| Friday,
November 23, 2007 Subject: NASA's "Cheap"
Satellite -
Jerry,
It appears that someone over at NASA thinks it
shouldnt cost hundreds of millions of dollars and a shuttle mission to get
something into space:
http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/22160
A step in the right direction?
Enjoy, Jason
=========
Subject: Quote of the Week
From Derek Clark, a European Parliament member (MEP)
complaining about new questions on the next census survey which will
ask--among other things--"the "date(s) of the beginning of consensual
union(s) of women having ever been in a consensual union: (ii) first
consensual union and (ii) current consensual union".
"Mr Clark added: 'When will politicians realise that
George Orwell's 1984 was a warning, not an instruction manual?'"
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7103915.stm
--Chuck
See Pournelle's Iron Law
=========
Subject: Mankind 'shortening
the universe's life'
Jerry
OK, not only are we heating up the planet, but our
observing the universe - through quantum effects - is shortening the life of
the universe:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2007/11/21/scicosmos121.xml
We bad.
Ed
When will the marches against observatories
begin?
=========
Subject: Writing Workshops and
other such
Dr. Pournelle,
I have enjoyed your fiction and non-fiction for many
years. I have done some non-fiction writing the past 20 years (see http://dwaynephillips.net).
Do you have any fiction writing workshops, forums,
blogs, on-line courses whatever that you can recommend?
-- Dwayne Phillips
First, if you have not already read my essay
on How To Get My Job (on this web site)
do that. If you already are comfortable writing English sentences with good
grammar and sentence construction, and you understand what paragraphs are,
so you are asking only how to get into fiction, the simple answer is that no
one can teach you that. You either know how to think up stories or you
don't. If you can think up good stories but don't know how to tell them,
there are learning techniques, but I have never met anyone who learned much
from creative writing classes. I've taught one writing workshop and thought
I didn't do much good for the students.
The best writing workshop I know of is
conducted by Tim Powers for the finalists and winners of the Writers of the
Future contest. If you have a story that might win in that contest, by all
means submit it: the week with Tim Powers and his associates is worth more
than the contest winning.
You also need two books. I didn't write
either of them; they are both by the late Dwight Swain, who was a
damned good writer, a really good story teller, and unlike most of us, a
damned good teacher. If Dwight were alive I'd say go to Oklahoma or wherever
he is and take his course; but since he's not with us any more, I don't know
where he's teaching now.
Dwight left us two books, and you need
them both. The first is on creating characters, and is called Creating
Characters.
If you buy it from this link
http://www.amazon.com/
Creating-Characters-Build-Story-People/
dp/0898796628/jerrypournellcha
I will actually get a dollar or so. The
second is called Techniques of the Selling Writer, and it goes into markets
as well as writing. You need them both.
http://www.amazon.com/Techniques-Selling-Writer-
Dwight-Swain/dp/0806111917/jerrypournellcha
Bill Knott, The Craft of Fiction (out of print, but
you can get it used on Amazon and elsewhere)
http://www.amazon.com/Craft-Fiction-
Bill-Knott/dp/0835911209/jerrypournellecha
is worth going through.
Dick Perry has a book, One Way to Write Your Novel
http://www.amazon.com/One-Way-Write-Your-Novel/
dp/0911654208/jerrypournellcha
which I acquired early in my writing career.
It was then available through, I believe, Writer's Digest. I found it
useful, and you may also. I certainly don't regret the time I spent with it
40 years ago.
After those there are dozens of books, many by
friends of mine, that say they'll teach you how to write fiction in general
and science fiction in particular. They may be useful, but not as useful as
simply getting down to it. Read in the genre you intend to write in. Read
good short stories if you want to try those (I have never been much good at
short stories and write few of them; I used to read a lot of them, but I
don't have time now.) Read the kind of novels you would like to write.
Keep notebooks, and write scenes. Think in terms of
scenes. If you need to tell a story, what scenes ought you show? Are you going
to write mostly action, or do you like the Perry Mason / Nero Wolfe stories
in which most of what happens is conveyed in dialogue? And so forth. (In my
case I do both: I set scenes with dialogue, then let them play out on stage.
Or at least I often do that.)
Other than that, the best advice I can
give you is that you must write, not talk about writing, not go to classes
about writing, not invite other amateurs to tell you how to write, not annoy
the working writer down the street to get him to tell you how to write: you
just write. If you already know how to do sentences and paragraphs (and most
people don't; the schools don't really teach it) you're way ahead. If not,
start with How To Get My Job and go
on from there.
=========
Subject: Huh?
Dear Jerry:
You said, "I have never met anyone who learned a great
deal from creative writing classes". Actually you have. I have a Master of
Fine Arts degree from the Iowa Writers Workshop, and before I took that I
studied Playwriting with Howard Stein in the Drama Department. He's the one
who encouraged me to see if I had any talent and take my first fiction
writing class. Stein later became a Dean at the Yale School of Drama. One of
my classmates in the Drama Department was Nicholas Meyer and I am sure you
know Joe Haldeman, who was at the Workshop, with a T.A., when I was there in
the early 70s. The trick of the Iowa program is you have to be a pretty good
writer just to get in, but you get to study with people who have had
significant publications. I learned a lot from my instructors. Robert
Anderson and William Price Fox taught me how to write screenplays as well as
fiction, Jack Leggett taught us about writing creative nonfiction and Vance
Bourjaily probably had more impact on late 20th Century American Fiction
than anyone else simply because he taught writers like Jane Smiley, T.C.
Boyle, and the guy who just won the National Book Award for fiction. The
M.F.A. degree isn't worth much these days, but then no one went there to get
the degree. We went to study with the people we studied with.
Sincerely,
Francis Hamit
You may well be right, but I know a lot of
people who make a good living at writing, and very few of them owe much to
creative writing classes. Many use workshops and classes as a good reason
not to write.
My suspicion, perhaps
unfounded, is that anyone who got much from those classes probably would
have done as well studying something to write ABOUT. Now if they needed the
structure to get them to read -- at Iowa I was in a precursor to the
creative writing classes, but what we had was a series of seminars in which
we read everything from Sophocles to Camus, St Augustine to Audin, Sarte and
Lewis and Chesterton, wrote papers, and discussed all this in seminars. That
I found valuable.
But peace. Perhaps there are valuable
creative writing classes. There sure don't seem to be many, at least judging
from results.
But then I never claimed to be a great or
even a very good writer. I just know how to tell stories and make a living
at it.
==========
Subject: The Jim Watson Broohaha
Jerry,
The geographical distribution of the IQ bell curve
should not be such a big mystery. All one has to do is consider the process:
hunter gatherers moving out of the relatively pleasant environment of the
Rift Valley into the harsher environs of the rest of the planet. Smartass
and hell-raiser kids are more likely encouraged to depart the family group
than those easily socialized. The truly defective die young. (Teelas always
excepted.) The survivors will be those smart enough to do well in marginally
more difficult conditions. A diffusion-selection situation.
The further away from the Rift Valley, the smarter the
population. Always marginally.
My personal experience has been that the Chinese and
Japanese folks I worked with over the years tended to be smarter on the
average than I am, but that is anecdotal evidence. By this criterion
Amerinds should be furthest to the right of the distribution, except to note
that smallpox and measles do not discriminate and the process might have
been scrambled 500 years ago. The last time I had close Indian contacts was
in the fifth grade. The Yuma Reservation schools did not go beyond grade
four so the "Powers-that-be" bussed the kids out of California across the
dry Colorado to the Sixth Avenue Grammar School. I have no specific memories
except for the warm feeling that we all had a great time together learning
English and practicing our growing skill throughout the day. The teachers
did not share our joy. Sight unseen I would bet my buddies also shared the C
for deportment on my record.
Val Augstkalns
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