Wordsmithing Strata

August 6, 2008 at 2:39 pm (writing)

I always enjoyed storytelling, though that is not to say I always enjoyed writing. Now that I do, I find myself looking back over my written word’s darker ages and finding them easily divisible into discrete stages. People who enjoy or teach writing are people I’ve often hung around (or married), and so I thought I would enumerate those stages here. I have no idea if this represents every human’s journey or just my own, and a part of me fears that I am sadly behind my peers’ curve of skill development. Still, here is how I see myself developing as an amateur writer without education beyond the general undergrad requirements.

Competence

I just write what it seems like I’m expected to write. Maybe I’m just jotting down my thoughts, or maybe I’m feebly emulating a style I’ve seen elsewhere. I don’t feel like writing is a strength or a weakness — just a necessary chore of life. This represents my entire life up until my senior year of high school.

Elaboration/Qualification

For the first time, as I start college, I feel like I could be good at writing some day. I get enthusiastic about it, and I get zealous about expanding my vocabulary (and exercising it at every chance!). My language gets flowery, and my style comes across as overambitious and naive. Adverbs are my best friends. My first drafts always seem to be exactly what I want, so I hardly ever revise.

Cohesion

For the first half of my twenties, the scope of my enthusiasm widens from decorating my  paragraphs to constructing a solid essay. I begin to pay much more attention to how sentences, paragraphs, and sections are interdependent with one another. The flowery language is still there, but it seems deceptively more appropriate now that I’m becoming more skilled at weaving threads of thought that develop and complement one another. First drafts still rule.

Concision

“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” My zeal for providing context to support the coherency of my thoughts takes over. By the second half of my twenties, verbosity has become a trademark of my writing to a fault: no one wants to read what I write, because it’s always a novel. Worse, verbosity can itself alter the content of the message by creating an impression of opacity, arrogance, or intransigence. I start to recognize brevity as an irreducible Good, and I endeavor to pare down my writing. But such pruning comes only at great pain, as everything I redact feels precious to me.

Essence

In my late twenties, wordiness is only occasionally a problem, and mostly relegated to creative fiction. In my everyday personal and professional writing, I am able to communicate a more rich and coherent stream of thought, even using artful decoration, using few words and simple sentence structure. I often find myself chucking a draft and starting over, having thoroughly considered my message and having distilled it down to its most potent essence. Writing haiku is easier.

The Next Stage

I have a lot left to learn. What will it be? Writing pedagogues, please help me along. :)

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A Code Monkey Lets it Ride on 22

July 7, 2008 at 8:39 pm (babbling, computers, programming)

There are certain moments in programming that make it really satisfying. There are eureka moments, learning moments, and finally-fixed-that-elusive-bug moments. And then sometimes there are spontaneous moments of creation, like watching a thousand shards of crystal fall together into an equisite vase.

There are several different schools of thought when it comes to how one should engineer code. The traditional, old-school outlook is to write out a design on paper first (probably done by a dedicated software architect). Then that design would be divided up, and each piece given to a low-level programmer (a true code monkey) who would then translate his piece into working code.

The currently fashionable, agile (or rather Agile) schools of thought favor an iterative design. Start with something really simple and small, but get that little atom of functionality working as soon as possible. Then, taking many small steps, add more atoms of working functionality, refactoring what’s already written, until the whole resembles the desired outcome, even if you don’t know exactly what the desired outcome is supposed to look right. 

It’s like constructing a skyscraper: you build a foundation first, then a skeleton of a building, then flesh it out with brick and mortar, one story at a time, building upward.

I don’t think anyone advocates visualizing an entire design and coding the whole thing in one, huge step. The process is error-prone, there’s nothing to show the users until the whole construction is complete and debugged, and there’s little flexibility for improving the design when something new is discovered. It’s like building all parts of all stories of the skyscraper simultaneously. There’s nothing in the mechanics of computer programming that naturally discourages you from doing this, though, in the way that Earth’s gravity naturally discourages building an entire skyscraper in one step. Programming happens in the microgravity of space — all the myriad pieces can float uselessly beside one another until the last connection is made.

But sometimes this rather haphazard approach feels like the natural one. Sometimes an entire design occurs to you all in one flash. With no discoveries assumed to be made during the building process, turning the design into working code suddenly feels like a tedious process. You’re impatient to get it behind you so you can move on to the next cool challenge. When this happens, all of those prudent schools of software design — new and old — become such a drag: drawing out a paper design ahead of time seems like artifact overkill, agile methods seems like taking baby steps when you’re ready for adult leaps, and test-driven development seems like belaboring a question that’s already been answered.

But in the same way that the mental image of crystal shards coming together in one moment to form a perfect vase is cool, writing the code that way feels cool. So you try it anyway.

Sometimes you fail. You work for hours, only to realize you made a flawed assumption from the beginning, and the code you’ve written is useless — a twitching lump of tissue and muscle in Dr. Frankenstein’s reanimation lab. You’re devastated. Less so by the fact that your beloved creation has to be abandoned, and more so because you’re now faced with no choice but to do proceed slowly and prudently, the boring way.

But other times you win. Big. Sometimes the gamble pays off, and you accomplish in hours what would have taken you days otherwise. You feel a rush from your level of accomplishment spiking at tenfold of normal. You’ve kicked ass. And you want to do it again. Do you try?

Your lucky number at the roulette table just won you a month’s salary in one spin. Do you walk away from the table, or bet your winnings on the same number again?

Here I sit this Monday morning, staring at my code. Green and amber typography on a black canvas. I’m sipping my coffee and pondering that gambler’s choice.

But there really isn’t a choice, is there? I open a new source file, roll the dice, and type like mad…

[title reference]

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Choice vs. Smart Choice

November 21, 2006 at 1:20 pm (business, design, ui)

Joel on Software: Choices = Headaches

THANK you. Joel succinctly and illustratively makes a point with which I agree wholeheartedly: too many choices are a bad thing.

Around the workplace, I’m an outspoken advocate of individual choice — particularly with respect to things like our physical work environment, the hours we work (i.e. flex time), and our individual hardware and software tools. That’s because, historically, we’ve had little or no choice. Some choice is better than no choice. Things are better, and improving all the time, step by step. But we still exist somewhere near the conservative extreme of the spectrum, and so I still feel compelled to advocate choice.

On the opposite extreme of the spectrum is the kind of thing Joel is talking about. Maybe software design and office management are apples and oranges to you, but ultimately their aim is asking the same question, “what is your preference?”

To augment Joel’s point, think of it like this: each of us is actually a manager of at least one employee: a computer. We make requests of our computers and ask them to perform duties: show me my email, let me write some code, send this file to Bob.

A computer program that offers too much choice is like an employee who can’t think for himself, who requires micromanagement and babysitting.

Imagine if my supervisor came by and asked me to write an Issue Paper for the board. What if I answered his request with a list of questions of my own?

  1. What should the subject matter of the paper be?
  2. How many paragraphs should the paper contain?
  3. How many footnotes?
  4. Should I use MLA-style reference citations?
  5. Should I include an executive summary?
  6. If I use the word “color,” would you prefer I used the British spelling (“colour”)?
  7. Should I use straight quotation marks or curly ones?

At least the first question started to touch on discussion that was relevant given the context. Even though I would deserve to be laughed at after my barrage of irrelevancy, Chris would probably be nice and give me some direction that would lead to greater self-sufficiency in me. Either that, or he would acquiesce and exhaustively answer all of my questions, and when the paper is done he would realize that having me there to help him really didn’t save him much time or effort. He would realize that I really hadn’t put any thought into helping him make a smart choice — I had only catalogued an exhaustive list of every choice, relevant or not, smart or not.

That’s what it feels like to use software that offers too many choices. That’s what it feels like whenever I’m trying to get something done in Windows or KDE, or when I want to make an Infragistics control just do something simple (they can do powerful things, but they can’t do anything simply).

What’s the alternative? An employee who takes some initiative, who does some of the smart thinking, independently. Software that takes some initiative, that does some of the smart thinking, independently.

I don’t need a hundred choices as long as I’m given the smartest three that make sense given what I’m trying to do. Think the computer can’t possibly be so helpful? Of course it can! If Joel’s example wasn’t enough, I’d be glad to show you how Windows’ numerous and partially-but-not-entirely redundant configuration panels for my wife’s WiFi card could be consolidated into a single panel.

If this is starting to sound too negative, then here’s the positive: let’s take some initiative and do some of the smart thinking every time we design a piece of software. Let’s shoot for making software products that are as valuable as independently thinking employees. And let’s advocate greater choice and diversity in the workplace, too, so programmers whose cup of tea is not micromanaging and babysitting the computers they employ can unleash even greater productivity.

[Insert video clip of the British parliament pounding their desks and shouting "Hear, hear!"]

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Your Story Needs a Third Act.

January 22, 2006 at 10:39 pm (movies, review, writing)

Friends warned me about the twist in The Village. One went as far as to say, “It’s a great movie up until the scene involving the shed. Once you get to that point the whole thing just plummets downhill.” Others were more positive, but it was clear going in that the key plot twist either makes or breaks this film. I expected something that would undermine the premise of the movie thus far, and that’s what I got; that’s what plot twists do, after all.

The plot twist unfolded, and in its unfolding placed all of the main characters on a knife edge. Ambiguous, moral decisions full of far-reaching consequences suddenly needed making. “This is a great movie,” I said to myself. “What a challenge of a pressure cooker to put these interesting characters into.”

And then the movie suddenly ended.

There’s a certain writing criticism I’ve heard thrown about so much I consider it cliché: “Your story doesn’t have a third act.” I’m guessing M. Night Shayamalan has heard that a time or two.

Whether you want to call it the supernatural, or the science-fictiony, or the fantastic, The Village’s story is driven by the involvement of beings and rules that don’t exist in real life. That fresh and creative universe is part of what gets people like me into science fiction and fantasy. But after the honeymoon is over, after the novelty of the universe itself wears off, what keeps the story interesting?

The third act.

Shayamalan had a fantastic first two acts. He introduced compelling characters, and through the supernatural plot devices set them on trajectories where their subsequent decisions or (potential) epiphanies could change the world for everyone concerned. Where morality and altruism lie became a really sticky question.

The purpose of the made-up worlds of science fiction and fantasy, I believe, is to provide a fresh and interesting mechanism through which we experience the very real feelings and motivations and difficult choices faced by the humans in the story (whether they are said to be human or not). Sci-fi and fantasy are a different and interesting language, but they still have to say something.

Shayamalan cut the movie off before cathartic revelation could be felt by the characters, before motivations at odds could be explored, before difficult choices could be made. The story had no denouement, and so the story felt devalued.

I actually enjoyed The Village, but don’t care ever to see it again. I already know the plot twist, and aside from the purely visceral, trademark thrill and dread of Shayamalan’s films, I have absolutely no reason to watch the movie again. I already know the plot twist. I already get the idea, but since there was no exploration of the idea, there’s nothing to review, no reason to watch the plot twist again.

So if my friend who made the comment about the shed scene is reading, I have this to say: I agree with you. I’ll look back on the movie as a downhill plummet. Where we disagree is simply why and at what point that plummet happens.

I have to add a postscript disclaimer, though. I experimented with doing exactly the same thing in one of my own stories. My goal was to create a handful of characters, define them, their pasts, and their motivations. I gave their conflicting trajectories to the reader, and at the key moment ended the story. How the trajectories intersect is a question left up to the speculation of the reader. There was no third act.

So maybe that was Shayamalan’s idea, too: purposefully to leave off the third act as an experiment in storytelling.

Personally, I’d rather have seen the questions attacked and chewed on, even if not answered. The superficial daydreaming of science fiction and fantasy is justified and by the meaty questions of humanity explored at the core of the story. To run a metaphor into the ground, The Village was a flimsy vegetarian story.

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Help

July 9, 2005 at 10:44 pm (god, tal)

Not long ago I listened to an episode of This American Life in which the subject of one of the stories described personal independence as an intermediate stage of maturity. When we come into the world, so he says, our dependence on those around us is so obviously necessary that we welcome it readily. As we grow up, we fight for our independence in the world — the ability to stand on our own two feet, to be self-sufficient. For no other people in the world is this so culturally ingrained as for Americans. But, so he says, what so many fail to recognize is the stage beyond independence: interdependence. When we reach that stage of maturity, we recognize our place within our community, within our society, and we accept both our independent contribution to and our dependent need for that larger whole.

It’s a matter of humility, I think.

I think that guy’s perspective is debatable. “Maturity” is such a slippery word. For one person, maturity may imply a struggle to overcome his codependent tendencies; for another person, maturity may mean setting aside the need to stand alone in all things. Perhaps I see balance as the key to maturity: know when to hold them, know when to fold them.

Regardless, what prompted me to write this was my own moment of weakness. In that moment, a deep instinct to ask God for help surfaced. And in the same moment another instinct — not quite as deep — shushed the first instinct, insisting that asking for help meant I was shirking my own responsibility.

God, can you help me? Sure, he could, but then he’d be living my life for me, doing all the things I should be learning to do myself. I made this bed, now I have to lie in it.

And I thought of that radio man’s words, saying that interdependence is the next stage of maturity. I think I can agree fully with him when I distill his words into these: that recognizing our need in addition to our capability is the road to wisdom.

So I felt okay with asking God for help, because surely he’s proud of me for what I can do without asking, too.

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The Color of Everything

January 28, 2005 at 10:53 pm (babbling, brain, psychology)

A friend just sent me a link on synesthesia. I definitely fall into the numbers-having-colors category. For example, two has been yellow, three has been green, and four has been red ever since I learned to count. 4,196 is black, red, and grey (and all of those colors get more intense if you remove the comma; they tend to dilute numbers). 9 is also a shade of red, and 1 is dark grey (varying in shade depending on context) while 6 is black. However, 239857 when taken together is a lightish blue, despite its constituent digits — the red of the 9 gets drowned out completely by everyone else. 8’s are yellow, 5’s are brown, 7’s are grey with a hint of pale blue. The constant e (~2.718), so commonly used interest computations in accounting, is appropriately a disturbing, disorienting combination of its constituent yellows and greys. One of the reasons π is my favorite number is because it’s so Christmasy (the 1 after the decimal is nearly invisible to me).

Letters also have color for me, as do words (e.g. “letters” as a word is a light, tannish fleshtone despite the strong red and black of the r and t’s, respectively). Vowels are highly saturated, bright colors, while consonants are duller but have subtler variations in value. And so on.

Music doesn’t have color or imagery for me, but it has movement — more precisely, I associate it with tactile sensations. I often find myself doing things with my hands when I listen to music alone. Not just drumming my fingers or “playing” along, but just doing weird things that it looks like an autistic person might do. And, like the unconventional behaviors of autism, I find such movements extremely satisfying/comforting.

Words, both written and spoken, also elicit a tactile response in me. Clavier, incommunicably, Gothic, and Esgalduin are all very tactilely pleasing words to me. It’s hard to generalize what will make a word feel good to me, but it almost always has to have a non-aspirated glottal consonant in it, and I happen not to aspirate any of the consonants in those words.

Okay, I think I’ve beaten this topic to absurdity now (despite the fact that I could write much more). Maybe I should actually read more than the first paragraph of that web page, just in case it says something like “people who have this thing are really, really screwed.”

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Why I Love Slick Computers

January 24, 2005 at 10:57 pm (computers, design)

“NeXT was one of the only computers I’ve ever been around where elegance of design was really important to the product, and it attracted the strangest kind of hybrid which was kind of like ‘Unix Weenies by Armani.’”—John Perry Barlow, Co-founder of the EFF

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Historical Cinema Roundup

January 21, 2005 at 11:00 pm (history, movies)

Now that The Day After Tomorrow is rapidly fading into obscurity, I think perhaps we have experienced the final echo of a wave of disaster movies that started with Independence Day in 1996. Hollywood’s desire to hop on the bandwagon eclipsed (by far) its creativity and produced results that still make me snigger. Remember when Volcano and Dante’s Peak came out within months of one another? And then Armageddon and Deep Impact did similarly, as Horatio might say, follow hard upon? Did we really need two volcano movies in one year, or two planet-killer asteroid movies? I’ll be glad to see the disaster movie genre fade back into the silent impotence of unfashionability.

Yet with the 2000 release of Gladiator I believe another trend was kicked off: the historical epic. This is a sub-genre I define by three elements: a story set in a world that doesn’t exist anymore (but once did), iconic heroism, and gratuitous violence. Historical epics aren’t new; Ben Hur was exactly as popular in the Academy’s eyes as Titanic and Return of the King. But not since the 60’s have we seen the entertainment industry crank out historical epics with such frequency or budgetary backing. A few examples of films to ride the latest wave include Alexander, King Arthur, The Last Samurai, Troy (which was awesome), Helen of Troy (truer to Homer, yet crappy), and even The Passion of the Christ (it fits my criteria, after all). I somehow want to include Braveheart in that list, but it was five years too early. Perhaps its success was the prime mover of the trend to follow.

It’s obvious I’m discussing this trend with a streak of cynicism, but in truth I have to confess that I adore the sub-genre of the historical epic. I adore history itself, so any attempt to bring back to life dead cultures is exactly my cup of tea. I’m still dying to see my Gilgamesh movie made, after all. :)

Today I just found out that there are not one, but two Beowulf movies on the way. I’m torn between excited giddiness and cynicism. Much as I want to see these movies, I’m starting to get afraid that the historical epic genre has already squeezed out whatever goodness it was going to produce. Some of that goodness was no doubt commandeered by Lord of the Rings, which falls into the historical epic category in every way except for its fictional world. Robert Zemekis is directing one of the Beowulf movies, and I like him, but at the same time I’m afraid he’ll make it into an uplifting, feel-good movie (complemented by Alan Silvestri’s touching piano themes) in the vein of Forrest Gump or Contact: “Run, Hrothgar, Run!”

So this post is a plea to Hollywood — nay, a prayer to whatever supernatural force inspires filmmakers — that the historical epic trend continue in epic volume and frequency, but that it also maintain quality. Make more Troys, and fewer Alexanders. As a history nut and film nut wrapped up in one, let me have my cake and eat it, too!

 

   

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Sarah’s Anachronisms

January 19, 2005 at 11:02 pm (books, god, history, osc, religion)

In a fit of “I wish there were a book seductive enough for me to lose myself in it for a few days” I started browsing the web site of my favorite author in the world, Orson Scott Card, and came upon Sarah.

I’m already disappointed in some ways. Abram, the father of Monotheism as we know it in the West, is introduced as a young man whose theology already has a modern ring. God has title but no name, is the only true God, and in every way seems to deviate from the traditions of the day. In short, Abram’s God is already The God of Abraham, right from the get-go.

While such details are at best muddied as they are carried through vast stretches of time to our present day, Thomas Cahill, an historian whom I have come to regard as eminently credible, conjectures that Abram’s concept of God wasn’t a quantum leap from Mespotamian polytheism but an evolutionary increment. Abram probably grew up with the household gods of his Sumerian cultural heritage. His idea of monotheism was probably a preferential variation on the polytheistic theme of his environment. Abram likely subscribed to an image of God that more closely resembled an especially glorified Baal (or perhaps even Enlil) rather than the image of biblical Yaweh. The latter image, with which we are intimately familiar in this day and age, would not yet evolve for a matter of centuries to come from Abram’s point of view. Abram may even have included other, minor gods in his worship.

Such conjectures are blasphemous when considered in the context of one who is faithful in this day and age, looking back to Abram as one of the Fathers of his religion. But such conjectures are historically the most reasonable ones we can draw. Card, as a faithful Mormon, seems to have opted to write in the context of faith, spurning historical sensibilities.

Furthermore, Card seems to write all of his characters, particularly the women, from a very individualistic point of view. One of the women is even called a “dreamer,” employing the same touchy-feely, “golly gee, what if?” connotations that contemporaries would infer. Being a “dreamer” is all well and good, and a great way to contrast that female character against the young Sarai. But from everything I’ve read about ancient Mesopotamia, such personalities simply hadn’t evolved yet. Cahill argues this point so strongly that it is the very main idea of his book “The Gifts of the Jews”: the emergence of Jewish culture endowed Western Civilization and eventually the world with Individualism and progressive thinking, as opposed to the collective, fatalistic, cyclical thinking which dominated Abram’s time. For every character to have such strong, progressive, individual minds strikes me as much a cultural anachronism as if the Civil Rights movement had been transplanted to some time B.C. Ironically, Card’s compelling character writing, which vaults his Ender books to being my very favorites, only serves to bring this story down. It’s just the wrong place, the wrong time. Again, I get the impression that Card has spurned history.

And I find this so disappointing because I don’t think any of it was necessary. I believe history is like science: it need not preclude faith. And like science fiction, history need not preclude compelling fiction, either. And I believe that because, perhaps more than any other abstract notion, I believe that any rejection of Truth as we know it is harmful; only through embracing what we have come to learn through our best methods can we move on. Science tells us that there were dinosaurs living on Earth no more recently than sixty-five million years ago. If, as some would claim is religious truth, the earth was only created about six thousand years ago, then what the earth tells us about dinosaurs is all a big lie. Is it at all enlightening to embrace a pattern of faith in which God lies? I see this issue of historical truth in the same way. When is it ever enlightening to assume that the truth as we know it is a lie?

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Computer Elitism and the Clash of the Titans

December 5, 2004 at 11:39 pm (computers, education, mac, mythology)

Computer elitism annoys me. Everyone has some skill they could choose to lord over other people. But electricians and plumbers don’t have this going on. Maybe auto mechanics do a little bit. But no other technical service worker can match an IT worker’s clichéd arrogance. It’s a stereotype that’s quickly grown up around the field and for the most part it’s accurate.

Within the more arcane areas of computer work (those areas set aside for people with Computer Science degrees instead of Computer Information Systems or what have you) the elitism is even more rampant. Collectively, we don’t just look down on the rest of the world for their technical infancy, we look down on the other computer people, too.

I’m reminded of a conversation I had in college with a fellow Comp Sci. He was telling me about how he was taking a VB class in the CIS department just for elective credit and giggles. “They don’t even know how to write a recursive function!” he told me. Now, it’s true, every programmer should be able to wield recursion with the finesse of a fencer with his foil. But recursion isn’t an intuitive technique; it’s as if the fencer were using his left hand. Mastery of recursion actually takes quite a bit of Zen meditation. Eventually you can levitate four, even five feet off the ground while working out the base case of the function. But I digress.

My driving passions in computing are quite different from those of most other computer people I’ve met. If I were going to go to grad school, I’d specialize in either Artificial Intelligence or user interface design. For me, their applications are two sides of the same coin: removing communicative barriers between the brain of a human and the brain of a computer.

I want to be the Prometheus of computing, defiantly giving the proverbial gift of fire to the mortal people of the world, much to the elitist chagrin of my peers. Were I a more career-oriented individual, I’d strive to reshape the direction of computing development so that everyone can have the confidence and power over computers that a (highly metaphorical) Titan like me already has.

This is exactly why I use a Mac: both the hardware and software design have the fewest communicative barriers between my thoughts and the electronic bits. I can make it do exactly what I want a computer to do with minimal extraneous thought. In a small way, it’s the closest I can get to having true telekinesis.

The irony is that I do sometimes take elitist pleasure in my Mac use. I think most of us have probably met those over-zealous Mac users of the world. My zeal has calmed but, not-so-secretly, I still don’t understand why anyone without a hole in the head would deliberately use a Windows system.

The further irony is the implicit elitism in the Prometheus analogy: in order to deliver the power of the gods to humanity, I must consider myself a god to begin with.

So in conclusion, you peons, don’t get in my way or you shall be totally pwned by my l337 hax0ring.

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