Umbran said:
Well, to be honest whether you buy it or not matters little. Our beliefs have little ipact on what might actually be happening to GRRM.
Ditto. I certainly hope that me being annoyed with him isn't slowing him down, but then, I don't really see how it could be, unless I'm generating some kind of intense karmic feedback loop.
[sarcasm] Ooh. Credentials. That makes you so much of an expert that I must obviously be wrong.[/sarcasm]
Wellllll.... kinda, yeah. I noticed that none of the people saying "You can't hurry it, it's an art, it has to take time to be done right" have ever mentioned writing and selling much fiction themselves -- they might have done so, but I've never seen them mention it.
If I to talk about how to get my taxes done, I go to somebody who does taxes professionally. If I want to talk about how I should get my hair cut, I go to somebody who cuts hair professionally. If you want to talk about writing, you apparently say, "Oh, it can't be rushed, it's an art," and then fire shots at somebody who has sold stuff professionally.
I don't do it for a living. I haven't sold a novel. In the pro-writing world, I am a tiny tiny fish. That said, I've got a lot more experience at it than you do, so yes, essentially, relative to you, I am an expert, and you are wrong.
There are other pro writers around here, many of whom are pretty big fish. They're welcome to come tell me that I'm full of it.
Um, that is so condescending to pretty much every artist in the world that I have to wonder about whether you actually thought about it before you wrote it down. Do you actualy want to say that artists don't have discipline, don't practice, don't work on their arts daily? I buy that less than you buy my statement. Sorry.
Perhaps I should restate.
If you want to do it for sheer love of what you're doing, it's an art. An art doesn't have to have any limitations or restrictions. It has no timelines, no requirements, and nobody holds you accountable.
If you want to do it in order to get paid -- even if you do love doing it -- then it's a craft. If you're a craftsman, rather than an artist, you don't have the option of saying, "Oh, I cannot create today, I do not feel inspired," any more than you could decide not to go to your computer programming job because "The Javascript, she is not within me today, I cannot summon the fiery essence of my script-coding genius." You get up. You do it. Sometimes it's hard. Sometimes you'd rather not. But you do it anyway.
A craftsman may or may not be an artist. An artist may or may not be a craftsman. A man who makes really good tables that are cold and logical and aeshetically empty is a craftsman but not an artist. A man who paints once every few months with rabid intensity and then stops when the painting is halfway finished and goes on to do something else is an artist but not a craftsman. Any good professional writer should be
both.
It's an
utterly semantic argument, and I apologize for being vague on it. It's one that many writer-types have heard, but saying it out of context like that is less than helpful. It came about as an attempt by some writers to nip a lot of self-important wannabe writer complaints in the bud. The wannabe-writers were complaining about stupid stuff -- "Every time I start one story, another one just comes into my head, and I have to go do that one instead, because I have to follow my art," or "Every time I get the plot nailed down, my character does something I didn't expect, and I have to change everything to let her do what she wants, because I have to be true to my art."
All of that stuff happens to writers, no matter how skilled they are. The difference is that the writer who thinks of himself as a craftsman is more likely to have the discipline to continue working despite his sudden random changes in inclination.
So: Writing is not an art. It is a craft. Art may come out of that craft, but saying that the book "takes as long as it takes" is insulting to the writers who meet their deadlines and get their stuff produced in a timely fashion.
Feh. It's not like I'm not gonna read the next one when it comes out. I still want it. I'm just annoyed that it's taking this long, and I don't intend to let GRRM off the hook with some "oh, the muse hasn't gifted him with the next vision yet" excuse.
