Student of Trinity

For all the random vagaries here in General, these boards do actually have a serious core purpose. Well, not save-the-world serious, but not just random spammage. There are games. People discuss them, offer tips, compare strategies, reveal Easter eggs. Another active board I'm on is similar in having a mix of totally random discussion with an actual purpose. I think that's a good thing for almost any community. I don't really know much about Pastafarianism, but I'm not really so surprised that it's having a tougher time. It's a good gag and all, but that's probably just not enough, you know?

I agree with Alorael's comments. I'd like to emphasize the softer side of moderating. Sometimes you just have to ban people, and do your best to do that when you should and not do it when you shouldn't do it. But you can do a lot more than you'd think with much less drastic measures. It's like the "broken windows" theory of policing. The mods here try to make an effort to be around, to set an example of civility, and to PM or post brief comments when someone strays too near an edge. When older mods become less active in those ways, we bring in new mods. It seems to be working pretty well, most of the time. There's a cost to everything. As most old-timers will tell you, life here is tamer now than it's been at times in the past. This means that for some hardier souls it was a lot more fun before, though it may have been a harsh place for a lot of people who were just driven away. What makes a good forum depends on what you want in a good forum. By some measures what we have here now is very good, and by some measures it's not. I think there's one thing you need for any kind of good forum, and that's creative input from people. You need people making posts that other people want to read. The main thing that brings in the kind of people that do that, or that turns people into that kind of people, is other people making posts that they want to read. So you need a critical mass. A board with only one or two engaged and articulate members is doomed, but one with a couple of dozen will be self-sustaining. So active posters who contribute a lot of interest tend to get a bit of slack; they can get away with pushing the envelope a bit now and then. That's not a problem; that's how it should be. Sometimes interesting posters lose interest, or just get too busy, and they drift away. So you need to keep bringing in new members, and you need to make it as easy as possible for new members to evolve from lurker through newbie into community stalwarts. For me, this is what distinguishes a good forum from just a good group of friends. And I think that for this reason it's better to err on the side of maintaining civility, rather than letting raucous oldbies have free rein. A free-rein forum like that may burn bright, but it burns itself out in a few years. So there's a balance to be struck between staying welcoming and staying interesting.

You young whippersnappers. And your carefree antics. Whippersnapping, for instance. What even is that? It sounds carefree and antic, all right, but also a bit reckless. What if the whipper snaps back? I bet it would smart. Better not chance it. Sure to be bad for the rheumatism. Apparently I joined a whole five days before Nikki. Let me tell you, though, those five days were the best. You young people have no idea. You might think you get it, but if you weren't there, then, No, you'll never get it, and you'll never even know what you missed. When your carefree recklessness starts to irritate me, I remember that you'll never know days like those five, and my vexation turns to pity.

Okay, it turns out that there's a big difference between having a first draft of a novel, and having a novel. In principle I knew this, but I didn't appreciate what the difference was. I had the idea that if all had gone well it would mainly be fine-tuning prose; and that otherwise I might have to make major changes, like adding or removing characters, or radically revising the plot. It turns out that there's a whole lot of stuff that I now have to do, in between those extremes. Having a first draft means that you have a lot of stuff. Around 100,000 words, if you want to call it a novel. You may have more than that, and think that's good. That's a lot of stuff, all right. Is it all the right stuff? That seems to be what the second draft is mainly about. With the first draft I found that I had the main characters, and the main plot sequence, and a lot of nice individual scenes and episodes. But going through it again, now, it's depressing to realize how many of those nice scenes and episodes are really digressions from the main plot. I wrote them, and racked up word count to make a chapter, and thought that was progress. It was; but it was the progress of a pretty meandering river. Some of my nicest scenes are little oxbow lakes, totally cut off from the main flow as it later evolved. The emphasis is off in a lot of places, too. Things that actually turned out to be rather minor still take up too many lines, because when I first wrote them in I thought they would be more important. And some things that turned out to be major themes got pretty short shrift. And I also completely missed some stuff. Like, somehow my main villain ended up with way too little presence in the book. He appears for a quick scene now and then, and says a few words, but he doesn't actually do much at any point. On re-reading, he's a pretty token villain. Kind of a patsy, only there to get beaten. In my mind he was more than this, but too little that was in my mind made it into my book. Whoops. I believe now that I would have been smarter to work harder on a more detailed outline. But I also see that extensive revisions in a second draft are probably unavoidable. A lot of good stuff comes up as you write. Some things that started out as digressions grow into major threads. Pounding out a detailed outline and sticking to it strictly would probably make a pretty lifeless book. You can definitely save a lot of time, though, by asking sooner rather than later: this is a cool scene, but does it move the story along? Or, conversely: is there something missing that should be in here already? It's as though there are two quite different tasks involved in writing. Maybe a good writer is a kind of symbiotic organism, like a lichen. One half generates energy, and the other provides structure. There's having ideas and writing along to see what happens with them, and discovering more ideas as you write along. But then there's being disciplined about making a book that someone else will actually want to read, by making sure the plot is coherent and avoiding bloat. I doubt that either kind of writing by itself will make a good novel. Probably it's the first kind of writing that most people think of when they think they'd like to write, but I can definitely see how the first kind alone will produce something that only the author can read. The second kind is really necessary, and it's not as much fun. Or at least, it's not fun in the same kind of way. It's more of an analytical task, and less creative. Sometimes it will generate interesting creative challenges, though. For instance, once I realized that I really needed to beef up my villain in his final scene, I had the fun idea of giving him a gun, even though he's a medieval type who's not supposed to have anything more sophisticated than a crossbow. I think that'll do the beefing up job very nicely, and it also ties in well with the main thematic threads. On the other hand, I'm going to have a tough time getting in more dialog among my villains, giving their point of view, because my narrator is one of the objects of their villainy. Since my overriding goal is to avoid stupidity, I can not have the bad guys just start monologuing to the hero to explain their plans. I think I'm going to have to figure out a way for the hero to eavesdrop on them. It's totally in character for him to try to do that, but it's not going to be easy for him to accomplish it. He's in their castle, he has only medieval technology, and he's too big a guy to hide behind an average curtain. I hope I'll figure something out; the challenge is interesting, anyway. I'm beginning to wonder whether this could be a shark that's better left unfixed. So far I've considered a couple of neat ways of fixing it, but they seem to have fatal flaws.

I liked those books when they first came out but the series somehow went downhill enough that I stopped reading it. I forget exactly what my complaints were, but I think it was mainly that he'd pulled out so many stops early in the series that he ran out of comparably interesting things to do after that. Just jumped the shark, I suppose.

It's a generalization of the genre, where you don't just get different modes of play, but different modalities. Warning/spoiler, though: the final boss is a necessary being. Really tough to beat, if you're playing on any difficulty setting higher than Hypothetical.

Implants versus p-zombies.

Looking at that linked summary, it seems the main shortcoming of the study is that it only looked at schools pretty near the top of the heap. They still cover a big range in prestige and tuition cost, but kind of in the way that 'upper class' includes the family doctor as well as Bill Gates. Smaller colleges and less renowned state universities weren't included. So it may be that teaching really does start to slide at some point down the pecking order. One reason that might make sense is that professors are produced by cascade. Top-tier schools grant dozens of times more PhDs than would be required to maintain their own faculties. Most of those people trickle down into jobs at less famous schools. So even if you don't go to Harvard, there's a fair chance your professor did. They know what their course was like when they took it at Harvard, and they'll be doing the best they can, under their circumstances, to make their course as good as that one. But below some point on the totem pole, Harvard-trained faculty start to thin out. The best you can get may be professors whose professors went to Harvard. I don't mean to take seriously the premise that education quality consists in degree of separation from Harvard. But there may perhaps be some partial effect along these lines. Universities aren't closed systems. They generate each other's faculty, and there's a kind of prevailing wind in the direction of flow.

What exactly is good writing for medieval combat scenes, anyway? Realism is hard to assess. Re-enactors can talk about how heavy weapons are to swing, and so on, but nobody re-enacts to the death. Realism to the point of vividly describing gruesome injuries is probably not going to sell all that widely. It might even get boring, if I'm right in guessing that what mostly happens is blood. I liked the handful of fight scenes in The Lies of Locke Lamora. They're done as plot rather than description. Something happens, so something happens, so something else happens. You can follow the thread of events and it seems to make sense even when it's surprising. In that way, I'd say that there's probably no big difference between writing battles and writing anything else. Descriptions are boring and action is better; show, don't tell.

I might not be so surprised if Thrun's Stanford course wasn't really that deep. One of the dirty secrets of elite schools is that selection is a bigger part of what they do than they'd like to admit. How much of the value of a Harvard or Stanford education accrues at admission, when you're marked as someone who got into that place? A lot more comes from hanging out with the other students, so how much is left to come from the actual courses taught by those big shot professors? Obviously people learn from them, but in most cases people at less prestigious institutions learn the same things from their smaller shot professors. Sometimes I think that the future of higher education will see universities withering away, while fraternities thrive.

I'd be curious to learn how Udacity works out. It should work well for CS if it works well for anything.

There's more to do for the second draft than I thought. For example, for a long time I had imagined my first chapter as this perfect thing, because it came to me kind of out of nowhere and wrote itself quickly and launched the whole story with a bang. Once it actually occurred to me to think about whether it needed revision, though, I found that it needed quite a lot. Some things had changed since I wrote it. Anastasia had gotten quite a bit more backstory and it had become clear that she had never been even as close to normal as she seemed in parts of chapter 1. One of her first lines had explained that she flung her book away and stomped downstairs for sheer satisfaction, but in fact she's a cold and purpose-driven person, apart from a weird impulsive streak, who wouldn't know satisfaction if it bit her on the nose. Her original persona was appealingly wry, I thought, but as she developed it became more clear that that just wasn't her. The Morandau, her people, had also been explained rather more. So some of the things that Anastasia and her people allowed to happen in chapter 1 might have been plausible for ordinary people, but they made no sense for what she and her people had become since I first wrote the chapter. And there were also embarrassingly many things that I simply hadn't thought about when I first wrote them, little stupid things that no intelligent people would really do in the situation I described, even if they weren't hardened mercenaries trained from birth. Like, why would the raiders dismount from their horses? There were several obvious reasons why they should not, starting just from the fact that getting on and off horses is quite an exertion. And why didn't Anastasia post a few of these sharp-eyed children on watch? I wanted to fix all these little discrepancies just because that's my goal with this story, to eliminate stupidity. And even if few of whatever readers I get will ever be nitpicky enough to care about such things, I have an idea that there's some threshold of realistic consistency that I need to get above, in order to achieve the gritty tone that I want for my story. I don't want to bog down in detail, but I want to be sure I make it above that threshold. So there were a lot of details to revise, or else to justify. And there was stuff to take out, because it just wasn't something Anastasia would do or say. Finally, Elmore Leonard died, and I read an obituary that linked to a short piece by him about how to write. I really liked Elmore Leonard's writing. Writing like him was definitely something I was hoping to do, as much as I could, at least with part of this book. And he said to do things like cut down on descriptions. He said never to use the word 'suddenly' — I think his point is that the suddenness should come from the shocking abruptness with which whatever it is hits the reader, not just from the author declaring that it was so. He said never to introduce dialog with any verb other than 'said', and never to qualify 'said' in any way. His point was that the characters' speech has to stand on its own, and not be helped along with stage directions from the author. Well, I'm not sure that's the only good way to write, and it might be especially worth reconsidering with first-person narration by the protagonist, since then the protagonist's choice of stage directions is also characterization. But in that spirit, it seemed to me that Anastasia Morandau probably would write a lot like Elmore Leonard. I had already developed a few deliberately consistent notes for her style, which I then varied drastically in the second part of the book, which has a different narrator. She is quite capable of using long sentences but she's much more comfortable with staccato rhythm than I am myself, so even in my first draft I'd been immediately rewriting most of my paragraphs to break up her sentences. She always says 'perhaps' and never 'maybe', and she says 'perhaps' a lot. So I decided to take this further, and Leonardize her narration. I'm turning Anastasia's every 'answered' and 'replied' and 'recalled' into a 'said'. I'll keep 'asked' for questions and I've left in a 'muttered'. I'm eliminating all descriptive attributes of 'said' or 'asked', and deleting every 'suddenly'. I'm also deleting an awful lot of commas. Anastasia is smart enough to know where commas are needed for clarity but when they aren't strictly necessary she'll leave them out. Her thought should feel fast and aggressive so I'll see how this works. It's possible that having too few commas actually works in the opposite direction, so I might need to put them all back.

The subjects are certainly interesting, but I'm curious as to what exactly you want to get out of a formal course on them, as opposed to just reading in your spare time on your own, or joining a book club. What's the interest in the course as such? The credential? Expert instruction in person rather than in book form? Higher education is changing, and I've thought a fair bit about how it might change in physics. I'm not sure everything that's currently an on-campus course, or a course at all, should stay as that. I wonder about the humanities as well.

The shocking thing about teaching is that results do not correlate well with effort. You can put in hours and hours of preparation for a lecture and have it go badly in every way. The students are bored at the time and none of them ever learns much from it that they wouldn't have learned otherwise. Or you can whip something up in a few minutes and see it take off. The trick my wife discovered was to make the students do more of the work. In-class discussions and debates are so awesome, they ought to be illegal. You spend about fifteen minutes thinking up some good topics, while drinking a beer. You take an hour or so to post a list of good references for the students to consult. Then you're set for the week. The students will get into it to an astonishing degree, especially if you've chosen cool topics and references, because this kind of thing is what students think college education is supposed to be about. They've been waiting to do this, through every lecture they've attended. All you have to do, during the class, is inject a few comments from your own background knowledge. You'll appear much more impressively erudite than in a lecture, where you still have to cover the parts that don't really make sense to you either, because when you don't know what to say, you can just keep mum. The students will think you're a deity of higher education. You'll work two hours a week, outside class. Okay, it's not quite that great. You can't quite pull the same trick every time. But you can really do it a lot. Lampshade it, tell the students loudly that this is your advanced concept of learning. If you're having trouble getting discussions going, I can offer an exercise that I invented myself. It's a kind of homework assignment, that you do have to grade. Each student has to submit an 'idealized transcript' of the actual classroom discussion. They are supposed to quote selectively and to paraphrase, to make a coherent discussion. And they are allowed to inject fictitious comments from themselves — things they should have said in class, but didn't — for up to 50% of the text they hand in. The lines they attribute to others, however, must be basically accurate. So you have to take decent notes yourself, so that you can judge accuracy fairly when you grade. The grade should reflect both accuracy in representing what people really said, and coherence and substance of the discussion in the transcript as written. You might need to hand back one week's assignments giving nobody more than 4/5, just because the discussion that took place was too shallow. Fidelity alone should not be enough for an A. Length can be short, at least at first — a page or two. In my experience, even fairly slow classes get the idea pretty quickly, and it makes for quite interesting discussions. Somebody says something that seems intelligent or interesting, and there's a pause while everybody scribbles it down. It really makes the students listen to each other. The main problem is that the discussion can remain coherent but go off the rails. The students may end up having a vigorous debate that is based on totally false assumptions. So you do need to moderate, and you need to provide references in advance so that they can arrive at least minimally informed.

After tinkering and polishing a bit on my first draft of A Lady of Morandau, which was completed in exactly a year, I began work on the sequel. I didn't consider the first book finished, but I had some ideas for what came next, and I wanted to write them down. Now, after some time away from the first book, I'm coming back to it and seeing what it still needs. I post this because I've found it interesting to discover just what kind of thing you do in a novel's second draft. In my case, at least, I'm not really going to make any enormous changes. The basic plot outline isn't changing. But there's more to it than just tinkering and polishing. My situation is that the first book that I originally planned was turning out to be enormous, so I decided to make a cut at around 125,000 words, and save the rest for the sequel. I think this was a good decision for several reasons. Polishing and tinkering have tended to add more words than they remove, so I'm pushing 130,000 words now. That's already long for a first novel. Also, since my ambition is to write an exciting adventure story, I've been trying to make the story work as a movie, too. Actually having it turn into a movie would be a pie-in-the-sky best case, when I'm by no means sure the thing is publishable at all, but what I mean is that the kind of book I want to have written is a book that reads like an action flick. Imagining it as a movie is my way of trying to keep up momentum. If I write a chunk and realize that it wouldn't really work in a movie, then I need to take it out. This is not supposed to be a novel of ideas. Anyway, action films normally only run about two hours. I'm not sure whether that's just a coincidence of cinema economics or something, or whether it reflects some kind of medium constraint for fast-paced stories in general, but rightly or wrongly, the movie metaphor was telling me to wrap things up. And I think that is right. For me, books much longer than 140,000 words have mostly been books that seemed to drag in places. My aim is not to drag. So, fine, I realized that I actually did have a good ending point at a reasonable length. It just wasn't the ending point I'd originally had in mind. What I have to do in the second draft, I've discovered, is to deal with the consequences of this. The truncated story lacked coherence as it was. It didn't have a clearly discernible shape to it; it wasn't clear where it was going. The shape that the longer version was going to have was classic: girl meets boy, girl leaves boy, girl goes back to boy. There were going to be all sorts of alarums and excursions, but what was going to be the basic shape of the story was just, Here are these two people; look how they get together. In retrospect, of course, that was very probably a ridiculous basic shape for an adventure story; but it did hang together, such as it was. Assuming that any readers would actually sit through the thing as I had it planned, you could have poked them and asked, "So what's this about?" and I think they could have answered, correctly, "It's about this girl, and this guy she meets." Then they could have gone on to describe what they two character were like, and I'd have been happy to think that my book had been understood. The shortened version now only makes it as far as girl meets boy. If adventure-novel-as-character-study was a stupid idea in the longer version, it's totally broken in the short form. There's no tension and resolution in merely meeting up. So what I'm doing now, in the second draft, is something I think of as re-balancing. I have to redistribute weight, in a sense, so that there is a clearly recognizable thread running through the whole story — what in German is called a roten Faden. In fact there will be three threads, related but distinct. One of these will still just be developing the two main characters, to the point where it's clear that if they get together, they will change the world. But since that thread just doesn't go far enough in this volume, there will be two others as well. One new thread is the source of the mysterious skull artifact that appears in Chapter 1: who made that thing, and why? The other new thread is the relationship between the Morandau, as gunslinging mercenaries, and the quasi-medieveal 'natives' who are their clients and victims. The natives are barbaric, but is what the Morandau are doing really the only alternative to something far worse? Neither of these two new threads is really new. Both were already important in the first draft of the story; in fact, they were the obvious two important threads in it, apart from the characters themselves. It's just that, before, they were clearly sub-threads. They were always running in the background, but they were only really highlighted now and then. You could lose sight of them for several chapters, in places, before they would come back into focus. So what I'm doing now, in the second draft, is promoting these prominent sub-threads into top-level threads, throughout the story. I'm making sure that they figure somehow, at least, in every chapter, and that they receive enough emphasis that they never fade from the reader's attention. Mostly I'm doing this by adding dialog — sometimes just a line, sometimes a couple of pages — in which the characters talk about these two threads. The major events of the plot already did feature both threads prominently; what I'm mostly doing now is just pointing this out. In principle there may be a risk of overdoing this kind of thing. Maybe at some point it just becomes monotonous, to keep banging the reader over the head with the book's main threads. The only way to check for this, I think, will be to get reader feedback once I've got a finished second draft. For now, though, I'm going on the theory that it's much better to err on the side of keeping on yanking the major threads into prominence. I think it's too easy, as an author who has been living with the story for more than a year, to know where it's all really going and what it's about. As an author, I know what parts are meant to be important, and what parts are meant to just be decorations. But unless you resort to boldface and footnotes, which is certainly weird and probably ineffective, then as far as the reader is concerned, major threads and decorative details are just paragraphs in the same font. If you give something space, then the reader takes it as important. Importance is also raised, I think, when the same thing gets mentioned repeatedly within the reader's short-term memory. So if you spend three whole pages describing some gadget, and then give it another paragraph in the very next chapter, then the reader is going to look for it to be a major plot device for at least the next several chapters, even if in your authorial intention it's just a bit of background color. Conversely, if something goes unmentioned for three chapters, then for the reader it's unimportant, even if in the author's mind it's the Main Plot. (Yes, your book might still survive if you let the Main Plot simmer in the background a bit; but I really believe this: if you do that, your book will be seriously weakened.) This is the sort of thing I mean by 'balance' in a story: keeping the right things prominent, from the ignorant viewpoint of a first-time reader. I suspect that somebody reading a book they haven't read before needs quite a lot of blatant cuing in order to recognize what's going on, and I think this must be one of the tricks of writing that is almost impossible to notice just by reading, because I think a reader takes narrative coherence too much for granted to even be aware of all the mechanisms that keep it maintained. So I'll be going through each chapter, working in clear emphasis on my three main threads. Maybe later I'll have to go back yet again and soften this a bit, if it's too heavy-handed; but at this point I think it's a clear improvement that will make the whole story much sharper and faster-moving. I've also decided that the third of the book's three main sections — the one with the really confusing tangle of deceptions — is still not working, after all. The deceptions work okay, I think, but the general tone is somehow wrong. Too much depressed musing, too little action. It's good for this section to be somehow oppressive, and for its violent ending to come as both surprise and relief, but ironically detached depression is too static a form of oppressiveness, for an action novel. Rising panic will be a much better alternative, I think. So I'll try to modulate the same tune into this different key. I'll do that by making the villains more vivid and active, and having them persecute the oppressed narrator much more aggressively. I'll let him survive repeatedly by using his wits, but I'll show him being steadily backed into a corner. This will mean keeping most of what I already have in this section, but kind of re-forging it. It will mean another big bout of moving exposition into dialog — that's just always a good idea, I'm coming to think. And I'll have to add a fair amount of new dialog and action, as well. The finished second draft will probably approach 140,000 words. It will be the same story, but better.

The Black Company was really pretty striking when it first came out. It was gritty fantasy, and also quirky in a way that reinforced the grittiness — odd details turned out to be vitally important, even though they didn't seem as though they obviously had to be. That could have come out as stupidly arbitrary, but it somehow made it over a threshold and worked, at least for me, as the brute facts of life not being tailored to human expectations. You ended up taking things a lot more seriously just because of how odd they seemed. I guess it's because a lot of very important details in the real world are things you'd never have expected, or could easily have overlooked. Cook managed to get enough grit in the story for the quirkiness to seem like added realism. For instance, learning a person's true name was terribly important, just as in lots of stories; the quirky bit was that true names were things like Mary Smith, and you found them out by looking up old birth certificates, or something. Could have been dumb, but it worked; figuring out people's original given names wound up being a more gripping quest than any search for mystic runes or magic gems. I agree that at some point the series went downhill, but I don't remember just when that was, for me. I think part of it was a weird form of villain creep. Characters that had been mere mini-bosses in the first trilogy somehow morphed into worse things than their original dread overlords had ever been. It wasn't blatantly inconsistent in terms of in-world rules — I'm sure there was some passable excuse — but it was pretty brutally inconsistent in flavor and style. Like some Gran Moff from Revenge of the Jedi appearing in Episode 7 as ten times the badass Darth Vader ever was. Otherwise, even the first three volumes might not be as impressive now as they seemed at the time, simply because I think a lot of people have copied the look and feel of the Black Company, at least to some extent, and it doesn't seem so original any more. But I think it really was.

No.

I always thought the Awakened were doomed. I think it's symbolic that Ell-Rah's tomb is infested by a demon. They were a nice bunch of guys all by themselves on Sucia Island, but they are just not up for prime time on the mainland. In a way their moderate path gets re-invented by Astoria in G5, which is a nice way to round out the series, but I doubt Astoria would have come to her way of thinking if the rebellion hadn't gotten very much more horrendous than the Awakened could ever have managed.

And it looks happy doing it! Oh the tiny little humanity.

I refrain from posting images out of consideration for He Who Must Not Be Named Arancaytar, but we may all pause respectfully to remember that some spiders are hairy.

Ha — both the Grail and the Silmarils are great examples. @Jewels: Have you ever read the novels of Charles Williams? I think Eerdmanns reprinted them some years ago. He had a couple of odd McGuffins, including the Grail itself in one book. Unfortunately the only other thing I distinctly remember about that book was that the protagonist was an archdeacon. It's got to be one of the most exciting books about archdeacons ever written. Williams was a buddy of C.S. Lewis, though I think I might agree with Tolkien in thinking Williams was somehow a slightly sinister influence on Lewis. There's something a little creepy in his mysticism. Of his seven novels, probably the best were All Hallows' Eve and Many Dimensions.

This is a great idea and I wish I had time for it right now, but I just don't. A month from now should be different, so I'd like to record a sort of vote in favor of the continuing series, for what that may be worth. I like all of the entries so far very much. I have to say that I am particularly taken with Alorael's picture of alien contact as ultimately banal. It's shocking, yet immediately compelling. Suddenly it seems like the default scenario.

A wizard did it.

I really wouldn't like to meet one of those in a dark alley.

Spoken like a living tool.