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kimyoonmiauthor · 17 days
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Reviews and Critiques and how to handle them.
So the second best treaties about this was Holly Lisle's Mugging the Muse (2000), which, BTW, I read much later, because she'd stepped down by then from Forward Motion. At the time I read it, it was free, but now it's paywalled, so it has gems in there, the most useful of which is don't jump on paychecks and budget. Learn how to do Writer Tax returns. Remember to truly LIVE to write better *cough Barthes should have known this one. And the last one is how to take critiques.
The one on critiques goes like this: She used scream and shout when she got critiques and sometimes cry. She'd go into the bathroom and scream and let her do this. And then force herself to act professionally. The BEST of us at this process still fucks up once in a while. The trick is to not fuck up too often.
This is my second best treaties I've seen and heard about it. The first treaties I ever learned about how to take critiques is from my former teacher/advisor, Thomas C. Joyce, who unfortunately died of cancer some years back.
I do remember the names of the people. But as I don't have permission to use their likeness and I don't want them to be harassed. The people who are living (as far as I know) I will not name. I am also including my own fuck ups, because it's only fair. But the core of this is mostly Tom Joyce. Who said something on the order of don't call me "Mr. Joyce, it makes me feel weird. Call me Tom."
He was my advisor at the Young Writer's Camp–a summer writing camp. For this reason, I'll call him Tom.
I wanted to write this treaties out because he never wrote it anywhere... and I might remember parts of it wrongly, but I 100% used this to post to Nanowrimo's first critique threads, and then for the critique forums, which served as the core of a lot of critique groups online?? (not sure about that). And I listed the rules he gave me during critiques. Also that there has been a rise in people who can't take or give critiques and they think doing so won't help their writing. So, I won't write it as eloquently as him, and honestly I'm writing this quite sad because I do wish it was his words here instead of my fuzzy memories of him.
Let me dip a bit into memory lane first, so you get a sense of who Tom was. Tom smoked. He knew he smoked a lot and didn't particularly care. He liked to give this lesson on perception. with music, showing that the simpler things in life aren't always first. And that the source of stories can come from anywhere–not just writing.
When I met him he was a bit portly, which he'd sometimes point out about himself and had salt and pepper hair, which was curly. He'd often talk about how he wanted to lose weight.
He had this calm and cool demeanor about him, but also warm. So when he gave you a critique, it felt like he was reaching into your writerly soul and he could pull out your intentions in an instant. He not only saw where you were, but more importantly, where you were going and intended to go. I aspired to be that sort of critiquer.
He never judged you on your process to write. He had no lessons about that. And he based the entire time around critiquing and making sure you had something for the group. If you wrote on clay tablets, I think he wouldn't care. He'd likely joke loosely about it, but he wouldn't care and say, can you share it?
We did not write the same genre. We did not have the same process to write by a long shot. I never really read his writing and since he was an advisor, he rarely talked about his own writing or boast. He was a cool character because he was HUMBLE and he pressed it into you that YOU MUST STAY HUMBLE at every point of the process. Brave enough to share, but humble enough to take critiques.
He loved anedotes. I probably got my love of making up extended analogies from him.
He was not just a good writing teacher he was the BEST writing teacher I've ever had. And fuck it—I've read a TON of ass novel writing manuals from Aristotle to the present and I've heard author interviews all over the best, I would rank him as the best.
He was so memorable that when I finally got something published he was on my top list of people to show because I'd promised myself I would do so, but when I looked him up so I could pass the story to him, I had found that he'd died of cancer. I was DEVASTATED.
The fact we didn't write the same didn't matter because his lessons around critiquing. His process was this:
You write. You get critiqued. You take the critique gracefully to your face. You learn to critique. You learn both of these processes and perfect them and apply them, and you get better as a writer. He had several large arguments for this process and why he didn't want it to be regimented into telling people how to write.
Remembering his lessons, I posted his loose list of critique rules to early Nanowrimo boards–I posted the first critique threads for first pages and queries, but never his justification for them, because I didn't think it was my place to, but he's not published it himself and I think the internet is forgetting. And I don't think we should forget Tom Joyce since he taught me some really excellent lessons that I think you need to know.
So loosely, Tom's treaties on taking a critique goes something like this:
On receiving a critique:
Stay silent when people critique you. No. Hold your tongue (Fuck, I'm really still working on this one).
Remember any time they put into the critique is a blessing.
Only open your mouth to fact check the person. If they think the US flag has green, you can POLITELY correct them.
Stop explaining your work before you give the piece. He taught me this one. I still struggle with it. I still repeat the advice, but I still have issues.
Do not argue with your critiquers. I've fucked this one up too.
Critiques aren't always right and sometime you have to divine what they are really getting at.
On giving a critique:
When you give a review try to balance the review out. You give 3 bad things, you give 3 good things list them out. Do a summary for your review. YOU MUST find something good to say about it.
Try to read the entire piece before you comment.
Honor the wishes of the author. If they don't think something is working, try to figure out why.
Do your best to separate "Not for you" versus objectively written bad.
Be SPECIFIC. That's more important than the length of your review. He drove this into me.
He argued, the more you critique other people, the better writer you become. And the more you consume, in general, the better writer you become. The more you recieve critiques, the better you become. It's a two-way process, not a one-way process.
His arguments are pretty much why I dislike the whole idea that people don't "have time to give critiques" and thus don't want to give one back. No. If you do 10,000 critiques and get better at them and get 10,000 in return and learn to apply them well, you get better as a writer. Focus on your craft and the writer you want to become.
And now you can see why even though we did not write the same genre, I did not know his writing work, I did not have a matching writing process, that I treasured his lessons. He also had this thing where he was super, super cool with however people wrote. He never, ever disciplined how one should or should not write. He simply said, produce the writing–that's the most important part. And then get it critiqued. We did do occasional writing lessons, but he never ranked that as important.
Now for his arguments on why he thought these things.
So, as a younger writer I struggled and still struggle quite a bit with the first rule. The shut up and listen to someone tear your baby apart.
How to Receive Critiques
First Rule: Stay silent when others critique you and NEVER argue with your critiquer.
His argument went this way: You, the writer are never going to win against a critic. Your entire existence is going to be criticism. You have choices. You suck it up, and accept it is part of the writing thus owning it. You incorporate the suggestion. Or you do better next time.
He had an anecdote, which he liked to tell about this writer who fought against a critic and screamed and shouted and the writer lost.
The result of you fighting against a critic, according to Tom, is that you gain a bad reputation. ALWAYS. Never fight your reviewers.
As Holly Lisle said, go scream into a pillow somewhere, but shut the fuck up and get off the internet. Don't post it onto boards. Tell a friend privately, but don't post it in public. Give yourself a set amount of time to get back to it.
He liked to say stop throwing stones at glass houses. It's not going to work.
No lie, his cool attitude over this still has me screaming at times, HOW DID YOU DO IT? I still try to override the impulse. It's so hard.
Second rule: Every time someone bothers to critique you it's a blessing.
They spent time, and effort consuming your product. As he liked to say THEY ARE A PAYING CUSTOMER. Treat your customers correctly.
And if they are not paying, they were paying their time with you. They cared enough about your work and you to give you a critique.
You have to suck it up and do better.
BTW, if you watch the Youtube Channel, Wait in the Wings, this argument comes up over and over again. When you fight the critics, you lose the majority of the time. When you honor they came to the show and did understand it,
They really cared about you and your art to do this, no matter how cutting it is. Learn to breathe, move on and figure out what to do next.
Third Rule: The only time you open your mouth AFTER the person is done, is on two cases:
The first is to say thank you. The second is to fact check something obvious.
There is no green in the American flag, for example.
DO NOT ARGUE WITH YOUR REVIEWER and don't use this opportunity to try to feel superior to them. WTF man, go back to shutting up. TT
I still struggle with this. I'm swallowing my own feelings as I'm saying thank you. And I'm fighting the voices. And Tom acted like it was easy.
Fourth Rule: Stop explaining your work before you show it.
No lie, my other professors who have given critique sessions also said this. My typography teacher said this, which I keep repeating to myself, "Stop explaining your work. Say that you did the best that you could for the time you were given."
But Tom's logic went like this: Every time someone picks up your work, are you going to be beside them to explain what you MEANT by this or that. Will you be in their ear to talk about your intentions? Let them read the work themselves.
No, it's on you the writer to communicate it better.
Most of the time it's on you, the writer to do it better. (go back to rule number 1 on why).
Fifth Rule: No really, don't argue with your critiquers
It will only end in a bad reputation. Learn how to let it go. Move on. Either take the advice or leave it. See if it works, but at least try it. But arguing with your critiquers will result in nothing good.
How to Give Critiques
First rule: When you give a review, try to balance the review out.
If you give 3 bad things, give three good things, but remember that the person has feelings, so put the good things first. The best critique is good things, bad things, summary. We'll get into how to sort a critique later.
Tom liked to say, remember there is a human being behind that work. And that you won't get that mercy in real life once your work is "out there."
Second rule: Try to read the entire piece first before you comment and then make your comments.
This is your basic reasoning of trying to figure out what the writer is trying to achieve instead of hyper focusing on what they did wrong.
Third rule: Honor the wishes of the author
Spoken and unspoken. If they think something is not working, try to figure out why and some solutions one can do to fix it. Don't just say this thing is wrong. Figure out why. This process will make you also a better writer.
Try to make the piece in front of you better for the author, not how you would write it. He repeated this a lot so you got it. It's not about you and OMG, I would insert dragon here because I could do it better. No, face the piece in front of you and find ways to help the author where they are. You may ultimately disagree and they might not take your advice, but make sure it's about the author, not you.
Rule 4: Do your best to sort "Not for you, versus objectively written bad."
He didn't write romance, fantasy, or Science Fiction. It didn't matter to him or this process. Because there are some commonalities and if you read widely enough, you will know what is good or bad. Don't discriminate like that. If you're struggling with this go to the previous rule about honoring the wishes of the author.
Rule 5: Be specific as possible on why you like or dislike the item in front of you. This helps to sort it out later.
If you say, character is lame. That's not helpful. If you say I dislike the character is diving off the cliff without motivation and I don't know why and the physics don't make sense, that's a lot more helpful to the writer.
He would say too, that the more you're specific and drill down to why, the better you become as a writer. This is why DOING critiques is as important as receiving them. Do the best you can as a critiquer and be specific as possible. It will develop your writer brain and editor brain better.
And I should insert around here:
Revenge critiques are counter productive to you becoming a better writer.
He didn't say this. But I think he would agree given the previous treaties, especially on the idea that the writer is always going to lose.
OMG, you said info dump in MY STORY was bad. So I'm going to find every instance that you info dumped and point it out to you.
Your hurt feelings shouldn't be entering into critiques. Go outside, do something else, come back. You aren't in a place of learning. And sometimes what works for one story will not work for another. Sometimes people do it on purpose and go back to the previous rule about the intentions of the author.
The writer who never honestly critiques and revenge critiques and doesn't listen to critiques, never improves and gets better.
How to Sort Your Critiques
Sort them into these tiers/categories:
Grammar
If you're crying over grammar mistakes, get over it. Just take it and agree or disagree. Do better next time.
Facts
The Earth isn't perfectly round, but it's not shaped like a pear either. The Wizard of Oz wasn't originally propaganda. Greensleeves aren't written for Anne Boleyn. These usually hurt less, but often can dissolve entire stories. This is why you should research. Make sure every single quote is true and truly attributed. This is because facts in your story you don't want that to pull out the reader at any point and you don't know who might be reading it.
Core story issues.
This or that character doesn't work. The intention and impact aren't the same. These are the ones that hurt the most. These are the ones in critiques one should be careful of the most. And the ones that are going to hurt you the most.
The problem is often sort story issues are also the hardest to divine and the hardest to fix.
Critiquer might have had a different emotion from your intention, so remember what I said about being able to reach into other people's writing and figure out their intentions and then work with that? Yeah, this is where it comes in handy to make your own writing better. Sometimes they point to a thing, but it's not that thing.
Say comments are,
this character is boring.
This character doesn't do much.
I think this character is lazy.
But you've written the character on a hot summer day where they are baking out of their mind.
How do you punch it up to make it better? Your KEY ideas on why they aren't moving are "Hot summer day." So punch that part up and give more specific details so people get it. So people get that it's so hot people can't move.
And when the person said the character is lazy, the commentary feels more like deprication rather than true laziness.
That's how you divine the comments. It's not well, this character needs to change the entire scene so it has more action. It's how do I do this scene better so it communicates more.
BTW, Botchan by Natsume Soseki is a masterclass in how to get your character into total inertia such that you actively hate them, but at the same time you understand them.
Tom would say something like, once you get the critiques what you do with them is up to you. Ignore them, take them, but realize that what you don't take is likely to show up as a critique later.
Seeee... both critiquing and receiving critiques makes you a better writer. I'd also argue, it makes you a better person, too.
Short anecdote.
I was on a board and this writer was complaining about this review she had which said that the clothing she had was "inaccurate" and she argued that it was an other world fantasy setting so she could do whatever she liked. And she wanted to know if she should reply and get revenge on the critiquer. A few people were comforting her and egging her on.
I pushed against it gently by asking for the specific critique lines pretty much repeating Tom's advice on how to take a critique. The critique isn't always right, you have to divine, etc.
She stated she loosely based the costumes on a particular century of clothing. So I looked it up for her. I pointed out that stays during that century had changed a lot over time and the underwear changed the outer clothing. So it was possible the person was objecting to the underwear and the outer clothing not matching. I named the pieces of underwear that had changed during that time period and pointed out there is a huge difference for us for 1990's clothes versus the next decade. And that previous eras were no different.
What she needed was someone to cold sort the comment, point out she needed to do research and point out that sometimes physics can't be explained away by an other world.
Don't argue with your critiquers. Also, stop encouraging people to do this???
She ended up deleting her entire post. If you can't take critiques. Get someone to cold sort your critiques for you.
Haha. I have an awesome self-nominated writer's assistant who refuses to be paid, even though I tried to pay her. She knows me sooo well, when she gives a critique and I'm in writer meltdown mode saying, but I could do this or do that. She says in a flat voice, "No, you're going to do this and this is why." I hide this from the public, but damn. You need people like this in your life too.
'cause as much as I'm going off on Tom's rules, I also occasionally fail them. I'm still trying to be as calm cool and collected as he appeared to be about this sort of thing.
How to Know you're getting review bombed.
The account is brand new
All of the review ratings are at extremes. No 3 star reviews.
All of the reviews are targeted.
None of them are specific about the book.
The hazards of making the writer the primary marketer such that they have to do the job of 3 people: Writer, Publicist, and Marketer. Separate your modes. Compartmentalization. Learn it. It can be healthy.
But really, go back up and read. The writer is always going to lose. The more you care about it, the more likely you're going to be review bombed. Fighting reviewers never does you any good.
Bonus Round
The person that you're worried is better than you is probably thinking the same thing about you.
In another words, it's not a battle against others.
In my Young Writer's Group, I deeply admired this guy's writing for his ideas, how he was able to cobble things together with this sort of balance. And I had this kind of feeling like I could never do what he did. I mean he had this kind of deeper detail I felt I was missing. Plus his ideas—fucking clever.
All the time he'd come up with the "obvious" idea that I wanted to be able to write. It's the kind of stuff that you go, OMG, of course.
Flat out envy on my side. And then one day, I heard him talking about how was I able to come up with so many ideas so quickly to other people in the group and that he deeply admired my ideas.
I was shocked. I thought it was one way the entire time. Of course, honor code, not typing up his name, and not typing up his ideas, but the spirit of it is this: You're in a battle against yourself. Your critiquers when you're honestly facing them, and not say, trying to get enough points to post your work, are truly helping you, but you critiquing them is also helping you.
There's still a few of his ideas I keep waiting for him to publish, so I can do spins on them. I still hope he's writing, because writing is a community effort.
Stop being intimidated by other writer's brilliance and find your own. You'll get there too. But damn, I still want to see at least two of his ideas make it onto screen/in a book. I keep looking for him. A few of my former critique partners got published. Dave, hello. And another one that too recognizable by first and last name.
If you can't take reviews, don't read them.
This comes from repeating Writing Excuses episodes–people have writer's assistants do it for them.
I had mine (self-nominated one) look up rare cat breeds... but yeah, some people have them do normal things.
Sometimes writers ask agents to filter them for them.
All you writers, stop stalking Goodreads and writing reviews about your stories/books. I know, but it's not going to do much anyway and the more you care, the more likely you're going to get review bombed or pull a Cait Corrain.
Remember, One Star reviews can be good actually
One star reviews tell you how to improve your product. The maker of Instapot in an interview said he oly reads one star reviews.
Also, sometimes one star reviews have told me that I absolutely want to buy the product in question.
If there are 10 reviews of 1 star by white reviewers saying that white writer wrote it better and it's about say, Chinese history. That says to me, I want to buy your book. I want to understand why they think it's substandard. I want to see what you did to break away from the common popular narrative.
If there are a ton of negative reviews on a product that says this item is too small but I have dinky hands and I want the product to be smaller, that's also useful to know.
One star reviews are not the end to the world. People don't go by purely star ratings. They also look at what the reviews say and how they say it and which people think that review is accurate.
One star review that says they don't know how a story about Jane Austen in Outer Space turned into a sex comedy with a tentacle squid monster? Please, please give me that book.
Stop hyper fixating on star ratings. People often will judge for themselves if it's for them or not. And you pushing back, force deleting the reviews giving that sort of guidance isn't going to help you. As Tom said, you're going to lose, so lose right.
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kimyoonmiauthor · 18 days
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Koreans swear
Being Korean and all, I know for a fact that Koreans swear. Haha. Our swearing is probably more colorful that English swearing, and I'd probably put our creativity with swearing second behind Russia.
I was told by SOMEONE NOT KOREAN, OMG, why do subtitles with Koreans have swearing in it, because clearly Koreans can't swear. LOL
TT Are you confusing us with Japanese people? I've taken Japanese and swears soften in the language over time. The only true swear word I could find when leafing through a Japanese dictionary one time was a word for "dick" basically, but it was labeled "antiquated"
There is Baka and Aho, (aho is a shortening of asshole) and this is about the best you can do in Japanese. and aho in Japanese means more like "a bit temporarily dumb." "daft" is probably a good equivalent. And it's used effectionally too. (depending on where you are" I know, someone is going to say "But, but Shimatta" Haha. Only in anime. It's only anime speak. I've been told over and over again by Japanese who giggle and laugh at the idea that word is used in everyday life.
Korean... there is a whole movie that never got translated about a Korean swearing contest, where this grandmother is caught swearing by a pond, and then gets onto a game show to win money to come up with the most colorful swears. It's hilarious—if you understand Korean.
Korean swearing is more colorful than Thailand, Japan and China. (I checked with Pinoy too... and yeah, more colorful than the Philippine languages my friends knew of...) It's so bad that swear words and slang that were in Naver have been excised, which I find hilarious. Korea is so deadset that international people won't learn the level of Korean swearing, they are willing to take it out of Naver's dictionary.
And the common swear words you know–that's only the tip of the iceberg there. Haha.
When a country gets invaded so many freaking times, you're going to invent swear words.
The upside of Korean swear words is not only are they colorful, but often they aren't particularly sexist, racist, etc. Occasionally tied to food... but lol Good luck finding them. They've gotten deleted from popular dictionaries.
Also, BTW, Koreaboos suck, because they are willing to lecture at Koreans about how Koreans don't produce BL media at all, OMG, and you know what "Homosexuals" don't exist in Korea because that was an import or something. And OMG, I just wanted to relax with Korean dramas and not talk about politics (have you watched Korean dramas????? Almost every single last drama is political in some way.) And OMG, why are you, a Korean, talking about politics—we never quit. We're still engaged in politics? Oh and Koreans don't really swear and stuff because you know, Asians are always polite like the depiction in the super racist Madame Butterfly.
Also, OMG, why are you soooo upset when I say Kon'nichiwa, Chingus on videos.
Like Chingu-deul is so hard to remember and shit. And why do I have to use "friend". You are so mean for reminding me that Japan occupied Korea and Koreans are still upset about that. I mean, Holocaust doesn't mean anything, clearly, Jews are over that so why can't you Koreans be over that and my daughter's friend when she went to China was married to someone Korean, so clearly there are NO problems between Korea and China, because you see the majority of Koreans in China HAVE to be South Korean, not North Korean. You are mean for talking real facts.
There is a Korean swear word for half-ethnicity... but that's about as severe as you can get. TT The Korean ranking system.
When I was in South Korea... Appa called me Kongjunim, but also three swear words, probably thinking I didn't understand. lol This is why Gyeongsangnamdo people get their reputations...
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kimyoonmiauthor · 20 days
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Death of the Author by Ronald Barthes (1967)
Full disclosure, I've never really liked this essay. That said, I do like Barthes' other arguments. But I always found this one lacking, not in its central thesis that readers also matter, but I find that the lines of evidence are really poor. People worship this argument far too much without examination of why it has no citations and no one seems to be willing to question the argument in full from other viewpoints of things like, does it make philosophical sense?
But then people often use this essay as a crutch to say they don't need authorcism, and in fact go towards 100% readercism and then skip out on other critical theories. This isn't exactly what it argues, but I also feel like it doesn't argue the points it wants to make well. And truly, if I handed something like this in as an undergrad to my English classes, I'd be marked down hard. I think we need the same level of scrutiny towards the so-called masters as we do towards students and don't make excuses for "Because he's well-liked". This wasn't a new idea like he suggests. Authorcism goes further back than he suggests–but because people don't want to challenge these notions (and apparently don't read all the way through Poetics?) they think he's brilliant?
Dude gave no citations. Seriously. All his assertions are on weak ground.
Man, sometimes I think being born a white straight male means never being questioned when you make wild assertions and no one will ever fact check you ever. Well, I'm fact checking this thing, and it's not coming up the way he wants.
Original file: (translated, 1977)
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No one wants to say this is racist or challenge the whole, "In ethnographic societies the responsibility for a narrative is never assumed by a person, but by a mediator, shaman or realtor whose 'performance' the mastery of the narrative code–may possibly be admired but never his 'genius'."
The core idea that the "author" is a modern figure is disputed by Aristotle, when Aristotle goes on and on and on about how much of a effing genius Sophocles was. I mean that Homer dude, that Homer dude wasn't good for anything and is a distant second to Sophocles. (Why do I remember this? Because I read the whole of Poetics and *cough* Aristotle waxes on poetic about Sophocles and barely mentions anyone else.)
No one wants to challenge how this basis and core of his thesis is coming off racist?
It's reading as those "primitive" people in that effing functionalist snobbery where some civilizations are "more advanced" than others storytellers aren't lauded. Ummm... OK, prove it, buddy. Your anthropology is faulty.
Often shaman, the keepers of the stories of the tribe/organization are lauded in their communities as important. If this was NOT true, the British Empire wouldn't have specifically gone after and tried to KILL those people. If he's arguing that the author was less important in those stories, that those people said, which is an interpretation, because he's not directly saying it, then the problem with that is there is a difference between losing the author, and what we'd call resonance of the words. And then you have a whole semantics question here on how much do stories outlive their authors, and how much there is over attribution issues to people that should not be lauded.
And then that's a whole other question than authorcism v. readercism. Because even those stories without the original author who might have shifted over time, still have other ways to read the text. Those are historicism, cultural relativism, race theory, etc. All of which, BTW, did exist by the time Barthes was writing. To pin his hopes on readercism, and say something this effing racist, that copyright does not matter to tribes, without textual evidence, when Kung! do respect copyright ideas, at the very least, is trying to kill the author, but also bury everything else in literary discourse, which was an issue I had with Percy Lubbock, to be fair, because I thought his way of thinking was far too reductive.
There's no citation?
The explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it, as if it were always in the end, through the more or less transparent allegory of the fiction, the voice of a single·person, the author 'confiding' in us.
I disagree, it's an overstatement at this point in time. Selden Lincoln Whitcomb, did do some of this, but he also looked at other things to explain the text. And there was Percy Lubbock who introduced Readercism (not the coinage, but the concept) in 1921. (yes, 1921, eat it, it sounds like plagiarism....). The absolutist idea that it was always sought through the author before this point isn't true. 'cause I effing did my reading.
Percy Lubbock said it was ultimately up to the reader to know the context, etc. Earlier critics have also suggested things like partnership between audience and creators. This would be writers such as Bertolt Brecht, who was around by the time Barthes was writing and gets half-hearted cited, no less. TT I did a ton of reading. There was a ton of effort in the early 19th century to give more context to plays like Antigone. Even that jerk, Freytag tried to give context to Aristotle, though wrongly. He uses (wrong) Historcism in order to illuminate Aristotle.
Though the sway of the Author remains powerful (the new criticism has often done no more than consolidate it)
What? As I outlined, I don't see that. He's making assertions without citation. And then people aren't challenging it. Why? I would be 100% be required to give citations for either assertion.
In France, Mallarme was doubtless the first to see and to foresee in its full extent the necessity to substitute language itself for the person who until then had been supposed to be its owner. For him, for us too, it is language which speaks, not the author; to write is, through a prerequisite impersonality (not at all to be confused with the castrating objectivity of the realist novelist), to reach that point where only language acts, 'performs', and not 'me'. Mallarme~s entire poetics consists in suppressing the author in the interests of writing (which is, as will be seen, to restore the place of the reader).
Stéphane Mallarmé was born 1842. No citation of the essay. TT Again, I'd be required to cite the effing essay. No one wants to challenge this? Intertextual evidence is missing. For a guy who says the reader is most important, he isn't doing a lot to prove it in his own work.
Instead, Barthes gets lauded by later writers by interpreting what the author meant when the author didn't say it?
It was largely by learning the lesson of Mallarmé that critics like Roland Barthes came to speak of 'the death of the author' in the making of literature. Rather than seeing the text as the emanation of an individual author's intentions, structuralists and deconstructors followed the paths and patterns of the linguistic signifier, paying new attention to syntax, spacing, intertextuality, sound, semantics, etymology, and even individual letters. The theoretical styles of Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Maurice Blanchot, and especially Jacques Lacan also owe a great deal to Mallarmé's 'critical poem." --Barbara Johnson, "Translator's Note" to Stéphane Mallarmé, Divagations, trans. Johnson, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007, pg. 301.
Isn't this against what he's arguing for? He didn't leave it on the page. He didn't say any of this. Barthes left no evidence. Reader with no context wins?
To be fair, here, I've seen Barthes other work and he does know how to do citations, but Johnson is flat out trying to explain the author for him and I don't like that. If you're arguing for readercism, then the author's intentions shouldn't need to be explained.
By putting it behind a veil of "Well, he did no citations, so we need to interpret what he meant" when he doesn't leave it on the page, that's authorcism, ironically. Makes me cranky when white men get away with doing no citations to prove their thesis.
Barthes cites Valery is Paul Valéry b. 1871, also no citation. I'd get lambasted if I did this. Ah, white male privilege.
No intertextual evidence for his assertion here, either. While I don't love Lubbock 100% and I thought he oversimplified, at least he put *effing citations* on the page to prove his assertions.
Where are the citations? He doesn't need them? Why?
Proust gave modern writing its epic.
There's no proof for this assertion. I don't think it's true either. Epic of Gigamesh. It was translated in 1875, not by Proust. Barthes knew about it. He's not giving the context well in the text either.
There's no citation for his assertions of Proust either. He makes opinions, but where is the textual evidence?
The removal of the Author (one could talk here with·Brecht of a veritable 'distancing', the Author diminishing like a figurine at the far end of the literary stage)
He cites Brecht, not the particular work?? But also Brecht argued for partnership between audience and author a bit at least?
Urrrgghhhh I HATE writers like this. Have I not gone over how much I dislike people who do assertions without citation and then get lauded?
The Author, when believed in, is always conceived of as" the past of his own book: book and author stand automatically " on a single line' divided into a before and an after. The Author is thought to nourish the book, which is to say that he exists before it, thinks, suffers, lives for it, is in the same relation of antecedence to his work as a father to his child.
Barthes, citation? No citation?
You asserted it was a "New idea" that the author reigned supreme. Prove it. Show the work that says that. Because Aristotle, nope. Aristotle worshiped the living pants off of Sophocles.
Look, Lubbock did a better job supporting his assertions in this area. He actually cited living works and did intertextual evidence. I agreed that his assertions are reductive like Virginia Woolf, but at least the man cited Tolstoy. He didn't make wild assertions about Tolstoy and then hoped that someone would get the references, and then cite no works.
In complete contrast, the modern scriptor is born simultaneously with the text, is in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing, is not the subject with the book as predicate; there is no other time than that of the enunciation and every text IS eternally written here and now.
Modern from when? What time period? If you're trying to argue anyone before Stéphane Mallarmé existed, again, effing Poetics. Not to effing mention the whole of Aelius Donatus's entire treaties on how plays should go was based on a single author: Terence. In what time period are you talking about? Author worship goes way back in time. Effing reading about Aelius Donatus loving the hell out of Terence's play with r*** made me cranky for a week. He found it sooo funny. And I was struggling with the Latin too.
The fact is (or, it·follows) that writing can no longer designate an operation of recording, notation, representation, 'depiction' (as the Classics would say)
which ones, Barthes, which ones? Give me an effing citation. 'cause I can't see that the "depiction" reigned supreme over the "author" through Aristotle literally ranking Sophocles as better than Homer. Aristotle kept going on and on about it. Plus you just cited Brecht earlier, who hates Aristotle's ass. So, make it mesh together. Which parts of the "Classics" are you citing, and which parts of Brecht are you taking from? Brecht HATES Aristotle, and most of the time when people talk of Classics, they are talking about Greek plays. You need to delineate which parts you are taking and which you leave behind.
rather, it designates exactly what linguists, referring to Oxford philosophy, call a performative, a rare verbal form (exclusively given in the first person and in the present tense) in which the enunciation has no other content (contains no other proposition) than the act by which it is uttered - something like the I declare of kings or the I sing of very ancient poets.
No citation again. I'm cranky. No citation or quotes for all these pages. For an author whose supposedly arguing for "readercism" and "simplicity" by leaving it on the page, as the critic earlier, Johnson, is saying, he's not doing either, honestly.
Having buried the Author, the modern scriptor can thus no longer believe, as according to the pathetic view of his predecessors, that this hand is too slow for his thought or passion and that consequently, making a law of necessity, he must emphasize this delay and indefinitely 'polish' his form. For him, on the contrary, the hand, cut off from any voice, borne by a pure gesture of inscription (and not of expression), traces a field without origin - or which, at least, has no other origin than language itself, language which ceaselessly calls into question all origins.
Honestly, there is more burying of citations.
He's saying in the fanciest of words to make it sound like he's smarter than he is, that "You aren't dumb 'cause you don't understand the author." If he's arguing for simplicity and leaving on the page, he's not practicing the same himself. So I don't know if the earlier argument by Johnson works in his favor at all.
We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single 'theological' meaning (the 'message' of the Author God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none' of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture. Similar to Bouvard and Pecuchet, those eternal copyists, at once sublime and comic and whose profound ridiculousness indicates precisely the truth of writing, the writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original.
I have issues with this from a philosophical PoV.
The question of originality, is certainly something that rose with industrialization, but that's more of an individualism, rather than an authorcism, I would argue–given how much that Aristotle, Aelius Donatus and others around the world tried very hard to preserve authorship. An argument of lost authorship overtime is a totally different affair, and one I've been dealing with as people over attribute, and I find that quotes are wrongly attributed because people don't remember the author or are too lazy to look up the texts they are talking about (I'm staring at you Barthes).
Individualism, is well, well argued to have risen with industrialization. Off the top of my head, though not in Barthes' time, you have Lucy Worsley, who in A Very British Romance argued that individualism in Romance is a very modern notion (argued, first episode within the first few minutes). Not to mention a lot of social sciences, in general, argue for this type of individualism, and then that argument, in general, leading to the arguments for why industrialization often leads to loneliness. To be contextually fair to Barthes, he didn't have the bit about loneliness yet, since that's a more recent sort of studying, but the scholarship on individualism as a part of industrialization should have been emerging in his time period, IIRC. This might have spurred this essay, but the notion that historicism and other ways of examining the text along with the author did not exist is a farce, at best.
One could argue the Butterfly effect, which is Henri Poincaré, prior to Barthes' existence of his essay, would disprove the idea of originality, but we're getting neck deep into physics and philosophy here. I am a nerd and interdisciplinary, so...
Say huip is a new thingy. It weighs 200 lbs. It does a bunch of new stuff–very theoretical. It doesn't matter. Someone newly buys this object that can do new stuff. It is a result of culture. Yes? Interwoven culture, as Barthes describes.
Bob has bought this huip thingy, and drops it down some stairs and finds that it rolls, not doing the original intended function. This is his particular life experience with huip. He thinks that 200lbs being able to bounce down stairs is awesome. I mean, dude, it defies all physics and is able to go down and turn on stair landings.
Bob posts this information somewhere, puts it into text, and then his interpretation, is by writing it, it is fun.
Sally, say, does the same thing, but kills a cat.
The first ripple is that it has killed a cat. Oh no, Sally's interpretation of huip is that the cat is dead and she's getting sued.
Isn't Sally's interpretation of huip and this thing it can do, but wasn't designed for novel as Bob's interpretation? If they both post about it, they are authors of a new experience.
If the manufacturers of huip say, but Huip isn't supposed to do that and do a total recall of the product and start doing things like making it so it can't roll, or weigh that amount, then the experience of the object changes. A new novel experience happens.
So the philosophical question is "What is then new?" in this scenario. If Barthes says "nothing" then it becomes an issue. Because humans aren't the same over time. And if you say that the author, Bob of the huip meme, didn't have a novel experience, dude, it is 200 lbs of menace and he discovered something new.
The fact that Sally interpreted it and then it ran over the cat and killed it... who is liable in that scenario? Bob, who didn't follow the instructions and accidentally found out and memed out what huip can do, the manufacturer, or Sally or all three?
Something clearly new happened.
BTW, I randomly pressed letters to come up with said object, huip.
If the experience is always anterior and not original, then how come witnesses never agree on anything? I don't think Barthes thought this part through completely. It's missing some key French Philosophers.
His only power is to mix writings, to counter the ones with the others, in such a way as never to rest on anyone of them.
Writers go outside and do things like experience seeing a new animal. Saying that a writer only mixes previous writing and cultural functions... meh, I'm not quite sure about this.
If his total argument is culture shapes the writer, and the writer has no free will, and the writer is merely mixing other writers, thus there is nothing new, this is more like an argument for determinism over free will, which runs into philosophical problems as I illustrated with Bob up there. Bob had a novel experience he wrote about. It wasn't the intention of the manufacturer, but gravity is not manufactured by culture. Stairs are manufactured by culture. Did an accident with gravity and a manufacturing error shape Bob into writing and memeing what he did with the huip? Or was it really Sir Issac Newton whom Bob never bothered to read, but loosely heard about once in Science Class for a test and he can't bother to remember the numbers for gravity.
Writers have experiences outside of books. The filter might be culture, but the filter doesn't always shape everyone's opinion exactly the same. Perspective, worldviews, and experiences do, and that's what's novel.
Barthes further argues that because the author has a dictionary, they are caught in culture. Urrggg. I made up huip on the spot. You still have no idea what the primary function of the object is. I'm sure someone is trying to make up one in their head. Or I typed that up and someone is making it up. But I don't particularly need to know much in order to make up that context. I need stairs, some name, and a mythical object I banged my keyboard for. Gravity is a natural force I personally experience. Especially when I was struggling to put an air conditioner in my window, heard a cat and then wondered what would happen if said air conditioner landed on the cat and then posted about it on Nanowrimo in 2008-ish.
Barthes might argue that I got it from literature somewhere. But the filter of words had nothing to do with the initial experience. I didn't have to put it into words. No one else was there.
Where did I get 200 lbs? Uhhh... random number.
Where did I get the runs over cat–from the original experience of worrying about the air conditioner falling from the window.
Where did I get magically rolls down stairs? I had an experience with a friend of mine that liked to roll down stairs. It was a novel experience for me. She liked to bounce around corners. (Hello, Libbie). If writing is purely words, culture, not nature, experience, worldview, opinion, Barthes has an issue with the treaties here.
My novel experience with the air conditioner and feeling like a weakling and hearing a cat though cat is not a controllable object in my framework, lead me to post about air conditioner falling from my apartment window into a roof, killing a cat, and typing it into Nanowrimo's boards.
Is Barthes saying the entire incident is mediated purely by words? That's a lot of coincidences, don'tcha think?
Gravity isn't a cultural experience and not everyone thinks in words either. In order to write you have to use words, certainly, but the initial experience still is not necessarily mediated by words or culture as he'd expect.
Classic criticism has never paid any attention to the reader; for it, the writer is the only person in literature. We are now beginning to let ourselves be fooled no longer by the arrogant antiphrastical recriminations of good society in favour of the·very thing it sets aside, ignores, smothers, or destroys; we know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.
Untrue. Aristotle spends a HUGE amount of time on it. HUGE. !@#$. (We need the play to have negative reinforcement on the reader in a morality PoV–he spends a lot of his treaties on this. How do you achieve this as author. About how the audience should feel. How plays are inferior if they don't achieve this. About how Homer was a poor writer for not doing it correctly and the impact being wrong.) Aelius Donatus even talks about it. (We Latins this. We Latins that. What does the audience think. What's the difference between 'us' Latins and the Greeks? Should we account for the differences?)
His idea is that in the past authors were never worshiped, until the "modern era" and copyright didn't matter. (Untrue, Aristotle). And that the reader has forever been ignored in literary criticism before him. (Brecht, Aristotle, Aelius Donatus?)
We should ignore the author because the reader is the ultimate decider–honestly Percy Lubbock did a better job arguing this in 1921 with less convoluted language.
That everything is mediated by culture for the author and previous texts. (Didn't read Raw and the Cooked by Claude Levi-Strauss? Levi-Strauss, BTW, was French and published before him) And that copyright didn't exist in those all oral tradition tribes. TT Kung! Anyone?
Because you see, according to him, writers don't experience or mediate it through their own lives. Only through texts.
I think the better argument for readercism would follow like this:
Readers have their own experiences and worldviews. This will not be universal or resonate reader to reader because inherently no two people will agree on anything. Despite that there is a sort of cultural agreement to tame what seems like chaos. Writing comes into this chaos and tries to pull meaning from it.
The writer and reader's experience will not close to always match, so the impact of the writing is not going to be the same no matter what you will do. The best you can do is mediate your experiences, whether it's with culture, nature or your personal experiences through writing which is interpreted by others.
As Lubbock said, the text doesn't come alive until a reader reads the text.
To me, Barthes' argument is far, far more poor than Lubbock's argument for the same. At least Lubbock's argument for the same wasn't effing blatantly racist. (I give more leeway to Lubbock in 1921, before the 1960's than Barthes in 1965 who is also French and has clearly access to Levi-Strauss and even talks about ethnographies) It's based on assumptions, the majority of which aren't backed up. Plus he has more to work with if what he says is true. D- argument. He doesn't argue for what to replace it with, doesn't talk about the other critical theories at all. Urgghh. He's done better. But I know, I'm not supposed to question the greats when people worship them. But it irks me that he gives one citation, maybe, and then we blindly believe everything else he wrote. Why? I want some critical thinking here.
For the record, I hated Derrida too. His major flaw for me, BTW, was that he said everything is mediated through words, which is not true. Functionalists suck. Structuralists suck less, but are still effing prone to racism.
Sometimes I wonder if academics purposefully like to teach convoluted texts like this without citations, rather than a cautionary tale, of what will happen, but because it sounds smart and convoluted and because they don't check the assertions as true or not and plus there is a bonus points for the level of racism they can force their students to read, but they gloss over it and say ignore it. I mean, you absolutely need to read Emmanuel Kant, even if you can't with his hatred of women and you're supposed to ignore that part because there are no substitutes in the world that might have said the same things he said better. Urrgghh. Do you purposefully choose the most uptight racist white men to teach and tell that they are lauded? Lubbock made a far, far better argument. Lack of citations and blind worship because of lack of citations+white maleness makes me cranky.
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kimyoonmiauthor · 22 days
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LeRoi Jones: Black Arts Movement
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3205500?seq=3
DAPHNE S. REED LeRoi Jones: High Priest of the Black Arts Movement. (1970)
Honestly, I'd heard about Black Art as a singular thing, but never the Black Arts Movement. (My education in the US mainly set out to hold black people as a token but look, we did diversity this year, rather than study movements within POC communities in art) On the back of my own ignorance, I'm posting this JSTOR article because it's likely if I never heard of it, that a lot of the people out there never heard of it. And buried in these mentioned plays might be transformative works that might help someone who is equally ignorant to study or find a story structure we've forgotten? Just a thought. It's a JSTOR link, so it's free to sign up, but you still have to sign up. I like the framing of it as a struggle for civil rights, because that asks so many questions when we often in school got the plays in my school that either showed Black struggle, but wasn't that challenging to white people, or we got white person tells about Black struggle (!@#$, do we have to read To Kill a Mockingbird again 'cause my classmates don't want to read or write?). But these plays according to the author were made and framed specifically to challenge white notions of slavery, etc, and argue for specific things. I find that part fascinating. What makes things resonate, acceptable, not acceptable, there is so much one could do with this in a teaching environment. I'm interested in the question of resonance of an art piece over time too.
I'm sifting through journals now. TT Antigone. I think I've lost her.
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kimyoonmiauthor · 25 days
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Article on Peking Opera.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3205778
It's JSTOR, so you have to sign up to get it free.
Behind the Bamboo Curtain: What the Communists Did to the Peking OperaRichard F. S. Yang It covers how Peking Opera changed over time and how communism might have influenced it. (Was looking for Antigone, but found this more interesting) i.e. things change, story structures change over time. So let go of the fantasy that the story structure near you never changed.
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kimyoonmiauthor · 26 days
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Useful free tools for writing.
More of the incidental tools that I find useful, regardless of how one usually writes that are often known in the writing community, but you might not know?
One Look dictionary
Reverse word look up. You know when you're getting stumped on a word you kinda know, but only can get the definition of, or you want to make sure your 3-word phrase can't be said more succinctly? Yeah, this resource should help. (The underline is a link)
Google Docs
I should note that after about 100K words, it starts to struggle. But it's good for editing, collab work, spreadsheets, and also keeping track of your previous drafts so if someone says, "But, but you plagiarized from me," you have a log saying you didn't, so you can say, "you likely took from me."
And so on.
Libre Office–because not everyone wants to deal with Google Docs or can afford Microsoft office. It also has a recovery function, so if it crashes, you can get your words back. (Microsoft Office often doesn't?)
Use it for formatting your manuscripts. For the editors out there, accept ODT format. This is absolutely free and sometimes it doesn't port well.
Rhyming dictionaries–yes, they exist. The slant rhyming is also useful. There are slant rhyming dictionaries too.
The almighty square bracket. []
To all of you discovery writers out there that can't afford Scrivener. This is the tool for you. You've written and dumped all this information into the text that shouldn't belong there, but you want to keep it. What do you do? You square bracket it.
If not that, there is also the curly bracket if you need a sub category. {
It's great for:
Editing notes.
Please expand this note to yourself.
Examine this phrase later because you moved on, but it doesn't sound right.
Cataloging important information you might need at a later date.
Info dumping that you want to break up.
Storing long descriptions you want to use elsewhere.
You're too lazy to catalog in your world building notes great information.
You have ADHD and some other idea has occurred to you, but it's totally off topic. Square bracket.
To avoid plagiarism 'cause you forgot you pulled a source.
If you're one of those super detailed people, you can also color code it. The reason is that both curly and square brackets almost never show up in manuscripts. <> sometimes does, but also often doesn't.
The best part is no matter your program, format, or keyboard, you have it.
Note that this doesn't work for Japanese as well, but Japanese also have access to {} which is why I noted it here.
Spreadsheets
You need to make a calendar for your planet and need the quick calculations.
You need to make a morpheme list for your mythical language.
You want to delineate gender quickly.
This usually comes with Google Spreadsheets, Microsoft Office and Libre Office. But writers often (me included) forget they exist.
But they are useful for more than number crunching. And some writers use them for plotting too.
For Fantasy/SF writers: Donjon:
The whole website, but particularly the Fantasy Calendar maker is useful.
Google Search: Quotes.
You want to fact check a quote. Or you got distracted and forgot to put in the citation information.
To be or not to be
is horrible search for. So what you do is this: "To be or not to be."
And you might get Will Shakespeare.
BTW, Goodreads is a horrible horrible source for finding out where quotes came from. Make sure you have the actual page number/place it was said with the surrounding quotes.
Equally, the -[item] is also often useful when you're searching.
You're looking up say... Kimchi, and you want search results that don't have napa in it You would type "kimchi -napa"
You are researching... I hope, I hope.
Public domain books: Project Gutenberg
You need a back issues of Gustav Freytag's Dies Techniks des dramas.
You need the quote from Anne of Green Gables.
You want to check if this Winnie the Pooh quote is in the earlier or later works because of public domain issues.
You need to read The Art of War for the tenth time.
You need to read Machiavelli's The Prince, because you are writing politics and war.
This is the place to find it. Sometimes, sometimes it is public domain, but it's not in there.
Library
Libby (app), for example. Sign up for it. Get a library card and you'll save yourself money. Some countries don't have one, but for the ones that do, you can read print books and consume audiobooks at home.
Often self-pubbed books are on there too. If you have an amazon account then you can use the kindle app with it.
Sometimes you can also go to university libraries and though you can't check anything out, you can use their catalogs to look up things. You sometimes have to be there, but often they give links to free resources in their catalogs and might be easier to use than JSTOR. You don't have to be a student. Just be respectful of the people there, and try to put the books back where you found them. (usual library stuff).
This will save you going to Hawaii for the University of Hawaii, for example, because you know they have some awesome East Asian resources.
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kimyoonmiauthor · 29 days
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The Art of Creative Writing by Lajos Egri (1965)
!@#$ Lajos Egri again, being creepy. First it was Child marriage and then it's this.
Almost immediately goes into creepy...
TW: sexual assault made "romantic"
Tumblr media Tumblr media
... So this part is filled with back story of "How innocent Barbara was" And how Victor was a creep for not reading, or whatever, and how Victor saw girls as a commodity to sleep with.
Tumblr media
Yep. And then sexual assault.
Tumblr media
And then she's like, you know what, you almost tried to r* me without checking in first, that's sooo romantic. I'll let you do me after that.
This, BTW, is the end of it. OMG, so romantic /sarcasm. Welp, this explains how he ended up with his child bride.
I'll edit this later, to do a deeper analysis, but I needed to shout this out in case people want to borrow this book from the library or worse, buy it. He's not alive, but do you really want to add this book to your collection?
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kimyoonmiauthor · 29 days
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If you want to Opt out of selling your blog and hard work to AI go to your settings–>Privacy–>Make sure "Do not sell my information to other companies" is checked.
This is NOT automatic.
According to an online report, Automattic/Tumblr plans to sell people's blog posts to AI companies.
OPT OUT!
Be sure to OPT OUT.
OPT OUT Say hell no. No backstabbing your fellow creatives. Opt out.
The Opt out should start on Wednesday, tomorrow. February 28, 2024. Also, while you're at it, complain to the FTC.
The FTC has a twitter account.
They've even scraped data they weren't supposed to like dead blogs.
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kimyoonmiauthor · 29 days
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According to an online report, Automattic/Tumblr plans to sell people's blog posts to AI companies.
OPT OUT!
Be sure to OPT OUT.
OPT OUT Say hell no. No backstabbing your fellow creatives. Opt out.
The Opt out should start on Wednesday, tomorrow. February 28, 2024. Also, while you're at it, complain to the FTC.
The FTC has a twitter account.
They've even scraped data they weren't supposed to like dead blogs.
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kimyoonmiauthor · 1 month
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The worst recipe for Kimchi I've ever seen.
So I'm a food nerd, if the love of Anthropology of food isn't self-evident enough in the 50 page doc on the history of food and food Anthropology based on Subsistence. lol
And I'm a super food nerd when it comes to kimchi. I've tried almost all the varieties of vegetables one can kimchi and learned their mush points. And this, by far is one of the worst recipes of kimchi I've ever, ever read. And being a food nerd, I'll break it down for you.
Don't worry, it's not made by a Korean--it's made by someone white, but I am Korean. And before someone chases me down, "You're an adoptee" I grew up in Korea for the first 5 years and have been tracking down Eomma's kimchi recipe after I semi-remembered the flavor. TT Covid stopped me from going overseas to test it out.
I know when you think of kimchi, you most likely think of the spicy cabbage variety, but I'll inform you that I've made a lot of types of kimchi. I made the Dae Jang Geum Kimchi after a lot of research and digging around. I made kimchi in plastic that never turned out well. I've taken out ingredients and put them back in. I've made kimchi out of different vegetables, and I famously got cited by my own city for making Eomma's kimchi, which BTW, has raw clams and mussels in it.
I've made monk Kimchi too, and gave those tips off to Maangchi.
I'm like kimchi geek over here. I can tell you all different facets of kimchi. Maybe because I tend to hyper focus on things, and I definitely hyperfocused on kimchi.
So I definitely can say the above is not kimchi.
Let's define Kimchi:
Kimchi is an aerobic lacto-fermetation process that is usually balanced with a protein in order to preserve mainly vegetables/vegetation, but sometimes seafood or other seafood matter.
Why is this not a kimchi?
1 Chinese cabbage
3 garlic cloves, crushed
2.5cm/1in piece ginger, grated
2 tbsp fish sauce (optional)
2 tbsp sriracha chilli sauce or chilli paste (see below)
1 tbsp golden caster sugar
3 tbsp rice vinegar
8 radishes, coarsely grated
2 carrots, cut into matchsticks or coarsely grated
4 spring onions, finely shredded
Chinese cabbage is not the same as napa. Chinese cabbage is longer than napa. Does it look similar, yes. Have I attempted to make kimchi out of it yes. Did it have the same properties? No.
But forgive the white person for not knowing that. Chinese cabbage has more water content than your average large head of Napa.
3 Garlic cloves is laughable. It won't preserve for a year like kimchi is supposed to.
1 thumb of ginger? No. No. No. That's not enough.
The fish sauce is not optional. You need that to even out the lactobacilli. If you're not going to use fish sauce, then up the protein content with barley. I really do swear after messing up kimchi on purpose the fish sauce does have a FUNCTION not just a taste.
BTW, more than fish sauce goes into kimchi, though. Usually depending on the region you might get shrimp paste, mussels, clams, crab, octopus, squid, oysters. These pretty much ceviche in the liquid over time.
My favorite is Eomma's recipe with katuggi. ^^;; But I suppose that would anger both my parents. Hers I'm fairly sure had mussels, clams and maybe crab? And yellow corvina fish sauce.
Anyway... Sriracha is made up of red jalapenos, which do not belong in kimchi. Kochu is special. BTW, this already has sugar in it. Kochu is designed to stain on purpose. See the slurry portion below.
golden caster sugar isn't something that came about until industrialization.
rice vinegar is a totally different process of fermentation than kimchi. It won't render the same results.
European radishes don't belong in kimchi. Have I tried it? Yes. Did I regret it? 100%. TT There isn't really a substitute for Mu. Daikon is a distant second. European radishes are when you're dying in a desert and there is a gun to your head to make the kimchi with them and you have no other choice. Get this: Koreans who moved to Brazil, rather cut out the radish component completely, use European cabbages than use European radish. It's just nasty to bite into as a kimchi. Mu has less water content and is far denser than your average daikon and definitely over European radish. I'd choose watermelon radish over European radishes. (Have I made that into kimchi? Yes.)
Carrots do sometimes go into kimchi, but I don't think that's why it's there. This is more a Jeolla thing though.
You're not supposed to shred green onion for any dish I know... and I'm thinking of things like pajeon and green onion soup. Where is the slurry? ALL Korean Kimchi has a slurry, if it has sweet rice flour, whole wheat flour or Barley flour. It has to have a slurry. The slurry has a function. It's there to make sure the ingredients distribute evenly.
Lactobacilli aren't going to act in ONE day. This brings the health benefits of kimchi.
The food science:
Since the majority of Korean fermentation lives on the wild side and likes things like air and sun, often the "weird" ingredients in kimchi that foreigners hate are there to MAKE SURE YOU DON'T DIE when you eat it. Stop trying to cut it out without understanding its function.
Got it? Now stop doing this crap and actually understand the food science of things like the anti-bacterial properties of garlic. How lacto fermentation is good for you, so you don't leave it out for only one day.
Koreans boast their heads off about the health benefits of kimchi as passed down from our ancestors for thousands of years. Why mess with a good thing without understanding why our ancestors made it that way?
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kimyoonmiauthor · 1 month
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A puzzle piece of Antigone's Diagram–Someone cool this time
Goheen, Robert F. (Robert Francis). 1951. The Imagery of Sophocles’ Antigone : A Study of Poetic Language and Structure  / by Robert F. Goheen. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Went all the way to a university library to look for the wrong diagram for Antigone.
The closest I got was this:
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"Unlike the modern opera to which it is often compared, Greek Tragedy did not subordinate plot and character–or if you wil, drama–to music and the dance. This is clear from the extant tragedies. In general, the plot or conflict of agents in action is, as Aristotle observed, the central structural feature And in every extant Greek tragedy the language, or element of diction, is highly and skillfully developed element. To some extent, perhaps this is a happy accident. A large open-air theater, heavy costuming, and masks imposed limitations on physical action ad facial expression which by modern standards must seem severe.
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...The total structure of the tragedy has therefore two significant dimension: a horizontal (time) dimension and a vertical (meaning, value) dimension is what the tragedy on the whole means. This, too, starts with the plot—the sequence of actions as symbolizing something or representing certain universals–but it includes also the choral and poetic components, which contribute to total content kinds of perception and modes of meaning that are to some extent over and above the specific actions of the character.
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So he put conflict and continued character at the center of the diagram. Which is different from the previous diagram I posted where emotion was argued for. There are a few loose references to Freytag's work, but no credit is given. You will understand why if you read his profile and then remember how much of an AH Freytag was.
This is not the "Big" gotcha moment I was hoping for, but given the timing, and how Antigone was played out during history ad earlier attempts to describe Antigone:
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Such as this earlier German look at Antigone, I think one can say the scholarship split into two camps somewhere down the line.
One is the way they looked at Antigone this way:
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This is from an early 1810-ish's version of looking at Antigone, predates Freytag, where the Greek is given.
And the other is more like Goheen's way of analyzing the text which is in contemporary terminology, but often with none of the credits for that idea.
There are more conservative looks at Antigone, which I glanced over while I was there, where the person goes by Stasimon, for example this study of Antigone: https://www.jstor.org/stable/44276322?read-now=1#page_scan_tab_contents
which is in French, but you kinda get the idea.
So instead of going over it in contemporary terms, it goes over it in terms that Aristotle would have gone over it and see it—a lot of the theses ran towards trying to see it as how Aristotle and Sophocles would have seen the structure. Chorus, morals, putting the order in the way Aristotle would have wanted.
There are somewhat the people in the middle, who don't discuss the structure at all, but keep emphasizing character as the most important thing.
Antigone by Jean Anouilh
The Theban plays translated by Robert Fagles (1984)
Both of these do this, though if you were paying attention to what Aristotle actually said, he didn't say that character was the most important, but that character was far less important than morals.
And then you have people on Goheen's side of things, where they take modern terms, ignore what Aristotle actually said, and try for basically readercism minus a lot of Historicism.
But you can see in those paragraphs I quoted for you shades of Freytag. "Can't move about the stage." was one of his assertions, though it was about the wooden sandals. And when I looked up Goheen's sources, he didn't source that opinion anywhere. His citation 7 leads to a dead end. He cites a entire book, but it's not about the staging...?
Freytag's assertions about character coming first, is also something he stated.
The diagram is also Freytag-ish, so why would Goheen not cite Freytag? Do you remember when Freytag called "Hindoos" (His phrasing, not mine) "Substandard as a race who couldn't make theater." ideas...
And if you read Goheen's bio, that had to get him in a twist.
I can also feel Selden Lincoln Whitcomb maybe via Rowe?
The shadow of Percy Lubbock is in this essay too, but it's late enough that maybe Goheen didn't know. Alice Guy Blaché was erased in her own lifetime.
About Robert Goheen:
Born in India. Both parents were likely? white. Maybe. It gets dicey with imperialism. But the wikipedia article said both of his parents were missonaries.
Fought for Black Civil rights in education. Super awesome as you can get. He faced steep opposition to his support of Black civil rights, but he still fought for them to be included in the college.
16th President of Princeton.
Conclusion
What I've learned so far is that you can like someone's ideas tremendously, but still hate their guts, but you really, really should cite them anyway and do a minor take down instead of all these sideways mentions. OK, it's not very academic to call Freytag a royal A Asshole that loves Fascism, even if that's very easy to argue, but also, I don't think it's a good idea to take the person's ideas and not give them credit. One can like an idea within the scope of a person but still think they are scum. Given the political leanings of Goheen and that I can remember some of the assertions Freytag made, yeah, I kinda feel like Goheen liked the idea of a plot structure, but hated the originator was really effing racist towards a country he'd spent his formative years in (maybe Third culture kid??)
And while I understand the lack of mention of Freytag, kinda purposefully getting Aristotle wrong on character, conflict, and so on kinda is a bit strange to me. You can point to the value shift, point to say, Percy Lubbock, and say, you wish to look at it from a Lubbock PoV, but maybe Lubbock being gay was against his moral code as the son of missionaries? (I hope not, but you never know). How did conflict and this readercism attitude creep in otherwise?
So cool figure. Maybe a puzzle piece, but CITE YOUR SOURCES NO MATTER WHAT. Even if you hate their guts. You can disavow the rest if need be and re-argue it from a different angle that's not based on say, the genocide of Polish people (Freytag).
One can say you like the upholding of the middle class and lower class in fascism, but still hate fascism and argue against it.
But I suppose plagiarism is kinda a Professor thing–or more professors in this long, long project have plagiarized than any other group. TT Sometimes you teach it, but you don't live it.
I got frustrated so much that I ended up flipping through every Antigone book I could find at the uni library. Not in any of them. TT I think I have enough to debunk the diagram, though.
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kimyoonmiauthor · 1 month
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Blind using a design without understanding where it comes from is the point here. You should credit the people you took the design from when you make something.
And no, That's not Gustav Freytag's Pyramid. Look on his page 115 of Dies Techniks des Dramas.
I'm saying, don't plagiarize and credit your sources. The flat sides is NOT Gustav Freytag. One should read people's treaties before assuming that's their work.
Using someone's design and work without understanding the how and why isn't exactly media literacy, but understanding the how and why of Gustav Freytag and reading his theory will help you understand that he was a royal AH. And it did influence his treaties very significantly, including his Christianity, which he drums on constantly and he equating it to male experience of sex quite explicitly. (You also have to put up with a lot of racism too, reading his thing)
What I'm drumming on is media literacy which includes checking your sources. Don't blind take things without understanding how and why of them.
Understanding that the original diagrams were meant to shut out women means that one should deeply consider that and rework it, think through it.
Understanding that Hero's Journey has taken fire for not being women-centric enough, makes you think harder about the influence of Joseph Campbell and if he really was universal, or if he made it up without doing the footwork to make sure.
What I'm saying is that by crediting, doing the analysis, actually reading the theses of the people involved, you will have a better foundation to make up your own diagram rather than blindly copy-pasting and give other authors the language and vocabulary to also do the same. I did the work of reading all the way through Gustav Freytag. I did the work of reading through what the Hero's Journey actually says and the sexism inherent in it. (I did draw the correct fully sexist version of the diagram on my blog, because skipping the sexism isn't an option for me) I also dug for the so-called more Feminist version. But also managed to show it had the same issues as the first.)
Blind quoting writing advice without understanding why does everyone a disservice. Granted, it's a long tradition coming, with Gustav Freytag making up things for his treaties by getting Shakespeare and Aristotle wrong, but still, I think it's better to actually read the treaties before blindly taking it.
You have in there the other authors I listed. But because you didn't do the reading, you don't know that you do.
The foundation of the diagram was meant to shut out PoCs and women. But in blind taking advice and not examining it, there is no way to transform the intentions of the base of the diagram.
And really, it's meant to be from the first, an exaltation of male experience of sex and Christianity.
BTW, Polti, who didn't contribute did try to counter this which is rather obvious if you read Freytag's entire treaties and then read Polti in full. Both books are free online.
I'm putting the design into context. It wasn't yours. It was influenced by Gustav Freytag, but the legs and angle of the design were not Freytag's, and from your defense you definitely didn't read the original treaties of either of the men you quoted.
BTW, some of the work that went into the current "Freytag's diagram" which is BTW, wrong, is still under copyright. This specific diagram I'm pretty sure from looking at the candidate authors is probably still under copyright protection. Freytag's Pyramid is not.
Works published after 1923, but before 1978 are protected for 95 years from the date of publication.
The flat, up, half down, is not Freytag. I've narrowed the field now to about 1921-1970's. But the figures I think are most likely are from 1951 publication, making it not in public domain, in all likelihood. They will expire in 2046.
Freytag did NOT argue for conflict and it wasn't Joseph Campbell's idea. So that technically came from neither of them. Read their original treaties. (With the sexism, racism, and mild queerphobia) I listed all of the figures you need to find it, because I did do the reading and work. But I'm far from advocating anyone should read my blog only and people should do the reading on how the diagram was created over time.
Understand that the triangle framework ABSOLUTELY was meant to be Christian forward and meant to argue against women. So then it's step two–how to do you make this, and really think about it, so it's not about sex and Christianity from 19th century forward white male (generally not queer) thinkers being AHs to everyone else? You can't run away from the intentions of the original authors and not think about transformation.
The flat edges, not either of them. The half up half down, I'm tracing the author for. The person who invented the conflict narrative, the person who listed what the climax is, the person who made the flat edges, the person who coined inciting incident, the people who dragged it further into academia, the people who made it into books and plays... I've done my best to list all of those I can find.
So absolutely doesn't use only those two authors. Don't take the cliffnotes and do the work and make sure to credit those you took from. If you don't know, then you should check. If people did that in the first place, then I wouldn't have been crying half the time trying to find figures to fill out who did what in this absolute monster.
Plot Organizer Template
A while ago I was digging around online, looking for a detailed plot organizer but didn't find anything that looked useful. I ended up making my own and included other segments I think are useful.
Use it however you find it useful. Let me know if something doesn't make sense or is confusing, or ignore it. I'd love to explain why I included something or clear other things up. For me, I print it out and write on it, but one could also write on it digitally. Whatever works!
Please don't claim it as your own - I would like credit. (tag/@ me or link back to this post). Here's an alternative link to the image on my Google Drive.
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kimyoonmiauthor · 1 month
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I wrote most that list, BTW. Dug for the page numbers, background, dates, etc. And you can see that off of my own blog where I outline the thing, pull the page numbers, pull the excerpts prior to the Wikipedia edits. So when I say it was popularizes by Kenneth Rowe taking from Joseph Esenwein from Selden Lincoln Whitcomb, but say that Elias Lieberman is the one that officially coined "Inciting Incident" but Elias Lieberman isn't on that list it's because I'm the one that did 90% of the work on that page and you can in fact see my name on the edits page and also see the huge shift from a tiny little page with wrong information to my big push to put all of those names on the page. It's mostly me. I memorized it so I can do the final work of undoing one diagram: The so-called Hollywood formula diagram that's not the Hollywood diagram at all.
I also did the majority of the work on the Kishotenketsu page too, listing the research I found here before I edited it there with the excerpts from the passages. Haha. Only the Japanese section isn't mine, though I still added 3 key components to it. (The diagram, which I corrected), and 2 references. I worked years, absolute years pulling teeth and fighting some racism to get the passages and then had to find the last reference, then had to cross reference with the other page, correct it, and then Coordinated the Eight Legged Essay to show that the Eight Legged Essay came from Qichengzhuanhe, not the reverse.
I think I've earned the right not to cite the wikipedia page.
I cite the diagram because it wasn't made by me. I'm still searching for the last of it. But you absolutely can find the raw research on this blog before I pushed to edit the wikipedia pages. I'm still debating how to do it for the other pages like the Three Act structure. I've almost gotten all the research.
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kimyoonmiauthor · 1 month
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This doesn't belong to you, though... the specific graphic might, the ideas don't. Give credit where credit is due please. It's also labeled incorrectly for the current era. I'll list the figures, but not tell you who did what... Loosely, Gustav Freytag (Royal AH, should come with trigger warnings, BTW), Selden Lincoln Whitcomb (not an AH), Joseph Esenwein (not an AH), Kenneth Rowe (Plagiarizer), Percy Lubbock (reductionist), Elias Lieberman (Royal AH, BTW), Bertolt Brecht (Not an AH), Syd Field (a bit of an AH, the coining of Hollywood formula), Lajos Egri (trigger warning for condoning child marriage). Clayton Hamilton. Ronald Barthes also kinda had an influence, but is mostly used as erasure for Percy Lubbock's original ideas because they couldn't STAND that Percy Lubbock was gay. WTF, people. I mean I didn't LOVE his treaties, but that's doing him dirty. NOT Aristotle or Shakespeare--that's a misreading of Gustav Freytag who thought he and other Germans of his time were BETTER than them. (cue me gagging in the corner) or Aelius Donatus.
The diagram above, with it not equal I'm trying to find the author of, but I have 3 likely candidates and it's likely tied to Antigone academia. More than half of these people, especially marked with AH were anti-women. A lot of them explicitly went after women writers to call them inferior, but didn't balance things out and well, exalting men more. And PoCs were next to nothing.
This doesn't make the diagram invalid, but considering the majority came from the 19th century forward, (and believe me, I backtraced all the way from Plato to about the 1980's-ish.) and a lot of story structures are older, and don't explicitly set out to bash women, it might be worth it to examine and think about the thing before holding it up without questioning it.
Plot Organizer Template
A while ago I was digging around online, looking for a detailed plot organizer but didn't find anything that looked useful. I ended up making my own and included other segments I think are useful.
Use it however you find it useful. Let me know if something doesn't make sense or is confusing, or ignore it. I'd love to explain why I included something or clear other things up. For me, I print it out and write on it, but one could also write on it digitally. Whatever works!
Please don't claim it as your own - I would like credit. (tag/@ me or link back to this post). Here's an alternative link to the image on my Google Drive.
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kimyoonmiauthor · 1 month
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That's not Freytag's pyramid.
That is. On Page 115. Though he's a royal AH, it's worth it to try to read his complete work so you can get how much of an AH he is. Denouement, BTW, wasn't originally at the end. Gustav Freytag is wrong a lot about Aristotle and Shakespeare, so fact check him as you read. His rants about race purity, etc are basically fascism before fascism.
And I'm still not sad he is buried in Poland considering he wanted to wipe Polish people off the face of this Earth. Also don't miss his rants about Christianity, how he thinks he's better than Shakespeare, personally, and how he compares the diagram to male experience of sex.
The diagram you have, I'm unraveling person by person. Inciting Incident wasn't coined by Gustav Freytag, though the idea for it is in his book.
The diagram you have mostly, but not all comes from Selden Lincoln Whitcomb, to describe SHORT STORIES AND ONLY ONE.
From there, it's a bunch of authors, but know this: Freytag did not argue for conflict at the center of his story structure.
And now you can see why people didn't give him credit in subsequent works, including Polti, who went to the bat to defend French, Chinese and Indian theater. Because guess what? Those are the ones that Freytag bashed heavily. Then he also defended later English theater.
It is 100% relevant to say how much of an Asshole Aristotle and Freytag were. Because it does shape their treaties and diagrams. If in order to prop up your diagram, you need to bash half of the population and ignore them, is the diagram really universal? That's what I would ask in a Literature class. (Someone argued to me that it doesn't matter, but they bothered to go out of their way to include it in their treaties, so to them, it did, so to me, it does.)
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kimyoonmiauthor · 1 month
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Controversial Opinion: Info dump isn't always bad and...
Info dump isn't always bad and there is a huge difference between description, detail, rumination, and info dump. Wait until I say that telling isn't always bad...
Haha. More story theory hopefully with a global perspective.
Definitions
Info dump is a lot of information supplied all at once usually in a long paragraph.
Description is usually a paragraph using adjectives and adverbs to represent a person, object or place. And for writers without an action involved. (Better with opinions and emotions and/or tone attached).
Detail is usually an insert into a sentence to represent an aspect of a person, object or place within a set of actions.
Rumination is usually a reflection that not necessarily has actions, but the thoughts of the character. This may slow down the current action, but should be loosely anchored to time and space.
Info Dumping
People say Info dumping is ALWAYS evil. ALWAYS.
"ONCE UPON A TIME a girl named Cinderella lived with her stepmother and two stepsisters.  Cinderella had to work hard while the others slept well into the day. It was Cinderella who had to wake up each morning when it was still dark and cold to start the fire.  It was Cinderella who cooked the meals. It was Cinderella who kept the fire going. The poor girl could not stay clean, from all the ashes and cinders by the fire."
Credit:
Ummm... info dumping.
Chinese folktale Ye Xian ("Chinese Cinderella")
"Long, long time ago, there was a cave chief named Wu in south coast of China. He married two wives. Unfortunately, One of them died after giving birth to a baby girl. After growing into a young lady, the girl was extremely beautiful and had a remarkable gift for embroidery and spinning. Chief Wu liked her very much and named her Ye Xian."
Credit: https://www.slps.org/cms/lib03/MO01001157/Centricity/Domain/4081/Cinderella--Ye%20Xian--China%20ancient%20and%20modern.pdf (Warning: PDF)
Umm... info dumping.
NK Jemisin said she cackled over the fact she put in what? Info dumping (blog):
"I am not as I once was. They have done this to me, broken me open and torn out my heart. I do not know who I am anymore.
I must try to remember.
* * *
My people tell stories of the night I was born. They say my mother crossed her legs in the middle of labor and fought with all her strength not to release me into the world. I was born anyhow, of course; nature cannot be denied. Yet it does not surprise me that she tried.
* * *
My mother was an heiress of the Arameri. There was a ballfor the lesser nobility—the sort of thing that happens once a decade as a backhanded sop to their self-esteem. My father dared ask my mother to dance; she deigned to consent. I have often wondered what he said and did that night to make her fall in love with him so powerfully, for she eventually abdicated her position to be with him. It is the stuff of great tales, yes? Very romantic. In the tales, such a couple lives happily ever after. The tales do not say what happens when the most powerful family in the world is offended in the process."
But why does this work?
BTW, I find it funny that the Chinese info dumping is shorter than the European one here. Usually it's the reverse and (usually US) people get enraged at the info dump in Chinese stories.
Granted fairytales try to shorten things by info dumping.
NK Jemisin said that she wanted to evoke folktales, but also, buried in that passage is characterization.
Info dumping is good for making something that would be long, long pages of nothing shorten to sometimes one sentence. Do you want 200 pages of showing how a town grew over 20 years with a first person narrative? No. That's not the time. So you can say something good about it, but integrate that info dump with other things:
emotions
place
character
time
NK Jemisin also plays with poetic phrasing to short up the expectation.
People will notice, but it's not necessarily "evil". And one can also do characterization of object as well. (Personification)
Info dump is also useful in Mysteries where you have a Sherlock Holmes-eque character who has put together all of the missing pieces and you need to remind the reader what has transpired. (Japanese dramas love, love, BTW, making fun of this)
So far her improvement was sufficient—and in many other points she came on exceedingly well; for though she could not write sonnets, she brought herself to read them; and though there seemed no chance of her throwing a whole party into raptures by a prelude on the pianoforte, of her own composition, she could listen to other people’s performance with very little fatigue. Her greatest deficiency was in the pencil—she had no notion of drawing—not enough even to attempt a sketch of her lover’s profile, that she might be detected in the design. There she fell miserably short of the true heroic height. At present she did not know her own poverty, for she had no lover to portray. She had reached the age of seventeen, without having seen one amiable youth who could call forth her sensibility, without having inspired one real passion, and without having excited even any admiration but what was very moderate and very transient. This was strange indeed! But strange things may be generally accounted for if their cause be fairly searched out. There was not one lord in the neighbourhood; no—not even a baronet. There was not one family among their acquaintance who had reared and supported a boy accidentally found at their door—not one young man whose origin was unknown. Her father had no ward, and the squire of the parish no children.
--Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey
100% info dump, but you forgive her because it's satire of a style.
Description
You can info dump without description. You can do description without info dumping.
These aren't inherently the same thing.
Their Eyes were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, Chapter 1
Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men. Now, women forget all those things they don’t want to remember, and remember everything they don’t want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly. So the beginning of this was a woman and she had come back from burying the dead. Not the dead of sick and ailing with friends at the pillow and the feet. She had come back from the sodden and the bloated; the sudden dead, their eyes flung wide open in judgment.
Annotated: https://pressbooks.library.torontomu.ca/theireyeswerewatchinggod/chapter/1/
But notice the transitions, the personification and the difference between info dumping and description in this piece. Are you really getting that much information from this? Isn't it setting more the mood before the action, thus setting up the tone? The first paragraph sets up men. The second sets up women. And yet if you read the rest of the text, it's not necessarily evil the rest of the paragraph because the rest of the passage, if you're patient, rewards you by tying the theme, and later the thematic elements of the book tie together.
In setting up the tone, and setting up promises along the way to pay off later, it's mostly using description, not info dump. Info dump is far more mechanical in nature.
Even the details within the passage aren't really helping with the INFO. But helping with setting the TONE.
Details
The snow had started that morning. Hye-ja opened the window, sat on the sill, and watched the carefree flakes turn the world giddy. The neighborhood was still, the snow muffling every tiny, squirming noise. There were no calls for the baseballs that came flying into her yard several times a day, no sound of children sneaking over the wall after them. When the girl who rented the room near the front gate worked the day shift, the neighbor children took advantage of the vacant house and climbed over the wall.
Opening to The Wayfarer by Oh Cheong Hee in the collection: The Future of Silence: Fiction by Korean Women. Translated by Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton
Tonal set up. Foreshadowing. But also a very smooth transition to the characters in the scene and also introduces thematic set up. The detail is there.
"still, the snow muffling every tiny, squirming noise"
to emphasize other things: "no sound of children sneaking over the wall after them"
This would usually also be struck down as "incorrect."
But this works to do so much.
Rumination
Of course the US filled to the brim with non-self-reflection in an imperialistic society hates, absolutely hates paragraphs of self-reflection and rumination.
But this is not info dump.
This is also called introverts exist, !@#$. The industry should allow introverts to exist and ambiverts too. The best way to do this is long paragraphs of rumination, tied to time and place.
Seeing the water birds on the lake increase in number day by day, I thought to myself how nice it would be if it snowed before we got back to the Palace--the garden would look so beautiful; and then, two days later, while I was away on a short visit, lo and behold, it did snow. As I watched the rather drab scene at home, I felt both depressed and confused. For some years now, I had existed from day to day in a listless fashion, taking note of the flowers, the birds in song, the way the skies change from season to season, the moon, the frost and snow, doing little more than registering the passage of time. How would it all turn out? The thought of my continuing loneliness was unbearable, and yet I had managed to exchange sympathetic letters with those of like mind--some contact via fairly tenuous connections--who would discuss my trifling tales and other matters with me; but I was merely amusing myself with fiction, finding solace for my idleness in foolish words.
The Diaries of Lady Murasaki by Lady Murasaki
What I'm saying, up front, is !@#$ Stop marking rumination as info dump and not all rumination is evil because you need dialogue every few paragraphs in order to cope with a text block. Rumination is not evil. It gives the inner working of the person, gives them time to reflect on their actions and make better ones.
Also, it's crucial to things like mystery novels.
Again, introverts are not evil. And I know a bunch of introverts out there marking up passages like this as "not good" but think really hard on it, self-reflect. Do introverts really, really do externalization of all of their thoughts to another person like they are on a movie screen? No. !@#$ Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey.
Internal v. external thoughts. Let rumination live.
Also, sometimes characters don't ruminate because they are externally motivated. Sometimes they don't know their inner world. These are called by US publishers, "Bad narrators". But I don't think this holds true either.
This clearly isn't info dump at all. Is any new information added to Murasaki's passage? No. Does it add that much detail? No. Does it describe much no. Does it tell the inner workings of this person? Yes. Her point isn't about the passage of time, but the loneliness and isolation she feels by the coming snow. It emphasizes what? tone, a mood and a thematic feeling that pays off later.
I should note here, I kinda wish that US publishers would allow this more. UK isn't as bad, but seriously. Let tone and thematic set ups live.
Conclusion
You know what I'm going to say here. There is no such thing as an evil writing tool. Only a tool that was applied badly for the story aims. The job of us as readers, critiquers and writers is to recognize them and apply them well. 'cause yaddayadda, reading comprehension and media literacy.
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kimyoonmiauthor · 1 month
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If anyone wants a ETA by ETA here is a blog that does that with a timeline and a summary, though dates are missing for obvious reasons that they didn't think it would go on this long: https://corabuhlert.com/2024/01/21/the-2023-hugo-nomination-statistics-have-finally-been-release-and-we-have-questions/
This blog post also has the Chinese side of things with (badly) translated Chinese notes, but if you read the comments, it does have better Chinese translations.
Looks more like preemptive bannings???
BTW, I'm really really aware of the fact that China bans things for often no reason or to grandstand. I'm far from going to defend the CCP, etc and Chinese businesses.
But I thought that the Chinese side should be illuminated via the posts given. Including the collected Weibo posts, the Chinese people on the committee, etc.
100% for accuracy, rather than blind guessing.
Me, I'm award and drama phobic. I usually stay away from such things, unless people aren't fact checking and it's getting wilder.
Mystery solved, everyone!
Emails between the Hugo Awards admin team last year were leaked and turns out the American & Canadian members willingly went through all the finalists and removed those of us who they thought might offend China.
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The leaked emails
The full exposé
Edit: We can't yet say for sure if the team did this due to government pressure or not. If you read the exposé there's a piece of evidence that suggests the local Sichuan government had a hand, but there's no confirmation. The point is that the Western admins chose to actively comply instead of uphold the integrity of the awards.
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