SRD on obscurity

Dan'l Danehy-Oakes · 14 Jun 2006, 18:01 · from 2006-June.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: danldo at gmail.com (Dan'l Danehy-Oakes)
Date: Wed, 14 Jun 2006 11:01:49 -0700
Subject: (urth) SRD on obscurity
In-Reply-To: <1105343188.20060614195206 at poczta.fm>
References: <1f7617370606091436r75c733f3x7de5dcd18332ae51 at mail.gmail.com>
	<200606091843.57324.ddjones at riddlemaster.org>
	<1f7617370606091552g4c40f201ra3ad8f22f2673500 at mail.gmail.com>
	<E1FoxXe-0005iI-RI at oceanus.uk.clara.net>
	<1105343188.20060614195206 at poczta.fm>
Message-ID: <1f7617370606141101p12c739fbi35cd203f6e92d93e at mail.gmail.com>

Now that we've all had the chance to play "bash the fantasy
writer (and fellow list members)," does anybody have any
thoughts on the original quote? To save y'all from having to
dig through week-old emails, here it is again:

"As a narrative artist, I face an incessant dilemma which
(I believe) plagues all artists in one form or another: I
suffer from a natural and understandable (and perhaps
inevitable) impulse to *leave out* anything that seems
perfectly obvious to me. At the same time, I expound
endlessly on anything that I find obscure or difficult. But
guess what? The things that are obvious to me are
seldom obvious to the reader. At the same time, readers
are quicker on the up-take than I am (because they read
so much more quickly than I write)."

I found Stanislaus's comment strangely apropos, by the
way:

On 6/14/06, Stanislaus <sbocian at poczta.fm> wrote:
>  By the way- he, after reading "Shadow" and "Claw", prematurely
> accuses Wolfe of the same - that is,  that the Claw is merely a
> plot device. - Wolfe as usual made it  appear that way at first,
> later to explain that the Claw was essentially worthless in itself.

-- though I'd argue that in fact something that _seems_
tremendously important but is "essentially worthless in itself"
is almost a working definition of a plot device (especially the
variety of plot device known as a Maguffin).

-- 
Dan'l Danehy-Oakes, writer, trainer, bon vivant

-----
http://www.livejournal.com/users/sturgeonslawyer
"One o'th'flay-rods gone out o'skew on th'treadle."

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