brigdh

I'm stealing a meme from, well, everyone, even though I've been bad and haven't answered anyone else's. Hypocrisy yay!

Man, this meme is practically designed to breed that particular hypocrisy. Because of course you-as-writer are dying to know what people would tell you, but from the point of view of you-as-reader, it's tremendously difficult to answer. I'm tempted to do it myself, and only the suspicion that nobody would have a clue what to tell me is holding me back.

As it happens, in your case I can take a crack at it, although I don't know how many other people I'd be able to give any kind of answer to at all.

Based solely on your fic:

1. You have no patience whatsoever for people picking on anyone who's weaker than they are. This spans the full range of despicable picking-on behaviors, from unkindness to children to dropping nuclear bombs on open cities. You have some sympathy for other sins, but not this one.

2. Like Simon Tam, you are very smart. Very, very smart. Also, much more inclined than the average to think with your thoughts, rather than with your feelings.

3. Your attitudes and opinions about real-life issues may not follow any standard pattern, because you tend to notice actual data, and therefore will see when reality doesn't line up with some off-the-shelf set of political or social opinions.

I can cite to actual text in your fic for where I'm getting this stuff, but I suspect it's obvious enough that you don't need me to.

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b-hallward.livejournal.com

I'm tempted to do it myself, and only the suspicion that nobody would have a clue what to tell me is holding me back.

Yep. That's it exactly. But I'm trying to work myself up to posting it anyway. Because I am just that curious.

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Post it! What's the worst that could happen: no one would respond? That's hardly a tragedy.

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Well, okay. If you can do it, I can do it.

Maybe. I guess.

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Do, do. Besides what I told Dorian, look: even Mely and

edonohana have done it now. Don't be the last to join the bandwagon!

I see no reason why peer pressure shouldn't work over the internet.

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Dude, I'm answering it for everyone on my reading list, provided LJ is not evil and does not hide the post from me.

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Heh. Good for you! I've been trying, but this meme is hard.

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Nah. I mean, lit analysis for the most part discourages us from assuming things about the author based on the text, but the first lit analysis most of us engage in is how we're so sure we'd be fast friends with the authors of our favorite books as kids, because they got this thing and that thing right. It's the same game. *G*

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it's tremendously difficult to answer

It is. And for most of the people who have posted it, I feel like I'd need to go back and read their work; I don't remember enough off-hand to have any coherent image of them. You should post it, though!

Still, I'm amazed again by your ability to pick things out of fiction. You're right that you don't need to quote text, because yes to all of them, but I'm shocked that they'd seeped through so clearly into my writing. I had no idea.

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Hey, I went to a fancy school to learn to do that. It would be embarrassing if I never could.

But those three are easy to see, although it's less easy to explain the one about picking on the weak than it is to explain the other two. It's relatively unusual for people to really pay attention to the world around them; the degree to which you perceive and note sensory detail in all your work, and draw attention to detail that means something because it's not part of a standard pattern, makes it a good bet that you'd be equally observant in real life. That, in turn, means that you're relatively unlikely to be an ideologue, because you'll notice facts that don't fit an ideology where most people would be incapable of noticing the facts, or correctly evaluating them, once they'd adopted the ideology in question.

As for the thinking with your thoughts rather than your feelings, one need only pay attention to the way your POV characters tend to think. It's true that a writer might try to fake that because of the way she sees a given character, but it's also a difficult thing to fake convincingly for anyone who doesn't come by it naturally. Finally, as to sheer intelligence -- well, I actually have a whole theory about this, having to do with the range of intelligence of the characters a given writer can manage believably. You often see writers who're merely reasonably bright trying to write characters who're supposed to be brilliant, and it's always sort of painful: the cruel fact is that it's hard to imagine what it's like inside the mind of somebody who's really, substantively smarter than you are (as opposed to someone who's merely quicker).

Much more rarely, you'll also see writers who can't write a stupid character at all, and I've come to think that the reverse of the first issue is at play in those cases -- that the writer is herself so smart that she cannot begin to imagine how the world looks to a not-very-bright person. So even if she tries, it's unconvincing, and a lot of the time she knows better even than to try. As I say, it's relatively unusual, and it always jumps out at me when I see it.

See? Pretty straightforward, really. I'm too much of a coward to go and take big intuitive leaps with a lot of this stuff.

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Well, I'm still impressed by how accurately you managed to draw your conclusions. Like this?

because you'll notice facts that don't fit an ideology where most people would be incapable of noticing the facts, or correctly evaluating them, once they'd adopted the ideology in question

Someone accused me only a few days ago of always needing to play devil's advocate, but it's not that I like to argue. It's just that I get annoyed when people continually reduce to a complex problem to a simple solution, and then ignore all the rest of the still-present complexity for the sake of, I don't know, proving their side right or something. So while you're right, you're still so right that I find it surprising.

well, I actually have a whole theory about this

Oh, that's interesting! But I think you're very right. I was reading a book a little while ago with a character who was supposed to be so smart, a genius of incredibly subtlety who was known throughout the country for his intelligence. And yet, in every scene where he should have displayed this trait, he just... wasn't. He wasn't bad, but I couldn't imagine that he would actually be famous for his skills, either. It really was painful to read.

Though, heh. Does this mean I can't write stupid characters?

From:

b-hallward.livejournal.com

people continually reduce to a complex problem to a simple solution, and then ignore all the rest of the still-present complexity

Argh! Greedy reductionism -- it's like waving a giant red flag in front of me. It's my bugaboo to end all bugaboos.

Does this mean I can't write stupid characters?

Actually, yes. I think how you write Goku is a completely telling example. Okay, so Goku isn't of course stupid, but he is uneducated and intellectually not very developed. And yet when you write him he's so clearly smart and canny and insightful. And if it wasn't so very late, I'm sure I'd have some point to make about how rendering smartness without relying on intellectual trappings is more difficult and telling and whatnot.

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rendering smartness without relying on intellectual trappings is more difficult and telling and whatnot.

I don't know about more difficult, but it's certainly telling. As in, strongly diagnostic of that whole thing where the writer is too smart to be able to write a stupid character. It's like, there you are, you've got a character who doesn't have any formal education or guided intellectual development, who is presented in canon as emotionally and intellectually young despite his vast age. So you consider his POV, you look around inside his mind, and you find -- well, come on, there's got to be something there, right? Something more complex than, food good, Sanzo pretty? So you find it and put it all there, because for there to be nothing complicated and perceptive is just -- it's not only not interesting, it's not even comprehensible.

I suppose I shouldn't say categorically that you can't write stupid characters, since I can't recall seeing you try. But I suspect you can't. And really, why should you? There are so many other people who can.

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Heh. I suppose I'm just proving your point, because my first thought when reading this was Wait, there are people out there who don't have boggingly complex stuff going on under the surface all the time? Really? ...How does that even work?

Also, I feel like I should say thank you for the compliments. Everyone uses this meme to say such nice things!

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kessie.livejournal.com

What

p_zeitgeist said. Also, I think you're a real romantic - you just need to find the right person. :) Am not basing this on YnM fic at all, no siree. :D

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Heh. I suppose that's true. And hey, that's what most of my stories are, so I think you'd be safe in basing anything on them. *grins*

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You're a go-getter, fearless and with a good sense of moral outrage. You're incredibly intelligent, and your humor tends to come out as snark. You've got an eye for detail, and a gift for just the right phrase. You tend to intellectualize, but that doesn't mean you don't feel, it just means you tend to process both input and the response in mental rather than emotional terms. This could be because you feel things very deeply, and need that bit of distance (as do the characters you most like to write) in order to not be overwhelmed by your own compassionate, crusading nature.

And these are the things I thought before I did know you, so there you go. *G*

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God, this meme gets the most fascinating results. And you people are so good at it! I could never pick up this much about an author just from his/her stories.

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Really? I mean, it's a game I played as a kid, and I assumed (which should tell me I'm in trouble right there ;-) that everyone did, or at least everyone who read a lot. As soon as I really understood that books came from people, I started to build pictures of those people in my head based on what they said, and how they said it, in their books.

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I seem to have a weird disjunct in my head between authors and their writing. I see a little of the connection- I might expect one person to be funny, for example, or another to be depressing- but all these incredibly detailed analysises feel so unnatural to me. I don't think in these terms, and it feel so weird to try it.

Of course, maybe it's just because the more I admire an author, the more I tend to be intimidated by them, so I'm more likely to love them from a distance than even imagine being friends with them. *laughs*

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Maybe because books were the only constant friends I had outside of my sisters (military brat, yo), I couldn't not think about what the authors would be like, and whether or not we'd get along. And if I'd meet them when I grew up and became a famous writer. ;-)

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I always wanted to be friends with the characters. The fact that they were, you know, fictional was not at all a deterrent.

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Oh, yeah, that too. I'd sometimes sit with my eyes closed tight and wish as hard as I could to fall into the world of the book.

They fell into me, instead.

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Yes, I remember that. It seemed so fundamentally unfair that I couldn't live inside the books, no matter how much I wanted it.

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I felt the same.

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coffeeandink.livejournal.com

Really? One of the reasons I find the meme so bizarre is that it just doesn't bear much relation to how I think of authors from their books at all.

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That's really fascinating to me. I think you can conclude certain things about an author based on what she presents in her fiction, what she focuses on, and how she approaches it. Which may not be the original aim of the meme, and I notice I haven't really answered the questions it poses in my guesses, but it's where my mind goes when asked for corrolaries between author and text, when the text is fiction.

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b-hallward.livejournal.com

I'd say you were a pessimistic person -- not in a gloom and doom sort of way, but as in 'things will not magically work themselves out just because you'd like them to.' It's hard to say, but I think I'd twig on to your lack of interest in gender, since your characters don't worry much about their sexual identities/orientations. I'm nearly certain I'd figure out that you're an observant person, someone who stops and takes the time to really experience things, since your writing has a lot of very specific detail, especially vivid sensory details. I'd say you feel being compassionate is important, since, underneath everything and despite the raw deal most of your characters have been dealt by the world, they still care about others, not blindly or reflexively perhaps, but because they aren't going to let the ugliness of the world dictate who they are and how they act. I'd say you admire courage and tenacity and fighting for what's important to you, not giving up. One thing I think I'd wrongly guess is that you'd be the sort of person who refuses to suffer fools or put up with idiocy gracefully, but that's just because you write characters like Hisoka and Sanzo, and are good at portraying that side of their personalities.

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because they aren't going to let the ugliness of the world dictate who they are and how they act

Aw, that's such a lovely way to put it. But yeah, completely true. I'm still impressed by all the interesting things people manage to say for this meme.

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parallactic.livejournal.com

Since I just added you to my f-list and just got acquainted with you, this ought to be untainted by long term interaction. Also, widely off the mark.

1. You're a very visual person, and you think in metaphor.

2. You're introspective.

3. You like angst. You also find absurd things humorous, an impression which I am basing solely on the 5th part of the "5 Things that Never Happened to Hisoka" fic.

4. You're an optimist in that you hope for things to work out, but a part of you is cynical. Or maybe not cynical, but skeptical. Huh, or maybe this is tainted by that IM conversation we had about Tsuzuki/Hisoka and fluff!fic.

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