Lessons from Master Hugh

We all have gurus. Right now, I'm reading Bujold and discovering, not only that she make it look easy but that it is easy. Bujold writes more than you do: that's the whole of her secret. That's it. Lois writes more than you do, and that's why she's famous and you're not. She is not afraid to write a ton of bullshit and then pare down to the essentials. She's not afraid to read it out loud to see if it scans. She's not afraid to break the rules. But more than anything else, she writes more than most "writers." This lesson is so important it should be tattooed to either your scrotum or the fold under your left tit where you fail the pencil test (or both, if you've got both) (or somewhere else appropriate, if you've got neither).

Today, I also reminded myself about Hugh MacLeod, the brilliant artist behind "Cartoons drawn on the backs of business cards." MacLeod's pointers on creativity bear some reading, and there are a few that strike me as immeasurably wonderful (note that his rule #3 is the same as the paragraph above):

#10: The more talented somebody is, the less they need props.

I started writing on cheap highschool paper with a pencil. I eventually graduated to a desktop computer and eventually a laptop. But it's an older laptop without all the bells and whistles of the modern age. When I want to write I pop out the wireless card so I can't fiddle with the internet. I use an ordinary text processor so I can't fiddle with the font. The two most amazing things my text processor does is it has a better file browser so I can find stuff, and it spell checks, and that's about it. I write emphasis in a style I've been using for years, with *asteriks* around the stuff that needs to be made louder, and that's about it.

Needing more than a keyboard and a screen to be a writer is known as wanking.

#15: Art suffers the moment other people start paying for it. The more you need the money, the more people will tell you what to do. The less control you will have. The more bullshit you will have to swallow. The less joy it will bring. Know this and plan accordingly.

I'm trying.

#22: Everybody is too busy with their own lives to give a damn about your book, painting, screenplay etc, especially if you haven't sold it yet. And the ones that aren't, you don't want in your life anyway.

This one I haven't quite learned yet. I sometimes kinda wonder if blogging out the process is all that worthwhile.

Hate SF? What are you, a Commie?

Dave Wolverton has as essay, On Writing as a Fantasist, in which he takes to task the various odd schools of writing that describe the genre known as Literature, and he reveals something I did not know. In 1866, William Dean Howells became an editor, and eventually the editor, of Atlantic Monthly, which at the time was by far the magazine with the greatest distribution and widest readership for short fiction. When he became editor, he set out new rules for the kind of fiction he wanted, describing it as Realism. Howell's rules forbade the supernatural, the weird, or the overly dramatic.

What Wolverton claims is that Howells was a socialist: he came up with a way of restricting his writers to dealing only with economic issues that affected "real" people. He took away all of the trappings of escaping: no witches, warlocks, vampires, ghosts, mob bosses and molls, ray guns, trips to the moon, adventures underground, or time travel. That left writers who wanted to get into the Atlantic Monthly with two constrictions: that all fiction must have a conflict, and that all conflict must be real, personal, and intimate.

Since at the time "intimate" was not allowed to have the same meaning it quite has now, his writers were pared down to writing around these issues, and they did what Howell hoped they would: they wrote all of their stories about economic hardships suffered by ordinary human beings. Howell hoped that enough stories describing the "plight of the common people" would encourage America toward a more socialist and collective direction.

If true, it would explain a lot about the state of Literature today.

Oh, Mighty LJ Brain (Javascript Edition)

I have a great mystery about Javascript: What does the new operator do, exactly? According to the documentation, "The new operator creates instances of ECMA standard objects and custom objects derived from Object." Since all other objects in the standard are derived from Object this would seem to me to be a useless addition, but that's not my point.

I have not yet found a use for the new operator in my normal programming responsibilities, and believe me I'm doing some heavy-duty Javascript these days. My traditional constructor looks like this:

MyClass = function(arg1, arg2) { 
    function privateFunction(argX) {...}; 
    function privateFunction(argX) {...}; 
    return { 
        a: 0, 
        b: '', 
        f: function(argX) { // Does something with this.a, this.b and arg1 } 
    }; 
}; 
myObj1 = MyClass(1, 4); 
myObj2 = MyClass(5, 9);

Calling the function MyClass returns an object (all the { ... } stuff after the return statement) and Javascript knows that unless you create a deeper internal scope, the this operator refers to that { ... } thing all the time, so a, b, f, and anything else described in there is available as a member of myObj1 from the outside, and this from the inside. Since every time MyClass is invoked, it creates a new scope and then pushes the closure out onto the heap before collapsing the stack, there's no need to call new.

So, when would someone need to use new?

That career meme thingy.

Baaaaaah.

( Okay, so it's not so bad after all. )