Discussion Groups / English Usage / January 2009

I'm reading Steve Martin's memoir about becoming a standup comedian in
his youth and needing many years to succeed ("Born Standing Up" -
brief but quite interesting). He emphasis a poing I've seen made
before, about how standup comics will spend months and years refining
the tiniest aspect of their performance until they get solid laughs.
If you don't hit the audience just right, you'll bomb.

Much the same is true of writing: If your book doesn't grab your
reader's attention and draw it along, you will fail.  Bht the write
has a problem that the comedian does not: The writer doesn't get to
try out your material again and again for months and years.  If you're
a writer and lucky, you can get a few friends to indulge you, and
maybe one or two of them will let you know what worked for them and
what didn't. If you're really lucky, some editor will tell you what
you've done wrong and encourage you to make repairs and try again.
But a large audience?  Where are you going to find a large audience?

elanders actually stumbled in front of a large audience: an entire
newsgroup to look at his writing and let him know what worked and what
didn't.  And what a cockup he made of this opportunity!  If the poor,
deluded sap had worked through the many sugggestions he's received
here and done some polishing, he might have got a millimeter or two
closer to having someone pay him for his work -- although I doubt that
even then he'd have had something good enough to sell.

On top of which, he purports to be working in the most difficult
aspect of the most difficult genre of all -- not just humor but
historical farce.  It takes a genius to pull off that sort of thing.
Aside from the Flashman books, I can't think of any that succeed
(although I'm sure others can add some).  There are times when you can
tell he's trying to be funny, but it falls flat.  And as Tony points
out, there's no helping him over the flat spots (and right now it's
all flat spots); he takes critiques as challenges, even to the point
of challenging one of our number (with whom I am intimately
acquainted) to a duel: quill pens at 30 paces.  Indeed, he's already
posted the results of the duel.  Guess who he declared the winner.

What a waste!

You're wrong, Tony.

Your commentary  has no substance. Your commentary here doesn't reflect
on my ability to tell a story or anything like that. If I listed the
comments made here we get.

show off
Queen mother
a few Tom Swifties
a language anachronism here and there

And that's it.

Well, that's window-dressing. Nothing at all indicating a problem in
structure, characterization, plot or all the other things you allude to,
Tony.

You're simply off-base, pal. Your  interpretation of what's being done
in my excepts is a confused one. You express this confusion by talking
in literary cliches. You talk this way to give your interpretation
authority. It doesn't.

Look, I don't have my life wrapped-up in this manuscript. I have a good
income and plenty of time. I've posted the excepts here for criticism.
The difference between you and I is I know how to evaluate the criticism
and you don't. You're reading things into it that simply aren't there.
You're completely off-track, dude, and when I tell you this, you react
by attacking me and the manuscript.

You're wrong. Flat wrong. The first three chapters are as strong as
first three chapters get.

The notion that Queen Charlotte was of African heritage can not be
introduce better than I do in the first three chapters. No one can
improve on that, if you think so, tell us how.

And the writing is uniformly strong. It's farcical, light humor which is
a very difficult kind of writing to pull off.

There's no one else in ng who can do that kind of writing, Tony. You
certainly can't, which is why you can't tell a gag without messing-up
the punchline.

I can. I can also do it dramatically, extending the gag through a
chapter, chapters, and the whole story. That's what's going on in this
book that you're completely clueless about. My execution of the several
running gags is done flawlessly; so well, in fact, you overlook the
skill involved.

Do you know what characterization is, Tony? Do you know how to talk
about it intelligently?  If so, let's discuss that. Let's discuss where
characterization fails in my book. No one else has, why don't you be the
first?

Or if you prefer, let's talk about plot, or setting or dialogue.

Point being, until you have the skill to discuss these things, Tony,
your critique has no legs, so substance.

You, and everyone else here, have provided commentary that doesn't rise
above window-dressing. However, as someone pointed out, this is an
English usage news group, not a creative writing one.

I hope that clears things up.

To sum up, you don't understand the process. You don't possess the skill
sets to analyze this process.

You have a half-baked idea of how literary criticism is done, not a
competent one.

In sum, you simply don't know what you're talking about, Tony Cooper.

EG.

To extend that - a book that reminds me that I'm reading has failed.
Any time I notice a typo, an infelicitous turn of phrase, get led down a
garden-path sentence or try to remember which whether "Bill" is the
person previously referred to as one of "Smith" or "Jones" or one of"the
mechanic" or "the customer", then he's failed.

It's one of those things where it's easy to spot the failure - the mark
of success is that no-one notices.

Exactly.

As they say - when he's right, he's right.