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elfsMy total wordcount is wrong. (The wordcount from this morning is still correct, however). I'm only at 23,059 words. I figured out what I was doing wrong with grep to remove the metadata from the headers; unfortunately, in the process I was leaving in the metadata that grep generates when scanning multiple files. The correct incantation is:
grep -hv '^;' *.txt | wc -w
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jaylake and I had a quick exchange recently about expertise, and I wondered if expertise should feel any different from "talented amateurhood." Omaha thought I was being silly, but we discussed what expertise was, from a behavioral and psychological point of view, and I mentioned how I felt I had it in the realm of being a programmer. Recently I was studying database abstraction layers and migrations under ruby, and I explained that I was having absolutely no problem visualizing the layers of a coding problem I had in a classical application server view but that Rails had me stymied in two places: the migration of many-to-many relationships (I know how to use them thought), and the isolation of information within a given transaction based upon session state. (For the record, the solution to the first is to add the magic incantation :id => false to the options field of a rails create_table invocation; this allows you to create relationship tables without the cluttering and rails-confusing master id field. I haven't got the headaround for the latter problem yet.) It was one of those things I've been slowly growing more comfortable with: I am for all purposes an expert at classical application server development and deployment.
On the other hand, I said to her, I don't feel like an expert when it comes to writing. I don't have the immediate abstract grasp of writing that some others do, nor do I have the collection of at-my-fingertips toolkits that many of the writers I respect most seem to have (or say they have) when they write.
Omaha begged to differ. She said that "absolutely" have a collection of writer's toolkits in my head and reach for the most appropriate one whenever I need it, whether it's an outline kit or a genre kit or a dialogue kit or whatever. I countered by saying that there were lots of writers out there with kits I didn't have, and my examples were Sidney Sheldon's "Hollywood" toolkit, and Robert McKee's "Story" toolkit. I've read and studied both, but never put either into practice.
Sheldon writes huge first drafts and then mercilessly dismembers every scene until what's left is the minimum amount needed to leave the reader unconfused, starting as late as possible in the action so the reader starts off with breathless action. McKee, in contrast, interrogates his characters at the end of every scene for their emotions and values and if there's not enough whiplash, positive or negative, for the scene, he either revises, tosses, or otherwise alters the flow of his story to make it more compelling. Both of these guys are frakkin' wealthy beyond my dreams thanks to their writing. Both of them obviously look at the art of writing as Serious Business, requiring a layer of mechanical story analysis that I find almost cold and disturbing-- but obviously their toolkits are very useful as these guys write bestsellers.
Maybe I've just never felt the need to write like that. Obviously, there are other writers I admire who don't write with that kind of brutal efficiency. William Gibson doesn't, nor Gaiman. Bujold probably does, and Weber did once upon a time. Maybe those are skills I should adopt more directly if I ever go for the ring of being Really Published, and not just a genre wank at the bottom of the Geek Heirarchy.
grep -hv '^;' *.txt | wc -w
jaylake and I had a quick exchange recently about expertise, and I wondered if expertise should feel any different from "talented amateurhood." Omaha thought I was being silly, but we discussed what expertise was, from a behavioral and psychological point of view, and I mentioned how I felt I had it in the realm of being a programmer. Recently I was studying database abstraction layers and migrations under ruby, and I explained that I was having absolutely no problem visualizing the layers of a coding problem I had in a classical application server view but that Rails had me stymied in two places: the migration of many-to-many relationships (I know how to use them thought), and the isolation of information within a given transaction based upon session state. (For the record, the solution to the first is to add the magic incantation :id => false to the options field of a rails create_table invocation; this allows you to create relationship tables without the cluttering and rails-confusing master id field. I haven't got the headaround for the latter problem yet.) It was one of those things I've been slowly growing more comfortable with: I am for all purposes an expert at classical application server development and deployment.On the other hand, I said to her, I don't feel like an expert when it comes to writing. I don't have the immediate abstract grasp of writing that some others do, nor do I have the collection of at-my-fingertips toolkits that many of the writers I respect most seem to have (or say they have) when they write.
Omaha begged to differ. She said that "absolutely" have a collection of writer's toolkits in my head and reach for the most appropriate one whenever I need it, whether it's an outline kit or a genre kit or a dialogue kit or whatever. I countered by saying that there were lots of writers out there with kits I didn't have, and my examples were Sidney Sheldon's "Hollywood" toolkit, and Robert McKee's "Story" toolkit. I've read and studied both, but never put either into practice.
Sheldon writes huge first drafts and then mercilessly dismembers every scene until what's left is the minimum amount needed to leave the reader unconfused, starting as late as possible in the action so the reader starts off with breathless action. McKee, in contrast, interrogates his characters at the end of every scene for their emotions and values and if there's not enough whiplash, positive or negative, for the scene, he either revises, tosses, or otherwise alters the flow of his story to make it more compelling. Both of these guys are frakkin' wealthy beyond my dreams thanks to their writing. Both of them obviously look at the art of writing as Serious Business, requiring a layer of mechanical story analysis that I find almost cold and disturbing-- but obviously their toolkits are very useful as these guys write bestsellers.
Maybe I've just never felt the need to write like that. Obviously, there are other writers I admire who don't write with that kind of brutal efficiency. William Gibson doesn't, nor Gaiman. Bujold probably does, and Weber did once upon a time. Maybe those are skills I should adopt more directly if I ever go for the ring of being Really Published, and not just a genre wank at the bottom of the Geek Heirarchy.
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Date: 2006-11-11 01:21 am (UTC)The only problem with that is that if you do one thing all the time, that means you're not doing another.
You and I both work from a shell prompt almost every time we sit at a keyboard. I am a master of small-scale Linux, and becoming a master of medium-scale. You are a master developer. Both of us also write English, each in our own fields. But neither of us have the time to sit and write and edit the way it would take to really make our current salaries at it... particularly since you have short people to care for and I am *still* digging out of a move and both of us like to do things other than bang on keyboards until our fingers are bloody.
Frustrating? I could see where it would be for you. I write for the same reason Frank Zappa does. Because I like it. If somebody else likes it, cool. If not, BFD.