Predictability, Emotional Rooms of the Mind, Meta-Brands

[justbeast]

This post of Seth Godin's, The Places You Go talks about how, very often, emotions are like rooms in our mental houses -- they are places we seek out because we want to be in that state, rather than something that happens to us.

Being a marketing philosopher, he of course connects it to brands, and mentions that the best brands figure out how to

Comments

[sinboy]

Four strangers are bound together in adventure, love and occasional sorrow in this parable from Tiptree winner Valente (The Orphan's Tales). The city of Palimpsest exists somewhere outside our reality, accessible only during the sleep that follows sex. The immigrants to Palimpsest, marked forever by the tattoo-like impression of a map on their skin, seek out one another for real-world sexual adventures that function as passports to new otherworldly quarters. In outstandingly beautiful prose, Valente describes grotesque, glamorous creatures sometimes neither human nor animal, alive nor dead, and mortal travelers who pursue poignant personal quests to replace the things (and people) they've lost. Valente's fondness for digression at times makes for a difficult read, and her fable of quest and loneliness is less an engrossing fairy tale and more a meticulous travelogue of a stranger's dream.
- PW's review

[justbeast]

Whoops! Sorry. Yeah, different review :) I'll edit.

[sinboy]

No worries. It's easy to get things mixed up. And sometimes a PW reviewer might not like Cat's books. It happens. But I have reason to suspect that the reviews editor who assigns the books to anonymous reviewers is as far as can be :-)

[theferrett]

So at one point you call a reviewer foolish for expecting your wife to write the same book over and over again... And then you call an entire writing style bullshit for not writing like your wife? Unwise, sirrah, unwise.

EDIT: Ah, I see you've edited. Still, while I agree that transparent prose isn't a standard to be applied to science fiction as a whole, I personally have a strong preference for it.

[justbeast]

That's interesting! And maybe an author's brand can be as simple as that, "provides a rich and vivid experience".

[yagathai]

Transparent prose is definitely not bullshit. Transparent prose is a wildly different writing style from what your wife does, but it's really foolish (and colossally arrogant) to throw out an entire writing philosophy whole like that.

[justbeast]

You are absolutely correct. I misspoke -- it's really two things that are a problem. One is the insistence that 'transparent prose is not a style, it's just how writing is/should be', which I've come across in too many conversations. The other is the view that genre fiction (especially scifi, though fantasy too) somehow necessitates the use of transparent prose, or else it's not being done right. "Use fewer words", etc. Which, again, I've heard people say way too many times, and it boggles me each time.

[sinboy]

In justbeast's defense, defenders of transparent prose frequently say nonsense like this: transparent prose is the best and the most difficult and the rarest of writing styles, 'cause, frankly, you almost never see it.

Good, sure. Hard to do right? Sure. Best? Most difficult? Rarest? Horsecrap.

It's a style, and some people like it. Some people prefer realism to impressionism, and some people who love abstract expressionism think photo-realism might as well be a photograph. They're both wrong, IMNSHO, as are those who disparage "transparent prose" as BS without defining it and explaining why that particular definition is BS.

Some definitions of transparent prose are BS. Not all, but some. Just like journalists who pretend to report without bias are full of BS as well.

Take Ken Follet on the subject:

"My aim in constructing sentences is to make the sentence utterly easy to understand, writing what I call transparent prose. I've failed dreadfully if you have to read a sentence twice to figure out what it meant."
It's wrong to say

[zoanne]

I read that differently - the bullet points seem to be just about Catherynne Valente's style, and not a recommendation for all fiction ever.

The more I think about it, the more confused I get about what transparent prose actually means. It's got to be more than just 'pacy writing with paper-cut-out characters' or people wouldn't defend it.

Does it mean verbally stripped-down? I would expect sparse writers to think like poets too; just in a different way.

Bad writing is different from sparse because it is boring and not properly thought-out. I don't like re-reading sentences because they're gibberish syntactically, or reading paragraphs so clumped up that I can skip them without losing anything. Good writing always needs a bit of the poet weighing out the lines.

So, I am trying to straighten out my thoughts on this and I remain entirely confused.

[caudelac]

I feel like this about music. It is why I have a hard time saying I like a particular artist. There's one song that hits me just right, perhaps-- let's say, "Maybe Sparrow" by Neko Case. And I get very excited, but the next bunch of songs I hear... they're not the same flavour, and I get disappointed. And then she writes "Magpie to the Morning," and I feel like I got the sequel to "Maybe Sparrow" I was looking for, and am happy again-- even if I did enjoy the flavours of say, "Dirty Knife" or "Furnace Room Lullaby."

With movies and books, you get the dissonance between people who want sequels to feel the same, and those who will whine about "well, it didn't do anything new," which annoys me. The first thing can be new, but I want subsequent entries in the same arena to have a similar flavour-- to generate the feeling I am looking for, like you say above. I cannot lie and say that I am not a slave to the flavour-- the feel I want right at the moment. I will frequently re-read chapters of a book because I can rely on it to generate /

[justbeast]

It's funny that you mention Neko Case -- I had the same thing happen. I /loved/ "Fox Confessor Brings the Flood", and immediately started rooting through her discography for something similar. And haven't found, yet, though obviously she's an amazing artist.