Ultimately, what I think drives fanfiction and aspiring authors is passion and the drive to tell a particular story to a particular audience (and to receive the feedback that what they wrote communicated what they intended, whether it's a message or an emotion) ...
True, but the issue here isn't the goal -- which for any type of art is really communication, plain and simple -- but the methods used, and the question of whether those methods are (1) "artistic", (2) "inferior", or (3) an entirely different toolbox than that used by original fiction.
Because really, the technique described here may not be useful at all in original fiction (except in the unusual case of sequels in which one plans to tweak earlier-established perspectives of one's own canon), but it's an integral and maybe even paramount skill to have in writing fanfiction. I'm not sure if this was the reviewer's intention, but when someone says "it's art, man," that usually implies (to me) that the person figures "it can't be analyzed", that is, "it just is, man." Deconstructing art usually does render it kinda flat, after all, if art is happening in the spaces between the plotted points -- but I don't agree.
I think all forms of writing can be art, but they can also be deconstructed to reveal their interior structures, just like we can reduce a poem to its rhyming scheme. That doesn't necessarily tell us why or how the poem is "artistic", only how the poem was constructed and then perhaps to gauge what impact this inner construction has on its artistic value (or perhaps to regard the two as separate enough that it doesn't matter anyway).
[As for KmO, actually, I meant literally the voice, as in the word choices. I've been writing a much stuffier set of characters over the past year, and I need a bit of practice to get back into such heavy slang and random obscenities. Heh.]
no subject
Date: 19 Nov 2009 11:40 pm (UTC)True, but the issue here isn't the goal -- which for any type of art is really communication, plain and simple -- but the methods used, and the question of whether those methods are (1) "artistic", (2) "inferior", or (3) an entirely different toolbox than that used by original fiction.
Because really, the technique described here may not be useful at all in original fiction (except in the unusual case of sequels in which one plans to tweak earlier-established perspectives of one's own canon), but it's an integral and maybe even paramount skill to have in writing fanfiction. I'm not sure if this was the reviewer's intention, but when someone says "it's art, man," that usually implies (to me) that the person figures "it can't be analyzed", that is, "it just is, man." Deconstructing art usually does render it kinda flat, after all, if art is happening in the spaces between the plotted points -- but I don't agree.
I think all forms of writing can be art, but they can also be deconstructed to reveal their interior structures, just like we can reduce a poem to its rhyming scheme. That doesn't necessarily tell us why or how the poem is "artistic", only how the poem was constructed and then perhaps to gauge what impact this inner construction has on its artistic value (or perhaps to regard the two as separate enough that it doesn't matter anyway).
[As for KmO, actually, I meant literally the voice, as in the word choices. I've been writing a much stuffier set of characters over the past year, and I need a bit of practice to get back into such heavy slang and random obscenities. Heh.]