Re: Critique rules

Tina Hall wrote:

Catja Pafort <green_knight@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Tina Hall wrote:

But knowing how to ride a bike isn't going to tell me how to
do tricks. (In fact, I used to be able to ride free handed,
not anymore.)

How did you approach the problem? What's your analytical
procedure in this? The first step would be the diagnostic:
you take your hands off the handlebar and wobble.

I've lost that skill. And it's not a very good analogy for
writing anyway, as that's mechanic. (I don't let go of the
handlebar, as I know it would just veer off in either direction,
which isn't comparable to not knowing how to write better at
all.)

See, I would disagree. I think there are two parallels.

You know you can't do it so you don't try. That's playing it safe, which
- in the case of the bike in traffic - might be safe, but if you _want_
to acquire that skill, eventually you have to trust yourself that you
will be able to do it - or at least test regularly whether you are able
to do it.

One certain way of not improving your writing is to stay within your
safety zone - to always write the way you know you can write/the way you
write best, and to pick stories and characters and settings that you
feel comfortable with.

One way of improving - or of simply finding our where your limitations
are - is to stretch yourself and write stories that make you feel
slightly uneasy because they seem a bit too much of a challenge. I'm not
saying you ought to throw yourself into a complex narrative like the
Time Travelers's Wife or a Pseudo-Victorian novel like Jonathan Strange
and Dr. Norrel - but I've found that tackling complex challenges really
has helped me to deal with simpler tasks.


Maths would be a better analogy. That's mental, not mechanical.
Say I know how to do +-*/, but have no idea how logarythm
functions.

I was trying to talk less about skills, then about learning strategies.
I know you are sincere in your desire to learn - but how do you learn
best? ShelleyS has named a number of learning strategies elsethread -
classes, exercises, reading other peoples' books, how-to books. 'Just
write' fell in that context as well, and I think it's a legitimate
method - but I would argue that it's writing and _critically examining
your own writing_ that works. Although sometimes you really need to do
something a few times before you can decide whether you can do it or not
(the first time might have been a fluke).

One part of learning is finding the right teacher. (And often deciding
that no teacher is *much* better than a teacher that's a bad fit, or
deciding that certain teachers are only good for teaching you certain
things, and finding other things to learn from.)

One part is knowing how you learn and instead of trying every possible
learning method willy-nilly, and getting frustrated in the process, is
to find the right method for you. When I started to take riding lessons,
I spent a lot of time struggling - I had lessons that would have been
brilliant for other people but were merely OK for me. I then had lessons
with a teacher who catered to my learning style and within a year I
caught up on the previous seventeen and revised my self-image from
'completely hopeless' to 'decent.'

Writing is intellectual rather than athletic, but there are still many
ways to learn (and many skills that you _can_ improve), so if you can
work out _how_ you learn best - what you are comfortable with and what
you aren't, what risks you are willing to take, whether you rise to
challenges or get disheartened by them, whether you prefer to learn
something one skill at a time or whether - like me- you need to have a
mental picture of what you're trying to achieve before you can tweak any
of its parts - whether you do better with written materials or examples
or doing it yourself in exercises or, or, or: the more you know about
yourself and your preferred learning style, the easier it will be for
you to chose among all the methods that other people have learnt by and
pick the ones that will work for you.

I don't think many people here find my method of dumping something in my
backbrain until I grok it, applying it instinctively _and then_
analysing it and applying it consciously anywhere near logical, but
that's the way things happen.


But instead of talking about analogies, where it's likely that I
don't know how to apply what's said about maths (for example) to
writing, I'd rather talk about writing, if explaining how to get
better at that is your intend.

It is, I was merely approaching it from an angle that might have been
too obtuse.

It's no use me telling you to sit straight and in lateral
balance and to keep your centre of gravity as much as
possible above the seat if your bike drifts to one side
because the frame is bent, so you need to do the diagnostics
yourself.

How much of that are you actually doing? or are you
simply saying 'I can't do this anymore' and leaving it there?

What would be the comparable questions concerning writing?

It's not as if I'm regularly falling off the chair, or
accidentally bite the keyboard. :)

I would hope not!

Ok, let me ask a writing-related question: what have you done in the
last week to improve your writing? List anything that you feel has
helped you become a better writer. (I'll give you my list later.)

I went through a tremendously frustrating phase where I could see that
there was 'something wrong' with my writing, but I could not tell
_what_; much less did I have the ability to write better. It sounds a
bit like the place where you are right now.


That hasn't improved at all in the 16 or so years I know how
to type, and it hasn't taught me to find the numbers blind (I
left the job-training where I learned typing before we got to
the numbers, so I only find the letters and characters on
those rows, shift, space, enter, and backspace blind).

This puzzles me extraordinarily. Because once you know how to
learn a row of letters on a typewriter, you know how to learn
them all.

The claim was that you get better by just writing, and the
comparison was typing. Just typing the characters I know isn't
going to let me find the numbers.

But knowing _how to learn letters_ is something you can then apply to
the numbers. I don't think writing skills are that easily transferable
or that closely related, which is a blessing as well as a curse, because
it means that hardly anyone is a crappy writer - everybody has things
they're good at and things they suck at when they start out, and it's
knowing how to strengthen their strenghs as much as how to get rid of
their weaknesses that makes the learning process.


Why hasn't it occured to you to simply sit down, and use the
same method - I presume a collection of exercises that made
you write out ada jlj aja dld etc until you knew where every
letter was - and use them on the numbers?

How is that applicable to writing?

There are two parties to the learning process: the teacher and the
learner. Most of the learning occurs in collaboration between the two.
The more you work on your ability to learn, the easier it will be for
you to find perfect teachers - both because you can say 'please present
the material like this' and because you can pick out the bits you need
even when they're delivered in a suboptimal form.

And because you've been frustrated with trying to improve your writing,
and you have - mostly - not yet found things that work for you, I think
it might be a good idea if you simply looked at other areas of your life
and considered what your best learning experiences were.



If you can find out the answers to that, you might find more
answers in what you need to know in order to learn to write
better.

I have no idea how the appropriate questions would be for
writing. That was all about bikes and typing, which I already
pointed out aren't fitting analogies. There's nothing comparable
in it.

I think there were a fair number of questions, but let me try to recap:

- what's your ideal learning style: do you need a live teacher, group
interaction, videos, spoken text, multimedia experiences, or do you need
to do things yourself?

- do you prefer building something piece by piece or do you need to see
the big picture first?

- where are you on an abstract to concrete scale? Are you better talking
about theories or do you need concrete examples? And if examples, do you
prefer things to be drawn out from existing texts or would you prefer
examples written with just one thing in mind? Do you prefer a neutral
text or for someone else to rewrite yours? (I think I know the answer to
that one)

- can you recognise the point where you say 'I understand this' and the
point where you can go away and do it yourself?

- can you learn by imitation? I got over one of my biggest humps with
description when Patricia Wrede wrote a passage which I
sort-of-understood, and Tim Silverman went and analyzed it sentence by
sentence: *this* is what happens here, and *this* is how it fits into
the whole. I then went away and used that precise sentence structure in
a description of my own, and sweated blood and water over it. I felt
like R.L. at times, slaving over the /object/ /swas distinguished from/
/the landscape/. ('The mountain rose abruptly from the plain.' Only I
wasn't writing about a mountain, but a church, and my landscape wasn't a
plain, but a river plateau...) It was painful. The result was, as
expected, *good*. I learnt a lot about what you can do with language,
how to microstructure paragraphs to make things flow, how to infuse
landscape with a life of its own. I ended up putting landscape elements
in contrast with each other, assigning them a purpose, making up a
conflict where, really, there was only a church above a river, and what
could have been boring description indeed ('the church sat on a plateau)
turned into something much more dynamic. (I've found the beginning of
the thread, but it went into the fourhundreds, and I've lost the precise
stuff in a crash - and I can't recall whether the things I'm talking
about were in that thread or in another.)

Err, I think that's enough for one post. There could be more, but I'm a
natural trilogist, so that should come as no surprise...

Catja
--
writing blog @ http://beyond-elechan.livejournal.com
.

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