☞ The Messiness of Reality and Stories
The goal is not to keep the TICHN cart empty and thus write a “perfectly normal” story. A story that approaches its ending with nothing in its TICHN cart is going to have a hard time ending spectacularly. A good story is one that, having created a pattern of excesses, notices those excesses and converts them into virtues.
George Saunders • A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life
And why shouldn’t we mix it up? Why shouldn’t writers follow their obsessions and interests and strange ideas? The result is almost always going to be more memorable than an unthinking devotion to plot beats and character arcs.
Lincoln Michel • Your Novel Should Be More Like Moby-Dick
Like Tyler Cowen’s criticism that personal stories filter the messiness of life, games are merely a framework superimposed over a set of activities. With that structure, things that sound utterly boring on the surface can become incredibly fun and rewarding—even addictive.
Eric Barker • Barking Up the Wrong Tree: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Success Is (Mostly) Wrong
The vast mass of routinely rational human behavior doesn’t make good novels, but it is just such humdrum rational narrative that provides the background pattern that permits us to make sense, retrospectively, of the intriguing vagaries we encounter, and to anticipate the complications that will arise when the trains of events they put in motion col
... See moreJohn Brockman • Culture: Leading Scientists Explore Civilizations, Art, Networks, Reputation, and the Online Revolution (Best of Edge Series)
I found it consoling after all these years to learn that writers are up against nothing less than the fundamental anarchy of the universe; entropy, prince of disorder, is sprinkling noise on everything we write. Ambiguity is noise. Redundancy is noise. Misuse of words is noise. Vagueness is noise. Jargon is noise. Pomposity is noise. Clutter is noi
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