News and Muse-ings.
The news, first. The moors were coolish and on occasion dampish, but (or, rather, therefore) lovely. After some period in the butts for driven shooting, my syndics and I, as we always do, devoted ourselves to walk-up shooting over dogs. It was a Glorious Twelfth, all told. I stopped after 36½ brace (not bad for this weather in this year in that place), because I really needn’t more to hang and the final day of the Test called. (BROADY! BELL! BRES!)
I and the Clumbers are now home, having now twice reaffirmed by experience that Stockport (Edgeley) remains the ugliest Category B station in the entirety of the UK railways system.
I have had occasion, of late - these are the musings - to think about criticism and editing.[The monster and the critics.]What is called ‘constructive criticism’ these days: exaggerated politeness, Californicating ‘yes, but’ rather than ‘no, no, no’ (footnote Mrs T, as she then was, God rest her), coaxing rather than taking up the blue pencil: is, I conclude, neither. This sort of thing is the death of prose, because it is the death of criticism.
Look here, damn it all. In this fandom, there are any number of talented people, be they writers or artists. I can say truthfully that of those with whose work I am acquainted, they are almost without exception more talented than am I. (There is a difference between talent and facility. GKC and Kipling possessed both. I possess only the latter.) I can also say that not a few should be better even than they are if they’d discipline. Talent without discipline goes nowhere at all, very swiftly.
I have had some brilliant editors - ‘betas’, to use a despicable term - even within fandom. Let me assure you: the better they have been, the less deference they have shown my MSS. And the less deference shown, the better the eventual work. The only result of ‘ladling the butter from adjacent tubs / Stubbs butters Freeman, Freeman butters Stubbs’, is an oleaginous and rancid mess. When I want a critique (preferably of pure reason), I expect, indeed I am entitled to, a no-holds-barred argument: unless the error or infelicity noted is inarguable, whereupon I fix the damned thing. I am the author; in the end, I prevail: but unless I am challenged to defend my choices, I have a very imperfect understanding of why something is or is not right, let alone defensible. Unfortunately for others, my own criticism, when sought, or expected by circumstance, is Kantian: I give what I demand to get.
It doesn’t go down terribly well, quite often.
This is, to me, mysterious. Why in buggery are people writing? ‘For fun’? All right; but in that case, why publish it? If you publish something, you are inviting people to read it. And you are inviting critical responses to it. (It is an ill omen that ‘critical’ now commonly means ‘carping’ in most minds, and is rejected accordingly.) If you must publish something, even for the amusement of your friends, and gratis, you have undertaken something that comes with a duty attached: a duty to your readers, if any. That duty is to write in the best English of which you are capable (and to see to it that it is the best English, by educating yourself if wanted), with the best characterisation, plotting, theme, pace, and all the rest. If, God forbid, you are co-writing, you have a further special duty to anyone whose name is also going to be on the damned thing, and who shall, as you shall, be judged by your and her or their weakest links: in which event it is your positive duty, without any consideration of persons or any refuge in hurt feelings and dramatics and waterworks, to give and get (and take, uncomplainingly) the most stringent possible criticism before foisting the bloody work on an innocent and confiding public. No, they mayn’t be paying you in £.s.d., but they are paying you the compliment of their time and attention in return for your work: time and attention they might otherwise have profited by: and you owe them in return the best work within your powers. And if you are writing as a gift for someone … well, need I labour the point?
It’s all very well saying that a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down. There are medicines the efficacy of which is vitiated by the addition of sucrose.
This, of course, is why I am increasingly known as savage and offensive, the fun-devouring killjoy, Wemyss the Dementor. This, of course, is why I am rarely asked to edit, and yet more rarely asked twice, and have lost a certain intimacy with some fellow writers (those not already driven away by the intolerable mismatch of my views and politics with their own, which are naturally perfect in every way).
On the other hand, it is why Bapton Books exists; and it is, however I myself fall not infrequently short of even a relative perfection, the essence of professionalism, to which we ought all, and are all obliged to, aspire.
I and the Clumbers are now home, having now twice reaffirmed by experience that Stockport (Edgeley) remains the ugliest Category B station in the entirety of the UK railways system.
I have had occasion, of late - these are the musings - to think about criticism and editing.[The monster and the critics.]What is called ‘constructive criticism’ these days: exaggerated politeness, Californicating ‘yes, but’ rather than ‘no, no, no’ (footnote Mrs T, as she then was, God rest her), coaxing rather than taking up the blue pencil: is, I conclude, neither. This sort of thing is the death of prose, because it is the death of criticism.
Look here, damn it all. In this fandom, there are any number of talented people, be they writers or artists. I can say truthfully that of those with whose work I am acquainted, they are almost without exception more talented than am I. (There is a difference between talent and facility. GKC and Kipling possessed both. I possess only the latter.) I can also say that not a few should be better even than they are if they’d discipline. Talent without discipline goes nowhere at all, very swiftly.
I have had some brilliant editors - ‘betas’, to use a despicable term - even within fandom. Let me assure you: the better they have been, the less deference they have shown my MSS. And the less deference shown, the better the eventual work. The only result of ‘ladling the butter from adjacent tubs / Stubbs butters Freeman, Freeman butters Stubbs’, is an oleaginous and rancid mess. When I want a critique (preferably of pure reason), I expect, indeed I am entitled to, a no-holds-barred argument: unless the error or infelicity noted is inarguable, whereupon I fix the damned thing. I am the author; in the end, I prevail: but unless I am challenged to defend my choices, I have a very imperfect understanding of why something is or is not right, let alone defensible. Unfortunately for others, my own criticism, when sought, or expected by circumstance, is Kantian: I give what I demand to get.
It doesn’t go down terribly well, quite often.
This is, to me, mysterious. Why in buggery are people writing? ‘For fun’? All right; but in that case, why publish it? If you publish something, you are inviting people to read it. And you are inviting critical responses to it. (It is an ill omen that ‘critical’ now commonly means ‘carping’ in most minds, and is rejected accordingly.) If you must publish something, even for the amusement of your friends, and gratis, you have undertaken something that comes with a duty attached: a duty to your readers, if any. That duty is to write in the best English of which you are capable (and to see to it that it is the best English, by educating yourself if wanted), with the best characterisation, plotting, theme, pace, and all the rest. If, God forbid, you are co-writing, you have a further special duty to anyone whose name is also going to be on the damned thing, and who shall, as you shall, be judged by your and her or their weakest links: in which event it is your positive duty, without any consideration of persons or any refuge in hurt feelings and dramatics and waterworks, to give and get (and take, uncomplainingly) the most stringent possible criticism before foisting the bloody work on an innocent and confiding public. No, they mayn’t be paying you in £.s.d., but they are paying you the compliment of their time and attention in return for your work: time and attention they might otherwise have profited by: and you owe them in return the best work within your powers. And if you are writing as a gift for someone … well, need I labour the point?
It’s all very well saying that a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down. There are medicines the efficacy of which is vitiated by the addition of sucrose.
This, of course, is why I am increasingly known as savage and offensive, the fun-devouring killjoy, Wemyss the Dementor. This, of course, is why I am rarely asked to edit, and yet more rarely asked twice, and have lost a certain intimacy with some fellow writers (those not already driven away by the intolerable mismatch of my views and politics with their own, which are naturally perfect in every way).
On the other hand, it is why Bapton Books exists; and it is, however I myself fall not infrequently short of even a relative perfection, the essence of professionalism, to which we ought all, and are all obliged to, aspire.