If They Can Be Talked Out Of It

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

When you wish upon a star, makes no difference who you are….

Given a little talent at astrophysics, a lot of study, some native talent and having been born in a society with sufficiently advanced science and tech, you might eventually help launch a probe that will bring us fractionally closer to colonizing that star.
            
But no, you say.  No, no, no, no, no, no.  That’s not how that story is supposed to be.  It’s supposed to be “your dream comes true.”

Yes, it is, isn’t it.  Everyone knows that story.  But here’s the thing about stories, even ones that become immensely popular, so popular that they live rent free in our heads: stories (trust me, I make them up) aren’t true.

You know, we humans are weird beasts.  Even those of us who don’t write for a living live and die by story.  Story is the way that the human mind makes sense of the chaotic input of reality.  This is why story is so important for culture – each culture has its own peculiar stories, which entwine in the subconscious of the members of it, and, in most cases, help keep them safe in the environment the culture inhabits (or inhabited at the time of it’s formation) or keeps them within cultural boundaries.  “Don’t go traipsing into the woods alone because a bad wolf will try to eat you” is a great moral.  As is “Be a good girl, work hard, and a prince will marry you, even though your sisters have prettier dresses and go to balls.”

Mind you, these morals are not necessarily good for every member of the culture in every situation, but if you follow the story moral – and most of us do, they really do live rent free in our heads – you’ll be all right more than not.  So the mechanism, by and large, works in favor fo the culture.  It might be bad for 20 members out of 100 (who need to go into the woods to gather mushrooms; or who never marry a prince because he rarely comes to the kitchen.) It is still better for the culture, though.

Even more unfortunately, though, some of the stories are soothing syrup.  They’re not really designed to enforce behavior or to help members of the culture.  They’re designed to keep the crazies in line, or to let us sleep soundly at night.

Keep the crazies in line?  Well… yes.  Or allow them to try things that are so fraught with peril, so completely insane – for the individual, but which might, in the long run, bring benefit to society – that otherwise no one would do it.

One of those is the “If you wish upon a star” or “If you want it badly enough” or the other endless “the wish is the action” things.  “You know you’ve got to stay hungry” or “Fire in the belly” or…

There is a certain amount of desire needed to accomplish anything.  Of course.  And success at crazy things like writing are – ALWAYS – a matter of perseverance.  (Crazy?  By definition.  It’s done by a minority for no visible EXTERNAL necessity.  It’s crazy.)  At least they are unless you get the lucky break that’s the equivalent of winning the jackpot five times in a row.

Because we’re all aware the chances of major success from a writing career are minimal – unless we’re two, live in a well or have never heard a writer’s story of success.  (Even J. K. Rowling – Fortune’s Favorite Daughter – was rejected 21 times.  A risible amount for most of us, but still adversity from the POV of any other profession.) – writing has accrued all these myths, like incrustations.

One of them is “true genius will tell” – particularly present in the Rowling mythos, but to an extent in others, as well – which I’ll deal with sometime next week.

The other one is “If you can be talked out of it, you should be.”  

I hate this myth.  I hate it with a burning, blazing passion.  It’s usually said by mentors and people in power over you, so you have to button your lip and nod.

It is also pure bullshit.  If I could get a gram of it, my garden would be perfectly fertilized.

Look up at the first paragraph.  Yeah, someone who thinks that by wishing he should be able to reach a star needs to be talked out of it.  That’s because it’s completely insane to think you can do that, at our current tech development levels.

In the same way, if someone is chiseling his words onto the skin of armadillos and thinks he’s going to be a bestseller by all means talk him out of it.  It might take a straight jacket, though.

For everyone else – WHY?  Why if you could be talked out of it you SHOULD?  What sense does it make.

Someone in my group on FB said “Because it’s a difficult road and it’s likely reward would be minimal.”

Oh, I see.  So you’re talking people out of it for their own good?  How kind and compassionate of you.  And you think they don’t know it’s a hard road and reward would likely be minimal?  You meet many authors who are two?  Or who have lived their whole lives under a rock with ear plugs on?

Do you see how nonsensical this is?  It’s marginally less nonsensical if it comes from someone who had a hard slog to get up there, and if they’re using that odious statement as a way to start telling their story.  And if they’re aware they’re being pricks and abrogating to themselves the right to decide who should and shouldn’t follow in their footsteps.

But it’s also said by peers.  And it’s used to justify things like: cut down critiques; judging your motives for trying this; and sheer sadism.

Ms. Breslin said she did her “Why You Shouldn’t Be A Writer” because if you push back then you have what it takes to make it.  (Rolls eyes.)  There will be a whole article on that particular fallacy.  (There is absolutely no indication self-confidence has a direct connection to ability to make it as a writer.)

At the bottom of that is “if you can be talked out of it you ‘should’ be.”  And at the bottom of that is ‘if the dream/wish is strong enough, you’ll make it.’

Apply this to other risky, hard to make it there professions that provide things we absolutely need: medicine.  Right now in the US there are artificial barriers to entry into medschool.  You can be a straight A student, do well on the M-cats and you still need luck to make it in.  So, if someone is willing to try to slog it through, should we try to talk them out of it?  For their own good?  And then what happens if we don’t have any doctors?  Or any doctors who aren’t freaking delusional ego-monsters?

Engineering: it’s hard to get jobs in engineering in the US, the way to the end is hard.  So, if you can be talked about it, you should be, and it’s a good thing I have that horse carriage in my barn.  (No, I don’t really.)

Plumbing: you have to work really hard, and there are all these regulations that will make your life difficult, and if you can be talked out of it, you probably should be.  Good thing I know how to dig a latrine.

Look – I’ll be blunt.  Whether you can be talked out of it or not, has NOTHING to do with your talent (to the extent talent exists), your willingness to work hard, or even weirdly your passion.  It has to do with a bunch of things, including your natural altruism (one way to get me to drop out that almost worked was “you’re making your family suffer for nothing.” Fortunately my family kicked me back into play, forcefully.) your self-confidence and even the type of stubborn you are.  (I’m very good at absorbing rejection.  However, give me a good nasty cut-down by someone I admire and it can stop me for years.  I’m still recovering from one I got from one of my mentors – I think accidentally? – five years ago.  It’s still putting traces of diffidence in my voice.)

I daresay if you try long enough and target it JUST right, everyone can be talked out of it.  I probably have the writing bug in extremis, but I could, once upon a time, have been convinced to spend the rest of my life writing Austen fan fic in my spare time and putting it up for free.  Frankly, at that time, it wouldn’t have taken much.

It doesn’t mean they “should” be.  Not for their own good, not for others.  Saying that if they can be talked out they should be is an excuse for insecure dwarves with souls ten sizes too small to try to clear what they perceive as competition.  (Competition in this field is not like that.  Writing doesn’t work on the Marxist model. We don’t have a finite number of books we will read in a lifetime.  It’s actually to some extent true that the more you read the more you want to read.  But Marx has always appealed to people with small souls.)  It’s an excuse for casual writers’ group sadists to have fun while pretending it’s for other’s good.  It’s an excuse for editors not to do their job but to try to be cutting and malicious instead, for the “wannabes own good.”

This is a myth that’s ripe to die.  It’s time we bury it deep.  Yes, the way is arduous.  Yes, the chances of great reward are small.  BUT the way itself will dissuade those who don’t have enough fortitude to make it. (And in some cases we’ll lose great writers, because as with medicine, the way has been made unnecessarily hard in traditional publishing.  Thank G-d for Indie.)  And if THAT doesn’t do it, who are YOU to tell them they should quit?

I say we need all storytellers willing to work hard enough to – metaphorically – get us fractionally closer to the stars.  

It’s obvious this culture is desperately in need of better myths.

111 thoughts on “If They Can Be Talked Out Of It”

  2. These sorts of things are usually said by someone who’s made it to someone who isn’t there yet. It’s meant not to bring a hint of rationality to an otherwise nutso endeavor, but the opposite. It has less to do with the aspiring writer than with the person saying it: “Look how I am! Aren’t I 21 kinds of wonderful? Just don’t try to share this space with me, because it’s MINE.” It’s not the sort of thing a mentor says on purpose.

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    1. I just finished reading Small Gods. Now I have Om standing guard in my head, ‘Mine. Not yours. Mine.’ I am not sure I am thankful.

      It could be that there is an element in saying, ‘writing is hard,’ is not to say don’t crowd me, but is an unspoken plea: give me pettings, I have accomplished something very hard and at a cost.

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  3. Those with the ability to write the difficult things should be PROTECTED. So that the difficult things get written.

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    1. I’m sorry, Jason, I know he’s your friend, but he is annoying and misguided. If it were only him, I wouldn’t care. BUT he’s echoing hundreds of other people self-satisfiedly using this bullshit to cut down others who MIGHT be more talented and better. And I’ve HAD enough. (I wield the broom as a Samurai sword and announce “the beatings will now commence” — you’d better believe it.)

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        1. The world runs on unexamined thoughts. It is occasionally useful to examine a few from time to time, just as it is a good idea to go through your refrigerator and check expiration dates. “If they can be talked out of it …” probably was valid back when getting published meant breaking through the gate-keepers, but is no longer so.

          Frank Capra, in his autobiography (reportedly as factual as any of his films) tells of studio head Harry Cohn* introducing him to a young man, an aspiring film-maker who was thoroughly intimidated by Cohn’s coarse, blustering, brow-beating style (Cohn was one of those bosses who evaluate ideas by how vigorously you defend them; incapable of judging talent he was expert at judging your confidence in your talent.) Walt Disney had only a brief stay at Columbia, but ended up enjoying a long and productive career.

          Harry Cohn is apocryphally the object of one of Hollywood’s most famous quotes. Noting the huge crowd attending Cohn’s funeral, Red Skelton supposedly observed: “Well, it only proves what they always say — give the people what they want, and they’ll come out for it.”

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          1. I knew a vice-president of McGraw-Hill who did something like Harry Cohn. He was a nice guy and never browbeat anyone: he’d ask questions of software engineers and not listen to the words, but watch the eyes. If you ask a technologist something and you see fear in the eyes there’s a good chance that there’s some significant technical risk. This was his way of evaluating technical ideas.

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    2. It seems to me that blog posts are like pearls: a tiny grain of sand can produce an accretion of luminous beauty.

      Or a malformed misshapen lump. YMMV.

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  5. When you get down to it, we have a plethora of morals, of adages, that are often complementary, paired opposites to be used by society’s yentas no matter which side of the fence you’re on. “A penny saved is a penny earned.” “Penny wise, pound foolish.” (Although that last now sounds like something the Hulk would say …)

    A lot of these adages are semantically null. “If you want it badly enough …”, for example, is tautological; failure to achieve the goal is evidence of not wanting it badly enough. “Virtue is its own reward” is valid for those for whom it is valid, all others demand cash.

    Culture, in the deep, anthropological sense, is indeed stories, for those stories define the ethos, the values of the culture. They are culture’s mothers’ milk, defining Good and Bad in our individual operating systems. Which doesn’t mean we are immune to worms and viruses … if you would attack a culture that is the route to take, undermining its roots and convincing a people that their culture is not worth defending. As Sun Tzu observed, “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”

    Just because “advice” is well-intentioned does not mean it is well taken. Establish your own standards and metrics, learn to take advice advisedly and remember that in a Gig of years all this will be gone and forgotten.

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  6. I think that for some of those who go to engineering school, and then decide to go elsewhere, there really is a public interest in them not continuing to become engineers. Not everyone is suited to be an engineer, even if I think that aspects of engineering education are essential for every adult*, and incompetent engineers kill people.

    Yes, if other things are not sufficiently screwed up enough, we can always use more engineers, but we don’t need more folks who don’t have what it takes, or have yet to be trained properly, and think they are qualified.

    *Some of this may just be me being nuts.

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    1. “Not everyone is suited to be X,” could be said of almost any job, including bagger at a grocery store (this is a particular peeve of mine – I don’t always empty the trunk and put away all the groceries, just getting the perishables so they won’t go bad. If the bagger put a bag of frozen veggies under the cotton balls and razors, they may wind up being tossed, because they were in my trunk for a day or two).

      Just because someone decides to go elsewhere after engineering school doesn’t necessarily disqualify them, nor does being sufficiently determined qualify them. But, while it is possible that being focused should be a qualification for designing something that lives will depend on, like bridges and skyscrapers, engineers also design camera bodies, washing machines, computer cases, etc., where the structural design does not endanger anyone, and in any case can be tested numerous times before being produced for sale.

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      1. I worded things incorrectly. I was referring to the practice of getting partway into an engineering degree from an ABET accredited program, and then deciding on the basis of the curriculum that another degree, perhaps business, would be much more to one’s taste. I was not talking about what one does after an engineering degree is finished.

        Design for structural strength is very much not the whole of engineering responsibility. Yes, some things are safer than others. Rubber balls and Frisbees may well have much lower factors of safety than things that engineers are supposed to be stringent on, like medical equipment and nuclear power plants. Risk is everywhere, and even where there is little to no direct danger to human life, if it is worth paying an engineer to do something, doing it wrong will have an adverse impact somewhere.

        A structurally sound washing machine can still electrocute, a camera might malfunction when it is being used to try to save a life, and a computer case might be assembled in so inefficient a manner that it costs jobs.

        PEs are not the whole of engineering, but I’ll list some stages in educating/certifying them anyway. (A PE is something like a lawyer who has passed the Bar. They can advertise their services as an Engineer, so long as they don’t get disciplined by the board.) There is pre-college education, which I’ve heard is a weak spot, and often doesn’t prepare people well enough for engineering school, who might otherwise become at least decent engineers. Then there is a BS degree from an ABET certified program. Again, folks who decide that they hate engineering school too much to continue include some people who really shouldn’t practice engineering. This is followed by the FE exam (which can and maybe should be taken while getting the BS), five years OJT (which I’ve heard is when one really learns to be an engineer), and the PE exam (which I’ve heard later grads will need an MS for). This isn’t perfect, if it was, we wouldn’t see PEs being disciplined.

        Anyway, I think engineers are an interesting occupation to look at in terms of encouragement and discouragement because of the strong public interests for both.

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        1. I considered that you might have meant it that way, but I couldn’t see the connection between it and the subject of the original post. If someone pursues something for a certain period of time, then decides that they either can’t hack it because the work is too difficult, or that they just didn’t really like it as much as they thought, that’s a perfectly valid reason to leave the field (at least it is to me), but not if someone preemptively declares that they are not cut out for it, just because that person believes that if you ARE cut out for it, then you will persevere anyway. Especially since, as someone else pointed out, many of the types who would stay are unable to recognize that they are just not good enough for it.

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          1. Item the first: Engineering school is not an exact model for the actual practice of engineering.

            Item the second: Anecdotes suggest to me that engineering school might be one of the more difficult and generally considered unpleasant majors.

            Item the third: Engineering professors have come degree of control over how much the material they cover discourages people.

            Item the fourth: My understanding is that engineering professors generally take their role in the selection and training of future engineers seriously.

            Therefore the engineering curriculum can be considered to include a combination of encouragement and discouragement. Engineering school as a whole seems to me to have a very powerful voice, for good or for ill. Whether nor engineering school is working as it should is important to me.

            I suspect that the proper operation of engineering school includes some forms of discouragement that are in areas up to the judgment and discretion of the professors.

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            1. Item the first: Engineering school is not an exact model for the actual practice of engineering.

              Ain’t that the truth!

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              1. I don’t know of any fields in which $SUBJECT school is an exact model for the actual practice of $SUBJECT. For the three fields in which I could be said to have obtained any significant schooling (Physics, Law, Hypnotherapy) the divergence is quite broad. :) In law in particular you can barely even see actual practice from school.

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  7. There is a difference between telling someone, ‘this is very hard, therefore you should quit,’ and advising someone, ‘this is very hard, you should go into it prepared and with your eyes open.’

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  8. “Whether you can be talked out of it or not, has NOTHING to do with your talent (to the extent talent exists), your willingness to work hard, or even weirdly your passion.”

    I was talked out of writing for twenty years by people who had nothing but the best of intentions for me. And the way they did it still echoes in my memory and chokes up the words like trash damming a stream.

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    1. Same for me… I had a great career as an electronics technician, and then I earned my degree in English lit so that eventually I could teach. What saved me was my illness. i can do none of those things anymore. I now have time to write plus w/o my normal energy writing is a there for me when none of the other careers could save me. ;-)

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  9. I have been thinking all morning about two bits from your post:

    ““Don’t go traipsing into the woods alone because a bad wolf will try to eat you” is a great moral.  As is “Be a good girl, work hard, and a prince will marry you, even though your sisters have prettier dresses and go to balls.””
    and
    “It’s obvious this culture is desperately in need of better myths.”

    The myths disproportionately shackle women. But the answer is not to co-opt men’s myths, except to do it in scanty clothes. At least, not ONLY to co-opt men’s myths.

    It is convenient for society if we all line up, men there, women here, and march in lockstep – but it isn’t good for society, and it can be utterly horrible for individuals (“don’t worry, little woman – you don’t need to make as much money as a man” is a real insult to a woman left by said man to fend for herself and THEIR four children).

    There are stirrings – but it is still heartbreaking to see how few women scientists there are, and what they have to pay for the privilege, especially in the hard sciences, and how women are treated in the levels of government (and then their few faces are removed, as Hilary Clinton’s was removed from the photo of the cabinet being informed of Bin Laden’s death).

    Oh yes – we need far better myths.

    (And for the first step, exposing the myths, may I suggest the videos at Feminist Frequency – very well done.)

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  10. Yeah… well, some people have been disproportionately shackled by myths, but an awful lot of people don’t have the sense to go lie down in a ditch when a tornado’s coming. Even though you can also watch the pretty clouds go by from the ditch. (And no, I don’t mean that as an analogy, and yes, it was at a semi-fannish camping event. I love fans, but some of us are not safe to be around.)

    In point of fact, though, there are tons of male-oriented fairy tales where the morals are things like “Be kind and well-spoken to whoever you meet,” “Hard work without grumbling is important even for princes and knights,” and “Traipsing through the woods alone when you’ve been warned against it is likely to lead to imprisonment and death.” The odd thing is that we seldom see male-oriented fairy tales these days, unless you count “Peter and the Wolf”.

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      2. “… because she will help you not die.” :) Amen. She’ll wrestle death, vengeful faerie queens, and the devil for your soul.

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  11. I feel a little guilty admitting it, but no one has ever discouraged me from writing. It’s been the other way around. “You have got to write this stuff down!” or “I don’t like history, but I want to read your book when you finish with it.” However, people did their best to discourage me from flying airplanes and from riding horses. Which explains my career as a pilot. Do NOT tell me not do something unless it is along the lines of, “no, do not fly that airplane. It is unsafe because the wing spar is broken.”

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      1. Yup. And one time a cousin of mine got me to ride a pork-barrel of an old nag, without warning me that she (the nag, not the cousin) had a fixed habit, once she came in sight of the barnyard gate, of bolting for that gate so fast she slid right out from under you and left you hanging in mid-air. I fell so hard I got the wind knocked out of me.

        My cousin tried to cajole me in the proper way: ‘When you fall off, you’ve got to get right back on the horse.’ I refused. I was a little too polite, and considerably too distracted by my nice fresh bruises, to say what I was thinking: ‘By all means, but not THAT horse.’

        I have ridden other horses since, and while I’ll never be a steeplechase rider or a cowboy, I can get from A to B all right. But if the horse has any habits like that, I want to hear about it first.

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        1. We had a mustang that had a six o’clock habit. You could ride him all day long, but at six o’clock every day he went back to the stable. At least he didn’t leave you hanging in the air. I swear that horse had a time and union card. lol

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    2. TXRed, you are absolutely forbidden from making an enormous fortune and sending me a million dollar paypal donation.

      (There, retirement taken care of. Ahhhhh.)

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    3. I haven’t ridden a horse in thirty years, but I’m sure I could do it again, faced with the task. It’s kind of like riding a bicycle — you don’t forget how, no matter how long it is in between. I no longer like flying, because the noise is too painful. The only problems I have with writing is wracking my brain for the RIGHT words. Like you, TXRed, I’ve had very few people tell me I shouldn’t. As for “going into the woods alone”, the wolves need to watch out for themselves. I do prefer to have company when I wander, because I see so much I want to share.

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  12. At the risk of stepping back into the hornets’ nest, I have to disagree with you to an extent here, Sarah. While being talked out of something may say nothing about the level of your talent, I think it does point towards a certain determinedness(is that even a word?). I think there are a lot of people with talent, but those that make it usually possess one of two factors in their favor:
    1. They have connections.
    2. They didn’t stop.

    I know, I know – I’ve set myself up for scathing replies from everyone on here(just like last thread), but I think allowing another person to talk you out of something, especially when that person was directing a comment at the public in general rather than at you per se, shows a skittishness that doesn’t lend itself well to success.

    What was amazing to me about the last post on this topic was that most folks on here explicitly HAVEN”T given up, yet they took Breslin’s article so personal that you’d have thought she shot the person’s dog.

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    1. Hey RD – ;-)
      No scathing remark – just an observation.
      I am at the age that I don’t take other people’s comments personally any more, but that wasn’t the case when I was in my twenties. So yea, I see your point, and NO I don’t because the people who will be stopped are the young ones. I mourn all the novels I could have written when I had the desire (at a very young age). I mourn the loss of my singing talent because I believed my parents. I have a 3 1/2 (or more) octave voice. I found that out when I took a few lessons at the age of 49.

      So I hope fifty is not too late to build a writing career. (I think not). I am starting late. I don’t mourn the adventures that I took instead of writing. They have helped me to see life in very different ways.

      BUT–

      And for all the reasons why I was skunked, I hate that article by Breslin.

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    2. To paraphrase the Hulk: You have not seen these people angry. You would not like them when they are angry.

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      1. A little nit here CACS. It was Bruce Banner who said “you won’t like me when I’m angry”. Hulk doesn’t say things like that. Hulk says “Hulk Smash”. [Wink]

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          1. CACS, Hulk can get away with calling me puny. Thor can get away with calling me puny. You’re not Hulk or Thor. ::Sends guided fire balls after CACS:: [Very Big Dragon Grin]

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    3. Not scathing, just an observation: a lot of very talented writers will read pieces like Ms Breslin’s and think that every single negative applies to them, personally, in spades. The reasons don’t matter. The fact is that people who have the bug but have zero self-confidence will take advice like that to heart, and while they’ll still write, they won’t send it out, and they’ll struggle to improve what they’re doing on their own.

      I did that for years.

      All it takes is a slight recasting. “It’s bloody difficult, but if you stick at it long enough and keep trying to find new directions when the ones you’ve tried don’t work out, and you keep trying to get better, you might just make it there.”

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    4. Sigh. RD — you TOLD me it was “different personalities.” Yes, it is. BUT what I was trying to get across is exactly that.

      No, I haven’t given up. But I know someone who writes as well as I do, who did. I just managed to coax her to write again, and it won’t take much to frighten her again.

      BEYOND THAT — go look at what I said. One of my mentors — I think under the misapprehension that I was doing work for hire (which I’ve done once, and of a peculiar kind. The book Plain Jane is technically work for hire) misdiagnosed (I THINK) why my career hadn’t “taken off.” This hit me at a time when I had six books due, was dealing with severe health issues and was homeschooling. I’m not mad at him. He was genuinely trying to puzzle out why I hadn’t taken off.

      I couldn’t give up — six books due and too broke to forswear them — but at the end of that year I had what can only be called a six month long nervous breakdown where I couldn’t write. Was it that letter? Who knows. There were other reasons, aplenty. BUT that letter still troubles me. In the circumstances he alluded to, about what he thought I was doing, I still pause and go “Was he right?”

      Have I given up? Well, no. BUT HOW has it affected me? Who knows? If he was right perhaps it has affected me for the best. If he was wrong… there are projects I’ve given up on account of his words.

      He might have been right — I don’t think he was since he started from the wrong premisses — but when you’re tottering on that edge, you can take anything to heart, and it will often be wrong. Look, the “can you came your words sing?” back when I was convinced the reason I was getting rejected was ESL coming through somehow, would have sent me back to revising the story I had already spent a year revising, because “if most natives aren’t any good at writing, then I must be worse.”

      I’m not giving you a scathing reply. I’m asking you to be aware that there are different personalities. To you it might not do any harm. There are people to whom it will do great harm. And what does it serve? If you don’t have what it takes, you won’t make it anyway. What is the point of the preemptive culling from within the ranks. It would be kind of like the people in charge of military operations killing half their army at the outset because “they’d just have died in the battlefield.” (And don’t tell me, “no, it’s not like killing them, just like sending them back to civilian life” — because that is the NORMAL process. I understand nine tenths of the people who set out to write never finish whatever it is they started. That’s normal. Stepping in and telling them “Abandon all hope” is more like … preempting natural processes.)

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      1. How many straws can a camel’s back support? Is it prudent or kind to keep adding until we know, or is it better to refrain from adding avoidable straws?

        I understood Breslin’s point without reading beyond her header. But it is one thing to say “The journey is difficult and many fail; take thou warning and prepare for hardship” and another thing to say “Don’t go – you’re all going to die!”

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        2. In Herbert’s _Dune_, there is discussion of “the amtal test” — the test-to-destruction; “only by destroying a thing can one know its true nature”. (Which does ask the question: “And after you’ve rebuilt it, is it truly the same thing as it was before?”)

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        1. You’re not making me sigh. EVERYTHING is making me sigh. The family seems to have caught the seasonal flu, totally undermining our father’s day plans we’d been making for weeks. None of which would matter, if I weren’t just well enough to want to work, and just sick enough not to be able to. Those who know me know how crazy it is taht I just spent most of the day watching TV — and had to give up on the crochet at the same time because “thought. Movement. Ouch.”

          Tomorrow’s post MIGHT be late.

          Goodnight folks.

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    6. There’s a lovely book that gets sold as “new age” but really is very down to earth: it’s called The Four Agreements , by don Miguel Ruiz. The Second Agreement is “Don’t take anything personally.” There’s not enough room to go through the argument that leads up to and supports the Agreements, but this one comes down to one observation: When someone says something “about you”, they’re speaking from their own state of mind at the time. Now, I know Susannah slightly, and she’s in the midst of a Really Bad Year, with layoffs, cancer, a very sudden marriage … and, like most all of us, she can’t really stop writing, about it, about something.

      It’s easy to imagine why she’d think “Oh, wouldn’t it have been easier if I’d have been something more normal?”

      Now, this advice to always tell someone who wants to write that she should forget it comes (originally?) from F Scott Fitzgerald — who also had the kind of life that might make one wish one had been an insurance salesman instead.

      That said, I suspect they’re both at least partly right: it does no one any good to make them believe they’re going to have a really easy time as a writer. But only partly right, because At the same time, they’re only partly right, because when there’s any glimmer of the True Madness, it’s worth giving the person some support.

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      1. Now, this advice to always tell someone who wants to write that she should forget it comes (originally?) from F Scott Fitzgerald — who also had the kind of life that might make one wish one had been an insurance salesman instead.

        F. Scott Fitzgerald’s life was what it was not simply because he was a writer, but because of choices he made, some of which became possible because he was a writer. He would have probably been a miserable insurance salesman, and would have made equally bad choices…and died.

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            1. Don’t get me started on a tangent about how horrible Death of A Salesman is. Truly. I don’t have enough energy to froth at the mouth and bite the carpet. “Anti-human wave” should do it.

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    7. As I said elsewhere… I didn’t stop writing forever after being set up to fail — but I lost about a year that I could have been practicing my craft and getting better. There are ways to say “it’s hard, it’s rough, it’s discouraging at times” without saying, “Oh, and you suck at it.”

      I lost a year. I don’t think anyone else like me should have to.

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    8. Actually, I did give up, for twenty years or so, and barely wrote for another seven. Mind you, it wasn’t because I thought my writing was bad.

      When I was a kid, I got so used to people in authority trying to cut me down by using anything I liked against me that I quit communicating, so they couldn’t find out what to destroy. Thing is, I learned reflexive noncommunication so thoroughly, to dodge the constant harassment, that I lost the writing for decades.

      Unsurprisingly, I take an amazingly dim view of people claiming authority and using it as a club to beat down less experienced people.

      If Breslin’s simply engaged in a bit of bad writing — if she didn’t get across what she meant — I’ll dial it back.

      Otherwise — you bet I have a grudge against the “cut them down if you can” crowd.

      Since presently I am engaged in trying to break enough of the psychological block so that I can write faster than the continents drift, the matter presently looms large.

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      1. Well, as Charlie said, I know she’s going through chemo. It’s understandable — we all have demons, etc.. It’s the people who will lean on her and engage in petty sadism at the expense of newbies that I’m trying to remove authority from.

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        2. I’ll give her a pass because of the chemo – I know what chemo does to the mind and heart …as I have been taking chemo for over nine years.

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          1. Yes. This is why I wasn’t upset at HER, I was just trying to dispel the force of the thought.

            I’ve never had chemo and — knock on wood — maybe will escape it. BUT the year I was recovering from near-fatal intercellular pneumonia I wrote some of the oddest, most futile stuff I’ll ever write. It gets in your brain and your mood.

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            1. Yes – it is not unusual for very sick people (chronic illnesses and such) to get depression as well. Plus I learned from personal experience that prednisone in high dosages (80-100 mg daily) can cause paranoia and other mental problems.

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    9. While being talked out of something may say nothing about the level of your talent, I think it does point towards a certain determinedness(is that even a word?).

      I see that there are several responses here already, and I can’t really speak specifically to what it takes to be a writer, but I would like to address the issue of “determinedness” (I say it’s a word now, whether it was before or not – you just made it up):

      There are some people, as your description of yourself makes it appear you are, who will do what they have determined to do, despite anyone who tells them they will fail. Then there are some people who will spite strangers, but who have a deep trust of those who they respect, and can be deeply affected by them, and can be put off by them, even by accident. This doesn’t mean that they are less capable, or even that they can’t slog through the normal barriers, but, as Sarah says about her mentor, the ones that get raised by those they trust, are far more difficult to struggle over.

      If I had the writing bug as strongly as some of the people here, rather than the more common, “Hmm… That’s an interesting idea, maybe I should write it down”, I could accept rejections from publishers like they were shooting marshmallows at me, but for my REAL ambitions, my parents, by always treating the physics I wanted to study as a complete waste of time, laid a wet blanket over me that drained away my determination insidiously, making it harder for me to fight back against any of the other barriers that rose up in my way. Yet I know, from the perspective of years, that they never intended to do such a thing. It still burns at the back of my mind, every time I read something about CERN, or one of the other particle accelerator labs, and I may even go back to school after I have both my children out of the house and working, but I’ve lost 30 years, and it may be too late for me to be able to secure a place for myself doing what I am really interested in.

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      1. Go back to school. You will at least have tried. And yes, on the lost time, but I console myself in my almost-fifties, I still have a good twenty five years working time, even if medicine doesn’t get better — probably thirty. THAT used to be a whole career. I’ll remind you, sir, that Heinlein’s writing career started in earnest in his late forties. Try it.

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          1. Oh, I probably will, but right now, my cash flow pretty much allows me to do something like buy treats at Dairy Queen once a month, and I’m very leery of taking out student loans. I’ve waited this long, I can afford to wait another couple of years.

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            1. The worst time to buy into a bubble is just before it bursts. Higher Ed is overdue for joining the 21st Century and the edifice is beginning to crumble:

              Frustrated that his (and fellow Googler Peter Norvig’s) Stanford artificial intelligence class only reached 200 students, they put up a website offering an online version. They got few takers. Then he mentioned the online course at a conference with 80 attendees and 80 people signed up. On a Friday, he sent an offer to the mailing list of a top AI association. On Saturday morning he had 3,000 sign-ups—by Monday morning, 14,000.

              In the midst of this, there was a slight hitch, Mr. Thrun says. “I had forgotten to tell Stanford about it. There was my authority problem. Stanford said ‘If you give the same exams and the same certificate of completion [as Stanford does], then you are really messing with what certificates really are. People are going to go out with the certificates and ask for admission [at the university] and how do we even know who they really are?’ And I said: I. Don’t. Care.”

              In the end, there were 160,000 people signed up, from every country in the world, he says, except North Korea. Rather than tape boring lectures, the professors asked students to solve problems and then the next course video would discuss solutions. Mr. Thrun broke the rules again. Twenty-three thousand people finished the course. Of his 200 Stanford students, 30 attended lectures and the other 170 took it online. The top 410 performers on exams were online students. The first Stanford student was No. 411.

              Mr. Thrun’s cost was basically $1 per student per class.
              [ http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/144960/ ]

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              1. “I don’t care” is high on the list of Most Dangerous Phrases in the World. It can encompass both apathy and psychopathy. But used for good, it is right up there with Laughter as a force against which nothing can stand. There is no feeling more blissful than the moment in which you realize that you do not care what other people think about something, you are going to do what you want to do. It can be quite dangerously addictive (and like most addictions it can turn rather squalid and pathetic very quickly.) But judiciously applied, it can move mountains and shift tides.

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                1. It’s also great in your private life. If you give yourself permission not to care what people think or would think if they followed you around and saw everything you do, you can live a life that suits YOU even if it would sound crazy to anyone else. (This realized after the kids remarked that on one of our vacations we went to the cheapest amusement park in town, went to hotel, changed clothes, and headed out to an expensive restaurant — and wondered about what their classmates would think. I told them I didn’t care. And now, ten years later, the kids don’t care either. They are at home in every area and know how to behave in each of them.)

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      2. Ouch. Ouch. :(

        My parents, mercifully, gave better advice. My father said to have a trade as well a profession: aim for what you want to do, and make sure you have something to fall back on, for the times when it doesn’t work out. He’d never have said, “Don’t be a physicist.” He’d have said, “Make sure you have another skill set, for times when the job market for physicists is bad.”

        I never had a burning passion to do one particular thing at the expense of others. There are too many things I’ve been interested in, and capable of learning. Writing’s good. So’s science & engineering. So’s computer programming. So’s art.

        When my health permitted, I had a demanding technical career. It doesn’t permit any more, so I have to fall back to something else.

        Lucky me: there’s plenty of something else I’m happy to pursue.

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        1. Ah, see, if I had been aiming for engineering, my father would have been happy, because he had a friend who owned his own architectural business. He would have probably tried to get me to work there, but the things I was truly interested in were so opaque and incomprehensible to both my parents that they couldn’t see any purpose to it.

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          1. I worked for a mechanical engineering & construction firm. We got hired by architects, or sometimes by the owner of industrial buildings. I started out with design drafting and eventually was the programmer/analyst/sysadmin & holding company bookkeeper. (See, I’ve never stuck to a single area of endeavor. Not that I actively set out to be a bookkeeper. But I could, and it needed doing, so I did it.)

            (Unsurprisingly, I hate the Can’t-Do attitude of human-resource types. Some of us can still learn things after high school, all on our own. We don’t need to be spoonfed, and we don’t have to do *exactly* the same thing this year we did three years ago. Sheesh.)

            The construction parts were union shops. That wasn’t a very health situation in the early ’90s recession, in non-right-to-work Taxachusetts, alas.

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    10. There is a vast difference between determinedness and self-esteem. I have noticed that most of the authors I know tend to actually have low self-esteem or else they appear to have an ENORMOUS self-esteem, in which case methinks they might protest too much. What we don’t need is more damage to the already-weak self-esteem. I am determined and stubborn as a mule. You tell me I CAN’T do something for no good reason, I will go do it. But if you tell me I’m NOT GOOD ENOUGH to do something, you feed into that secret (or maybe not so secret) weakness in the self-esteem. You undermine my confidence.

      I had some very bad experiences with management when I was working the space program. I shall not go into a great deal here except to say that I was groped, struck, and sexually harassed. (No, not everyone did that. But enough people in the right positions did.) And in my entire 20+ year career, I have more achievement awards than I have wall to hang them. And in my entire 20+ year career, I had – not one single promotion.

      Friday at DSC50 I met an old colleague, who was in management. He remarked on how glad he was to see that I’d left to do something else and landed so solidly on my feet, and he was glad I wasn’t being treated badly anymore. This startled me, because some of the treatment was of the sort where you wonder, “Is it just me, or is this really intended this way?” And he confirmed that it HAD been intended that way, and it wasn’t my perception. So I asked him why, and I got an answer I frankly didn’t expect, although my parents had been saying it for a long time; this was just unexpected confirmation from a source in the position to know. He said, “You’re smarter than they are. They knew it, they were jealous, and they wanted you gone.”

      This one statement rocked me on my heels. Yeah, my parents said it, but hey, they’re MY PARENTS. Of course they’re gonna say it, right? But coming from a manager, in a position to know what was going on, but who was someone that was NOT threatened by me and liked and admired me…

      Determination took me through 20+ years of that kind of treatment. But when I came out of it, my self-esteem was nearly non-existent. I was beaten down, uncertain, and unsure. Now I know. Been walking with my shoulders a little wider, my head a little higher, ever since.

      DO NOT BEAT OTHER PEOPLE DOWN. You never know what’s in their heads and hearts.

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  13. For some reason, there’s one segment of our society that believes it’s their moral duty to tell the rest of us what we can or can’t do. They’re so sure of themselves that to go against them infuriates them, and gets one labelled a troublemaker. It’s a monicker I wear with pride. I remember just a small snatch of a song about “stomping on a dream”. There’s a special place in Hell for people that do that, and they deserve it! I’ve tried to NEVER do that to my kids, and I hope I’ve succeeded in encouraging them to do what they wish with life.

    There’s a fine line between telling people the realities of what it would take to achieve a dream, and trying to talk them out of it. It’s a line that the busybodies in this world constantly step across.

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  14. Do I think there are people who aren’t writers and never will be? Of course. And I do think that there are people out there writing reams who will never, ever learn how to tell an entertaining story.

    One of the things I do for my paycheck is administrate a roleplaying site. Some of these people are positively rabid about rping and couldn’t create an interesting character or interesting storyline to save their life (even by copying something existing). And many of those people talk about being writers, and they are utterly oblivious to their flaws and most of them seem the sort who always will be.

    But.

    But no one can throw a wrench like someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing. It’s why I’m not opposed to roleplaying with people who aren’t “good” at it/at storytelling. They’ll try things that others wouldn’t, or cause in-character drama inadvertently where ‘better’ players would ‘know better’. As long as they’re trying, they can be welcome members of the game. And some of them, though they’ll probably never learn enough to be “clever” can certainly learn enough to be considered “valuable” players. Occasionally, I’ve seen people grow out of that stage and actually learn enough to become very interesting storytellers, though they’re pretty shaky in other aspects.

    Roleplaying and writing are similar enough that they require a lot of the same skills. But I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone tell a roleplayer to “never try”. In fact, the average roleplayer (though perhaps snobby in their own way) is so hungry for people to play with, they will take utter rocks and encourage them, hoping to find even an interesting rock when they’re shined and polished – and glorying if they find a common gem, much less a diamond. If they find a ball of mud with no substance, they just don’t play with the person. They don’t tell them to stop roleplaying.

    As was said above, writing itself is a self-weeding garden. Many people who are never going to be able to write something up to snuff will never sit down and try. Many of those who try will never finish. Many of those who finish will never publish. A lot of people who “want” to write just like to talk about writing or for whom one novel will be enough to satisfy that urge. If they’re open to feedback, try to learn, and keep writing, even if I would personally never give them a snowball’s chance in hell, that doesn’t mean that through sheer perseverance they can’t. And who am I to tell them not to try? That they’ll be happier doing anything else?

    These feelings are, of course, completely different from how I feel about music and dance. >_>; With writing, you can keep trying and practicing until you’re literally incapable of communicating your thoughts into a device or to a person. With music and dance I think there are more limits to sheer capability. Plus the way they’re set up professionally, you really could be wasting a lot of time and money in the pursuit of a dream you’re not capable of achieving. I don’t think people should tell people, “So don’t even try.” But I do think that people are sometimes kinder in saying, “You really don’t have the talent to pursue this further. And this is why I say that.”

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    1. *applauds* Well said! I have had good or mediocre players in my RPG groups produce some fantastic situations, sometimes by choosing an overly-simplistic characterization but then playing it to the hilt. Heck, one of the best gaming nights I ever had was because the Oyster Wife (yes she plays with me <3) convinced the other players to completely ignore the story lines I had prepared (I even had backup plans ready!) and start an epic, in-game pub crawl. It was fantastic. New ideas are vital, and so are new mistakes.

      I will quibble – hard – with one thing. You do not need talent. Screw talent! Relying on talent is for people who don't know how to work. My personal hero/example is Howard Tayler, author of the inimitable Schlock Mercenary. He gives a talk on the subject at various conventions and symposiums, so I’ll just point you to his explaination rather than ranting further: http://youtu.be/o4qBSrLe19k

      I do accept that there are limitations that cannot be overcome. I worked with the developmentally disabled for years, and it drove home to me that there are some things that simply cannot be accomplished. Well, that and my mother-in-law is incurably tone-deaf, which is rough on me coming from a family comprised entirely of musicians. But I have also learned that natural limitations are rarely as constrictive as people think they are. Example: http://youtu.be/hayM4B7hcBQ

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      2. You mistake me if you think I mean “talent” as something that you can only be born with. :x “Talent” can be acquired through sheer perseverance and practice. One of my favorite authors put it thus (when talking about swordfighting skills). I’m paraphrasing because it’s a short conversation, but essentially, “There are people who are a natural at a skill, but you can learn to be a natural.”

        The key bit is learning to be a natural. It took Alanna of Trebond a good long while, wielding a sword too heavy for her to drum in the basics. She suffered humiliation and doubt as she learned alone and mockery from those who thought she’d never learn.

        For the record, I don’t think I’m a natural. I have a long way to go.

        (BTW: Haven’t watched all of the Howard Tayler video yet, though I’ll finish it after dinner.)

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        1. I see. So we agree entirely in principle and differ in terminology. I might be pedantic about whose terminology is correct, but today is much too nice a day for needless arguments. :)

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            1. Not wanting to pick on an ESL writer, but the grammatically correct phrase would be: “It’s not as if I set …”
              Pedants-R-We

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          1. Some people are incapable of learning (one disadvantage of already knowing everything) or consistently learn the wrong lessons. These people need reality to smack them upside the head ASAP as often as necessary.

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          2. While I am not as big a fan of Thomas Edison as once I was, I have always liked his apocryphal quote on developing the light bulb. When asked if the thousands of experiments he had made regarding the filaments etc were a waste of time, he replied with surprise, “No, of course not. Now I know thousands of ways it won’t work.”

            Knowing what doesn’t work is only slightly less important than knowing what does.

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                2. There was a TV series with Tesla as a featured character some years back. Ran for a season, IIRC. I could IMDB it if anyone is interested.

                  As we all know, a mystery series with Tesla would merely be a start – it is enough to stir (some) people to pick up the book and read the back (flyleaf.) Getting them to actually purchase it takes a good story.

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                    1. My error – the series featured a character so blatantly based on Tesla that my memory “overwrote” the character’s name.

                      Legend is a science fiction Western television show that ran on UPN from April 18, 1995 until August 22, 1995, with one final re-airing of the pilot on July 3, 1996. It was Richard Dean Anderson’s first major role after the successful MacGyver series, and also stars John de Lancie, best known for his role as “Q” in Star Trek: The Next Generation. All three series were produced by Paramount Network Television.
                      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legend_(TV_series)

                      And yes, de Lancie played the Tesla-character.
                      http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112045/

                      Not apparently available on video at present. It was a moderately successful show (not so much good as that you wanted it to be good) in the same vein as The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. and (decades earlier) The Wild, Wild West as early attempts at live-action steampunk.

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                  2. Tesla often appears, either directly or in thin disguise, in pop-culture oriented sci-fi. Probably my favorite appearance of his to date is in the Callahan’s Bar series, where it is literally him. We are told that he was given an extended life as a) a means of humankind getting the benefit of more Tesla, and b) by way of apology for how shabbily the world treated him during his lifetime. :)

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    2. “Do I think there are people who aren’t writers and never will be? Of course. And I do think that there are people out there writing reams who will never, ever learn how to tell an entertaining story. ”

      And many of them are published, a few are even bestsellers. So what does that tell me?

      1. I’m not fit to judge their talent, or

      2. Talent, or lack thereof doesn’t necessarily determine success.

      The moral of the story? Don’t tell me what to do; and I won’t tell you what to do. Tell me what to do, and what I tell you to do is liable to include hand gestures and the instructions, “sit and spin.”

      So who am I to tell you whether you are going to be unsuccessful?

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      1. To quote pride and prejudice “Who are you to determine in which way your friend is to be happy?”

        I just laughed warm tea up my nose (your fault) reading the “a few are even bestsellers” — because I’ve read those people, or tried to. :)

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        1. Warm tea up the nose is probably not all that comfortable, but it’s probably good for you, so kudos to bearcat! (running)

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      2. I never said talent determined success. I said exactly what you quoted: There are some people out there who aren’t writers and never will be. Fullstop. Some people will never be “writers” because they never put the effort into writing. And I do think that there are people out there writing reams who will never, ever learn how to tell an entertaining story. You and I know of or even possibly personally know people who write a lot and have frightfully boring stories as a result. I never said that these people couldn’t find some degree of success. I know that they do. And I know there are plenty of people who look down on what I find entertaining, calling it “popular drivel” or “lady porn” and what-not or not giving certain quite popular authors their just-due and even the courtesy of a nod to their hard work.

        I’m hoping that you weren’t inferring from my post that I am suggesting that writers should “never try”. I thought I was quite clear that they should. I also thought I’d implied re: the example of the roleplaying forum that I suggested you just not read what you didn’t like and don’t tell people not to write just because you don’t like it or don’t think they’d be successful.

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        1. I understood (I think anyways) what you were saying, I was just agreeing with it, and expanding on it with my own thoughts. There is nothing wrong with a writer writing stories that put you to sleep; some people read to go to sleep ;). Just don’t expect me to read them. I’m fine with somebody writing them, and publishing them, just so long as they don’t try to tell me I have to read them. Admittedly I sometimes scratch my head and wonder, “how can this author be popular, compared to their stories, watching grass grow is breathtaking,” that doesn’t mean I think they shouldn’t write.

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    3. “The greatest swordsman in the world fears not the second-greatest, but the worst.”

      The one time in my whole life I managed to tag my UC instructor was by doing something so boneheaded that he “knew” someone of my level of skill would never do something so stupid, and he committed to a move which left him no out from it. Of course in a real fight he would then have killed me, but I *did* manage to hit him. I call this the “Liberty Bell Play” maneuver. :)

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  15. Right now, I’m not writing not because I don’t want to; I’m not writing because it’s f***ing-near-impossible to find a keyboard which wasn’t designed for someone with fingertips the size of pipe-cleaners (the contact-patch on this laptop’s keys is 0.5″ across; the smallest of my fingertips is… 0.5″ across; it requires all my conscious effort to not wind up typing something which looks like a Lovecraftian invocation).

    I have an appointment with the local provider of Bigkeys[TM] keyboards later this week….

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