This May I want to get back into writing. I’m not at all consistent. I’m at a point where I don’t feel like I can work on bigger things, because I can’t guarantee myself to keep working on it in a week from now. So I will take this month as a training month to get back into the habit of writing. I will do this by writing (or trying to write) 200 words every day. Topic is irrelevant. How great my writing is that day is irrelevant. Just 200 words written down. A habit taking 21 days to form was debunked, it does take a lot longer, but 31 days are a start I would say. These are already 140 words, so 200 words every day are hopefully manageable. You're more than welcome to join me if you like 😊
If your plot feels flat, STUDY it! Your story might be lacking...
Stakes - What would happen if the protagonist failed? Would it really be such a bad thing if it happened?
Thematic relevance - Do the events of the story speak to a greater emotional or moral message? Is the conflict resolved in a way that befits the theme?
Urgency - How much time does the protagonist have to complete their goal? Are there multiple factors complicating the situation?
Drive - What motivates the protagonist? Are they an active player in the story, or are they repeatedly getting pushed around by external forces? Could you swap them out for a different character with no impact on the plot? On the flip side, do the other characters have sensible motivations of their own?
Yield - Is there foreshadowing? Do the protagonist's choices have unforeseen consequences down the road? Do they use knowledge or clues from the beginning, to help them in the end? Do they learn things about the other characters that weren't immediately obvious?
People really need to realise that “media can affect real life” doesn’t mean “this character does bad things so people will read that and start doing bad things” and actually means “ideas in fiction especially stereotypes about minority groups can affect how the reader views those groups, an authors implicit prejudices can be passed on to readers”
How fiction affects reality is about how it meshes with your internal templates for how the real world works.
Ratings are based on a rough estimate of when most people will have those templates form. For instance, there’s a standard for children’s media which states that you’re not supposed to include imitable violence more severe than an open-handed slap, because kids are just learning the overrides for the monkey-brain “if someone makes us angry, we hit them to send a message” drive. You can’t make a show for preschoolers that shows how to throw a punch, because they might very well just start punching people.
But you can show your average teenager as much punching as you want, and unless their parents REALLY fucked up, they won’t take it to mean “this is how you solve ANY problem, from a threat to your life, to someone looking at you funny.” When you can show the use of realistic guns to a person without them deciding that shooting people is a good idea depends on a lot of personal and cultural factors, but as a standard we can settle on people tend to agree that, as long as it doesn’t settle into reinforcing stereotypes as a possible invocation of “things that are okay only to defend your own life” or blatant war propaganda or similar exceptions, most adults can see all the violence they want - yes, even glorified violence - without turning into a violent menace themselves.
If you have it impressed upon you your whole life that killing people is bad - as you will, unless you have the worst kind of parents imaginable - you can watch your favorite action star kill tons of dudes, or play games that are just excuse plots for killing tons of dudes, or read about a million and a half creative ways to get away with killing tons of dudes, and you’re still not going to run out and kill tons of dudes or even think it might be okay to kill tons of dudes. This is because your mental template for how the world works strongly emphasizes “death = tragic; killing people = hurtful and bad”. Again, it might fuck with your head if the explanation for why killing tons of dudes is justified in the context of this piece of media aligns with common stereotypes of real people, or your own preexisting biases - this is how propaganda works - but even in THOSE cases a lot more factors have to align to get someone to the full extreme end and think “yes, killing tons of dudes irl is the answer to all my problems!”
It’s where people have weaker templates that’s really a problem. For example, most Americans have no idea that Cairo in the modern day like this:
…because they’ve been inundated with media that portrays Egypt as looking homogeneously like this:
And - and this is the important part - they have had little to no experience to tell them otherwise.
Now, I’m assuming the majority of the people reading this post don’t live in Cairo - if you do, take this shoutout! - and if you are in that majority that doesn’t, imagine if someone tried to pass something like this off as your own hometown. Obviously, you’ll call bullshit! You’ve seen that place and it’s nothing like that!
But if it’s a place you don’t know anything about beyond the fact that it exists and has these famous landmarks for these famous historical reasons, then anyone can…pretty much just say whatever they want from that baseline, no matter how absurd, and you will probably accept it as, if not a fact, at least a believable fictionalization with some basis in reality. At most, maybe you’ll go
This is how media creates and perpetuates stereotypes - by getting in where you don’t know better and forming your mental template. It can even work if you do have real-life counterexamples, when those real-life counterexamples are uncommon enough or you don’t spend enough time with them - if you know maybe 5 members of a minority group and none of them act like the 500 stereotyped examples you see on TV, you’re likely to end up thinking “okay, there are exceptions to the rule”, rather than “the rule is bullshit”.
This is why “honest, varied representation matters” and “not all fiction is 1:1 monkey-see-monkey-do propaganda and it’s really dickish to assume the worst of someone just because they like one (1) game that you see unfortunate implications in or something” are both statements that can and should coexist.
Throwback thursday to when I was like 12 and I was putting out new writing DAILY...... Like entire Chapters of my then-current wips just, over an afternoon. What the fuck was I on
A huge part of this is because you've gotten better! And now, when you're drawing/writing/doing whatever creative task, you're not just mindlessly throwing thoughts at your paper, you're thinking as you do it. Children can churn out a lot more work because it's not yet refined, but when you're older and have more practice, you work with all these thoughts running through your head about form and shape, color palettes or word choice. Now, you're making a dozen decisions with every moment of work, and you're also questioning the decisions you've just made, wondering if you can do it better. Don't beat yourself up about producing less work now than you did back then, because every sentence or shape involves a lot more effort for you now, than it did when you were ten and brand new to this hobby.
Jane Austen really said ‘I respect the “I can fix him” movement but that’s just not me. He’ll fix himself if knows what’s good for him’ and that’s why her works are still calling the shots today.
yes critical analysis of media is super valuable but I think suspension of disbelief isn't practiced enough
"the beginning relied so much on fate/chance meetings/a bizarre set of circumstances that could have solved the conflict if avoided" babe that's an inciting incident
to reiterate my point more clearly: suspension of disbelief and understanding conventions of storytelling is critical analysis while nitpicking like you're cinemasins is just annoying
"Children are capable, of course, of literary belief, when the story-maker's art is good enough to produce it. That state of mind has been called "willing suspension of disbelief." But this does not seem to me a good description of what happens. What really happens is that the story-maker proves a successful "sub-creator." He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is "true": it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed. You are then out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside. If you are obliged, by kindliness or circumstance, to stay, then disbelief must be suspended (or stifled), otherwise listening and looking would become intolerable. But this suspension of disbelief is a substitute for the genuine thing, a subterfuge we use when condescending to games or make-believe, or when trying ... to find what virtue we can in the work of an art that has for us failed."
I had that exact essay in mind when I wrote this originally!!
Not to nuance my own post, but I love the idea of a distinction between a willing suspension of disbelief (something that requires obliged effort) and the rare magic spell a literary work weaves where little to no effort is required to believe the "truth" of the make-believe world.
Here comes the nuance!
Sometimes your problem with the media being "unbelievable" is because you're in cinemasins-mode and you're not even entertaining any form of suspension of disbelief (i.e. accepting the conventions of storytelling). The solution there, I might suggest, is to consume less of that brand of "critical" content (the sort who would "ding" a musical for, surprise, having all the characters belt out their feelings).
On the other hand, sometimes the problem isn't actually you (that's nice to hear!) and the media you're reading/watching/whatever is actually failing to effectively create this, as Tolkien puts it, "Secondary World". You were perhaps watching this TV show completely engrossed and willing to suspend your disbelief about dragons and unicorns and gnomes and then POP! some weird little throw-away line or plot point bursts the dazy spell you were, until then, lulled under.
Perhaps you can believe in said dragons-and-unicorns-and-gnomes but then the story brings in, I don't know, helicopters. If the writer set this up well, establishing the "laws" of their Secondary World where this could be very unlikely but still believable, still following the rules, perhaps this wouldn't burst the spell-bubble. The magic remains unbroken and effortless. But, if it was executed poorly, if the introduction of this bizarre element isn't woven into the rules of this world, it goes from very unlikely to downright impossible. It sticks out like a rupturing thorn.
In this case, you either have the chance to just accept it and "stifle" your disbelief, something that is now a chore rather than something as effortless as breathing, or I don't know, go online and make an angry YouTube video. But as a writer (and as a reader who likes good writing), it's a great exercise to critically analyze the work (Hurray! We finally got back to critical analysis!) and why it didn't work. What broke the spell? How does this violate the Secondary World? Why can't you believe it? Why is it actively lying in the face of the established "rules" that have been established?
Congratulations you're not cinema-sins nitpicking but interacting with a piece of media with sincere intent and a critical mind!
