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Internet SF Slapfight Tuesday!
Jul. 21st, 2009 11:14 amApparently, the SF community realized that I was getting bored of the Disney Channel. Here are my thoughts on two of the three slapfights of the day. ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
jimhines pretty much summed up my feelings about the boobies/man ass debate.
The "Good Enough" Debate
This one started with an agent's rant. My friendsjmeadows and matociquala then added some smart things. I do believe that this comes down to a matter of audience and semantics. The agent was tired of getting unprofessional work. Unfortunately for her, the point was probably missed. The kinds of writers that bother to read writing blogs are the ones that revise, go to workshops, and have critique partners. To them, "good enough" refers to the process of abandoning a manuscript after tinkering with it over and over again.
One of the early lessons that I managed to learn from my creative writing classes is that you revise a piece until you can't make it any better. It's never perfect. There does come a point, though, when you're just making changes to make changes. At that point, it's time to move on to another project. That is what most serious writers mean when they think a manuscript is "good enough."
The Hugos
An author published the semi-annual "Why Award X Sucks" post about the Hugos. Scalzi fired back.
rarelylynne covered a lot of this with truepenny in their Politics of Posterity panels at Odd Con and WisCon. Here's the deal: the Hugos have NEVER told us what the best novels are. They tell us what a very specific group of people enjoyed that year. The Hugo Awards give us a very good idea about which writers have fans/friends/name recognition amongst the attendees of Worldcon. That's it. There really isn't a point to knocking around fandom. Even in a perfect world where every attendee has read the 3,000 or so SF books that came out that year, the whole "best" thing is completely subjective anyway.
jimhines pretty much summed up my feelings about the boobies/man ass debate.The "Good Enough" Debate
This one started with an agent's rant. My friends
jmeadows and matociquala then added some smart things. I do believe that this comes down to a matter of audience and semantics. The agent was tired of getting unprofessional work. Unfortunately for her, the point was probably missed. The kinds of writers that bother to read writing blogs are the ones that revise, go to workshops, and have critique partners. To them, "good enough" refers to the process of abandoning a manuscript after tinkering with it over and over again. One of the early lessons that I managed to learn from my creative writing classes is that you revise a piece until you can't make it any better. It's never perfect. There does come a point, though, when you're just making changes to make changes. At that point, it's time to move on to another project. That is what most serious writers mean when they think a manuscript is "good enough."
The Hugos
An author published the semi-annual "Why Award X Sucks" post about the Hugos. Scalzi fired back.
rarelylynne covered a lot of this with truepenny in their Politics of Posterity panels at Odd Con and WisCon. Here's the deal: the Hugos have NEVER told us what the best novels are. They tell us what a very specific group of people enjoyed that year. The Hugo Awards give us a very good idea about which writers have fans/friends/name recognition amongst the attendees of Worldcon. That's it. There really isn't a point to knocking around fandom. Even in a perfect world where every attendee has read the 3,000 or so SF books that came out that year, the whole "best" thing is completely subjective anyway.
