Recent content by nck

I loved reading as a kid and still do; I don't think I'd even want to write if I didn't, the whole point of writing for me is to try to recreate for others something like the experience I've had of reading my favourite stuff.

This just seems to be one of those things that a lot of writers and editors have a lot of really strong feelings about one way or the other, and the average reader doesn't care about at all. EDIT: Actually, that's maybe too glib. It's not that writers and editors are wrong to care about it, and...

As a reader and as a writer I prefer magic that feels weird, mysterious, and unexplained to magic that's basically just science with rules that are in principle all knowable and can be mastered. I mean I'll read the latter, but the story needs to justify it, and I'll definitely put down anything...

I think of myself as a frustrated medieval historical fiction writer in some ways, so definitely.

Our main Greek and Roman sources for mythology were already themselves retellings or reworkings of stories that were presumably originally orally transmitted, so any sort of contemporary retelling fits firmly into the mythological tradition, in my opinion (how it's labeled for marketing and...

"Every little thing" is actually often colloquially used to mean "all," but even if that's not what was intended, the rest of my point regarding what "if you're offended, don't read it" amounts to it still stands.

I honestly don't know how anyone is meant to read "If you worry about offending people over every little thing you'd best give up writing right now" as anything as a generalization across all offenses. If you don't see the difference between saying "If it offends you don't read it" as a...

I took that accusation to be implied this language: That clearly seems to be saying to me that because some people are just going to get offended about anything, you might as well not worry about who you're offending. Again, I'm not taking a stance on any of this. I am saying "if it offends...

I actually took Chinaren to be making a similar suggestion. It's possible I read them wrongly. ETA: Or, to be clear, I was responding specifically to Chinaren's suggestion that some people are just looking to get offended over every little thing, and that if one is offended one can simply not...

I feel like I'm maybe not being completely clear. I am not taking a stance on what one should do in the face of this kind of criticism; I am suggesting that the wrong way to frame the sort of discussion we are having here is to dismiss this kind of criticism as prima facie illegitimate and "just...

This doesn't quite speak to the point I was making, which is that it seems wrong to pre-emptively shut down criticism to the effect that something is offensive by saying, "Just don't read it." But even apart from that, it seemed like the point of this thread in the first place was to get...

I feel like "if it offends you just don't read it" isn't a great stance to take here. As writers what we create is open to criticism, including "that's offensive."

This is definitely something that I can only get perfectly right by reverse-engineering things in later drafts, like you describe, though to a certain extent writing dialogue in relatively distinct/characterful voices is something that comes naturally to me (I've spent a lot more time working on...

A couple things worth keeping in mind about this argument: (1) Socrates' argument doesn't actually concern art in general, it concerns "imitative poetry," and there's a lot of debate in the Plato literature about what, ultimately, that covers. It arguably doesn't even apply to visual art, since...

I feel like you should reread what I was saying you were saying, and then re-read what you just said you were saying, because they're the same thing.