I've been thinking about this recently, and would appreciate anyone's thoughts on this issue - to what extent does a writer need to be mature to be able to write well?

1) Let's take the example of characterization. A writer has to be able to characterize, i.e. create characters with all the deep and varied motivations and emotions that animate real people; characters that may be intelligent and clever but nonetheless don't know everything and make mistakes because they are human; characters that have flaws and weaknesses just like we do.

So the question is, is a child or a teenager systematically disadvantaged compared to an adult, when it comes to writing such non-cardboard fully-rounded characters? Has a teenager had sufficient life-experiences (know enough) to write about characters and their loves and hatred, their thought processes and their limitations, their weaknesses and their foibles?

Love and lust and sex - for example - make up a gigantic part (is this a freudian slip?) of our normal lives. For a teenager who has had limited or no experiences (whether personal or from others) in this regard, can they really be expected to write something significantly better than the usual cringe-worthy teenage angst fanfic?

2) Plot. This is, I think, significantly less an issue than characterization. In terms of writing a realistic storyline, a sufficiently precocious child (as I suppose we all thought we were) could probably write relatively good stuff.

Questions arise, I think, only in regards to areas such as politics and politicking, since writing about this requires genuine understanding of both human nature and politics in general. I've always found well-written fics that deal with political intrigue to be few and far between - the rest being of the Manipulative!Dumbledore sort of tripe.

3) Themes. The big one, folks. Can we genuinely expect a child, whose experiences are necessarily limited and whose brains (i.e. the prefrontal cortex, which handle) are literally still developing, to accurately and maturely portray stuff as staggeringly important as love and death, war and peace, or morality and justice?

Thoughts, my fellow DLP-tards?

N.B. Of course, maturity need not be the same as age. I'm talking about maturity in general, nebulous though that term may be.

 

No.



/10char

 

Obvious man is obvious.

50 Shades of "he's soft and hard at once, like steel encased in velvet" shows how bad sex writing can be if done by a mental incompetent, whatever the age.

More than anything, writing well requires practice. Go read the first chapters of Joe's Hero trilogy, then go read The Rig. That's what a few million words and a decade of focused practice buys you.

 

Really? I though that Harry was in the wrong when I read it at 15. I've never claimed to be normal, however.

OT: Yes, maturity plays an important role. Most teens haven't had the life experiences yet to correctly write about them, but since it seems the vast majority of said teens have the belief that they know everything, they write it anyway. And it sucks as a result. Once they grow up, they realize not to write what they don't know, i.e. I don't write smut because I don't know it.

My own writing has matured considerably from when I really started writing eight years ago. Reading some of what I wrote back in 2008 made me facepalm so much that I'm rewriting it. Part of it is that I've spent time writing so I know some of the pitfalls to avoid, but some of it is that I've just grown up. So yes, maturity is important.

 

Bloody hell, a decade.

And I still feel, quite often, that the words are bullshit. I'd say I've written about three million words in the last ten years, about half that fanfiction. Of the original stuff, it is only very recently that I've started to think it worth a dime.

Is that maturity? I'd say, like anything, it is long practice and persistence that closes the gap between shit and kind of shit.

If competency in story telling is a timeline, then mine looks like this:



Within that, I read 1000's of books, often more than once. I mimicked, I copied, I shook the hand that shook the world, and eventually started to churn out passable, then competent, even approaching good, stories of my own.

Who knows where 5 years will put me, eh? Back at the start if this year is any indication. :facepalm

 

So, though I've only been writing for three or four years (and it definitely shows), I can already look back and see three significant steps in my writing ability, rather than it being a smooth transition and learning. Was it the same for you, or was it just little changes adding up over a long period of time?

 

I'd say the latter, little changes - but not anything I could point at and say: 'Yeah, I made characterisation my bitch.' or 'Damn that plot arc was liquid gold.'

I know I'm better. I can see the difference, as Pers suggested, because the Hero Trilogy is still up and viewable. I've considered removing it, given my rising star in original fiction, but I reckon embracing the past is best. But it's never been significant steps for me - more like levelling up, constant grinding, with breaks in between to slay a few bosses and access areas with better XP. Sometimes I win the boss fight (The Rig), other times I don't (the ten useless novels on my hard drive).

Finish what you start. <-- Best writing advice in the world.

 

As this picture has shown us (among many others, I'm sure), trying to remove something embarrassing from the internet is a losing proposition.

One of these days, I'll get around to buying Joe's original stuff and reading it. Might be possible soon since I'm out of school and should actually be making real money soon.

 

Leveling up, I think, is a great way of explaining it; like when I finally realized what "POV" meant and that I had to keep it through a scene (Imagine that?), or that it's important to set a scene at the beginning rather than only when I needed it as part of the plot. Then there's other tidbits that I've picked up here and there—one from you on showing someone remembering something, rather than blatantly stating it; one from Cheddar and Sesc on using all five senses, that kind of stuff.

The funny thing is, the first year or so, trying it would've made my writing worse because there were so many other errors at the time.

I thought about posting my first story here and letting everyone take a rip at it. Still may, to be honest. But since it's Harry/Ginny, it'd be less of a bulls eye and more of a kick-me sign on my back.

 

I disagree. After 15 years working at a criminal court I look at Dumbledore, and cannot help but start to add up the years he'd have to serve. More experience has made me much less understanding of people who abuse children, or those who protect the abusers - and that's not even getting into his awful failures as a politician, general, spy master and general human being. I understand his motives, yes - but it only makes him look worse to me. The best I can do is to consider him paving the way to hell with his good intentions - but not only does he have to willfully ignore reality to act his way, but he also drags most of magical Britain down into hell with him.

 

I still look at nice crumpet and get a chubby.

 

Yeah, canonincally, he - with the help of author fiat - won the war. But at the cost of thousands of innocents being brutally murdered, many of them normal people. All that could have been avoided if he had not been so utterly stupid. He tolerated child abuse by his staff members (Snape, Umbridge), actively endangered children in his care or at least let it happen (Detention in the Forbidden Forest, Fluffy in Hogwarts, the tournament itself, he let Draco attempt to kill him despite knowing about it, which almost led to the death of Katie Bell and Ron and the school invasion). He didn't lift a finger to make Harry's life with the Dursley's more acceptable (if one believes he had to be there). He utterly failed in his goal to turn slytherin bullies into decent people. His idea to get Harry out of the Dursley's - the seven polyjuiced decoys - was so stupid, only braindead idiots would have follwoed that plan when Harry had the best invisibility cloak there is, and enough money to take a bus to some meeting spot. Or could have just been side-along apparated out. And that's just a few of his more obvious failings.

 

So... You are saying that the post was not mature enough to judge its maturity in regards to writing?

Sounds like on topic to me.

 

From the wiki:

Having only 3'000 wizards around in all of Britain doesn't really make sense and is contradicted by the mentioned excerpts from the books.

I did not know that in the last 10 years somehow, endangering children and letting staff and students abuse and bully kids was made legal.

 

I did not know that anyone needed reminding that JKR penned a children's story, deliberately writing several things way over the top (such as the alleged child abuse by the Dursleys) for the purpose of quickly setting up a story and communicating a tragic hero backstory to children and adolescents and their gnat-like attention spans. This was intended to be a work of fiction, not a treatise on morality or child-rearing (though if reading the books to my son when he was young showed me anything, it was that the book was chock full of prompts for discussion of moral themes). In fact, one could say that the central conflict of Harry Potter was never with Voldemort, but rather with how the canon magical world's norms of behavior and ethics are so at odds with those of the Muggle world. These fridge-horror moments are a large part of the "otherworldliness" of the series--and of its appeal.

A handful of examples: Slavery of sentient beings is accepted widely. (Hermione was considered a deviant because she objected to the practice.) Torture? Have at it--even schoolteachers get in on the action. Prisons guarded by feral, torturous beings. Deliberate poisoning of students? That's just Fourth Year Potions class. Speaking of Potions, playing with toxic, volatile, magical goo with barely any safety equipment? Comedic gold (let Neville melt another cauldron). Don't like what was just disclosed? Obliviate. Magical plants and beasties that literally can kill you? Part of the standard curriculum. Mind reading for fun and profit. Exposure of children to magical creatures embodying their worst fears? Some might call it a horrific practice; in the Magical world, it's Third-year Defense. Muggle-bating? Ho-hum. A general lack of any rights for Muggles or Squibs--or, for that matter, Muggle-born, Blood-Traitors, or anyone else who happens to be on the wrong side of the prevailing political powers. A complete lack of due process. Gladiatorial death matches for entertainment. Mind control elixirs and compulsion spells. Oh, and the most popular sport in the world happens to be a pageant of violence and mortal danger.

Most heinous, however, is that with an absolute knowledge of the existence of souls and the afterlife, Dementors are allowed near people. Soul death is a very real thing in the Harry Potter world.

Go ahead and piss on Dumbledore if that's your kink, but if you do, then you really should throw out the entire magical world, top to bottom, as it's a moral cesspool--and not a single major character comes out looking well. Sure, perhaps Dumbledore could have made things better--he admitted to his mistakes--but he sure as hell could done worse (see his youth). If anything, considering he's a product of a world as fucked up as the wizarding world is, I'd say he did pretty well and that singling him out for a sanctimonious rant seems so very 2005 Indy!Harry. (And now we're back to the maturity thing...)

 

/clears throat

You uh, you do know that the wiki is infamous for being completely unreliable and considered inadmissable as far as evidence goes, around here, right? Any argument that uses it as a foundation is just asking to be toppled over and mocked relentlessly.

Though I'm a have to agree with something Taure said on IRC once on Briatins Magical Population: 8,000 is much better number.

Also, that excerpt comment on it being unlikely that a sixth of the Britains population working on the Quidditch stadium isn't taking in a few obvious facts. 1) Witches and Wizards are goddamn fucking crazy about Quidditch, 2) The Ministry has a precedent for stupidity and 3) It's always possible it wasn't just the British Ministry.

The thing for Quidditch matches is also easily dismissed - As far as we kow, they aren't mandatory to attend and probbaly not everyone does. But hey, 4/5ths of the school seem to be fanatics, more evidence to Britain in general's obsession with the sport.

The hundred of people working in the Ministry - The Ministry seems to be the largest workforce Britain has. most people seem to go on to get a job there, with the minority taking up jobs elsewhere. And I mean, if you think about, you only have 4 places to find jobs that aren't in the Ministry- Hogwarts, Hogsmeade, Diagonalley and Knockturn Alley. And how much do wanna bet most of those jobs and business are family owned?

The excerpt also fails to take into account both of the wars that happened in the last 50 years for the Magicals. With such an already small population, it's no wonder it'd have gotten even smaller.