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Adapting to Your Audience In Writing: a Bad Idea

April 4, 2022

Writing

creativity, fiction, intended audience, literature, writing

“Adapt to your audience” is a sentence I’ve seen used by many so-called writing advisors. It’s a bad idea to begin with, for any artistic context. But adapting to your audience in writing is a truly awful idea, for reasons we’ll examine.

Let’s get some definitions out of the way first: What do we mean by “adapting to your audience”? This basically means to take readers’ feedback into consideration and alter the work accordingly.

For advance readers (that is, beta readers) this means modifying your novel to suit the (extrapolated) audience’s desires, even before publishing. Otherwise, it means taking feedback and reviews into consideration and “give people what they want” in the future.

Either option is awful. Let’s see why.

Adapting to your audience is easy if that is an abstract intended audience (existing in your head), because the audience is then a homogeneous, controllable – by you – entity. Hardly the case in real life
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Mediocre Fiction: Why Is There so Much of It?

March 28, 2022

Writing

capitalism, fiction, literature, society, writing

Mediocrity is one of the things that occupy much of my time – on the blog and otherwise. We’re surrounded by mediocrity, and there are clear, simple reasons for this, which I’ll talk about in this post. More importantly, for the topics of the blog, what concerns me is mediocre fiction.

The whole concept is somewhat tricky. After all, I’ve claimed that:

You get the idea…

So, if literature is very hard to approach objectively, how can we speak of mediocre fiction? To put it another way, what makes mediocre fiction… mediocre?

mediocre fiction
Other arts, like sculpture, have a much higher technical threshold to separate inability from ability. Writing doesn’t, which leads to mediocre fiction
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Forbidden Island JavaScript App: An Experiment in Creation

March 21, 2022

Programming

art, game, javascript, programming

First of all, a necessary disclaimer: If you came here expecting to find a ready video game version of the popular board game, Forbidden Island, I’m afraid I’ll disappoint you. This post does show my efforts in creating a Forbidden Island JavaScript app, but I can’t share the program with you. I can’t even share the JavaScript code with you.

You see, the game is – obviously enough – copyrighted. It would be both illegal and unethical to the creator of the game, Matt Leacock, to offer anything I’ve made (even for free).

However, worry not. Not only will I describe my thought process behind turning Forbidden Island into a JavaScript/PHP app – which might help you code one yourself, if you so wish – but, more importantly, I’ll share with you a discovery I’ve made.

This discovery is useful to all of us, gamers or not, coders or not.

I discovered that the most genuine form of creation comes when not only do you have no expectations, but when you can’t even have any expectations. In other words, the most genuine way to create something artistic is a result of knowing it will only be made for the sake of making it.

Forbidden Island JavaScript app
Here’s what the main screen of my Forbidden Island JavaScript app looks like. Notice that neither images nor (most) of the locations correspond to the actual game.
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