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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 a sneaking suspicion that the main value of all those expensive, intensive creative writing workshops and programs is that you block out enough immersive time and pay enough that you're kinda forced to figure it out or risk having wasted your money.
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Just like you learn foreign languages best by actually paying the big bucks to travel and live there for a few weeks. The situation forces you to pick up the language at least a little, and the cost provides an incentive. The immersion prevents all escape.
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When the famous programs bring on famous fiction writers etc. that's mostly just evening entertainment. The main value is being shut up in Oberlin or wherever and wondering if you've wasted your money.
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I've been sort of idly tweeting about this reading bunnytrail/yak shave for a while now. I oughta do an overview blog post of all the stuff I've looked at and what I've learned/failed to learn from them.
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The thing about fiction is that there’s no point writing a *bad* story. By contrast, there is often a point to writing bad non-fiction. If you have interesting enough things to say, it doesn’t matter if you say them badly. This is not true of fiction.
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If I knew I was writing a Catch-22 it’d be worth a decade of effort. Writing 10 dreck novels would likely be less fulfilling for me than flipping burgers for 10 years. Some authors manage to be both good and prolific, but unlike nonfiction there’s no strong correlation.
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I suspect fiction writing is naturally a guild economy, while non-fiction writing is naturally a free market. So when the internet killed distribution scarcity and tastemaker gatekeeping, nonfiction exploded but fiction remained basically the same.
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Fan fiction communities in relation to “published” fiction markets (text, screen) are a joke, compared to nonfiction social media vs old media. Non-fiction new media (blogs, newsletters) have pretty much brought all but the costliest investigative non-fiction to its knees.
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Replying to
i think about it a lot; like how the diet plan that fits in a single paragraph+example chart couldn't be a viable self-help book without adding an additional 200+ pages
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