delany, etc.

Lisa Schaffer-Doggett · 29 Jul 2003, 07:04 · from urth-v0307.mbox · original

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: Lisa Schaffer-Doggett <harlekin at earthlink.net>
Subject: Re: (urth) delany, etc.
Date: Tue, 29 Jul 2003 00:04:38 -0700
Message-ID: <urth-v0307-3805 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0307/3805.txt.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

On Monday, July 28, 2003, at 11:15 PM, maa32 wrote:
   "You have a wonderful idea here.
> Many wonderful ideas.  But you will have to get much better at writing=20
> before
> you can do justice to them.  You explain yourself way too much."
>
> I was infinitely grateful for his input - and I regard it as extremely
> positive - yet here is the rub: everyone who has ever read my work=20
> says I need
> to explain more, because it doesn't make sense - that I make too many=20
> quantum
> leaps that should be explained.
>
>

Don butts in with two maybe three comments:

Having never read anything you've written I would instinctively say=20
that Mr. Wolfe's advice will give you critical longevity and "everyone"=20
else's advice will give you more marketability.  I'm a less is more=20
writer myself (and chronically unpublished, critically unnoticed, etc -=20
My only hope is that when the Apocalypse comes the airtight seal on the=20
time capsule will hold and I'll win by attrition : )

By the by, there was no excuse for what those students did.  They=20
didn't even have the guts to complain to Mr. Wolfe in person.  Besides,=20
we are all rational (usually, sometimes, potentially) beings who have=20
the ability to study criticism and accept or ignore it to whatever=20
degree we wish.  How often do you think Mr. Wolfe lets someone talk him=20
out of a "bad" story idea?  It's his confidence in HIS story that we=20
love as much as his skill in presenting it. IMHO.

I think I'm over my limit.

--=20

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net