Writing: February 2008 Archive Page

H.H. Munro (SAKI)  Esme

"The hyena hailed our approach with unmistakable relief and demonstrations of friendliness. It had probably been accustomed to uniform kindness from humans, while its first experience of a pack of hounds had left a bad impression. The hounds looked more than ever embarrassed as their quarry paraded its sudden intimacy with us, and the faint toot of a horn in the distance was seized on as a welcome signal for unobtrusive departure. Constance and I and the hyena were left alone in the gathering twilight."

From the Short Story of the Day.

Greg Costikyan on Play This Thing!

A review is a buyer's guide. It exists to tell you about some new product that you can buy, and whether you should or should not buy it. A good review goes beyond that, and suggests who should buy it, since not everyone enjoys everything. (E.g., A romance novel may be very fine of its kind, but is quite unlikely to appeal to me, since it is not a genre I enjoy.) 

Thus, Ebert is, ultimately, a reviewer; the net result of his discussion of a work is a thumbs-up or thumbs-down. Mind you, he is also an informed and intelligent watcher of film, and his discussion of a movie frequently veers in the direction of criticism; but he is not being paid to write critical works. Pauline Kael was. 

Criticism is an informed discussion, by an intelligent and knowledgeable observer of a medium, of the merits and importance (or lack thereof) of a particular work. Criticism isn't intended to help the reader decide whether or not to plunk down money on something; some readers' purchase decisions may be influenced, but guiding their decisions is not the purpose of the critical work. Criticism is, in a sense merely "writing about" -- about art, about dance, about theater, about writing, about a game--about any particular work of art. How a critical piece addresses a work, and what approach it takes, may vary widely from critic to critic, and from work to work. There are, in fact, many valid critical approaches to a work, and at any given time, a critique may adopt only one, or several of them.

One of the first things I do in my Video Game Culture and Theory course is have students compare a games magazine review with a "new games journalism essay" (in order to get them to realize how much else there is to write about besides simply reviewing the game for a person who has never played it).  I then introduce games scholarship, and have students write their own academic research paper on games.  The first time I taught this course, in 2006, there was plenty of scholarship of the kind Costikyan calls for, and when I taught it again in 2008, there was so much that perhaps next year I will demote the importance of "new games journalism" and jump right into the criticism.

Politico:

Wolfson made the explosive charge in an interview with Politico after suggesting as much in a conference call with reporters.

On the call, Wolfson said: "Sen. Obama is running on the strength of his rhetoric and the strength of his promises and, as we have seen in the last couple of days, he's breaking his promises and his rhetoric isn't his own."

"When an author plagiarizes from another author there is damage done to two different parties. One is to the person he plagiarized from. The other is to the reader," said Wolfson.

Obama closely echoed a passage from a speech that Deval Patrick, now the Massachusetts governor, used at a campaign rally when he was running for that office in 2006.

American Literature.com

The Short Story of the Day features works by Anton Chekhov, Jack London, Louisa May Alcott, H.H. Munro (SAKI), Guy de Maupassant, Charles Dickens, Edgar Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, O. Henry, Ambrose Bierce, and many others. An archive of all the stories featured to date can be found here.

From The Boston Globe:=

College administrators say that intense pressure to gain acceptance to selective schools has compelled parents to turn to high-priced essay editors and coaches. "The euphemism we use is polished," said Parke Muth, an admissions dean at the University of Virginia. "If you're paying someone that much money, there shouldn't be fingerprints. But some essays have that sheen, that lemony-fresh smell that makes you wonder." Outright plagiarism usually sticks out like a sore thumb, and suspicions can often be confirmed with a Google search. But detecting the helpful hand of a parent, guidance counselor, or writing coach, even for admissions officers who have read thousands of personal essays, takes a keen eye.

Up Right Down already features over a dozen versions of the same story. What's yours? (Via)

THE PLOT: In a bistro in Paris a young woman (A) tells her three girlfriends (B, C, and D) about the affair she had with an American tourist, who returned home promising to write, and hasn't. It's been over two weeks; something must have happened to him. (She has just learned she is carrying his child, but she doesn't tell her friends.) B tells her to call him; C to e-mail him; D to forget all about him. Enter a fat American couple; each of them has a different speech impediment. They order food. The man chokes. A performs the Heimlich maneuver on him, and saves his life.

A great series hosted by Heidi Ruby Miller, a recent graduate of Seton Hill's Writing Popular Fiction program. She has asked writers of genre fiction (fantasy, crime, etc.) to tell the story of their first publication. I'm just starting a career track unit in Introduction to Literary Study, and several of the students want to be professional writers.

Every writer follows her own path within the publishing industry, which makes for entertaining and inspiring stories off the page. Paths to Publication offers some of those unique perspectives. I hope it also gives us all comfort knowing that our journey as writers is not just the breaks we get, but also the opportunities we take.

Interactive fiction author Emily Short offers a thoughtful analysis of the function of designing puzzles that permit the player to come up with original solutions. She refers to her game Metamorphoses, which includes a complex physical world model that includes such concepts as size, shape, weight, etc.  For instance, you can beat down a door by enlarging a needle so that it is the size of a battering ram, and you can turn your simple clothing into a suit of armor by converting the material from natural fibers to metal.  I wish I had the time today to give her thoughts the attention they deserve...

Metamorphoses includes several in-game processes (resizing objects, breaking objects, changing the material substances of objects, piercing objects with a needle), and it's possible to string these together -- change an item to glass and then break it, say, or change an item to something that isn't too hard, then pierce it, then resize it so that the hole is large, then change the item into a heavier substance... But I did anticipate most of these sequences, in part because there weren't that many problems available to be solved. Emergent solutions tend to happen more often when there are a large number of puzzles, so that the world model developed to account for problem A can also be leveraged, unexpectedly, against problem B. So such games also probably need to be of a reasonable size.

So I hypothesize that a game allowing emergent solutions needs all of the following:

• attributes common to most game objects that affect interaction
• processes, effective on many game items, that allow the player to change attributes (or produce an item with new attributes out of an old item, as in the case of breaking the tail off the rat)
• a selection of processes that can be used in combination (freeze rat then smash it); one way to think about this at the design phase might be to draw a chart of attributes and processes, showing which processes convert which attributes into which others; the more long chains are possible, the more complex the plans the player can execute
  
• sufficient number of puzzles that the solution space becomes too large for the author to anticipate at the design phase 

Once we have all those features, though, we run into some other serious design problems.

Gettysburg College:

Students create text-based "interactive fiction" games that are rigorously derived from archaeological data and filled with references to Viking and other cultures. The games describe a scene or object in detail, then ask players to make a choice, such as "go east" or "take sword." Each decision leads to a new set of possibilities. "From an English professor's point of view, this is really creative writing," said Fee.

Don't forget the red lutkefish puzzle.

Random thoughts are exactly what they are, random!

Anyone can say random words. It does
Have favorable results. His attempts to woo
-- But never all the way -- toward the cliff
Conform to something so unlike yourself

The other points are pretty valid. It's
A place to jot down information as
Questions. For example: how many?
Some mystery, not just telling the story

And one of the issues that I struggled with
Has meaning and the other does not.  Which
Alters it, stepping farther and farther away
From the last meeting to give you an idea.

I should just take a note book and go sit
At the food court at the mall.

My students are working on showing and telling. It's a difficult concept to learn, and I've found over the years it's not that easy to teach.

So as part of an upcoming short story assignment, I've started to introduce the concept of "pointless showing" to define the practice of avoiding clear language in the misguided belief that "being obscure instead of direct" is the same thing as "showing instead of telling."

• Pointless Showing: "A stream of thick red substance sliding from the jar into the pot... the long strands in the pot, undulating and flowing like hair, like Lucy's hair, took on the crimson hue, and moments later the silence of the empty apartment was broken by the slurping sounds of eating. Or was it weeping? Not even the absent Lucy would have been able to tell for sure, even if Jack could have choked out the question. He reached for the cheese grater, held it to his chest, and ground, ground, ground his love into Lucy's favorite dish."
  [What the hell? Showing isn't simply about being obscure. It's about choosing details carefully, in order to lead the reader to figure out, on his or her own, what precisely the details show.]
  
  
• Good Showing: "Bill still cooked himself pasta with the sauce he made Lucy's way. He hoped he might learn to love pasta, but feared Lucy had learned to loathe him."
  [This scene uses plain language to tell what the character is doing and thinking... but it doesn't come right out and tell the significance of each action, or announce how Bill feels at any particular moment.  This version SHOWS something that is not explicitly stated in the pasta example -- that Bill associates Lucy and pasta in his mind, and that the habits he has developed about pasta echo the habits he has developed around Lucy.  There's no big dusty book that says "Pasta is a symbol of romance," but if the scene progresses so that the pasta catching fire, or Bill throws it away and cooks something else, or he chokes on the pasta and throws up on the floor, we can figure that's a hint about Bill's chances for a relationship with Lucy.]

See also Planning Your Short Story