Serdar Yegulalp's Blog, page 160

So What'chu Want Dept.

One of the standard pieces of advice that writers are given is "Write the book you want to read." This is great advice, but like all advice it has just as much potential to leave the recipient hidebound as it does to liberate him. It's no fun gnawing through straps you pulled into place yourself, trust me.

First, the good parts. It's always best to write the kind of book you want to read, because that increases the chances of you writing somethingthat doesn't actually exist yet. If the kind of...

Guardedly Successful Dept.

Say, did I mention I sawGuardians of the Galaxy the other week? I was pleasantly surprised — the movie isa ton of fun — although having that reaction isn't unexpected given how I walked in knowing nothing about the material or what approach was being taken with it. But it leaves me with decidedly mixed feelings.

First off, the comparisons people have made to classicStar Warsare not wholly misleading, but I wouldn't go so far as to say we're talking about a proper spiritual successor to that f...

Brainsmanship Dept.

Ads Don’t Work That Way | Melting Asphalt

Cultural imprinting is the mechanism whereby an ad, rather thantrying to change our minds individually, instead changesthe landscape of cultural meanings — which in turn changes how weare perceived by otherswhen weuse a product. ... [A]nad campaign seedseveryonewith a basic image or message. Then it simply steps back and waits — not for its emotional message to take root and grow within your brain, but rather for your social instincts to take over, and...

Think, Thank, Thunk Dept.

For ISIS, Slaughter Is an End in Itself - NYTimes.com

... I was given pause by Martin Amis’ afterword to his powerful new novel, “The Zone of Interest,” where he probes the “why” of Hitler and quotes both the icicle passage and another from Levi:

“Perhaps one cannot, what is more one must not, understand what happened, because to understand is almost to justify. Let me explain: ‘understanding’ a proposal or human behavior means to ‘contain’ it, contain its author, put oneself in his place, iden...

Wear Your Heart On Your Page Dept.

In between working on Welcome to the Fold I've been gathering notes for the projects to come after it, many of which are not set in the here-and-now, but rather in some analogue of the past. I keep thinking of all the pitfalls involved in telling any story out of your time and place, it's thetone of the story that's one of the most underappreciated.

Whenever you tell a story set in some distant past, two possible mistakes of tone come up. The first is when you tell it through the eyes of the...

It Ain't Me Dept.

Rob Barba has a post in which he talks about not being apologetic for the excesses of one's characters. I think this goes almost entirely without saying: you are not your characters, and so just because you create people a certain way doesn't mean you are advocating the kind of people they are, etc.

That said, I think how you construct a story can say a great deal, whether or not you realize it, about your attitudes towards those characters. Most people are not horrid bigots or sexist turds (...

Here's Your Engraved Invitation Dept.

Over at Brad Warner's blog there's a discussion of that old standby, the Right Way to Meditate. His take on it, as best I understand, is that the first mistake is assuming there's a right way, and the second mistake is assuming a right way can be taught rather than discovered independently.

I'm the same way about writing and creativity, and that's why I sometimes sound like I'm down so viciously on the how-to and the how-I-did-it literature. I think telling people "this is how you do it" is m...

Second Round Draft Choice Dept.

I'm most of the way through mapping out the second draft of Welcome to the Fold, and I'm starting to feel like the guys who have been given the thankless task of tearing down the Javits Center and building something better in its place. The hard part is not getting rid of the old, although that's bad enough; it's bringing in the new without recapitulating the sins of the old.

This is not a long book, but it's a complex one, with a great many individual little details that have to function corr...

Nonbiodegradable Dept.

Not much time to blog the last couple of days, but I did want to circle back to Wednesday's post, where I touched on howwe are creating a world in which nothing is ever really ephemeral or disposable. Culture has become like that garbage patch in the Pacific that never completely goes away, because of the disturbing preponderance of stuff flung into the ocean that doesn't biodegrade.

Just typing out that analogy made me realize that analogies are often deceptive, because they are best used to...

Do It One More Time Dept.

Why Back To The Future IV never happened | Den of Geek

What else do we really need to know about the adventures of Doc Brown and Marty McFly? We spoke to Travis Knight, who runs the animation company Laika [Boxtrolls], about sequels in general. His company has never made one, and he specifically said that "when you look at a story, ideally, the story should explore a pivotal moment in the protagonists' life. If we're doing a sequel, by virtue of what it is, it's going to be a diminishment. The...