Short Story Reader
Feb. 19th, 2012 10:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethThe reader for this Short Story unit is starting to annoy me. I'm used to it being badly cut and pasted, but the bullet lists turning into n list n list n list does make it a bit harder to read. The complete lack of sources for vast chunks of it does not seem like a great example. Perhaps the teacher wrote it all herself and simply forgot there were no first three chapters to refer back to, you never know. And the wrong page numbering, and simple wrong pages, repeats of pages, pages that actually belong at the end of a previous chapter and just interrupt instead of ending this chapter, they could all be printer errors, except for where it happens in the middle of a sentence where it's probably cut and pastes fault again. And the copy of a copy of a copy thing is pretty inevitable, so wanting things to be legible and printed in larger than six point font is just me being picky. But add them all together and I end up wondering why I bother.
Also it just used a story as an example of omniscient narrator that I can't see as anything other than tight third person. It only goes into one persons head, the motives and history of all the others are a mystery to him and the reader, we only see what he is looking at right then. That's not omni.
I realise I've been studying how to write for years and have shelves full of how to write books. And I have read the ones in the college library. And the university library. or at least carted them home and skimmed through them while feeling virtuous about it. It would help if I remembered which about all of them. But. My point is, I know I've been studying writing for years, so a second year course knowing less than me isn't surprising. But it is frustrating.
And I'm still not sure I'm going to be able to write the assignment right. One thousand words only. Something that fits the teacher's theories about the genre. Explaining my creative choices.
Some of my creative choices are scriptwriter habits. Like, smells and tastes are only relevant if someone speaks about them, but I can tell all about the visuals and sounds. Unless I've listened to a lot of audios, then the visuals have to wait on speaking too. But I do not like going and writing about people's thoughts. You can't see people's thoughts. You can't guess them. You're only directly acquainted with your own, and even then most of your brain doesn't tell you what it's doing. The only things you can say for sure are those you can concretely sense, and even then, hallucinations screw everything up. But assuming you're perceiving accurately, you can only know what muscle twitches and posture and body language and facial expressions are going on, what sounds and sights and language and signs you are hearing and reading. You can't know what is going on in their head. Thinking you can is just making stuff up. It's a bigger lie than writing about little green men on the moon, cause it's not just bad fact, it's bad process and toolkit. Mindreader people think autistic spectrum people are deficient in knowing how other people feel, but mindreader people cannot actually read minds, they've just all told themselves they can and play a game based on that assumption. They get it wrong very plenty often. ... less often than those of us that don't even play, I admit, since there is at least possibility of correct, but still, lots of getting it wrong. So I don't want to write stories that say 'he is sad' or 'she is happy', let alone 'she is thinking about last summer and secretly happy' or even 'she likes it because it reminds her of summer', since she wouldn't know all her own reasons, motives are sneaky like that. You can't know that stuff. You can know the stuff that goes in scripts, the stuff you can see and hear, plus the taste and smell and touch stuff. So I want to write those things, and leave it to readers to figure it out, and know it's a puzzle. Like real.
I know I'm being weird. And may in fact be wrong about mindreader people. Maybe they do have the magic.
Also I know that trying to understand people is valuable of itself. Like listening. Trying to figure out how people feel is part of caring and showing you care.
It just doesn't work very well.
There's lots of signs to read about how people feel, but actors can fake them all, so you can't actually know. Mostly people are giving out mixed signals, or ones irrelevant to the particular interaction. And people tell themselves stories about why they feel and why they choose, but there's lots of studies that show that behaviour doesn't work the way most people think and it can be influenced by so many things is all chaotic. People are wrong about many layers of things at once. Is why you cannot logic them.
Inventing people that have logic and that you can see the insides of is appealing, but wrong.
I keep saying it different ways because I'm trying to find the one that most accurately conveys how I feel, but I just sound stupid and wrong and sulky about my own limitations. Which I also am.
I just get more annoyed by descriptions of thoughts than by descriptions of things we could all perceive.
Boo. I'll start disagreeing with myself in a minute. Like, maybe if we all tell our thoughts we can all figure out how thoughts work! That would be nice! Maybe we have mostly achieved that! Maybe story people are quite a lot like real people after all!
... which story people? Modernist people do not appear people shaped to me. All sorts of characters are like that sometimes, you can see the strings and stitches.
Okay, so now I'm working up to my sulk about what are stories really for, how can they ever achieve it, why do I bother anyway. :eyeroll:
:-p to me. I shall go read stories I like and make stuff up and not sulk about reality not matching. Stories are more fun anyway.
Also it just used a story as an example of omniscient narrator that I can't see as anything other than tight third person. It only goes into one persons head, the motives and history of all the others are a mystery to him and the reader, we only see what he is looking at right then. That's not omni.
I realise I've been studying how to write for years and have shelves full of how to write books. And I have read the ones in the college library. And the university library. or at least carted them home and skimmed through them while feeling virtuous about it. It would help if I remembered which about all of them. But. My point is, I know I've been studying writing for years, so a second year course knowing less than me isn't surprising. But it is frustrating.
And I'm still not sure I'm going to be able to write the assignment right. One thousand words only. Something that fits the teacher's theories about the genre. Explaining my creative choices.
Some of my creative choices are scriptwriter habits. Like, smells and tastes are only relevant if someone speaks about them, but I can tell all about the visuals and sounds. Unless I've listened to a lot of audios, then the visuals have to wait on speaking too. But I do not like going and writing about people's thoughts. You can't see people's thoughts. You can't guess them. You're only directly acquainted with your own, and even then most of your brain doesn't tell you what it's doing. The only things you can say for sure are those you can concretely sense, and even then, hallucinations screw everything up. But assuming you're perceiving accurately, you can only know what muscle twitches and posture and body language and facial expressions are going on, what sounds and sights and language and signs you are hearing and reading. You can't know what is going on in their head. Thinking you can is just making stuff up. It's a bigger lie than writing about little green men on the moon, cause it's not just bad fact, it's bad process and toolkit. Mindreader people think autistic spectrum people are deficient in knowing how other people feel, but mindreader people cannot actually read minds, they've just all told themselves they can and play a game based on that assumption. They get it wrong very plenty often. ... less often than those of us that don't even play, I admit, since there is at least possibility of correct, but still, lots of getting it wrong. So I don't want to write stories that say 'he is sad' or 'she is happy', let alone 'she is thinking about last summer and secretly happy' or even 'she likes it because it reminds her of summer', since she wouldn't know all her own reasons, motives are sneaky like that. You can't know that stuff. You can know the stuff that goes in scripts, the stuff you can see and hear, plus the taste and smell and touch stuff. So I want to write those things, and leave it to readers to figure it out, and know it's a puzzle. Like real.
I know I'm being weird. And may in fact be wrong about mindreader people. Maybe they do have the magic.
Also I know that trying to understand people is valuable of itself. Like listening. Trying to figure out how people feel is part of caring and showing you care.
It just doesn't work very well.
There's lots of signs to read about how people feel, but actors can fake them all, so you can't actually know. Mostly people are giving out mixed signals, or ones irrelevant to the particular interaction. And people tell themselves stories about why they feel and why they choose, but there's lots of studies that show that behaviour doesn't work the way most people think and it can be influenced by so many things is all chaotic. People are wrong about many layers of things at once. Is why you cannot logic them.
Inventing people that have logic and that you can see the insides of is appealing, but wrong.
I keep saying it different ways because I'm trying to find the one that most accurately conveys how I feel, but I just sound stupid and wrong and sulky about my own limitations. Which I also am.
I just get more annoyed by descriptions of thoughts than by descriptions of things we could all perceive.
Boo. I'll start disagreeing with myself in a minute. Like, maybe if we all tell our thoughts we can all figure out how thoughts work! That would be nice! Maybe we have mostly achieved that! Maybe story people are quite a lot like real people after all!
... which story people? Modernist people do not appear people shaped to me. All sorts of characters are like that sometimes, you can see the strings and stitches.
Okay, so now I'm working up to my sulk about what are stories really for, how can they ever achieve it, why do I bother anyway. :eyeroll:
:-p to me. I shall go read stories I like and make stuff up and not sulk about reality not matching. Stories are more fun anyway.
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no subject
Date: 2012-02-20 07:51 am (UTC)she likes it because it reminds her of summer is the bad sort of telling anyway. Much better to say something like The sun shone through the leaves, creating a patchwork of light and shadow beneath the trees. She smiled as she remembered sitting under those trees for a picnic one summer. Afterwhich she can either remember something else about summer and the trees, or her thoughts can be interrupted by something else happening.
Your course notes do sound pretty useless, though.