Helping Anonymous

Yes, I know. We're acting like a couple of children. That's just how it is with hyperintellectuals and whatever the hell he is.

Anonymous said...

My google alert caught your response & i was atingle to discover a new blog. If i'd known "That really stupid essay in the Times" was not in quotes for irony, i wouldn't have been so underwhelmed by your boring word choice. Try some subtle gradients in your prose !It sound's like Waynes World, which was satirical mockery of dude jargon in the last century. No idea what you were trying to say about anything but your own choice(?) or default (?) lack of skillz with words. And yes, i used skillz because it's from back in the day when middle school kids called called everything fucking nuts &retarded, dude. ;)
Use a thesaurus! Edit!
Bonaboba

Look. Anonymous. When you criticize someone's prose, it's a good idea to either qualify your criticism with a statement like, "I not smart but know words stink," or "Since that's how I'm handling it, my writing is going to be fucking awful," so as to draw attention away from any of your own shortcomings in that area.

Another way of handling that situation is to show some minimal command over the English language. On consideration, that might be best. Let's see how your comment would read if written in something closer to standard English, just for chuckles. Proper nouns, punctuation, all those petty things with which we low-grade prose stylists are so infatuated.

Anonymous said...

My Google alert caught your response and I was atingle to discover a new blog. If I'd known the post's title, That Really Stupid Essay in the Times, was not in quotes for purposes of irony, I wouldn't have been so underwhelmed by your boring word choice.

Whew. The obvious fixes are not going to be enough to salvage this one. Now, I know this isn't a compliment. So as we go, if I find myself feeling as though I've been praised, I'll know I'm in error.

"If I'd known the post's title was intended seriously --"

Really? That's what that said? Interesting.

"If I'd known the post's title was intended seriously, I wouldn't have been so underwhelmed by your boring word choice."

I fail to get the connection here, but this does look a lot like a comprehensible sentence so we'll let it stand. I'm nurturing a fantasy of Anonymous hoping for a brilliant excoriation of that squealing, vapor-filled article fit to stand with the works of Swift and Mencken, and writhing in an agony of disappointment on finding, instead, the word 'dude.' Alas, this sentence is our only hope of knowing more.

"Try some subtle gradients in your prose! It sounds like the dialog in Wayne's World, which was a satirical mockery of dude jargon in the last century."

I think the exclamation point is a bad idea. It pokes a hole in what's left of your gravitas after the capitalization and spacing errors had their way with it. But it's your anonymous comment, Anonymous.

I have to admit, you pricked me with this one, you scoundrel. I must admit, I'd thought a piece of writing that runs from, "Are those guys huffing thinner?" to, "Anyone with the most infinitisimal grain of sense or experience knows that suffering is an absolutely necessary and unavoidable part of life, and that exaggerated attempts to avoid it cause grotesqueries that bring suffering of themselves," might have some subtle gradients to it, but then, we're always the worst judges of our own work, aren't we? Thank you, Anonymous, for calling this weakness to my attention.

No idea what you were trying to say about anything but your own choice(?) or default (?) lack of skillz with words.

Anonymous, at this juncture I must act with boldness, and I crave your pardon if I misread your intentions. However, this sentence is a crafty foe, and resists all conventional analysis. I must allow myself the luxury of intuition. And out of sheer love of invective, I will endeavor to bring your insult out of the murky depths of awkward syntax and up into the light of day.

I have no idea what you're saying here, due to your extremely poor writing ability. I would suggest that you polish your 'skillz.'

Ho! Ho! Anonymous, I just slapped my thigh in mirth. That's the stuff, is it not? Do you notice how it's not necessary to explain that your use of the word 'skillz' is sarcastic when the rest of your missive is written in standard English? I may not be able to write the way you think you can, but I do know a little bit about humor. Word to the wise. Make sure your jokes are funnier than you are.

Now that doesn't mean we should throw the baby out with the bathwater. How about...

You should know, only middle-schoolers use terms like, 'fucking nuts,' and, 'retarded.' 'Dude.' ;)

You have no idea what it cost me in terms of emotional health to leave that emoticon in place. But for you, Anonymous? No sacrifice is too great.

Use a thesaurus! Edit!
Bonaboba

Okay, I'll leave those there. In a way, they're the best part.

First off, 'use a thesaurus' is terrible, terrible advice to someone who needs access to a more varied and flexible vocabulary. Learn to use words in speech before you put them into your prose. When you fish in a thesaurus for interesting words while you're composing, you wind up with the kind of verbal slop McMahan produced in The Meat Eaters.

And that last word. The cherry on top. Literally the punchline. Edit! At the end of that email, the command, Edit! Really, Anonymous. Now you're just being silly. If your comment is the result of someone scrupulously editing with a thesaurus at their elbow? Do I need to continue?

So let's see how it turned out. From...

Anonymous said...

My google alert caught your response & i was atingle to discover a new blog. If i'd known "That really stupid essay in the Times" was not in quotes for irony, i wouldn't have been so underwhelmed by your boring word choice. Try some subtle gradients in your prose !It sound's like Waynes World, which was satirical mockery of dude jargon in the last century. No idea what you were trying to say about anything but your own choice(?) or default (?) lack of skillz with words. And yes, i used skillz because it's from back in the day when middle school kids called called everything fucking nuts &retarded, dude. ;)
Use a thesaurus! Edit!
Bonaboba

... to...

Anonymous says...

My Google alert caught your response and I was atingle to discover a new blog. If I'd known the post's title was intended seriously, I wouldn't have been so underwhelmed by your boring word choice.

Try some subtle gradients in your prose! It sounds like the dialog in Wayne's World, which was a satirical mockery of dude jargon in the last century. I have no idea what you're saying here, due to your extremely poor writing ability. I would suggest that you polish your 'skillz.'

You should know, only middle-schoolers use terms like, 'fucking nuts,' and, 'retarded.' 'Dude.' ;)

Use a thesaurus! Edit!

Bonaboba

Bonaboba... Oh, you tease. You may be Bonaboba to your mother, but you'll always be Anonymous to me. And Anonymous, just between the two of us? When we're together, I imagine -- and how sweet it is, to imagine this -- that you are Jeff McNamara. Ours is a strange love, is it not?

That Really Stupid Essay in the Times

Further refinements and a touch of color. I don't like the black corners; only the streetlamp and lines should be black.

Note the subtly varied color -- I've found that by using layers of transparent gradients, I can get a much more interesting, much less 'dead' result than a straight-up from the box gradient. Bringing life to digital art is the real trick.

I thought I was going to be able to avoid writing about this, but I've been obsessing on it to the point where I've been losing sleep. This is retarded, but this is what it's like to be crazy. How crazy?

Crazy enough to care about the state of intellectual discourse in the US. I mean, you've seen crazy from me before, but not on that scale.

Here's the article I'm addressing.

If you ain't up for it, dude is saying hey, shouldn't we be thinking about how we can eliminate meat-eating? As a behavior? In animals everywhere? Like, just get rid of the carnivores because they're real mean.

I shit thee not.

I tried to imagine that this is some kind of put-on but if it is, this guy puts Andy Kaufman in the fucking shade. I really think he means it. Red wine? Pot? Both of the above, maybe a little medication mixed in? Because these just do not seem like the thoughts of a sober man.

Let's get this straight. I don't think Jeff McMahan is a bad person. And for all I know he's done work that would blow me out of the fucking water. But as I write this, I will abuse him as a fool over and over and over again because this essay is stupid as shit -- which is bad -- and it was published under the rubric of the New York Times. This is fucking nuts. Isn't that the paper of record? Are those guys huffing thinner? What the hell is going on?

Okay. I don't want to spend time on this. I want to spit my bile and move on. Since that's how I'm handling it, my writing is going to be fucking awful, so I won't make a big deal out of how...

Rob once sent out a rejection letter where he accused the person's manuscript of having been 'rat-fucked by academia.' If you're wondering what that means, go read the essay. 'Too stuffed to jump' is another phrase that comes to mind.

Anyway. On to the meat. First off, the core of his position is this statement.

"It is relatively uncontroversial that suffering is intrinsically bad for those who experience it, even if occasionally it is also instrumentally good for them, as when it has the purifying, redemptive effects that Dostoyevsky’s characters so often crave."

I'm sorry, but that's a load of stupid you need a wheelbarrow to move. It is not at all uncontroversial; rather, it is the exact opposite of the truth. Anyone with the most infinitisimal grain of sense or experience knows that suffering is an absolutely necessary and unavoidable part of life, and that exaggerated attempts to avoid it cause grotesqueries that bring suffering of themselves. Without the experience of suffering it is impossible to truly understand the suffering of others.

Life exists in a dynamic situation of contending forces. Pleasure is the way our organismic selves guide us toward things that have proven beneficial to the meta-organism in the past, while suffering guides us away from things that have proven harmful. To the species, not the individual, please note. Suffering is not a source of harm; it is a warning that harm is being done. To struggle against the real sources of suffering is a noble thing. To attempt to eliminate suffering itself is like tearing out your goddamned smoke alarms. Jackass.

Are you familiar with the fate of those who do not feel pain? They, and those around them, must be constantly inspecting their bodies for unnoticed injuries. They frequently die young.

Get me?

And starting off with that muttonheaded Schopenhauer quote -- “one simple test of the claim that the pleasure in the world outweighs the pain…is to compare the feelings of an animal that is devouring another with those of the animal being devoured.”

What kind of idiot actually thinks that is a reasonable picture of life? I rather doubt it was one who had any experience of animals and how they live. Note the pleasure/pain dynamic above. It is tuned, so that a typical animal under typical conditions will of course experience more pleasure than suffering because that is how the relative functions of pleasure and suffering balance. Mild pleasure lets you know you're doing okay, suffering tends to indicate special circumstances. An organism that suffers more than it experiences pleasure is not a typical organism -- it is unfortunate.

And as for the specifics of one animal eating another. This is squeamishness, plain and simple. Would you rather be eaten by a shark or die of AIDS? Neither will be pleasant; the first will be much faster.

It also may not be as bad as you'd think. When David Livingston was attacked by a lion, he reported a dreamy sense of disconnection; anyone who's handled animals injured by cats has seen something of this.

Listen, McMahan? Most animals don't die of predation. Most animals die worse deaths. Most small animals die of pneumonia. Think of all the tiny mice and birds laying on their sides and quivering as they drown in their own snot and then tell me how cruel predators are.

Goddamnit.

Next up is this little doozy. In reference to the notion that it may be possible to some day engineer carnivorous behavior out of the ecosystem, he says, "Rather than continuing to collide with the natural world with reckless indifference, we should prepare ourselves now to be able to act wisely and deliberately when the range of our choices eventually expands."

So let me get this straight.

If we ever get magical superpowers, we should already have our wishes lined up. Is that what he means?

The idea that we should invest thoughts in hypothetical situations like this does have a place. It is in fiction. And if McMahan had plotted this out with the intellectual rigor used in the best science fiction, he may have come up with something of interest to say.

But that would mean speaking from a position of knowledge. He would have to say something meaningful about how predation operates in the ecosystem, how we'd manage birth control for moths and so on. He would have to really think, not engage in the outgassing of an intellectual colon.

Doing this kind of half-baked wambling about does not have anything to do with real thought. This piece consists of words and half-understood emotional impulses chasing one another around a cranium that is either permanently fuzzy or temporarily pixilated.

To prime oneself for possible action based on guesses made from a position of profound ignorance is a terrible, terrible idea. Jesus, McMahan! What the hell!

Okay, I'm sorry. That was uncalled for. But it really, really pisses me off that this kind of vague dopey slop -- and sorry, McMahan, I'm sure you're a nice guy and this isn't representative of your work, but this honestly does read like the transcribed ramblings of an over-educated stoner -- is being placed before the public eye and given the gloss of credibility that comes with The New York Times. This is the pathetic state of discourse. And here I sit, stewing bitterly in petulant insignificance. Unread save for the true elite.

(If for incomprehensible reasons McMahan is reading this, that was for you -- I am a spiteful nobody. Go ahead and dismiss my ravings. Plus, really, I'm irked because you want to get rid of all my favorite animals.)

Listen up, US of A. This is a warning. I'm watching you.

Think better.

Or else. I mean it.

Notes to a Fellow Writer

This is the first test I've made of the process I'll be using to generate the half-tones in the series of Swillistrations I've got in the works.

This uses the Phantasm plug-in for Illustrator. This is an incredible tool, and I'll no doubt be doing a more extensive review of it later. But this is so much nicer than the half-tones in Photoshop, and it's resolution independent. I can print this at any size that I want to.

Oh, this is going to be sweet.

So the cat's out of the bag. Ol' Ferrett Steinmetz has fessed up to being my correspondent here in this blog post.

(On the internet, we call that a 'link-like loop.')

Anyway, you can go out and buy a story right now that he wrote and I helped critique. It's called Under the Thumb of the Brain Patrol, and it's in the current Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine.

And for the record. I do not 'eviscerate' prose. I do not 'cut it to fucking ribbons.' For goodness' sake, it's just a little spit on the corner of a napkin and the way some people squirm you'd think it was boiling acid. Honestly.

So dude!

I have dealt out the praise and addressed the specifics of your story in personal correspondence, but as I began to write of more general matters I found myself saying things I've wanted to say to other people, so I wondered if this might not be placed in front of a wider audience. If you don't mind the internet listening in, here's some large-scale advice. Please note that I'm well aware that you're further down the professional path than I am; the arrogance of my stance is tempered by this humbling knowledge. If I over-explain anything, it's for the benefit of those peering over our shoulders.

Here's a big one. Scenes. The basic units of organization of a dramatic story are the sentence, the paragraph, and the scene. A scene is a specific action or interaction, usually but by no means always taking place in a specific location. It has the shape of a story, with a beginning, complete with inciting incident, middle, and end.

You frequently use extended passages of exposition in your stories rather than scenes. "She thought back on those lost years, when she had wandered free..." and you go on for a while. This is a technique of oral storytelling rather than dramatic fiction as it is currently written. And as it stands, those passages stand out as weak spots in your work.

If you want to make them work, you might try framing stories that use this technique as oral stories. Let the voice of the storyteller be present at the beginning to introduce the story, and when it returns later, it will be accepted. Having conventional dramatic scenes inside of a fairy-tale framework works fine.

But I think you'd be better served to learn how to think in scenes more consistently. Conventional fiction is written entirely in scenes -- even when there is exposition, it takes place inside the context of a scene. A lot of the time your exposition leaves me wondering if you're avoiding the hard work of imagining a specific event or interaction that will say what you want to say. You do this perfectly in most places -- I think you should do it everywhere, all the time. Of course, that's me.

If you want to go that way, I would suggest doing at least one draft of one story in script format. Imagine it as a film rather than fiction, and only tell us what happens through dialog and action. You can go back and add the frosting later.

(A quick aside. For years, I avoided doing writing exercises because I was writing my fiction. Big mistake on my part. It turns out that writing exercises can be really, really useful for targeting specific areas of writing that can't otherwise be reached. Kind of like a Nautilus for prose.)

Now I'm going to address a tangle of stylistic issues that I think relate to the above-mentioned issue of oral versus written storytelling. These are things I've had to fight with in my own writing, and I've seen them in a lot of other people's writing. They tend to occur together, and I think I've finally figured out what they're about.

And you will find all the mistakes I'm talking about right here in this post. This is my casual writing. Don't look to it as an example. It's fun, but it kinda sucks.

Anyway.

The use of fancy punctuation -- dashes; semicolons, ellipses... The use of lots of modifiers. The use of meaningless conventional phrases, such as 'and then', 'of course,' and so on. These all seem to go together, and I think I've finally figured out why. They're from oral storytelling. From speech.

The punctuation and conventional phrases act as ways of linking ideas so as to provide a continuous flow. That flow is further enhanced by the use of conventional phrases and modifiers to allow time to think. In addition, there is a music to the spoken word whose tempo and beat can be controlled by such words. These are all functional when spoken.

But on the page, ideas are linked physically, and there's no need to pause for thought. Anything that doesn't contribute is in the way. Grit in the lubrication. Every little flyspeck of a comma or unneeded 'ing' paves the path to Hell.

Try writing a draft of something without colons, semi-colons, dashes, or ellipses. None. At all.

I mean it, dude. Worked for Jersey.

And here's a little mind-blower I got from Nancy Kress. I wouldn't put it out on the blog -- guild secrets, you know -- but she swiped it from Ursula Le Guin and it's got a name and everything so I think it's out there in the public welkin already.

It's called Chastity, and it's dead simple. Write a page without using any adjectives or adverbs.

Dude, stop laughing. I mean it. No, really. None.

Dude?

Dude... Oh, brother. Sorry. Should have been more gentle with that. Here's some Kleenex, buddy. It'll be okay. Just try it once. It's curiously refreshing.

And as for meaningless words and conventional phrases, hard work at revision is your best bet, but this can be aided by the use of search functions in word processing. I know that if you were to do a search on the following words --

and
so
then
but

and the phrase

and then

and then look at each instance and ask, "Does this word bring anything to the party? If I just yank that sucker out would anyone miss it?" you will find your prose hella tighter. Tex mentioned a book called The Ten-Percent Solution on self-editing that looks like it goes into that kind of thing in greater detail and I'm getting me a copy.

Of course, any stock phrases like 'of course' that you run across should get the same treatment.

I'd also suggest that you can save a lot of excess wordage by taking advantage of point of view. This story was written from the close third-person, where you write from inside the character's head. You have a habit of saying, "So-and-so thought..." We're in their POV. Nobody else is thinking. No need to specify who it is.

And for that matter, when you describe a sound? You don't need to say that she heard it, because that's how you perceive sound. If she sees it, tell us. That's interesting. Assume sounds are heard, sights are seen, sensations felt, ad nauseum.

Here's one that I do all the fucking time myself. You're describing something and you try and combine or triangulate descriptions to get greater effect -- "It was thus and such, it was this and that." It do not usually help. One clear description is best. Restatement is a form of hesitation.

And, finally, a word to the wise.

Yours,

Sean