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Tortured Artists: Is Suffering Necessary for a Fiction Writer?

April 12, 2021

art, artist, mediocrity, society, suffering

Amy Winehouse, Kurt Cobain, Ernest Hemingway. Troubled souls, phenomenal artists. The idea of tortured artists is a sort of a trope or stereotype that wants great artists – writers, painters, musicians – to be constantly frustrated or even self-destructing. But is suffering necessary for a fiction writer? Can “normal” people be exceptional artists?

The truth is, I don’t know. That’s also one reason I’m phrasing the title of this post as a question mark. Based on purely historical precedence, we can draw the following two conclusions regarding tortured artists:

Not all tortured souls become exceptional artists.
Not all exceptional artists are tortured souls.

In other words, I’d say we can’t really reach any safe conclusion regarding tortured artists. What I believe we can do – and it’s the reason this post exists – is attempt to answer the more modest question: Can “normal” people be exceptional artists?

The lessons from this attempt can be very important indeed, because they can let us see the ingredients of a great fiction writer.

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Binary Dilemmas: What They Are and how to Avoid Them

February 22, 2021

Philosophy, Society

conditioning, dilemma, ignorance, mediocrity, misinformation, philosophy, questions, social media, society

Binary dilemmas are dilemmas that force you to choose either of two options. You could argue the term “binary dilemma” is somewhat redundant, in the sense that a dilemma usually only involves two options.

However, this is not always true; you could be facing a dilemma between wearing a red, a blue, or a white t-shirt. More importantly, I deploy the term “binary dilemma” to emphasize the particular social dynamics involved: Binary dilemmas are insidiously constructed in a way that conditions you to believe these are the only alternatives.

As a humoristic example of a binary dilemma, imagine a woman asking her boyfriend’s opinion on her new dress. If she phrases her question as “does this make me look fat or thin?”, there is no way for the hapless man to offer a pleasing answer.

If the example seems familiar, it’s taken from my post on the only game in town fallacy. However, whereas that post only focused on the fallacy, the focus of this post will be on avoiding binary dilemmas.

Moreover, the concept of a binary dilemma transcends a mere discussion between two people, having far wider consequences. Think of media, social media, social conditioning, misinformation, and ways to control public opinion.

Importantly, whereas in the example with the dress there is likely no intention to deceive, binary dilemmas are nearly always precisely constructed to make it appear as if there were no alternative.

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How NOT to Write Genre Fiction: The Dangers of Pleasing Your Audience

November 16, 2020

Fiction Writing Tips, Writing

art, artist, genre, literature, mediocrity, popularity, writing

There are many guides out there that promise to teach you how to write genre fiction. And yet few of them will tell you the most important thing: Writing genre fiction is an inherently people-pleasing act, which is an always dangerous business.

In a sense, genre fiction is the opposite of literary fiction. Whereas literary fiction deals with abstractness and generality, genre fiction deals with concreteness and specificity. To put it another way, if literary fiction is about “everyone, always”, genre fiction is about “that one, right there and then”Of course, this is a somewhat simplistic way of putting it. Quality literature (including genre fiction) can always extrapolate from the specific to the generic, even if it does so operating on a subconscious level. Take a look at my review of The Lighthouse..

If this sounds a bit too theoretical, worry not; I’ll unpack it in more detail in this post. My purpose is not to offer you tips on how to write genre fiction, but tips on how not to write genre fiction – though obviously enough, the two processes overlap.

In other words, I’ll highlight the pitfalls of writing genre fiction, together with my opinion on how to avoid them (there’s a twist in the plot here).

write genre fiction — If you’re writing genre fiction (say, fantasy with witches), there are things you can do, and there are things you *can’t* do. This is always a problem in anything that would like to call itself artistic creation

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