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Vonnegut is kinda different. I binged everything he wrote in college. I'll have to think about how his models relate to Campbell's.
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Replying to @DanielleFong
Yeah Vonnegut is a bit different. He has that great essay where he argues that real life story structure is basically a straight line.
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I do have idle plans of eventually working more on my fiction, but tbf, this stuff is interesting enough, I'll be fine if I end up just doing a gigantic yakshave exploring all this stuff and abandoning my fiction ideas. It's interesting in its own right.
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There's a sort of lean-startup model for nonfiction and I understand it well enough to even teach now. I think I could get any reasonably competent English speaker writing decent blog post level essays within a couple of months. There's a reliably executable learning curve.
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Fiction though, lacks both the agile startup learning curve AND any pedagogical model anyone can guarantee. There's a vast industry of people offering education, but none strikes me as reliably capable of getting you to a first good story even assuming you have decent ideas.
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i have recently started thinking philosophical treatises are just ideas written by people who don't know how to write a story
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seriously though consider somebody like ayn rand, whose manifestly terrible ideas run like wildfire, when like iunno, rawls or somebody is graduate-level obscurity —brandolini's law, philosophical edition
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there's something about her reach that is not actually earned, since her books are circulated by an evangelical cadre ... like gideon's bibles have a huge circulation but shouldn't be considered a best-selling edition of the bible... they cheat with hotels, and nobody reads them
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