Work Within Your Limitations: Make the Idea Fit the Writing (or, How I Get Away with Shitty Prose) · 5:07pm Nov 21st, 2018
Something that might surprise most of you is that, when I try to humblebrag, I barely talk about the obscene size of my penis. There is nothing humble about it. It’s just generally a great thing.
No, what I always talk about is the fact that—and this is true, fucking warped as it sounds—even though I am the dumbest motherfucker on this website? I sometimes need to put, like, real effort into convincing my readers that my prose is shit.
Because I think it is shit! And look, I get it. I’m such a manly hunk. I’m awe-inspiring. I don’t call myself a ‘pussy slayer’ because that implies that I need to put effort into slaying pussy. I’m more like a great bonfire, only the heat I radiate takes the form of thrusting hips.
So, yeah. It can get difficult to withstand such raw sexual energy and then point out, that, um. Dude, you’re kind of a shit writer, come to think of it, aren’t you?
Why, yes, I do look like that. See what I mean with the thrusting hips?
I am! I don’t think my stories are bad. Some of them are actually pretty neat! But I’m not a good writer, because those are two different things. I want to make clear from the get-go that I don’t consider myself a bad writer just because it’s cool to undersell yourself—God almighty, I would never do that—but for like, actual, rational, empirical evidence that I, in fact, can’t write like a good writer.
Mainly: English is not my first language! And unlike other non-English native speakers (hi, Vladimir Nabókov, how’s it going, Vladimir Nabókov) I lack the knowledge or the wit to make my prose work anyway!
But then, how come I consider some of my stories good?
‘Cause you don’t need to be a good writer to create good stories, that’s why. I always say the same here—my prose is absolute garbage but I hide it with style.
Right. Or, in other words, and stating the thesis of this blog I guess:
Work Within your Limitations: Make the Idea Fit the Writing
Or
How I Get Away with Shitty Prose
PROLOGUE: ARAGÓN HAS SHIT WRITING, (or, Musicality)
I’m gonna go out of a limb here and explain what I mean with ‘shitty prose’ first. Otherwise, I can already tell that some motherfucker is gonna go GNGHEEEE WHY DO YOU SAAAAY THAT because my readers are all great and I love them a lot, but they won’t fucking let me make a point when I try to.
Right? Right. We’re having prologues in our blogs now. Fuck me sideways.
So there’s this characteristic of prose that, as far as I’m aware, has no real name. I call it ‘musicality’, myself, and I’ll be referring to it as such (and I’ve called it that in some of my blogs once or twice without properly explaining it, I guess, because the best thing about making up words is that nobody can accuse you of using them wrong).
Right. Musicality is the shorthand term I use to define prose that sounds good to the ear, that is pretty, that is pleasant to read. It’s a term I use to define stuff like this:
“Put the motor in the red,” she said, grinning, “I want to see this hot rod go.”
He grunted as boot stamped and crushed pedal to time worn metal. “I’ve been working too hard to get a clutch of that long green to lose it now on some slide flake gone for the wipeout.” His eyes never left the road as he fished smokes from his front pocket. “Play it cool, pussycat, no need to go for the straight kill.”
Look at that.
Look at that.
Magello fucks. That’s what I get from reading this little quote—and Death Guts is an entire story written in this way. That is some sexy prose I just quoted. I understand some of you might not like it, because some of you are objectively wrong when it comes to tastes? But in my opinion, this paragraphs shows that when I write, I drive a Prius. Magello, on the other hand, owns a fucking Lamborghini.
That’s musicality. It’s rhythm, it’s cadence, it’s beauty in the way words are put in a page. A paragraph is musical when you feel the powerful urge to hump your screen after reading it. It’s musical when you feel you can bask in the words themselves without giving a shit about meaning, or context, or story. It’s pure aesthetic pleasure.
Magello has an advantage here, mind you. He’s an artist, he has a heightened sense for aesthetics. I understand that! But, still—this paragraph fucks. No way to go around that.
And I can’t really do stuff like this. I can’t write objectively pretty prose, or words that look sexy by themselves, in the way they sound, and flow, and weave together. It’s, as I said earlier, a matter of language—I’m ESL, I had to teach myself English by writing down the moans of every British lad I buttfucked in 2012. I just don’t have the fucking vocabulary to write aesthetically.
I understand this kind of prose when I read it, mind you—I’m fluent enough for that. But, if you’re bilingual, you probably know the struggle already: recognizing a word is not the same as being able to remember it on a whim. It’s simply out of my reach.
Which means that yes, my prose is shitty. It has to be. I lack any musicality whatsoever. Even if I’m trying to be aesthetic the only way I can describe a room is by saying “it was a room,” and then a queef joke for the ladies. If you’ve ever felt the need to hump your screen while reading one of my works, it’s probably just because your mom told you I was a great lay.
Right, so that’s the set-up. That’s the Great Obstacle in my way: I can’t write sexy prose. How do I go around that, then?
Fuckin’ easy, man. I hide my obvious lack of talent with style.
FIRST: RESHAPE YOUR IDEAS (or, Cortázar Was Never Human to Start With)
In 1947, an Argentinian author named Julio Cortázar wrote a book named The Tunnel Theory. It’s an essay on writing, and the evolution of the novel. It’s a very interesting book that makes it obvious that Julio Cortázar doesn’t really understand how humans work.
Can you blame him, though? This dude was both Argentinian and a French scholar. He could call you bellísima and then speak French between your legs, all the while reciting poetry. He’s the reason why bohemians go to Paris to get drunk, and possibly the only male in human History [1] who can be objectively said to be sexier than me. He’s even named Julio, which, as we all know, is the most beautiful name.
[1] Personal experience has made it abundantly clear that there’s probably at least one dog out there that’s hotter than me.
So yeah, like any other American who comes to Europe, Cortázar kinda gave up on his humanity at some point down the line. Through this The Tunnel Theory book, he legitimately seems to believe that writers are born at the apex of their writing skills. Some people come out of the womb shooting sonnets from your fingerprints, apparently, and if you don’t know how to make women cry with your descriptions of blue curtains at age four, you’re done, mate. That’s as good as you’re gonna get.
And as anybody who’s even seen a toddler can tell you, that’s bullshit. Toddlers are idiots. People get better at things as they keep doing them, that’s how learning works.
Seeing how Cortázar legitimately ignores this fact in some of his arguments, you could believe that he’s full of shit? But, y’know. Right after publishing The Tunnel Theory, he locked himself up in a room and like twenty years later he finished what I consider to be the best book of all time.
So, aight, maybe not that full of shit after all. His arguments make sense in a way? He just doesn’t understand us mere mortals, with our nonperfect writing and whatnot. Still worth exploring, however, which means that for the time being I’m going to ask you to take that fact—“writers get better at writing as they write”—and do with it what you’d do with a penis. Mainly: stuff it somewhere else while you talk to me. Suck on a lollipop in the meantime to get used to the gag reflex or something, I don’t care, we’ll get back to it later.
Anyway! One of the arguments in Tunnel Theory, one of the useful ones, is that there are two ways you can improve your stories:
- You adjust your story to the limitations of the language you’re using, or
- You break the language you’re using to tell your story.
Neat, that makes no sense, and you’re probably confused. I’m so great at explaining things. Lemme translate this and add some brilliant jokes in the text to make the lecture more palatable or something.
The idea here is that you as a person have some limitations in how you use words. Especially when it comes to writing. Sure, we’re all used to language as a means to communicate ideas, because that is literally the entire fucking point of language—but some ideas are communicated better than others.
When you come up with a story, what you’re coming up with is a concept, right? An idea. A series of facts, and feelings, and characters, and actions, etc. It’s a series of things that together make a story, and when you write it, what you do is you convey them to the reader.
Writing is communication, savvy? You’re using language to send a message, you’re translating this concept that you have in your head into a form that others can appreciate. But, as any ESL person can tell you, any translation is flawed unless the translators are Jorge Luis Borges or Umberto Eco. And you’re not any of those guys, ‘cause they’re fucking dead.
To get around this, our go-to strategy is to change our writing, to make an effort, and shape it, and edit it and rewrite as necessary. We modify our use of the language (writing, in this case) to convey the idea properly.
This is overall a very complicated way to explain something simple: [idea good + writing good = story good]. But [idea good + writing bad = story no good], which means that you need [writing good] and not [writing bad].
Here’s Cortázar’s hot take, and the one thing I’m actually defending: maybe [writing bad] isn’t necessarily [writing bad]. Maybe it’s [writing good]. Maybe it’s just that your [idea good] is not a good fit for translation.
(Remember: we’re working under the assumption that everybody is already writing as well as they’re ever going to write, because apparently we can do that now?
As this blog continues, it might look like I’m advocating for stagnation; I’m not. Trust me for a bit and keep reading—ultimately your goal is to get better and improve as much as you can. You do this by challenging yourself and stepping out of your comfort zone. But we’re not talking about that, we’re talking about how to sidestep your limitations. Don’t write your angry comment yet).
Maybe you think you’re [writing bad] because you’re focusing too much on your ideas, man. Look—nobody’s perfect, that’s the sad truth. You already know one of my biggest flaws (I can’t do pretty prose). I’m sure that there are things that you’re better at when it comes to writing, and things at which you’re not as good, too. Maybe you can write some kickass action scenes but you suck at dialogue. Maybe your character writing is on point, but your worldbuilding sucks.
That’s your [writing bad]. Your worldbuilding is bad; get better at worldbuilding so it becomes [writing good].
Or, y’know. Maybe you don’t need that. Maybe you can just focus on the bits of your [writing] that are already [good]. This is Cortázar’s hot take. Remember the first point I made?
- You adjust your story to the limitations of the language you’re using
Yeah we’re going balls-deep into this.
SECOND: IDEAS ARE A MEANS TO AN END, (or, It’s Ballsack Time)
When he talks about the ideas you need to translate into stories through your writing and the like, Cortázar mostly means themes and the like. Undertones. Sociological ideas, political stances, etcetera etcetera. But this applies to more practical stuff, like an action scene or a lot of dialogue in your story, and Cortázar admits this at some point; he just digs talking about #DeepShit a lot.
Which is why I’m gonna ignore all the thematic shit, really. Fuck it, baby steps.You wanna talk ideological implications of your writing, go talk to someone smarter. I’m just here to post selfies.
Brilliant
Anyway—[writing good] and [writing bad], and the like. Here’s another hot take: ideas aren’t sacred. You can change a story’s plot so that it’s different from the original concept you had, if that makes the story better.
This sounds obvious? But, hahah, yeah don’t give me that shit. If you’re a writer, you know exactly why that feels like a personal attack. Look at me. Fucking look at me in the eye. How many times have you kept a shitty plot point in a story because you were fond of it? How many unnecessary B-plots or secondary characters that are only there because you included them in the first draft, and taking them out would be hard?
Yeh. Thought so.
The process of mangling your idea and killing your ego in the meantime is made explicit in The Tunnel Theory with Balzac as an example, and I’m going to use it too, because the dude’s name sounds like ‘ballsack’ and I am super not above that. So:
Honoré de Balzac (French novelist, XIX Century, wrote La Comédie Humaine, had a hilarious double chin) was like, fucking juggling a lot of stuff in his writing, generally. He was one of those realist guys, right, so he wanted to “study society like a scientist studies Nature” in his writing. Really #DeepShit material.
And his first book fucking sucked, apparently.
So in 1829 he wrote Les Chouants, which is about love and war and shit. But here’s the thing: Balzac wanted to charge this book with a lot of themes: the turbulence of the human heart and its effects on history, how hierarchies shape society, and so on. Only he wrote in a way that was novelesque as fuck? Think a soap opera. A telenovela.
His style is not really adequate to what he’s writing about, so the message is undermined and it all becomes kind of a mess. If you wanna make a serious study on the idea of forbidden love, be my guest, but if it’s written and structured in a way that reminds me of Pasión de Gavilanes you’re fucking up, my man.
So yeah. According to Cortázar—and he knows more about French lit than any of us—not Balzac’s greatest move. But, dude caught up. He was like, shit. I’m really not doing justice to the idea of this book, what with all the corny shit that happens in it.
What follows in Balzac’s career (Physiologie du mariage in 1829, La Maison du chat-qui-pelote, El Verdugo, La Vendetta, and many more in 1830, dude was a writing machine) is a constant struggle. Dude knows his writing, he’s a master of his own universe. But he also knows his limitations, he just writes a lot of corny shit. Writing #DeepShit is kosher, but he’s gotta learn what kind of #DeepShit to tackle, cause not everything works. His writing (especially at a technical level) is irrevocably adjacent to the Romantic aesthetics that he was trying to abandon with the whole Realism thing; try as you might, if everybody arounds you speaks with an accent, you’re probably gonna pick it up too.
But this is not necessarily bad! Balzar reduces his themes and ideas and stories so that they can be better translated into his writing. He changes the content of his stories, to match the style in which he writes them. By Gobseck (1830 novella about a lady being bored with her marriage and ruining the fuck out of it by wasting money, having an affair, and trusting a dude nicknamed, shit you not, ‘Daddy Gobseck’), he’s achieved harmony. His themes fit his writing.
Gobseck kicks ass. There’s not a single idea in that book that isn’t perfectly translated through his writing. It plays to Balzac’s strengths, and more importantly, it plays to his limitations.
(And keep in mind, Balzac wrote that in 1830, and this motherfucker kept writing till 1848, apparently hitting a home run pretty much every time. We should all read more Balzac. Make a club. Call ourselves Tezticles).
When recounting all this, Cortázar does mention in passing that oh yeah also Balzac got better at writing whatever—then goes back to talking about how there’s a beautiful harmonic cage in something something prose something themes blahblah. Not really focusing in that whole process, really.
But Balzac did get better at writing. By writing shit that he wasn’t good at, he at least learned one way to not write about certain themes. He gave up those ideas that he couldn’t translate, while also getting better at translating. Not everything out of his reach remained out of his reach.
Which brings us to our next point.
THIRD: BRING SEXY BACK, (or, Minmax your Writing)
I hide my obvious lack of talent with style. That’s what Cortázar was talking about.
Look, no way to get around the fact that I don’t know many words, so my writing’s kinda gonna suck? But, hey. I’m still perfectly readable. How do I get away with shitty prose? I just write stories that don’t require pretty prose. It’s literally as simple as that.
This might come off as a bit of a weird blog, but I do genuinely think a lot of people don’t think about this at all. Ultimately, yes, you want to learn by tackling your weak points, but there’s value in writing the best story you can write, too—because you learn a lot from that too.
There seems to be this idea that ideas are pure and sacred, and that a good story needs to fit a certain mold. I especially see this in newbie writers, or in people who just started to get into the art of telling stories and are learning the curves. Some experienced writers seem to pick up on the point of this whole blog by themselves—you can recognize them easily, because they’re the ones you call “the good ones”.
There ain’t no Platonic Ideal of a story. You might prefer adventures that follow the Hero’s Journey and include action scenes and a romantic subplot, but not every single story must be like that. Especially if you’re the one writing it.
I think this whole thing about ideas being sacred (the fetishization of ideas, you could call it) comes from a genuine love for stories. Which is good! But you can love so much you love wrong, as the Spanish saying goes. You might only come up with ideas you think of as ‘good’ based on what other writers have done, instead of ideas that actually fit you.
And you need to come up with ideas that fit your writing style. This is extremely important.
There is merit in giving a good look at what your own limitations and trying to write around them. By all means, step out of your comfort zone and grow, but develop a comfort zone first. A lot of writers keep writing story after story but they don’t seem to get better, because they’re too busy writing to their weaknesses to develop their strengths.
Art is born in boundaries. I realized long ago that if I wanted to describe something in detail to the point of the reader feeling like they were there, I was going to be fucked. I can’t do that. So I don’t—I write different descriptions. I adapt the tone of the story so that the location is only necessary as part of a scene, and not as an entity of its own.
I lack vocabulary? Neat. Write with a style that doesn’t ask for complicated prose. Make it simple but with enough personality to feel unique, and then pump that shit out like it’s your genitalia and you’re home alone on a Wednesday.
I can’t do character growth, because I have trouble pacing how characters shift in their reactions to stuff? I write stories where the arc is about them learning to live with their flaws rather than growing out of them. Different arc, still works. Different kind of story. I change the idea so it fits my writing.
Picture what you’re good at, and write that. Build your creative mindset around those strong points. Avoid anything that is mediocre or terrible or just generally [writing bad] to you. Focus SOLELY on what you’re good at, and see what the result is. Write only dialogue, write an entire story where there’s a war but not a single fight scene, write a story where there’s ONLY worldbuilding.
Hone those fucking skills. Turn your [writing good] into [writing great].
Because if you focus on what you’re bad at, your growth is going to be slow as hell, and that can only be frustrating. If you’re reading this, you’re a nerd, so you know what minmaxing is, right? Apply that to your writing. Minmax the fuck out of it.
And then, once you’ve mastered your best qualities, you’ve developed your own comfort zone. Your writing will get better by itself; so will your ideas. The brain is a muscle too if you don’t know any biology, and those get stronger with exercise. If you force your ideas to shift and change and mutate to adapt to you, soon enough you’ll easily come up with shit you can translate into a story more easily.
It’s a whole process, really. And now that you have your comfort zone, so you can step out. Tackle those things that you weren’t good at and get better, and then BAM you can translate more ideas, more concepts. You have more freedom in the creative process, you have much more wiggle room, you can take risks, you can get payoffs.
You don’t have to force yourself to be miserable when writing, is the main thing. You can allow yourself a little bit of fun, you can let yourself focus on what you already like and then go for the hard stuff once you’ve got enough confidence.
That’s the main point of this blog. We need to bring sexy back to the website and destroy this fetishization of the Idea as something immutable and holy. ‘Cause it ain’t! Fucking delete that subplot if it isn’t needed. If you can’t make the romance work, take the romance away and write a better story with the elements at hand.
Or, in other words:
- Adjust your story to the limitations of the language you’re using
See what I mean? Use the tools at hand. Go full Balzac. Become a Tezticle.
FOURTH: TWO SIDES TO EVERY COIN, (or, Keep it Pure)
Aight, I keep coming back to that last quote, but if you remember, Cortázar said there are two ways to make your story better. What was the second one, again?
- You break the language you’re using to tell your story.
Ah-hah.
Well, yeah. There are two sides to every coin—in this blog I’ve been going with what Cortázar refers to as ‘the classical writer’, or ‘the traditional writer’, or whatnot. I’ve been working under the assumption that you want to write something that reads like a traditional story; as such, if your idea and your writing collide, you change your idea.
But it might be that you don’t wanna sacrifice the idea. And if there’s no traditional way to translate this esoteric concept in your head into writing, then fuck it. Sacrifice the language, and maintain the purity of the idea.
Hahah. Oh, man, yeah. Keep an eye out for the second part of this blog, ‘cause, babe?
Next time, we’re going postmodernist.
Man I can't wait for part 2 'cause I'll even include the word 'postmodernism' in the title and like, smart people will flock to that? And I will not understand a single word they'll say. Fuck I can't wait for the people talking about postmodernism in THIS blog, even.
I'm calling it now. It'll be completely undecipherable. First instance of the word 'nihilism' and I'm out to fuck a woman to get the nerd out of my system.
4971202
isn't that more hedonistic?
Dear god.
I notice when you say "obscene size" you don't mention whether it's obscenely large or obscenely small.
Is your penis large? Let's talk about it! I mean, I like talking about the size of my penis. And my breasts (which I'd like to be even larger, but that might impact my ability to teach students). And my balls. My balls are abnormally large. If I wear normal-length shorts without panties they'll peek out the edge.
For the record, I did not begin this line of conversation.
4971202
I think I'm legitimately too stupid to understand anything you just said.
4971202
Be sure to use 'juxtaposition' as well!
Though, it's pretty fifty-fifty on whether it makes you sound like a learned man or a pretentious twit to your readers.
Seriously, among those who know the the word, it seems like half of them are people who took Literature-related classes in college, and the other half are DotA players.
4971209
hot
4971215
Very helpful
Touch my ass.
4971218
Did you stop being a mod exactly when you posted that
4971223
Hey brah.
As long as I phrase it in a way where Aragon has a chance to refuse, I'm in the clear.
Aragon: The Element of Humility.
I've been trying to write a Harry Potter knock-off/crossover/thing, so part of that was to take the third book and carefully pick apart the first two chapters. Found something really interesting that I didn't realize before. J.K. Rowling's style is long-winded and slow, while her character descriptions are brutally short, mostly because she can pigeonhole the mental image of the character in a word or two. Like Neville's grandmother, described as 'a formidable woman'. That's it. It's about the opposite of what we've been told to write, with detailed characters, scenes, etc...
4971202
this is your second (possibly out of future 3) of your posts that I find both interesting and useful. Yeah, I'm a non-native speaker as well and sometimes my idea of good writing surpass my knowledge on the language (not if be by fucking mlp I would be watching anime and programming all day like a nerd and probably would have never touched a book, or be bi. who knows? oh, yeah, take seriously that fucking part because the first thing I wrote was nasty clop).
Now if I could only be good at comedy instead of sad stuff and clop.
PD: there were enough balls and dicks in this post to make me feel as if I was reading a porn novel meant for girls. (I'm not complaining thou
)
Huh. It’s Wednesday. I’m home alone. Apparently I’m missing out on something. Ah well. Back to reading dumb crap on the internet.
(For the record, this is useful and intelligent dumb crap.)
4971237
She also uses surprisingly short words even if she doesn't exactly dumb down the vocabulary. But yeah, her descriptions tend to be short and focus on the impressions they're creating on the characters rather than going into detail of what they're reacting to.
Definitely interesting, and a good point that it's okay to write to your strengths and develop a comfort zone. Much fun.
The worst part is that you're actually kind of cute.
Also thanks for the blog. I was literally in tears last night because I was frustrated writing.
4971202
And yet, your blogs are works of art that are clearly minmaxed to fuck and back. Why else would we keep coming back?
4971208
Okay, yes, we'd keep coming back for that, of course. No one's questioning that. But also for the pure, raw beauty of Aragon's mental calligraphy.
4971202
will... will it have more selfies? asking for a friend
Those are very dangerous words, my friend.
4971277
Are you implying there's a timeline where Aragon is not a sexy motherfucker?
Thanks for repping my fic. Even if no one liked it, I did, and that's the important thing.
This is true. My nephew was almost 8 before he discovered existentialism, whereupon he stood at the window and said to my brother "sometimes I think about how much I don't understand things, but one day I will. Then I'll die."
Or something to that effect.
Smart kid. He plays a tuba now.
I'll have you know my 7th grade Spanish Name (because when you learn another language, you pick a new name from it for people to call you in class!) was Julio, and while it might have made me sexier, it did not make me sexy. <.<
4971202
I mean, postmodernism is just using epistemic, metaethical, and aesthetic nihilism as a tool to undermine rational systems the wielder hates in order to jockey for social capital. While postmodern movements often try to claim just outcomes as the goal of their wholesale destruction of meaning, by opposing themselves to movements they claim are inherently oppressive, in reality, the lack of positive alternative and the ideological reliance on skepticism renders their efforts moot. More often then not, their efforts end in an ouroboric dead end where they, much like Saturn, eat their own in a never ending line of redefinition and obscura as they fight among themselves for attention by creating whole new vectors with which to crucify yesterday's savior.
(( You're welcome.
))
4971388
Julio's a pretty fucking hot name for a hunk. I'm straight and I'd bang a Julio.
This is a feel I've been thinking about for a while, so it's cool to hear you talk about it. Looking forward to part 2.
Thank you for the blog man.
Wish I had more shit to say. "Great blog. You were right. Hella right and fly at the same time." I mean, I could go into depth about your points, so you know that someone else understood what you said, but that's also hella gay. So yeah. You did good work. You had good ideas. And you should keep on writing.
That is all.
4971534
Yeah okay no. Like, you've got the gist, but this example in particular is garbage -- I defend writing silly stuff if it's just fun to you and that's it, but going for 'purposedly terrible' just because trying is hard is still producing terrible shit. If you don't know how to write characters realistically, write stories where the characters don't need to -- fairytales, for example. Those use archetypes rather than developed characters pretty often, and the motivations are simplified and stylized. But don't fucking advice 'this is hard to do? Never actually try, and so you have never actually failed!'
Likewise,
bit of a shit story, no? If you suck at endings realize what kind of ending exactly you're bad at, and write something different. 'Sucking at endings' is too broad to be like, an actual thing people might struggle at, if you ask me. There's probably a more specific problem at hand there.
Naaah. Art is born in limitations, as I said, so if anything there are more chances that you'll come up with something cool. All stories are art in a way, it's just that some are shitty art.
This one's spot-on, though.
4971397
I'm gonna fuck your mom in particular for this.
4971388
I have spent all night trying to come up with the funniest way in which I can tell you that actually my IRL name is Julio, hence the joke, but tbh nothing I could think of was half as hilarious as you apparently being my fake 7th grade Spanish dopplegänger.
4971550
Oh huh. Yeah, no, I agree with pretty much everything you say in this second message -- it just seems we have vastly different definitions of trollfic, apparently?
What I define as a trollfic is something that's purposedly bad. As in, something that is, by design, either unreadable or completely unsalvageable. Usually that's made for comedy's sake, and I guess it might work if you know enough about humor to pull of a metajoke in such a scale? (I.e., the entire story's concept is a joke; Freddy Got Fingered is an example of a story supposedly working this way if you're aware that the very idea of it is the auteur trying to see what he can get away with while still making a hollywood movie with a budget. The movie has nothing in it that's funny by itself, and the characters are all insufferable, which is precisely why it's funny for some, because it's so bad)
But like, if you can pull that off reliably, you either know a shitton about stories anyway and if anything you're trying something hard, or you got massively lucky. Unno. Call it high art.
What I think you call trollfics (the word doesn't really have a definition, I guess, which is why we got confused here) is what I referred to as "silly stuff" in my original reply -- mainly something that's just in your comfort zone and you don't really try to push boundaries as much as simply getting practice in writing as-is. I've written stuff like that myself, where I don't push the envelope and just go for the comfy bit because, like, fuck it. Writing is supposed to be fun. I'm allowed to just enjoy the process and aim for nothing more than that myself.
If that's what you were talking about? Then yeah, I do support that 'write this kinda stuff' mentality for the writer's own sake. What I call trollfic tho is just someone, say, starting to write a story and then halfway through adding an XD and 'and then Shadow the Hedgehog came and killed them all with his dick the end'.
Which is just... I mean, again, if that's your thing, go for it? But I also said that once you have a comfort zone you gotta get out of there. I don't think you'd develop intolerable habits from it, but it might end up causing you to never write anything that doesn't eventually evolve into nonsense, out of fear of actually trying, as I said. That's a whole different can of worms though, one that I didn't really tackle in this blog.
But yeah, that's the thing -- different definitions of the word, apparently, and as you just said 'trollfics' I assumed mine (which isn't "write for fun even if it's not super high quality, just focus and what you do best", but rather "purposedly make it terrible for the lulz and maybe to get people angry so they downvote").
Seems like we generally agree on the gist of everything else tho. You didn't really distort my meaning at all and got everything I wanted to say in the blog, judging by this second comment. Just, yeah, different definitions of a word so I thought we were disagreeing is all. My bad!
I have no idea. I naturally have more contact with writers than with readers, because those are easier to find in my experience (if I go to a discord server and I recognize a name 'cause they wrote a story I liked, I can strike up a conversation there; there's no way to know if anybody is a reader of my shit tho). So I always tend to think I have a very small audience of writers, even if the number of views and followers in my account clearly indicate the opposite.
Unno, it's hard sometimes to realize that oh yeah, some people actually like. Consider themselves my fan and stuff. Unironically. I'm constantly working under the assumption that I have a very small niche audience and that most of them are other writers 'cause they're the ones I recognize. It's a visibility issue I guess?
4971538
This is some really true, really quotable shit, something I've been trying to convince people of for years.
So thanks. Julio.
4971538
I mean, that seems like cutting off your nose to spite your face, but if you want to slum it, man, you do you.
Also, you're just mad that the fact that the Feminist Glacial Studies paper exists meant my shitpost was 100% on the nose.
Just to be clear, the second part of the blog is regarding the breaking of language?
Because I am eager for that like the metaphorical.
4971208
Truth be told, I just assumed they meant to say 'shape' instead of 'size' and it was something like a klein bottle or one of those forks where the edges merge into each other and/or don't actually exist because sadly, it's 3 edgy 5 me.
4971202
Ideally, you'll want to try and squeeze post-postmodernism in there somewhere, or go for metamodernism and make the readers wet.
If you didn't know that Beckett wrote 'Waiting For Godot' in French (not his native language) explicitly because it prevented him the facility (word used most intentionally, in every sense of its meaning) he enjoyed in English… ("parce qu'en francais c'est plus facile d'ecrire sans style" - Beckett)
…then you now know something new about limitations
Great blog, lots to think about.
But my main takeaway from this is you're eating lollipops wrong if you trigger your gag reflex with them.
Lollipops should be licked, not deep throated.
So, it looks like part 2 of this hasn't happened yet? And you've since decided to try out being a decadent asshole (Citation) which would have been perfect for writing about postmodernism?
4971202
I hate to throw this out there, but did part 2 happen? I didn't spot it in a cursory re-look through your blogs, and I admit to still being curious to see more on the topic two years later.
5408483
Oh right I forgot to reply to this.
There's like, some kind of curse that was cast on me the day I was born which prevents me from writing any continuation of a blog that actually promises one. There was a planned blog, to follow up on this, and I drafted it and everything, but stuff happened (it's been so long I don't even remember what it is) and the draft itself was kind of shit, so I kept putting it off because I needed to do more research and eventually I just went "ah, to hell with it" and stopped trying.
So nah, don't think part 2 is happening. To be honest, though, this blog is kind of autoconclusive, so I mean, not that big of a loss.
5409231
Thanks for the reply! I appreciate knowing a bit about what happened.
If that draft is still floating around anywhere, I’d love to check it out. Of course if it’s gone it’s gone. But the ideas hinted at here remain fascinating.