|
Aswad -> RE: So Why Are All The Genius's Insane? (6/5/2007 10:33:24 AM)
|
quote:
ORIGINAL: Tuoni
Figured as much. Don't give a rats trombone about mensa, but I do know a couple psychiatrists. Well, know of. Oh, and love reading your posts Aswad. Better than a couple books I've read :)
Thanks.
quote:
I want to take the test because. well, I want to take it. No real reason other than curiosity as to what it would say. I'm not expecting any result. I'd be surpised if I got bellow average but I'd be more suprised if such a result negatively impacted me.
~nod~
It's always interesting to gauge performance.
The contest is always with yourself. You must always strive to "beat" yourself; to better yourself. There is no goalpost; it's successive approximation to an infinite, and thus unattainable, goal. In that, there are no betters, no peers, no inferiors; only fellow travellers, and those who do not travel that road.
quote:
I may have missinterpeted what you asked. I have a feeling I probably did, but I would emulate. . well, myself. I'd escape to within my own mind much like I do now. Only more so.
~nod~
I spent elementary school walking in circles around the school (ADHD; I'm restless sometimes) and thinking. Sometimes with a friend (I only had one among the students until the second half of year 5), talking to him, sometimes not. Most of the time when by myself, I'd stay in the "confines" of my own head, which to me was not confinement at all. Some saw it as such, though, and suggested I might be autistic; savant abilities at math, which I have since lost through disuse, and excellent memory (more on that in a later post), strengthened their belief in that. Turned out not to be likely to be the case, though. It's just withdrawal into freedom.
quote:
This is partly why I have difficulty understanding the genious frustration with normal people. I don't care about other people for the most part. (I still want others to be happy and live a good life, but how they live that life? Meh) I've got my own people within my head to worry about.
Become an author.
Robert Jordan isn't great because he's got all this cool, new stuff nobody's seen before.
He's great because he's taken a billion different themes from pre-existing stuff, added his own ideas to that, added his observations on the fairer sex to it (yes, most female readers find his portrayal of women in the series to be realistic), and then done a huge amount of work in going through the gruntwork of mapping out this setting to the tiniest details, and then started writing a story arc, with extensive notes along the way dealing with who's where at what time, what they're doing, and so forth, allowing him to make every single scene packed with as many layer of detail as you'd like to uncover. People spend days, nay months, poring over the books, piecing together clues to puzzles that some don't even notice are there.
At virtually any level, there are more things to uncover there.
After finishing the first book in the series, I think, out of 12 (about 800 pages each on average, the last volume estimated to be 1500 pages), he commented that he had about 50.000 pages of background information on his setting.
More recently, he commented that it had grown, and that he now had about 2 megabytes of text on every single person living in a particularly important building in the setting, and that's just the ones we will probably never see, or if we do, it's for a few paragraphs. He's got similarly sized files about every noteworthy topic in the series: the nations, the groups, the major characters, the particular concepts, and so forth.
His wife is putting together an encyclopædia of the setting when he's done, with help from him, if he can manage to beat the odds on primary amyloidosis (sp?) mean life expectancy.
And he's got the background for just about everything he's included in the series. Someone commented that they didn't think the knifework was realistic once. I'll quote the reply from his blog: "[...]the blade length depends. I just did a quick survey around my desk and environs, coming up with six knives that qualify if you allow the one-piece Ek with the parachute-cord wrapped hilt. The balance of it is just right. All have at least a slight protuberance demarcating the end of blade/beginning of hilt or vice versa. Blade length varies from five inches to seven inches.
The protuberance is all you need to keep your hand off the blade in a fight, really, and as for blade length, you’ll have be pretty thick if I can’t reach all of your vitals with five inches of steel. Heart or kidneys are all that really count in the trunk. Plus which, more often than stabbing I would be going for the blood vessels on the inside of the wrist, the inside of the elbow and/or the outside of the neck. Easier and quicker and surer to reach.
If it isn’t a knife fight, just a killing, then you come up from behind and insert your blade, parallel to the ground, into the side of the neck below the earlobe (distance to be adjusted per size of target), and thrust clear through to the other side thus slicing through the carotids, the jugular, the windpipe and the vocal cords. Some like to sweep the blade outward, slashing open the throat, but this is overly flamboyant, allows a lot of blood to escape (you might want to hide the sucker, after all), and sometimes allows him to get out something like a loud grunt, perhaps sufficient to alert others you would just as soon remained unalerted for the moment. Some people prefer doing a Wingate, but I think it’s iffy, myself. You give the guy that added split second to react.
And as for getting cut, one reason for throwing a knife rather than getting in close is to avoid getting cut. That doesn’t always work, of course,[...]"
He did two tours in Vietnam, where he was nicknamed (depending on context) Ganesha the Remover of Obstacles (Hinduist reference; what the chopper pilots called him) or the Iceman (Eugene O'Neill reference to death; much disliked nickname after firing 3000 rounds off a gunboat when his sideman's gun jammed, killing everyone in the target area before the artillery strike hit).
Clearly, his writings portray violence quite differently from most High Fantasy, as well as the various kinds of people who do violence, or live with it.
This may seem a bit off topic, but it goes to what you said.
Become an author.
Map out your setting in great detail. Do the same for your characters. Play to your strengths.
Create a situation; a beginning, an end, and possibly some events you'd like to happen along that arc.
Recursively refine by successive approximation until you have the general gist of what will happen.
Familiarize yourself with the setting and characters. Start writing, keeping good notes along the way.
Don't worry about the quality of the writing; it will start out poor, then get better.
Observe how people talk about things, how they behave, study them, and use this to improve your portrayal of the characters.
Read lots of books, and try to pick up how to do the prose properly.
And bear in mind that the appearance of effortlessness and free flow only comes on the 8th or 9th rewrite; then comes editing.
In the end, you'll have a great work, and will have shared a part of yourself in a way most people cannot. You will have allowed many people to take part in your creation, and allowed them to experience a richness of fantasy that they themselves frequently will not have. Not necessarily because you have a better imagination than they do, or because you're a great writer, but because you have the capacity to go the distance.
Just my 2 cents.
|
|
|
|
