On throwing away the rear-view mirror
Oct. 24th, 2014 01:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dreadedcandiru2As you may or may not know by now, Lynn gave the following bad advice:
Like cartooning, writing is something that can’t be taught … you have to experience it, think about it, keep what’s valuable, and put the rest back. I never looked at my own books. I never read my work running again in the paper. The past was the past.
in a long-form essay about her career. What she doesn't realize is that she accidentally revealed a very bad thing about herself and, by extension, her characters by smugly stating that she doesn't like to think about the things she does. What she did was put an exclamation point on a previous silly comment about how she only had thirty seconds to think about the work she did. After the time was up, she could no longer be expected to care about it because it was done. Asking her to care about making sense or keeping track of what was going on was a silly demand that simply asked too much of her because, as she said, the past was the past.
The odd and annoying thing about this is that it seems obvious that she's the only person in the world afforded this luxury. She can't quite keep track of the details because of her poor memory but she does maintain a list of people who've wronged her by getting in her way, making her feel bad and asking more of her than she should be expected to deliver. We see this in Mike when he wonders why people bring up stuff that's happened in the past when he's the one being held to account while at the same time making a list of all of the times Sistwirp butted in in a place where every good person knew she didn't belong: her own home.
Like cartooning, writing is something that can’t be taught … you have to experience it, think about it, keep what’s valuable, and put the rest back. I never looked at my own books. I never read my work running again in the paper. The past was the past.
in a long-form essay about her career. What she doesn't realize is that she accidentally revealed a very bad thing about herself and, by extension, her characters by smugly stating that she doesn't like to think about the things she does. What she did was put an exclamation point on a previous silly comment about how she only had thirty seconds to think about the work she did. After the time was up, she could no longer be expected to care about it because it was done. Asking her to care about making sense or keeping track of what was going on was a silly demand that simply asked too much of her because, as she said, the past was the past.
The odd and annoying thing about this is that it seems obvious that she's the only person in the world afforded this luxury. She can't quite keep track of the details because of her poor memory but she does maintain a list of people who've wronged her by getting in her way, making her feel bad and asking more of her than she should be expected to deliver. We see this in Mike when he wonders why people bring up stuff that's happened in the past when he's the one being held to account while at the same time making a list of all of the times Sistwirp butted in in a place where every good person knew she didn't belong: her own home.
