10 out of a Zillion

OK, the thing that makes this meme interesting to me is that I am Not a Writer.

(from Gentle Reader Matt H. at xenolith): Take someone else’s list of Ten Things I Don’t Know About Writing, comment on it, and then make a list of 10 of your own. First, then Ten Things Your Humble Blogger Don't Know About Blogging'n'stuff.

1. Why I bother to do it at all. To the limited extent that I do write, that is. Which is pretty much this Tohu Bohu.
2. How to make myself finish anything. In addition to the various serieses I haven’t finished on this blog (the Song of Songs, the Declaration of Independence, etc, etc), I have two plays, one of which I’ve written three scenes for and one of which I have an outline and two scenes for. On rare occasions, I think about going back and working on them, but I know I won’t ever finish them. Now that I think about it, I had a series of short humor stories that I was writing; I wrote four and a half...
3. How to write female characters. It’s worse than that, actually; the situations that I feel inclined to write about have no place for women. The one play I completed was about a guy coming back from his first year of college and hanging around with his high-school buddies; the guys wouldn’t have hung around with girls, and the one female character is conspicuously a Plot Point. One of the started-not-written plays is for two male characters; the other is for either four or five male characters.
4. How to write for female readers. Not to be all stereotypical about What Women Read and What Men Read, but as y’all Gentle Readers have probably noticed, my style of argumentation and rhetoric is quite ... well, it’s a Guy Thing. I alternate between being oblivious to it and being embarrassed by it. Now and then I read feminist bloggers writing about the stuff that burns them about how Stereotypical Guy Blogger argues, and I say “that’s me!”
5. Which of my blog notes will elicit comments and discussion, and which will die a quiet death, unmourned and unremembered. Actually, if I accept that not everything I write will spark a thread, it’s probably more entertaining that I can’t predict which is which. Still, it’s disconcerting, sometimes, to finish a nice, provocative rant to no effect at all, while an offhand comment is into double digits. Similarly, now and then I think I’ve got something too good to not comment in somebody else’s space, only to have it sink without a ripple.
6. When to stop. Not that I am generally aiming at the two-hundred word pithy post, but I do sometimes go back and read a note and realize that I’ve said what I have to say three times.
7. How to insert a personalizing anecdote without making it obvious that I’m throwing in an anecdote to personalize an issue. More generally, I tend to want to abstract political issues to their logical structures, and then remember that persuasion is about much more than logic, and throw in some rather clumsy appeal. It tends, I think, to come off very much like I’m contemptuous of the anecdote, when in fact I respect its power to persuade.
8. When I’ve crossed the taste line. Specifically, when my triples, anaphora and polysyndeton have gone from being mellifluous to being corny. So I figure I’ll just keep going, and be damned sure I’ve crossed so far past the line it’s no longer corny but ironic.
9. How to use graphics or design elements of any kind. It’s not so much the technical aspects—I can make graphs and could learn CSS—as the basic question of what images or design would be helpful. I’m reading Edward Tufte again, and am more cognizant than ever of my utter lack of instinct for this sort of thing.
10. What kind of audience I want. This Tohu Bohu has settled in to about fifteen commenters and I assume some similarly small number of Gentle Readers. I like y’all, and of course I want y’all to comment more, but I don’t really want the hundreds of commenters I see on the Big Blogs, because the conversation here wouldn’t be possible with that many people. On the other hand, I am occasionally wistful that I can’t bring one of my incredibly powerful insights to the attention of the person who could make use of it.

And, because part of the meme is to do this, here goes some comments on Matt’s list

1. Anything about the publishing process. Can’t help you there at all. I’m sure I know less than you do. Fortunately, I don’t care, as I am not writing anything for publishing.
2. How to write about things I know nothing about. I think the standard practice is to hire a researcher, and make him write those bits. Isn’t it?
3. How to come up with the hook. I would have thought that recognizing the hook would be the problem. Of course, that’s not much help.
4. How to get a character to do something they fundamentally don’t want to do. Guns! No, seriously, if the character fundamentally doesn’t want to do it, the compulsion must be fundamental as well. Like a gun.
5. How to make a character’s emotions real for the reader. I don’t know how to do it right, but YHB hates the bit where the character muses about his (or her) emotions. I’m all for telling, generally, but this seems to be where showing is less annoying. Also, as a question: does it matter whether the emotions are real? Other than as that contributes to the character’s reality?
6. How to do characterization in the Stephen King mode*, and integrate it with the plot of, you know, the story. I haven’t read much Stephen King, but in the stories I’ve read the characters are so thoroughly in the story, that is, without any distracting outside-the-story aspects, that the characterization and plot are sort of naturally integrated. I think in the kind of story I like (but not all of them), it’s a mistake to have the character exist too much outside the story; he (or she) then requires harnessing back to the plot. Of course, many people feel exactly the opposite.
7. How to make a character seem like an expert when I, myself, am not one. Become an expert in everything! Or, alternately, have your character an expert in something that doesn’t exist!
8. How to measure pacing success. Not your job. That’s what you have a first reader for. Don’t sweat that part. You will be revising later, after all.
9. Whether I have anything valuable enough to say to make this writing thing worthwhile. Not your job. I mean, except to the extent that you need to have some sense of what you are not doing with your writing time. If it’s coming out of videogames, it’s worthwhile however crappy it is. If it’s coming out of childcare, it’s not worthwhile even if it’s genius. By my reckoning. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it (or that you should), just that your part of that judgment is not figuring the value of what you have to say.
10. How to make the story on the page as good as the one in your head. How is it different from the one in your head? Is it the words, or the pictures? Is the page deeper or shallower? I suspect that (for most writers who I have read writing about their writing) there are bits of the story in their heads which are totally wonderful three-dee extravaganzas, and they think that the story in total is wonderful, because the story in their heads skips the crap bits, the bits that they haven’t written at all. Since the story needs those parts, the story in your head (without those) is not actually better, it’s just shinier.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.