Moby Dick is a book about Melville being a weird dude whose life was all distorted and twisted and warped around this part of his life most people find horrifying and disgusting and scary -- his career of murdering beautiful creatures at sea and slicing off their fat to sell
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Replying to @arthur_affect @BetaDecayPlus
The book is a book about a man trying to make a human connection, to get you to understand this strange alien world that made up such a huge part of his life Geeking out at you about all the knots he learned to tie is one tactic The made-up story about Ahab's leg is another
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Replying to @arthur_affect @BetaDecayPlus
But they are all part of the same thing Just like Hal Incandenza's personal life story is only one thread in Infinite Jest, and possibly not even the most important one
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Replying to @arthur_affect @BetaDecayPlus
(DFW's story "Octet" is one that stuck with me a really long time, because it's a story where he literally *gives up on telling the story* halfway through and just starts talking directly to the reader through the fourth wall about why he's writing the story)
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Replying to @arthur_affect @BetaDecayPlus
I have always aspired to be able to write that kind of thing and make it work, which is very difficult but very powerful when it works Just admitting to the reader "I don't think I can make this story work, and frankly I'm not doing great personally right now"
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Replying to @arthur_affect
I wonder if they also complain how 17776 never gets around to describing the future of football.
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Replying to @BetaDecayPlus
CS Lewis once talked about being baffled by how aggressively well-meaning readers can ignore the point of what you were trying to do with a book and why maybe you should be careful whose advice you take
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Replying to @arthur_affect @BetaDecayPlus
He said a friend of his wrote a script once, which, like Tolkien's stuff with the Ents, was inspired by the Birnham Wood stuff in Macbeth The point of it was trees gradually becoming sapient and mobile and going around killing people for cutting them down
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Replying to @arthur_affect @BetaDecayPlus
It was, admittedly, a hackneyed horror movie cliche, and in order to try to make it work as a script the writer plugged in a generic action hero guy and gave him a love interest he ends up hooking up with by the end of the story etc. And he sends it to a professional editor
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Replying to @arthur_affect @BetaDecayPlus
Who looks it over with his professional Hollywood experience and sends it back going "Yeah so this is a workable story, but you've got to cut out all the crap about the trees"
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(And, well... who knows, that might actually be good advice, if the writer actually thinks it's worth doing a total rework just to get paid *Lots* of scripts start as something totally different, get the core gimmick surgically extracted, and get made in unrecognizable form)
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