I bet you’d end up with silly-looking, embarrassing pastiches of no lasting value, maybe good for a chuckle or two because of contemporary allusions the readers would recognize.
Like Kick-Ass, huh? Its authors certainly don’t seem to treat it (or its audience) with much respect. Or like, for that matter, Don Quixote itself (it was supposed to be a silly comedy and a lampoon of chivalry books, not the Best Novel Ever it’s become… well, Part I was; part II takes itself more seriously).
The goal is to use modern, more sophisticated tools to make something better than the original. If your result is a “silly-looking, embarrassing pastiche of no lasting value”, you’ve failed in your task as a writer, and need to try harder. And, of course, “silly-looking” is a subjective qualifier, but it’s the job of a good writer to properly anticipate audience reactions; I’d even say it’s their main job. If by “embarassing” you mean “will lower your status in the eyes of a certain demographic, whose cooperation you need in order to achieve your goals”, then, yes, this is a crucial factor that should be accounted for, and pre-empted.
To sum it up, if the result is a “silly-looking, embarrassing pastiche of no lasting value”, you need to try harder, because you weren’t doing your job properly.
Don Quixote itself (it was supposed to be a silly comedy and a lampoon of chivalry books, not the Best Novel Ever it’s become… well, Part I was; part II takes itself more seriously).
But that’s just as I was saying: Don Quixote remains on the list of Great Works (there is no “best novel ever”) because new generations find it relevant even as their tastes and understanding shift. To the contemporary audience Part I was LOL-grade funny and to modern readers it’s much more tragic; this is probably because we’ve taught ourselves to empathize much more strongly with someone being ridiculed than people in the 17th century (note: this and not the novel’s age! Gargantua and Pantagruel is 100 years older and reads today exactly as the satire it was then, w/o accumulating gravitas). But the novel always supported both points of view; if it didn’t, we’d have stopped reading it. There’s any number of satirical texts from the same era that are no longer widely read because to us they would just seem stupidly cruel, with no high tragedy involved.
Like Kick-Ass, huh?
Well, no. I don’t like Kick-Ass personally, but it’s a very successful graphics novel that also resulted in a successful movie. This is incredibly rare and difficult to achieve. If you aim to start with a “great work” of the past and change some stuff around to make it modern, it’s highly unlikely that you’ll replicate the success of Kick-Ass.
If by “embarassing” you mean “will lower your status in the eyes of a certain demographic, whose cooperation you need in order to achieve your goals”,
By “embarrassing” I mean that it’ll be embarrassingly badly written.
If you aim to start with a “great work” of the past and change some stuff around to make it modern, it’s highly unlikely that you’ll replicate the success of Kick-Ass.
Yes, but that shouldn’t stop one from doing everything in one’s power, as a writer, to achieve it.
By “embarrassing” I mean that it’ll be embarrassingly badly written.
The whole point of the exercise is to write better than the original. Again, if it’s badly written, it’s a failure, no matter how otherwise “modernized” it is. Whether the failure feels embarassing or not to the writer is utterly irrelevant; what matters is that they failed, when rationalists should win.
You: “Let’s work together and, as an exercise, take a famous classic work and rewrite it as a better one”
I: “This is a naive and ill-founded proposal that has near-zero chance of success. You don’t seem to understand what made past great works great, or what it takes to make a successful work of literature today. Most likely you’ll end up with an embarrasingly badly written piece of pastiche”.
You: “The whole point is to be better than the original! Rationalists should win! Try harder! If what you say happens, that just means I haven’t achieved my goal.”
… yes, it does? What does this pronouncement have to do with anything I’ve said? Why are you just repeating empty slogans?
I think Anatoly’s point is just that this project is will involve an absolutely massive expenditure of time and effort, while being overwhelmingly likely to fail. In general, the combination of these two situations is very good reason not to do something, especially when there’s no clear payoff.
For my part, I also don’t think it’s true that LWers are well equipped to handle this sort of project. LW tends to attract comp-sci, math, physics, bio, engineering type people. It also tends to specifically drive away history, literature, art history, english type people. The reaction to philosophy is mixed at best. If GRE scores represent anything to do with writing ability, this means that LW is a community that generally selects against writing talent. And writing talent is just a minimum condition on writing good literature. It’s not close to sufficient. Almost everyone who spends their entire lives perfecting their writing and trying to write great literature fails completely.
It also tends to specifically drive away history, literature, art history, english type people.
The causes of that, and how to counteract them, would be a topic very much worth investigating. We cannot get by on matter-oriented skills alone.
will involve an absolutely massive expenditure of time and effort
Well, yes. I´m just beginning to set the foundations and attempting to gather interested, like-minded people. The easy part is to look at an old book and go
where is there here room for improvement?
what techniques and methods in this book wouldn’t a modern writer be able to get away with? unless already high-status or explicitly homaging older works?
A typical example would be to switch from an Omniscient Narrator who judges characters for the reader, to a narrator that doesn’t spell things out so much, while also avoiding the alienating extremes of a Cameraman Narrator who only shows the externalities of actions. Third Person POV narration seems to be the modern standard, with character thoughts referenced to obliquely (instead of “‘She´ll kill me!’ she thought”, use “She would kill her!”) so as to get past the subconscious separation between reader and character, and make the story more immersive.
Another would be to take old stories that used to follow Random Event Plots and Nested Stories and shave off anything extraneous to whatever the tale´s “about”. Part One of Don Quixote had lots of little stories and backstories in it that had nothing to do with the plot, the themes, or the message (heck, sometimes they sort of undermined it; a pastoral fantasy in a chivalry lampoon?), and which didn’t even serve the purpose of being allegories or reflections of it, and which might have been better off as separate stuff. Many nineteenth century Doorstoppers were compilations of serialized works where the author was paid by the word, encouraging them to verbosity and filler.
when there’s no clear payoff
There is; fun, and improvement of writing and critical skills, and all the secondary skills that go with that. There is also focus; an interesting, challenging goal, with clearly-set parameters, and with all the usual facilities of fanfiction.
There’s already a bit of a tradition of writing fanfiction of classics (from the Aeneid, to Avellaneda’s Quixote, to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies), and there’s a bit of a tradition in the fanfiction community of writing fics that change something about the original that audiences found unsatisfactory, and “Better Than Cannon” is not all that uncommon a praise.
The only thing about this project that is novel and dangerous and exciting is that, instead of starting from works that come under heavy fire for their flows, one starts from works that are so sanctified and canonized as to be nigh-untouchable. Setting out to “improve” them is a twofold task:
Determining what, precisely is great about them, why we would want to keep them around, why they would be worth the effort of reading by new readers.
Getting rid of whatever gets in the way of that greatness, of conveying whatever the work is meant to convey.
This optimization process, and its defiance of blind faith, bias, and halo effects, is gratifying in itself, and very much in the spirit of Less Wrong. Failure, at first, is, of course, inevitable, as part of the process called deliberate practice.
Almost everyone who spends their entire lives perfecting their writing and trying to write great literature fails completely.
Irrelevant; we’re not trying to write new great literature; we’re just updating stuff that’s allegedly (allegedly) great.
LW is a community that generally selects against writing talent.
I have a wonderful answer for this that my margins of time are too narrow to contain right now. I’ll get back to you on this in July, when I’m done with finals.
Like Kick-Ass, huh? Its authors certainly don’t seem to treat it (or its audience) with much respect. Or like, for that matter, Don Quixote itself (it was supposed to be a silly comedy and a lampoon of chivalry books, not the Best Novel Ever it’s become… well, Part I was; part II takes itself more seriously).
The goal is to use modern, more sophisticated tools to make something better than the original. If your result is a “silly-looking, embarrassing pastiche of no lasting value”, you’ve failed in your task as a writer, and need to try harder. And, of course, “silly-looking” is a subjective qualifier, but it’s the job of a good writer to properly anticipate audience reactions; I’d even say it’s their main job. If by “embarassing” you mean “will lower your status in the eyes of a certain demographic, whose cooperation you need in order to achieve your goals”, then, yes, this is a crucial factor that should be accounted for, and pre-empted.
To sum it up, if the result is a “silly-looking, embarrassing pastiche of no lasting value”, you need to try harder, because you weren’t doing your job properly.
But that’s just as I was saying: Don Quixote remains on the list of Great Works (there is no “best novel ever”) because new generations find it relevant even as their tastes and understanding shift. To the contemporary audience Part I was LOL-grade funny and to modern readers it’s much more tragic; this is probably because we’ve taught ourselves to empathize much more strongly with someone being ridiculed than people in the 17th century (note: this and not the novel’s age! Gargantua and Pantagruel is 100 years older and reads today exactly as the satire it was then, w/o accumulating gravitas). But the novel always supported both points of view; if it didn’t, we’d have stopped reading it. There’s any number of satirical texts from the same era that are no longer widely read because to us they would just seem stupidly cruel, with no high tragedy involved.
Well, no. I don’t like Kick-Ass personally, but it’s a very successful graphics novel that also resulted in a successful movie. This is incredibly rare and difficult to achieve. If you aim to start with a “great work” of the past and change some stuff around to make it modern, it’s highly unlikely that you’ll replicate the success of Kick-Ass.
By “embarrassing” I mean that it’ll be embarrassingly badly written.
Yes, but that shouldn’t stop one from doing everything in one’s power, as a writer, to achieve it.
The whole point of the exercise is to write better than the original. Again, if it’s badly written, it’s a failure, no matter how otherwise “modernized” it is. Whether the failure feels embarassing or not to the writer is utterly irrelevant; what matters is that they failed, when rationalists should win.
This conversation is bizarre.
You: “Let’s work together and, as an exercise, take a famous classic work and rewrite it as a better one”
I: “This is a naive and ill-founded proposal that has near-zero chance of success. You don’t seem to understand what made past great works great, or what it takes to make a successful work of literature today. Most likely you’ll end up with an embarrasingly badly written piece of pastiche”.
You: “The whole point is to be better than the original! Rationalists should win! Try harder! If what you say happens, that just means I haven’t achieved my goal.”
… yes, it does? What does this pronouncement have to do with anything I’ve said? Why are you just repeating empty slogans?
That part is new. Very well, let us assume, for the sake of argument, that I don’t. Enlighten us.
Woe! “Rationalists should win” is an empty slogan now?
I think Anatoly’s point is just that this project is will involve an absolutely massive expenditure of time and effort, while being overwhelmingly likely to fail. In general, the combination of these two situations is very good reason not to do something, especially when there’s no clear payoff.
For my part, I also don’t think it’s true that LWers are well equipped to handle this sort of project. LW tends to attract comp-sci, math, physics, bio, engineering type people. It also tends to specifically drive away history, literature, art history, english type people. The reaction to philosophy is mixed at best. If GRE scores represent anything to do with writing ability, this means that LW is a community that generally selects against writing talent. And writing talent is just a minimum condition on writing good literature. It’s not close to sufficient. Almost everyone who spends their entire lives perfecting their writing and trying to write great literature fails completely.
The causes of that, and how to counteract them, would be a topic very much worth investigating. We cannot get by on matter-oriented skills alone.
Well, yes. I´m just beginning to set the foundations and attempting to gather interested, like-minded people. The easy part is to look at an old book and go
where is there here room for improvement?
what techniques and methods in this book wouldn’t a modern writer be able to get away with? unless already high-status or explicitly homaging older works?
A typical example would be to switch from an Omniscient Narrator who judges characters for the reader, to a narrator that doesn’t spell things out so much, while also avoiding the alienating extremes of a Cameraman Narrator who only shows the externalities of actions. Third Person POV narration seems to be the modern standard, with character thoughts referenced to obliquely (instead of “‘She´ll kill me!’ she thought”, use “She would kill her!”) so as to get past the subconscious separation between reader and character, and make the story more immersive.
Another would be to take old stories that used to follow Random Event Plots and Nested Stories and shave off anything extraneous to whatever the tale´s “about”. Part One of Don Quixote had lots of little stories and backstories in it that had nothing to do with the plot, the themes, or the message (heck, sometimes they sort of undermined it; a pastoral fantasy in a chivalry lampoon?), and which didn’t even serve the purpose of being allegories or reflections of it, and which might have been better off as separate stuff. Many nineteenth century Doorstoppers were compilations of serialized works where the author was paid by the word, encouraging them to verbosity and filler.
There is; fun, and improvement of writing and critical skills, and all the secondary skills that go with that. There is also focus; an interesting, challenging goal, with clearly-set parameters, and with all the usual facilities of fanfiction.
There’s already a bit of a tradition of writing fanfiction of classics (from the Aeneid, to Avellaneda’s Quixote, to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies), and there’s a bit of a tradition in the fanfiction community of writing fics that change something about the original that audiences found unsatisfactory, and “Better Than Cannon” is not all that uncommon a praise.
The only thing about this project that is novel and dangerous and exciting is that, instead of starting from works that come under heavy fire for their flows, one starts from works that are so sanctified and canonized as to be nigh-untouchable. Setting out to “improve” them is a twofold task:
Determining what, precisely is great about them, why we would want to keep them around, why they would be worth the effort of reading by new readers.
Getting rid of whatever gets in the way of that greatness, of conveying whatever the work is meant to convey.
This optimization process, and its defiance of blind faith, bias, and halo effects, is gratifying in itself, and very much in the spirit of Less Wrong. Failure, at first, is, of course, inevitable, as part of the process called deliberate practice.
Irrelevant; we’re not trying to write new great literature; we’re just updating stuff that’s allegedly (allegedly) great.
Are you conflating academic interest in the history of the arts with proficiency of creative writing skills? More importantly, what is this “talent” you are talking about?
What are the ‘modern, more sophisticated tools’? I think that’s one of the things I don’t see from your post.
I have a wonderful answer for this that my margins of time are too narrow to contain right now. I’ll get back to you on this in July, when I’m done with finals.