Probably belaboring the point... but the whole, "I don't remember where I got this, but I'm passing it along anyway" and don't know the argument for it, don't know why it was invented, or why it was applied as advice, but think it's a magic formula, needs to be quit in the writing community, in my opinion.
In no other community does this work. Art has a physical reality, so people want to know how and when it was applied and who came up with the technique, and when did the techniques shift. Art History covers this.
But in writing, oh no, but I was told if the story has no conflict there is no plot, which, BTW, is racist. But they don't know what the justifications are for it, because they heard it from somewhere online, but don't know the supporting texts for it, and then when they hear the supporting author, they don't read the supporting author to make sure what was said was true.
So the tenant, "You must have conflict" for example, has power over the writer, rather than the writer having power over the tool presented in front of them.
To me, if you're going to master the tools in front of you, you should know the justifications for why it does or does not work and how they were invented.
You should know Percy Lubbock's justifications for readercism, so you don't get stuck into that terrible loop that Barthes used.
You should know that Mur Lafferty is being Blache-ed in her own lifetime and not being given credit for coining "pantser".
You should know Alice Guy Blaché.
Not because I'll look down on you for it, but when items become mythical portions of SUPER GREAT THING, and THINGS YOU DO NOT QUESTION, they have far more power over you, than you have command over them. And who wants a story dictatorship anyway. We are the artists who should be in command of the tools, not the reverse.
The introduction of psychology of the character from a modern psychologist perspective is Lajos Egri. (Though he's a little shit for doing child marriage).
But one could also argue Dorthea Brande had a better grasp than any other writer I've read on where ideas come from, which Egri shat all over.
And knowing these things, knowing their names, knowing the exact argument and the nuances, I would say gives us power as creators, as academics, as readers to have power over the tools, rather than creating a mythical figure that never existed, like giving credit to Aristotle for Brecht's work. OMG, the poor man would be crying so hard. WTF, you do that to a Jew who hates Aristotle that much and then fuck up his story structure?
Because once you know the arguments and how they evolved and why, then you absolutely know when the apply them, much like an artist might know that maybe they need refined walnut oil to mix that kaolinite clay into a color instead of thinking that linseed oil is the only oil one can and must use. (Which BTW, if you know even more you know that cold pressed refined flaxseed oil is the same thing and usually cheaper). See, you become the master over the art and the terms when you know more, when you know the justifications, rather than thinking in narrow ways because you were told so without the reasons why.
AKA, please, my fellow writers, can we start to give name credit to ideas so people can backtrack where those ideas come from. I'm begging you for people like me in the future who want to trace history of writing more effectively. Do I need to pull out my best pout and puppy dog eyes?
BTW, I've seen so many people refer to Death of the Author where it was clear they never read the essay itself carefully and in full and WTF. Cool coinage doesn't mean you understand the concept without reading the primary work. Someone tried to challenge me on this recently, but when I started to quote the original essay they suddenly disappeared.
But you don't understand Freytag, someone said who didn't really read his work... you see people can't dance in wooden shoes (clogs exist. It is cool, BTW. Geta dancers, look it up).
Yeah, simply asking writers to read the original work before making gross declarations like about what Aristotle believed.
Would anyone mind explaining to me in very small person words what NFTs are and why everyone hates them (aside from them being hurl on the carpet levels of ugly?)
Writing advice books by (white) men v. (white) women and the fracturing in the 20th century.
'cause apparently some people don't like me pointing out the fracturing and how utterly mindnumbng it is. So I'll slow down and point it out (again) with sources.
It goes something like this...
Around the beginning of the 19th century there was no rotary printing press to the point that education wasn't widely for women, but over time it increasingly became so.
This meant that more than Jane Austen types could read and write, but also lower classes than before could read and write. This is how you also got books at the end of the Regency Era increasingly focused on the poor and class stratification, even the last book of Austen's (unfinished) Sandition was more focused on more than one class (if you bother to read it.)
By 1847, the Rotary Printing Press was invented, which lead to mass education, as I pointed out, but also was refined, so by the time you get to the 1850's, this meant lower classes and slaves, etc had more opportunities to learn to read and write. Paper mills also were in full production at the time. I know a lot of people think that the Printing Press by NOT Gutenberg was the thing that moved industrial Europe, and while important, it isn't the key invention that brought education to the masses like it did for the elite in China (Why did it change for the elite in China but not for Europe is a whole thing and more a philosophical debate about the nature of writing and print than it is a concrete one... but I'm open to it as long as you're familiar with what I'm aiming at with John Locke and the Song Dynasty). No, you have to wait until the Rotary printing Press for that.
But you see, by and large up to that point, as pointed out by earlier works, such as Mary Wollstonecraft, John Locke, and Jean Jacque Rousseau the education of people was supposed to be confined to rich white men. Because printing was slow and expensive on a one by one basis and unlike China and Korea, there weren't centers for printing like Dunhuang China. It's true that one could pay to print, but distribution was still severely limited to rich quarters.
So rolls around the 19th century and NOW you have women starting to be able to read and write and expect them to. Well, this is a problem for men who have tried so hard to relegate people like George Elliot to not write, not go to college and not have basic education. But you also get an explosion of women writers and people of color and also, most importantly, TRANSLATIONS are now accessible to the masses. Also the rules about men having control over what women printed lifted during the Victorian era. During the Regency period women needed permission from men to publish anything. The increase in women's rights, including you cannot hit a woman to discipline them, women being able to own property, meant increased equity.
You might think this is not impactful on writing, but 100% it is. You suddenly have all these new voices buzzing around the space and as usual, white men act like they're being threatened. OMG, equity is taking over OUR spaces. (which accounts for people like Freytag being assholes towards all of the above groups.) So this is also an explanation pretty much for why there are so many calling back on the greats by men during this period, and women slamming back to not be so fucking uptight about "rules".
So you can contrast, for example, Virginia Woolf about writing and how to write, which focuses more on the process, and how to get to the finish line, and how it feels compared to say, Freytag who says if you don't follow these rules everything sucks, you suck, and you're probably one of those JAPANESE, HINDOOS (etc and a bunch of racist things I'd prefer not the retype.).
I should note that there were contemporaries who hated Freytag's guts and rightfully so, but no one talks about that, do they? There's sideways mentions of hating him all over the place if you're paying attention. Polti's my favorite, though. The shade. Followed by Brecht's shade on the man. He almost directly goes against Freytag one for one.
The treaties, though that split the two groups the hardest, I think is Percy Lubbock, The Craft of Fiction, also not directly referenced, but the contents are often cited almost one for one in subsequent books to the point that I kinda think they were fucking homophobes.
You see, pulling from the earlier works and combining them, later story theorists, were trying to lock out women and tell them the way they wrote was "wrong". Women with educations were "Dangerous" which is why some of the story theorists I found were really, really hard to find because they were associated directly with women.
It's NOT the result I wanted. It's the result I found with a ton, ton of work. What I wanted to find was the reason a particular story structure existed, but instead what I found was a bunch of mainly white men trying to lock everyone else out due to the increase in general education and then a fracturing in two main sections that I truly do not wish existed because I kinda feel like it hurts writers to believe this false split which does not seem to exist in other countries except in the US and UK. (Even France doesn't seem to have this as much).
The two main splits are
genre fiction v. "literary"
And the way white men tell people to write v. how white women tell people to write.
All of this started in the 20th century. And if the egos were not so fragile, I don't think people would have retconned people like Brecht and Polti as they did and got them so incredibly wrong. (You need the paratext to understand the context and then it makes a whole lot more sense).
The one that people have issue with is how I talk about men v. women's writing advice. But it only split this way after the whole trying to reject women and come up with a formula to lock them out. (Really, it is mind numbingly that daft you want to stab something.)
On the men's side of the equation, you have you MUST hit a formula, if you do not, then it's a BORING story and NOT A STORY and you just don't understand the fundamentals of writing at all. The worst of these will often preach their own self-importance and the superiority of men while they do it by coparing everything to the male experience, especially of sex And I'm not joking about that last bit. Literally, Freytag spends some time on how the whole of a story is about CONSUMMATION. (Also of Christianity). And I have so many curse words for that. Some men will dice it up and try to hide it and couch it but it comes back to that at some point.
BUT DO WE HAVE TO?
I hold, as a thesis, this is why there are so many effing racist and sexist examples in that side of the writing advice section with absolutely no invitation towards women. Otherwise, why aren't they mentioning more women, except to mostly disparage them? It's not that they don't know what effing feminism is. It's because they don't give a fuck to invite women in the first place. They want to teach this story structure TO women, but listen to them? Fuck no. They are too busy talking about how great child brides are. Giving sexist examples and effectively locking women out for daring to have an education.
This sells the idea that men's writing is superior to women's writing because it is prescriptive and effectively some of the men will go as far to accuse women of locking men out which is not what the women are doing. (Most swings are at Gertrude Stein. Dudes, not your enemy. But they are hard-pressed to give her credit for anything influential, but would love to mention the men influenced by her in virtually the same breath. Do I have to grit my teeth here?)
If you read the books by women about writing, and completing books, a lot of them are really well sourced down to page numbers, if not inline examples. They assume the reader is male or female, and go to pains to make this abundantly clear. Instead of prescriptive, where if you don't do it, you'll die some weird ass death of not making a "correct" story they go over the struggles, say they are there with you and some of their techniques might not work for you. By and large the largest number of Women-written books about writing are more about the tools you'll need, how to refine them, and how to grow them through the 20th century. Ursula Le Guin goes to great pains to delineate that these are tools, where she thought she saw them, and who they might work for. Some of them also hold onto the old 19th century ideals and suggest things like morality is A-OK, that you can also use emotion and development/discovery to convey and move the character. And they are more likely to go through the emotional struggles of the writer.
Anne LaMott, for example, has a section where she says one day she's a lion tamer and another section where she's struggling hard to get the story to speak to her. That's PROCESS and encouraging the writer by saying to them, this kind of thing happens. Bird by Bird is like a memoir, but also hides a lot of tools, without saying these tools will work for you.
Dorothy Brande goes over the first thing that these are things that might work for you, they might not. That's OK. If they don't work leave them behind. She NEVER says if you can't use these you're a failure of a writer. But her male counterparts will go as far as to try to argue such a thing while at the same time trying to write the same thing, but then not giving you alternatives that worked for other writers, like Dorothy Brande does. And I find that freaking maddening. Lajos Egri will go out of his way to dispute her, but then gives absolutely no alternatives. And truly that makes me freaking upset. You want to put down a woman, but have no solutions to the problem yourself? That's unacceptable.
I don't fucking care about your stupid gender wars. I want sources for your info, you fuckers. Give me sources even if you hate that person's guts (Freytag, for example.)
I don't rag on the men because they are men in this case. I'm annoyed at the men for being freaking Prescriptive. As if you will DIE if you can't write to the style and standard they set out. And the egos are boundless in this case. I hate them for not giving sources when they should. Sure hate that person's guts, but I rather you give me that source. If the women did this, I would point it out and hate them too. And I have shown where women have failed this and failed to realize their own media imperialism (Three compared to only three-4 men who are exempt out of a long list). But by and large this is far, far less than the cis men on the list.
As I've pointed out ad nauseum, I don't think it's a condition of hormones, but a condition of people parroting blindly without checking sources plus a function of privilege itself. You are stuck and isolated in your own world and don't see outside of it, to the point you're willing to call something written in qichengzhuanhe wrong, or call a clearly Korean drama in Korean having a three act when it's clearly giseunjeongyeol.
So I'm 100% serious when I say white women and minorities in the writing advice section *tend* to as a group talk about tools and toolsets over white cis men. It's because, effectively we are stuck with a foot in two doors. We know that some people write with emotions in mind front and center. We know some people treasure discovery more--more likely women and Asian groups (Some South Asian and South East Asian groups included, so I'm not saying East Asian only) Also, historically white women have tried a little bit to invite WoCs, gay people, etc to the writing table, so have more likelihood to see that there are other ways to write, and therefore, are less likely to commit to a prescriptive model. (Again, looking at the downsides of privilege.)
I know someone in the back is telling me that I'm calling white men evil or something. No. There is a separation here. I'm calling the list of behaviors unproductive and too rigid to be helpful to everyone. Telling people who are trying to innovate failures because they don't follow YOUR method, and follow YOUR story structure, and telling them they will be commercial failure they don't follow your plan is generally a bad idea. The problem isn't white men, the problem is that too many white men I've read does this that I have to brace for impact it's happened so many fucking times that I feel like it should be a fucking drinking game. I'm begging you CITE YOUR DAMNED SOURCES. Also, maybe, just maybe let go of the prescriptive model. There is no guarantee of commercial success. No such thing exists.
I've generally read writing advice from the likes of L.M. Montgomery, Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, Gustav Freytag, Bertolt Brecht, Clayton Hamilton, Anne McCaffrey, Mercedes Lackey, Audre Lorde, Mark Twain, Charles Dickenson (asshat, BTW), Edgar Allen Poe, Georges Polti, Selden Lincoln Whitcomb, and pretty much anyone I could get my filthy little paws on. Steinbeck. Yep. Stephen King. Yep. Terry Brooks. Yep. NK Jemisin. LE Modesitt. Diana Gabaldon. Ursula LeGuin. Sir Conan Doyle. Mur Lafferty. (Probably about to list writers you've never heard before)
Some of the deemed no longer acceptable writers like Neil Gaiman. JK Rowling. Marion Zimmer Bradley.
Some authors, I spent more time reading their author notes than their actual works. So when I'm expressing annoyance at a large swath of white male writers being asshats to the general population by doing sorting hat shit, generally, I've read the author notes/writing book by say the likes of John Gardner and going WTF is with the random racism against Indigenous Americans and lacking the ability to do some fucking basic research.
Look, you won't be on the side of I hate you if you, as a writer when you do writing advice do the following things:
Cite your damned sources. With page numbers please.
Do not get your sources wrong. I will catch you if you say that Freytag coined the term "inciting incident". He didn't. He didn't make that flat end diagram either. Get it right. Cite the correct people. He also didn't argue for fucking conflict. Don't just skip to the page with the diagram. That's not the core of his argument. The core of his argument is German nationalism is the best and everyone else sucks because he watched Wagner's The Ring.
Stop saying if you don't do this thing to everyone else that writer is a failure. You can make an entertaining tale with the barest of techniques. The problem is when you get to book 7 and find out that you've written the same book 7 times. (BTW, some people say this of John Green... just saying, but some writers are fine with that too. You do you.).
Give context at least a little for your ideas instead of copy-pasting them like Kenneth Rowe. C'mon, my dude, you're a professor. You seriously are going to plagiarize and think you wouldn't be caught. Where did you get them from? Which book? What time period?
Acknowledge women positively? And PoCs positively? And gay people (Disability is rarely acknowledged in these books) and recognize that the differences in experiences might produce totally different stories and sometimes it must be that way to make something more compelling.
Avoid Media Imperialism. It makes me effing cranky. And men are more likely to do it over women. Iunno why since men spend so much time boasting about how they went to civil rights rallies in their writing books... but if that's true, then why isn't there more sensitivity towards media imperialism of minority groups and other cultures? (BTW, A Study of a Novel by Selden Lincoln Whitcomb is exempt, though I wish he had cited Indigneous people for the braided diagram.) The worst offender of this is Joseph Campbell.
Cut the ego. I'd like to listen more to what you learned from others than how great you are for teaching classes. I loved this from Dorothy Brande, for example. She paused to reflect on how much her students taught her without saying she stole their work without credit, say like Orson Scott Card. You were not great unto yourself. Which is also why I want you to fucking cite your sources. So many to choose from, but Freytag every time. Iunno, you lost me around the time you insisted you could write Hamlet better than Shakespeare.
And the references to male orgasm as making a book possible. I don't need to know about your fucking sex life to write a book. I might be sex indifferent, but nothing frustrates me more than hearing about how you want your book to orgasm. I'm looking at you, especially Robert Scholes in Fabuloation and Metafiction. What the actual hell was that? I'm not a prude but that does not belong. That was lousy advice. And you knew it. You were just trying to be an asshole to women with a side of hating on gays.
This is like bare minimum of human decency towards your fellow artists and future writers. But I'd also like things like not celebrating child marriage to make it (Lajos Egri—also the sexist section of one of his books where he basically writes in a SA and makes it A-OK.), not having to read your racist poem about being an American (Inciting Incident coiner Lieberman), how you taught women to finally write like men while not learning from a single woman the entire time (Syd Field), No racism... (John Gardner, Freytag. Surprise, look there is a huge list. You that mad that PoCs can now read and write and are being translated to English too? Can you cut the racist and sexist examples?) BTW, Polti, I love you~ for putting the effort in to prove Freytag wrong for that one paragraph that you felt that you needed to write a whole book to prove it. I only wish I could have the Chinese name of some of the plays you're referencing, but I know that was a hard ask back in the day.
I don't think it's bad to have a structure. A prescriptive structure is bad. A subscription to a structure is not bad. I'm not anti-Structuralist. But to do it in such a way that puts down the people who want more freedom, to work more on craft, to focus on toolsets and accommodate a larger number of people, I dislike. Likewise, sometimes toolsets are good, but sometimes having a starting place with what I can try until I level up, can help. But I think one should be honest with the advice and say this is a starting point and in the future you should also try these things to see what you can learn and discover from them. It shouldn't be split. It should work together. This is not Skeksis vs. Mystics.
Same things with Literary v. Genre. The original split came as a way to push women's theoretical writing into college courses and also PoCs. I got more PoCs in college Lit courses than High School. But my question is Are PoCs really that more Literary than mainstream? I don't think so. Something is wrong here. The theoretical works should also be by PoCs when analyzing PoC work, but they aren't most of the time. But what if you made an UrSkeksis? Ah, that's what other countries had where they never really split. I suppose this is Literary Philosophical and Historical Theory, though. Should you not use the tools in Literary as a genre just because some stuffy 19th century men said it was too advanced because the techniques were created by PoCs and women? (also usually queers and disability is shoved in there too.) And I'm inclined to say that a hammer is neutral. I don't understand this assigning "higher" education to a hammer. (Going into this is a whole theoretical post with whole new lines of evidence but you'd need to know more Modern Lit outside of the European and European Diaspora canon. Who wants to read a term paper that my uni would never sponsor since it uproots a lot of the basis for higher academia around literature?)
I won't lie, I kinda liked the diatribe from Stephen King's On Writing, First edition where he laid out how Agents came to be and called them evil, even if I don't agree with that. It's not for the opinion, but laying out writing history clearly is always a plus for me. He cut it out of the later editions though. I still have burned into my brain what he said about the rise of agents, how intellectual lawyers worked and exactly why he hated agents. That's really important info to have as a writer.
If by and large the 20th century men and some of the current writers did the above and understood the context they were pulling advice from, I would have no cause to complain. Do you know who coined "pantsing" I do. It's Mur Lafferty. The full term is, "By the Seat of your pants." Have you even consumed any of her work? I have. This is why I also know the strengths and weaknesses of ways to write. (BTW, Mercedes Lackey does Milestones and said as much.) Did Lafferty get credit in the latest books by men on the subject of "pantsing" no. She's fucking alive you bastards who wrote a whole book on the subject like she doesn't exist. She laid out a treaties for this you ignored. Arrrghhh. You'll bend over backwards for men and to credit them. Why not women? The point isn't that they are women, the point is the credit is uneven across the genders in writing books for no good reason I can find other than sexism. I can understand hating Freytag, but to hate on women that deeply is inexcusable. Will it kill you to give Gertrude Stein her dues on influence on contemporary writing or is the fact she's a woman and homosexual stopping you?
So I guess the final point is if you're writing a writing advice book, I really wish you would do the bulleted list. For everyone else, understand the context of the advice, but beware that a lot of the 20th century writing advice white male writers were assholes to women and it'll make you as bitter as I feel remembering researching them. Meh, Clayton Hamilton is important, but not enough for you to sit up. I suppose him introducing Denouement as vocab for the "falling action" and then that term moving at a later date is probably good enough. (Though frankly everyone hated Freytag. And you can't blame them after the racist pro-Fascism crap he spewed.)
A great many of the posts on this blog do list people under the story structure tag, but I also tried my best to give the context on their time period, why they might have written it like they did, literary movements, and their life experience so one could weigh the advice as useful or not useful. Also spent a great amount of time trying to correct wrong myths about story structure. I went to the uni library, took pictures, posted the primary sources, etc. Under the story structure tag, this particular post's axioms and various accusations are posted on this blog and the lamenting and I rather not repeat those lines of evidence. Still, !@#$ What is with the child marriage thing, Lajos Egri? This is why no one wants to give you credit. Your writing advice book should not have to come with a trigger/content warning, but sometimes I think that was the point of white men writing that way? To drive everyone they didn't want writing away.
