Category: Uncategorized

My problem is narrative oversharing. My fiction goes way too long into things that don’t need discussion.

I’d really like to see the original, terrible cut of Star Wars just to understand classic examples of what should be cut.

Cashmere sweater and hiking boots

Other than absolutely everyone, who knew a PhD would be so annoying?

That’s right. No one.

The professor was a blithering idiot.

“I really don’t care about any of you students,” he said. “I went to harder schools, and over fifty percent of us didn’t have what it took. You’re lazy, you’re cheaters, and you don’t care. You’re just here to appease your parents or meet boys, girls, what-have you, and none of you are worth my time. I don’t accept late homework. I don’t give partial credit. I will fail each and every one of you, and laugh in your whining faces when I do it. I just don’t like you, and I hope that tells you everything you need to know about this class.”

It absolutely did, and I rose to leave.

“But for those of you still here, we’ll begin with advanced draconomancy, the summoning and controlling of dragons. They’re immune to normal sorcery, so we’ll have to develop specific techniques.”

I sat back down, and I hated myself for it.

It’s a problem if you treat it like it’s not a problem. If you treat it like it is a problem, it isn’t.

Evil bean juice make me go fast, make my heart beat fast, make me make mistakes fast!

Get in, losers! We’re writing fanfic.

What do you want to do today, Brain?

The same thing we do every day, Pinky. Try to complete the dissertation!

BLARGH

Never go to school, kids. Herd goats.

There are two basic aspects of identity and a third in reality: what you do, who you think you are, and how other people see you. We sometimes deny the third, but there’s no end of research that shows how people perceive you affects how you perceive yourself and how you act.

For the blog post, let’s confine ourselves to the first and second.

The former is the old ‘someone who’s nice to you but mean to the waiter isn’t a nice person.’ Let’s throw in that person might think of themselves as a nice person. However being mean is a habit, and habits become default behavior. If you want to know if someone’s going to be nice to you in the future, how they habitually act to others now is probably the best way of predicting that. There’s two-way dependency wherein who you are is and is determined by what you do.

If you want to understand someone, you must know how they see themselves. That’s the filter through which they will perceive all of your interactions. If the interactions themselves are of import, if the relationship matters to you, you need to know what’s happening on their side. Imagine a bridge over a canyon. You can’t build just one side of a bridge. Without a foundation for the bridge to land, the bridge will collapse, and with people, that foundation is often who they think they are.

To understand someone, you need all three.