This is from a post by Cory titled "The art of Daniel Danger". Go read it at the link, not least because of the images of said art. But this bit, I thought was hugely thought-provoking, and I wanted to hear what the good folks here (including Cory, if he wants to add anything) thought of it.
Udhay https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/23/but-i-know-what-i-like/#daniel-danger <q> There's this behavioral economics study that completely changed the way i thought about art, teaching, and critique: it's a 1993 study called "Introspecting about Reasons can Reduce Post-Choice Satisfaction" by Timothy D Wilson, Douglas J Lisle, Jonathan Schooler, Sara Hodges, Kristen Klaaren and Suzanne LaFleur: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/240281868_Introspecting_about_Reasons_can_Reduce_Post-Choice_Satisfaction The experimenters asked subjects to preference-rank some art posters; half the posters were cute cartoony posters, and the other half were fine art posters. One group of subjects assigned a simple numeric rank to the posters, and the other had to rank them and explain their ranking. Once they were done, they got to keep their posters. There was a stark difference in the two groups' preferences: the group that had to explain their choices picked the cartoony images, while the group that basically got to point at their favorite and say, "Ooh, I like that!" chose the fine art posters. Then, months later, the experimenters followed up and asked the subjects what they'd done with the poster they got to take home. The ones who'd had to explain their choices and had brought home cartoony images had thrown those posters away. The ones who didn't have to explain what they liked about their choice, who'd chosen fine art, had hung them up at home and kept them there. The implication is that it's hard to explain what makes art good, and the better art is, the harder it is to put your finger on what makes it so good. More: the obvious, easy-to-articulate virtues of art are the less important virtues. Art's virtues are easy to spot and hard to explain. The reason this stuck with me is that I learned to be a writer through writing workshops where we would go around in a circle and explain what we liked and didn't like about someone's story, and suggest ways to make it better. I started as a teenager in workshops organized by Judith Merril in Toronto, then through my high-school workshop (which Judy had actually founded a decade-plus earlier through a writer in the schools grant), and then at the Clarion workshop in 1992. I went on to teach many of these workshops: Clarion, Clarion West and Viable Paradise. So I've spent a lot of time trying to explain what was and wasn't good about other peoples' art (and my own!), and how to make it better. There's a kind of checklist to help with this: when a story is falling short in some way, writers roll out these "rules" for what makes for good and bad prose. There are a bunch of these rulesets (think of Strunk & White's Elements of Style), including some genre-specific ones like the Turkey City Lexicon: https://www.sfwa.org/2009/06/18/turkey-city-lexicon-a-primer-for-sf-workshops/ A few years ago, I was teaching on the Writing Excuses cruise and a student said something like, "Hey, I know all these rules for writing good stories, but I keep reading these stories I really like and they break the rules. When can I break the rules?" There's a stock answer a writing teacher is supposed to give here: "Well, first you have to master the rules, then you can break them. You can't improvise a jazz solo without first learning your scales." But in that moment, I thought back to the study with the posters and I had a revelation. These weren't "rules" at all – they were just things that are hard and therefore easy to screw up. No one really knows why a story isn't working, but they absolutely know when it doesn't, and so, like the experimental subject called upon to explain their preferences, they reach for simple answers: "there's too much exposition," or "you don't foreshadow the ending enough." There are lots of amazing stories that are full of exposition (readers of mine will not be shocked to learn I hold this view). There are lots of twist endings that are incredible – and not despite coming out of left field, but because of it. The thing is, if you can't say what's wrong, but you know something is wrong, it's perfectly reasonable to say, "Well, why don't you try to replace or polish the things that are hardest to do right. Whatever it is that isn't working here, chances are it's the thing that's hardest to make work": https://locusmag.com/2020/05/cory-doctorow-rules-for-writers/ But if I could change one thing about how we talk about writing and its "rules," it would be to draw this distinction, characterizing certain literary feats as easier to screw up than others, having the humility to admit that we just don't know what's wrong with a story, and then helping the writer create probabilistically ranked lists of the things they could tinker with to try and improve their execution. </q> -- ((Udhay Shankar N)) ((udhay @ pobox.com)) ((www.digeratus.com))
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