SurroundedByBooks

“And one of the things they’ll try to do is they’ll try to make your story into the story they would write, instead of a better version of the story you want to write.

“And that is the single worst thing that can happen in feedback, is someone who is not appreciating the story you want to make, and they want to turn it into something else.

“New workshoppers are really bad at doing this. In other words, they’re really good at doing a bad thing, and they’re doing it from the goodness of their heart. They want you to be a better writer. They want to help you. The only way they know is to tell you how they would do it, which can be completely wrong for your story.”

Then, last fall, my very last semester of college, I took a class with a professor who told us that we were not going to use the classic workshop format. Instead of writing down everything that we thought our classmates should do, we were assigned to ask them questions. And as writers, we were assigned not to sit passively while feedback was fired at us, but to ask questions, to explain what we had been going for and ask if it worked, and if not to brainstorm together how we might make it work.

It was miraculous. Instead of shutting my mind down, this workshop process blew it wide open. Instead of going home after class dispirited, never wanting to touch my story again, I went home inspired, with a hundred new ideas.

We (humans) made all this up. For the sake of simplifying our understanding of the world we live in, we came up with categories that apply broadly to most instances. So when something new comes up, it's easiest to put things in one of those boxes.

This is not always applicable. That's why we have a word for 'fish,' and most people agree on what is and is not a 'fish,' but all fish do not share a common ancestor.

Another example: 'vegetable' is not a useful term in biology, but it is a useful culinary term. So we can put things like tomatoes (fruits), carrots (tuber), and broccoli (flower) in the vegetable category for cooking and dietary classification, even if individually they're different things.

Those kinds of classifications are useful in the disciplines where they are useful, but generally not outside of it. In an ideal situation you look at every instance with individual nuance, but sometimes that can be a bit much.

Arguing taxonomy is a favorite pastime of a certain kind of guy that I work with. It's a way to feel googleably smart, but its not always applicable in real-world situations. (Example: I once said I was cold. He told me that 'cold does not exist, it's the absence of heat.' Which might be true, but hypothermia is real. Warping of metal under extreme conditions is real. Contracting of molecules, shattering of glass, and presence of ice are all very real. So while possibly technically correct, functionally useless as a talking point. Believing that 'cold' does not exist does not make me less cold.)

When trolls are like 'what is a woman,' I'm like... several levels of education above answering that question in a way that they're willing to understand, because they are trolling. They dont actually want an answer and they wont listen to the answer i give them. "You'll still have to go to a procologist instead of a gynecologist." Etcetera.

Those are areas where the words 'man' and 'woman' might be useful distinctions, but it's also really rude to talk about a person's genitals, so I really don't need to know what kinds of doctors they see.

MY BAGELS JEWISH

MY CITY PARKS THRIVE

eliott: i have a tragic history being entangled in the mafia and even now i could kill the most dangerous fighters without firing a gun

You have Parker, who has been designated as bad and wrong since she was a very young child and who has let go of any expectation of being anything else, so that identifying and doing what she thinks is the right thing is consistently an overwhelming and scary experience for her;

Then there's Eliot, who can point to exactly when and how he became irredeemable in his own eyes and whose highest ambition now is to do the wrong thing for the right people this time at least;

Nate, who is clinging to all of these ideas about morality and legality and good and bad that are completely inconsistent both internally and with his behavior, because his very normative view of the world was shattered and he never put the pieces back together in any kind of coherent way;

Sophie, who sees right and wrong as primarily about relationships between people, like she does everything else: right and wrong is in how you engage and who you hurt interpersonally, anything more abstract is irrelevant. But within that, there's also this weight to how she engages, this sense of regret at how she's treated people in the past that we never really see the full scope of;