I got a better understanding of how I could write fiction that was great like HPMOR is great
Wow, yeah, your comment is a perfect place to reply with something that was bothering me for awhile.
I’d really like more folks on LW to write fiction, because HPMOR and other stuff was indeed a kind of writing workshop. Even if it loses much in retrospect, at the time it did show a lot of people that writing could be cool. But I very much don’t want more of the kind of sad writing that goes on on r/rational—taking the explicit lessons and striving for borrowed awesomeness and all that.
The make-or-break factor in writing (or at least, any writing that gets called “great”) is not about thinking up plot, world, or characters. It’s “liking sentences” as Annie Dillard put it. It’s voice. You cannot write with the same voice as EY, and nobody wants you to. What you can do is find your voice, your own way of liking sentences. And then all the superstructure will fit itself to that. Maybe it will ask for rational characters rationally doing rational things, but maybe it will be humor, or absurdism, or magical realism, or social commentary, or any number of things. Before you get the voice, you can’t know.
Wow, yeah, your comment is a perfect place to reply with something that was bothering me for awhile.
I’d really like more folks on LW to write fiction, because HPMOR and other stuff was indeed a kind of writing workshop. Even if it loses much in retrospect, at the time it did show a lot of people that writing could be cool. But I very much don’t want more of the kind of sad writing that goes on on r/rational—taking the explicit lessons and striving for borrowed awesomeness and all that.
The make-or-break factor in writing (or at least, any writing that gets called “great”) is not about thinking up plot, world, or characters. It’s “liking sentences” as Annie Dillard put it. It’s voice. You cannot write with the same voice as EY, and nobody wants you to. What you can do is find your voice, your own way of liking sentences. And then all the superstructure will fit itself to that. Maybe it will ask for rational characters rationally doing rational things, but maybe it will be humor, or absurdism, or magical realism, or social commentary, or any number of things. Before you get the voice, you can’t know.