How much of philosophy for fiction?

[freshface]

FRESHFACE

I cant imagine how you'd write about cannibalism or Eskimoism or homosexualism or infantile paralysis without some experience. But I can write about the sick feeling I had when I killed someone, and what I observed. I know what its like to crawl thru rocket and mortar explosions and buildings engulfed in flames. I know what its like to almost die from a head injury. I know what ether induced hallucination is like. I know what its like to piss on an electric fence.

I can describe birth, but I have no idea what a woman experiences....a woman told me its like squeezing a large chicken between your lips. OUCH.

My lone offering here was in the Gay Male category. I'm neither gay nor male, so it wasn't completely based on personal experience. I set it in ancient Rome. I have a bit of experience from visiting Roman ruins, but no other personal experience there either. It required research, imagination, and some help to make sure the details were right.

JK Rowlings has no experience riding a broomstick, but that doesn't keep her from writing about it. That's why we have imaginations.

 

[sr71plt]

FRESHFACE

I cant imagine how you'd write about cannibalism or Eskimoism or homosexualism or infantile paralysis without some experience.

It's called research, imagination, and facile writing ability.

I suppose you thought Agatha Christie was a serial killer.

You know this is a typically dumb position by you, JBJ. Yet more evidence you aren't a writer at all.

 

[Recidiva]

My lone offering here was in the Gay Male category. I'm neither gay nor male, so it wasn't completely based on personal experience. I set it in ancient Rome. I have a bit of experience from visiting Roman ruins, but no other personal experience there either. It required research, imagination, and some help to make sure the details were right.

JK Rowlings has no experience riding a broomstick, but that doesn't keep her from writing about it. That's why we have imaginations.

It depends what aspect of the writing you're discussing.

"Riding a broomstick" is imagination, yes, but Quidditch it has its own laws and rules and they're based on soccer.

And unfortunately just as boring to me as soccer.

However, she has a very strong emotional viewpoint that goes through all of her books, and that has to do with the themes of death and family and how the affect people, positively and negatively.

So Quidditch is the window dressing, but the theme is the window.

She chose a powerful theme to children and didn't deviate in any book from expressing death and family.

She's not about to write a book about how great drug addiction is and how the best thing you could do is put your kids up for adoption.

That'd be a Chuck Palahniuk book. Who is not about to wax rhapsodic on the joys of human togetherness any time soon either.

 

[3113]

I think this is a bit of a conceit like "journalistic objectivity." Everyone has a point of view. Try to be completely objective and you're left with...an inadequately presented object. Unsatisfying. Like food with no flavor.

But the important thing is that the pov be that of a character--not the "author" per se. Meaning that if you have an omniscient pov, and you switch from that of a little girl watching the scene to that of an old man, the two should be very different--in what they observe, how they observe it, how they feel about it, what they conclude from it, in the style, even, of how it's written up. And if you do it well enough, the reader shouldn't know if the author is male/female/young/old.

This, I think, is what James Joyce was trying to do--and may or may not have succeeded at it. It's what Oscar Wilde discusses in The Portrait of Dorian Gray. Can the author submerge themselves into a character and that character's story, and that character's point of view, no matter how alien/foreign or different from their own, so as to be invisible? It's very like acting. The author attempts to be like those rare actors who can really become other characters. So much so that the characters the actor has created are very well known and recognized, but the actor themselves, when they are being themselves, aren't recognized at all!

I think that some authors can do this, and are better at it than others, but the more stories an author writes, the harder it is to hide themselves away as readers can compare works and see reoccurring themes and such that give *something* of the author's identity away.

As for that holy grail, the "authorless tale" that tone that probably can't be written by one author. Movies sometimes manage to do this--have a point of view that isn't that of any one person because writer, director and actors all had an equal hand in creating it, and no one of those controlled it enough to give it that one's voice.

 

[Recidiva]

But the important thing is that the pov be that of a character--not the "author" per se. Meaning that if you have an omniscient pov, and you switch from that of a little girl watching the scene to that of an old man, the two should be very different--in what they observe, how they observe it, how they feel about it, what they conclude from it, in the style, even, of how it's written up. And if you do it well enough, the reader shouldn't know if the author is male/female/young/old.

This, I think, is what James Joyce was trying to do--and may or may not have succeeded at it. It's what Oscar Wilde discusses in The Portrait of Dorian Gray. Can the author submerge themselves into a character and that character's story, and that character's point of view, no matter how alien/foreign or different from their own, so as to be invisible? It's very like acting. The author attempts to be like those rare actors who can really become other characters. So much so that the characters the actor has created are very well known and recognized, but the actor themselves, when they are being themselves, aren't recognized at all!

I think that some authors can do this, and are better at it than others, but the more stories an author writes, the harder it is to hide themselves away as readers can compare works and see reoccurring themes and such that give *something* of the author's identity away.

As for that holy grail, the "authorless tale" that tone that probably can't be written by one author. Movies sometimes manage to do this--have a point of view that isn't that of any one person because writer, director and actors all had an equal hand in creating it, and no one of those controlled it enough to give it that one's voice.

I can agree with you there. Peter Stormare is the sort of actor that took me about five movies to catch on "It's that really talented and striking guy that I keep thinking is five different talented and striking guys."

But to not be Peter Stormarish once I've memorized his face, name and voice, he'd have to suck, and that's not going to happen soon.

I think you can create a whole solar system of characters that follow their own orbits, but there's really got to be that sun at the middle providing some sort of gravity, or it really isn't cohesive at all.

Yes, you can be conflicted on issues. But it's unlikely I'll be writing something on the theme of what absolutely doesn't matter to me.

Two of my favorite authors that I think do well at writing opposing points of view are Heinlein and Thomas Harris. But they both have deep passions that tend to make their heroes and villains distinct to them. Thomas Harris isn't going to create anything that is simply a chaotic mess. He idealizes order and reason and esthetics. His villains are actually disorder, greed and crudity.

Lecter and Starling are so alike. They're both his heroes.

So even if they're the opposite sides of the same coin, he tends to pick the same coin and flip it around.

I've read bits of work that have no gravity, no light, no pattern to them. I couldn't care less. I think that ideal has...no soul, no center, no life. And I don't enjoy reading it.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

FRESHFACE

No one has any experience as a werewolf or going to Mars or riding broomsticks, but plenty of people have experience being gay or killing or being paralyzed. And when you imagine what sex is like, and youre a virgin, your inexperience shines like a beacon in the night. To wit: A guy wrote and published a memoir of Vietnam. The memoir begins in my hometown at the same time I enlisted in the military. I had lived in the town since birth. But the writer named places that never existed and events that never happened in that town, so the effort seems phoney to me.

SR71PLT

Unless Christie had some experience as a serial killer, she had no idea what a serial killer experienced. But, most people dont, so she could pull it off.

 

[sr71plt]

Unless Christie had some experience as a serial killer, she had no idea what a serial killer experienced. But, most people dont, so she could pull it off.

Worthy of consideration, but irrelevant in the end. If she's convinced her reader, her fiction is successful--and she's done it with out any restriction such as it having to reflect her own philiosophy or having to come from experience.

 

[Stella_Omega]

I agree. After I posted what I did, I thought I should have pointed to a lack of imagination as the block to being able to write outside your own philiosophy (if you want to). I can't imagine anyone being able to write fiction well if they don't have sufficient imagination to break through their own base pilosophies.

I'm feeling that lack, at the moment. It's pretty damn hard to write a genuine antagonist (as opposed to a Bad Guy) if I can't create that POV. And it's not like I can merely flip my protagonist's POV-- it's not that simple. But at least I know what I'm up against, unlike;

...a woman told me its like squeezing a large chicken between your lips. OUCH.

I can easily imagine that a woman would give you that kind of non-answer. I can easily imagine you'd assume that's all it is, too.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

SR71PLT

Nonsense, when people dont know they suspend disbelief and doubt...if the story pans out.

Philosophy isnt entirely clever idea, its based on a fund of knowledge and experience.

On the otherhand a writer can have other worldviews, based on experience, that are so bizarre and alien no one believes them. Read Colin Turnbull's MOUNTAIN PEOPLE memoir. If you wrote about a community that uses infants and toddlers to fatten livestock prior to slaughter, few would believe you.

 

[Recidiva]

I'm feeling that lack, at the moment. It's pretty damn hard to write a genuine antagonist (as opposed to a Bad Guy) if I can't create that POV. And it's not like I can merely flip my protagonist's POV-- it's not that simple. But at least I know what I'm up against, unlike;
I can easily imagine that a woman would give you that kind of non-answer. I can easily imagine you'd assume that's all it is, too.

I was just thinking that I can't ever write a "bad guy" that I don't end up adoring.

And when I try to make sure they have no point of view that is in line with my own, even tangentially, I get bored and wander off.

I know for me I just can't create "random, crazy evil" because I find that to be one of the biggest cop outs of fiction. I NEED a cohesive, reasonable and persuasive "bad guy" or I feel cheated.

 

[sr71plt]

SR71PLT

Nonsense, when people dont know they suspend disbelief and doubt...if the story pans out.

Philosophy isnt entirely clever idea, its based on a fund of knowledge and experience.

On the otherhand a writer can have other worldviews, based on experience, that are so bizarre and alien no one believes them. Read Colin Turnbull's MOUNTAIN PEOPLE memoir. If you wrote about a community that uses infants and toddlers to fatten livestock prior to slaughter, few would believe you.

I knew you wouldn't get it. You'd have to be a real writer to get it.

 

[Weird Harold]

I think that some authors can do this, and are better at it than others, but the more stories an author writes, the harder it is to hide themselves away as readers can compare works and see reoccurring themes and such that give *something* of the author's identity away.

The most difficult thing to achive for an author writing against personal philosophy is to shed the basic assumptions instilled in childhood.

Everyone holds certain concepts that were shaped by their social environment -- pop-culture influences, for example -- that they use without explanation or expansion with the (often erroneous) expectation that their readers will understand what they're writing about.

It takes a determined effort to get past a cultural indoctrination like "cannibalism is evil" to write a convincing cannibal character who doesn't carry that particular bit of cultural baggage around.

 

[rgraham666]

I loathed what Lecter did to Starling in the last book. Far, far worse than cannibalism in my opinion.

I'm thinking of feeding him to my vampires.

 

[Recidiva]

I loathed what Lecter did to Starling in the last book. Far, far worse than cannibalism in my opinion.

I'm thinking of feeding him to my vampires.

I loved it. It was perfectly in character.

I was disgusted they cut it out.

 

[rgraham666]

I loved it. It was perfectly in character.

I was disgusted they cut it out.

In the movie? So was I.

I'm still going to feed him to my vampires. You want to see something really evil?

 

[Recidiva]

In the movie? So was I.

I'm still going to feed him to my vampires. You want to see something really evil?

I'd be interested in seeing how the vampires do after drinking his blood. Probably start eating each other. Awesome.

 

[rgraham666]

They'd find it very interesting.

In my milieu vampires don't just taste the blood, they taste the soul. So he'd be a very unique meal.

Rather like the serial rapist one of them chowed down on last year. She likens it to a very stinky cheese. Tasty but not to be lived on.

 

[voluptuary_manque]

I have such a benevolent view of the world that it's hard for me to come up with a character who is truly evil. Misguided, stupid, etc., I can manage but I much prefer protagonist vs self or protagonist vs nature plots.

This is probably because I'm too aware of how nasty I can be and don't want to go there. Let's stay in the happy place, thank-you.

 

[Corylea]

Each of us works from our own epistemology, which is the bedrock of all philosophy. So the correct answer to the question is ALWAYS.

I agree with JBJ about something; I wonder if I should go lie down until the feeling passes.

One of the tenets of feminist therapy that I strongly agree with is that therapists must inform their clients about what their view of health is, because no matter how objective one tries to be, one's own personality, opinions, and philosophy color everything one does. If one claims to be objective, that just means that unexamined ideas will leak out all over the client. So if I feel, say, that mental health requires a balance between independence and interdependence, such that one can do things on one's own and one can also connect deeply with another person, that's the sort of person I'm likely to guide the client towards being. If the client sees the lone wolf as the best exemplar of humanity, then s/he is unlikely to want to embrace the interdependence half of my vision of mental health and would likely be happier with a different therapist. I can imagine being the kind of therapist who thinks that mental health means not needing anyone, ever, but even if I tried to implement that worldview for a client, my efforts would be likely to be ineffective.

We carry our biases with us, always.

 

[The_Trouvere]

My value system is reflected in my stories, but I realize that other people have different values, and that if I hit them too hard with a message, they will reject the story. Therefore I try to be subtle. What is most important is to write interesting stories about likeable and believable characters.

 

[SEVERUSMAX]

I loathed what Lecter did to Starling in the last book. Far, far worse than cannibalism in my opinion.

I'm thinking of feeding him to my vampires.

I loathe Lecter, period. Dolarhyde, at least, was understandable. Lecter was a monster, and shouldn't have been released, even in a novel.