Can we have a writer's room? Please?

[_Bond James Bond]

Apparently Droopy and I have a similar writing style. H.P. Lovecraft. :D

[_asbestosman]

Apparently Droopy and I have a similar writing style. H.P. Lovecraft. :D

I write like Droopy? Nooooo!

[Guest]

Apparently Droopy and I have a similar writing style. H.P. Lovecraft. :D

I write like Droopy? Nooooo!

Lol. I submitted a section from a paper I wrote last semester, so I guess that was my "big boy" writing voice not my message board style. Will check message board style to see if I'm a consistent writer.

When writing poetry I'm: Cory Doctorow (?) edit: Ironically we share a birthday.

When writing academic papers I'm: H.P. Lovecraft

When writing on message boards I'm: Kurt Vonnegut! (lol)

[_Chap]

It says I write like H.P. Lovecraft too ... maybe the mechanism is jammed?

Abraham, cited from the Book of Abraham, is said to write like William Shakespeare. So now we know Smith can't have made it up.

Somehow I don't think this is going to beat Jockers (et al.)

[_Bond James Bond]

It says I write like H.P. Lovecraft too ... maybe the mechanism is jammed?

Maybe it's true that we're all sockpuppets of one person. :D

[_Morley]

Sorta on topic, but The Dude pointed me to a place where you can have your writing analyzed and find out whose writing styles is closest to yours. Yeah, I know, it's kind of pointless, but fun.

I Write Like

Apparently, I write like William Gibson. Darn, I was shooting for Steinbeck. :-)

Interesting. I submitted three samples and got three different responses: Stephen King, Ian Fleming, and James Joyce.

[_Bond James Bond]

At least when you analyze something by Cory Doctorow it says you write like Cory Doctorow.

[_Blixa]

Hey guys! I'm sitting here next to the A/C reading The New Yorker. Asbestos asked for a good example of good writing and I found a great one in the summer fiction issue.

It's called "Home," its by the writer George Saunders and its about a guy returning home from Iraq. Read it. Its a dialog-driven first person narrative that is both hilarious and intensely sad. Tragic, possibly.

It is a perfect example of how important it is NOT to over describe and how one can say more with less. Some bad things have happened to the main character. We never find out what they were exactly, and that makes it all the more upsetting: things he can not even bring himself to remember.

It would be an especially good tutorial for SeattleGhostWriter as its a near polar opposite of his online novel. George Saunders does more in a few pages than SGW accomplishes in 30+ chapters.

I hope you don't think I'm needlessly harping on SGW. I believe he himself even asked for feedback on his work. And a good place to start is to look at a work that exemplifies the basics one has yet to master.

Here's a great interview with Saunders talking about the writing of the story, "Home." Make sure you read it as well. Here are snippets to tempt you:

And of course there’s a class element, too—I’ve met so many soldiers recently who joined up for what were basically economic reasons, went to war, then came home to the same crappy prospects they’d left, plus now they’re psychologically and/or physically messed up. And who’s sharing their sacrifice? Well, their parents, spouses, kids, and that’s about it...

A few years ago I sat on a plane next to a kid who’d been to Bosnia and Afghanistan and was on his way back for his third tour in Iraq—he was maybe twenty-two or twenty-three years old. He told me he’d seen and done things that nobody his age should have seen or done, had lost a lot of friends, etc...[He seemed] compelled to talk, over and over, about what had happened to him. But his monologue also had this stilted, reality-show confession-booth quality to it—he seemed intent on presenting his story in a certain way: dramatic, macho, rife with clichés. He seemed to be lacking, in other words, the narrative mode/language with which he could start working through the crap that had happened to him, and was trying to sort it all out using some combination of FoxSpeak + MTVSpeak. Which was also, in a complicated way, an effect of social class. So it was a kind of double whammy.

To me, this is part of a larger thing that’s happening in our country, where all our traditional virtues are being subsumed by a kind of pragmatic/materialistic ethic. The fading, noble idea that a country is about its common people, for example—where did that idea go? That is, questions like: what kind of life does our country give the average guy? What level of comfort? What does it ask of him? What does it deny him? How do we treat the lowest among us? What is our fundamental attitude toward poverty? Toward losing? Toward simple bad luck? Here, in our time, it seems as though we’ve even stopped apologizing for crapping on the poor and middle-class, and they, in turn, have started to forget that it’s their right to object when shat upon.

So I have a feeling there are thousands of untold stories to come, from these men and women who’ve been doing our fighting for us—and I only hope that as a culture we are open to these stories, and honor them, and don’t sweep them under the carpet. That seems like an important part of the contract: if we’re going to ask for these tremendous sacrifices, we’d better not forget about them when it’s time to step up and make good on our part of the deal.

[_asbestosman]

Last year I was at a meeting / training session about code quality. One of the examples they used was about how a writer's skill and the writer's complexity are related. A beginning writer writes simple stuff. As a writer learns more, she starts writing more complicated expressions until we get into very dense writing one often finds from students at a university. However, at some point a funny thing happens: as the writer becomes more skilled, eventually the writing actually becomes less complicated (or rather more accessible).

The most skilled writers end up sharing very complicated ideas in a very concise and approachable manner. Superficially it appears like an beginner's writing but in reality it's the most useful and powerful writing available. What sets a master's writing apart from an amateur isn't how complex it is, but rather how much information it conveys.

Writing good code is much the same. Some code is easier to understand (and hence modify, maintain, and debug) than other code. Interestingly, one rule often heard in coding is DRY--Don't Repeat Yourself. Another rule is that it's better to use well-known programming idioms rather than something unfamiliar and confusing. It's also better to use descriptive variable names rather than trying to save on typing.

[_Hoops]

I'm in!!! I've been trolling this board - and others - for those who would read and critique and for whom I could do the same.

Fiction okay?