it online? Just for fun? It's fun to show friends and strangers poor
writing?
>I don't get it.

I deal with a lot of bad writing myself, and what becomes obvious if the
writers involved will talk freely is that *nobody* submits bad writing
deep-down-knowing it to be bad.

My latest interaction with someone over this issue was a wretched
conversation with a woman whose schooling has been very inadequate.  Oh,
yes, she knows that her grasp of Standard Edited American English is not
very good, that she spells badly and has little sense of where punctuation
marks go.  She's *not* stupid, Suz, and few bad writers are.  The percentage
is bsically the same as in other areas of life, I'd venture.  I play
excrutiatingly bad baseball, myself--I am stupid at baseball--but I dare say
that does not make me stupid overall.

Anyway, after several hours of work, which I witnessed, she had finally
managed to write a paragraph about what she most admired about her sister.
Yes, one paragraph.  I think it went through four drafts, not a record in
this class, but still more effort than I am sure she had put into writing
for a long time.  I graded it;  that's my job.  A week later we were having
this awful talk about how her sister had loved it and couldn't I see how
hard she'd worked and why had I marked it up and of course writing well is
very important and she really valued high standards and she realized that
she wasn't any good at this and she thought maybe she'd drop the class and
she really valued this opportunity.  Actually I didn't end up saying much
myself:  she was doing both sides of the conversation.

Just because somebody on a newsgroup doesn't tell you her life's story
doesn't mean that it is not like this.  And there are a lot of ways of
saying "it hurts to take your criticism seriously."  And it is *legitimate*
to write something about, say, your sister, show it to the sister, and be
more influenced by what she says than by the words of a relative stranger.

I *love* good writing.  And for myself, I want to honor the affection I have
for the fandom and the characters, and live up to the best of the fiction
I've read, by writing as well as I possibly can.  As well as I know how to
write, in all the ways I can understand.  I suspect most fan writers feel
that way, even when they don't say it, or can't articulate it, or don't know
how to look for the things that bother me.

I can't say, honestly, "here's why I don't write poorly," because I honestly
believe the issue can't be framed in that way.  But here are the reasons I
want most to write well, try hardest to do that:
1.  Some very intense experiences, some life-changing feelings and thoughts,
happened to me while I was reading.  If I have any chance of doing that for
someone else, I don't want to mess it up because I lost track of my
modifiers and left them dangling around.
2.  I love my own writing when it's good--it does cause me intense, itchy,
squirmy embarrassment if I feel some part of the writing is not right.  I
want to avoid feeling that.
3.  I love praise, but I get little pleasure from it unless I agree with it,
rationally.  If I don't feel the writing is good, nobody else can touch me
with their appreciation of it.
4.  I know how irritated I get when I see basically good writing or a moving
idea or an intriguing plot twist obscured by errors that a good proofreader
could catch, or a good beta-reader could ask the writer to revise (would he
say that?  Doesn't he seem to have three hands here?).  Like you, Suz, I
don't want to cause that reaction.  I am too vain for it.
5.  I'm ambitious.  I want to live up to and even surpass the fiction that
I've enjoyed so much myself.

So there's my list.  It overlaps with yours a lot.  If we tried we could
make a master list, probably, that even your old newsgroup would agree with.
It wouldn't prevent bad writing, of course;  if only that were so easy.

Jane
---
story page:
http://homestead.deja.com/user.jat_sapphire/index.html

--== Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/ ==--
Before you buy.
