Stover on Psycho Progress 2.0

Again from our pal snark:

Regarding smoothness, it sounds like you're saying that writing is an iterative process. It also sounds like you're saying "You want a step by step by step instruction manual to writing well for dummies? A set of writing principles? Ha, Sure. Here are the principles of writing well: talent and hard work."

Which is fair enough.

I don't actually know what you mean by "iterative process," unless it's intended to signify something you learn by doing it over and over and over again. If that's what you mean, then . . . well, no.

That works for learning to play a guitar — or a video game, or tennis, or to hit a baseball — but the creation of narrative can't be learned by repetition; no matter how many times you copy Hamlet, it won't teach you to write like Shakespeare. Learning to write is not a process of entraining motor reflex pathways. It's more analogous to learning to play chess.

Yes: playing chess well requires that you play game after game after game, just as writing well requires that you write scene after scene after scene, but you aren't mastering a motor skill, you are heuristically uncovering the essential structure of the activity.

Even the greatest chess masters don't see the game more than three or four moves ahead. Lasker, reputed to be the greatest mind in the history of chess, is said to have been able to see seven moves ahead . . . but I suspect that applied largely to the endgame, where options are restricted. What chess masters have is a vast well of experience — what people call "feel for the game." They don't have to analyze a position in detail, because they have an intuitive sense for the progress of play.

Same with writing, except it's harder. With chess, you know whether or not you're getting better; you have an objective measure in wins and losses (or cumulative points in the leagues and such). As long as you keep winning, you're obviously doing something right. With writing, all you have is your own sense of the quality of your narrative, and the inherently suspect opinions of whoever you can strongarm into reading your shit.

Even commercial considerations don't help; we can all point out hundreds of shitty books and dumbfuck stories that have not only sold, but sold well. Once you're in print, you do get some occasional honest feedback . . . from people who love your work if it flatters their intelligence or accords with their political prejudice, and hate it otherwise, and you have a small group of people whose opinions you really respect . . . but they're no more likely to be right than anybody else. (No offense.)

The only way you know you're making progress is if, when you stop and look at your project, your experience and intuition gives you a feel for how the story needs to go . . .

This is why people who want to be good writers should read lots and lots of good writers. Leave the beach book crap to people who want to write beach books.

In the end, all you have is Rule #1a: "If it works for you, it's right. If it doesn't, it's wrong."

This paragraph ended up a ramble in the response I'm trying to retype, so it's hard to summarise. I guess the point was that the amount of exposition you manage to get into this scene, regarding jedi attachment, the planet, Mace's relationship with the planet, Mace's relationship with Depa, Depa's backstory, the civil war, and so on, can't be an accident. Do you stop and say "Here's the bit where I'm going to need to tell the reader these particular elements?"

I think you're speaking of Mace's journal entry as his shuttle is making the atmospheric insertion into Pelek Baw airspace.

And yes, in that entry, I did have two main expository goals: to delimit the gross characteristics of Haruun Kal as a planet and a war zone, and to establish Mace's connection to it.

Throwing in the fabricated HoloNet entry for the planet is a cheap trick to give the appearance of objective authority. The rest . . .

Well, by Stover's Rule of Exposition, the trick is to work the info into a little story of its own. After all, when you remember something, you are (in effect) narrating the story of that event to yourself. So each thing I wanted to convey about Mace gets attached to its own story . . . and stories are messy things, especially when you're remembering them, that produce all kinds of unexpected interrelations. Read Proust. He knew his shit in every conceivable way, but the on the interaction of consciousness and memory, he is unmatched in the history of literature.

I didn't write that sequence to set up shit. I wrote it because it's what Mace would have written. I have Mace thinking about his childhood, because he's going back to the place he was born. He's thinking about Depa, because he's worried sick about her and has no idea if she can be found, much less what he'll find. And he's thinking about war and atrocities because war is overtaking everything he thought he knew about the galaxy . . . and he bitterly regrets not having committed an atrocity himself, because . . . well, you remember. It's not only what he's thinking about, but what he's thinking about the thinking.

I could have put that into a paragraph just like the one above, and saved about eight pages of very dense prose, but it wouldn't have worked for me.

Rule #1a.

I think I may have put this in one of the SRW posts, but it's important to every element of writing:

Never write shit just to set up other shit. Your shit needs to be powerful and engaging right where it is, otherwise just skip it and move on to something that is powerful and engaging.

Set up is bullshit. Story grows from story. If you're writing something primarily to set up something later, you're thinking too far ahead. Make where you are perfect, and where you're going will take care of itself.