Reply to thread

Message

<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9071666" data-attributes="member: 42582">This isn't my experience. I don't know what examples you have in mind - if you've shared one (or some) I apologise that I don't recall it/them.What you quote JRRT as writing is &quot;What really happens is that the story-maker proves a successful &quot;sub-creator.&quot; He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is &quot;true:&quot; it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside.&quot;This does not assert, nor even imply, that the author should have in mind the laws of that world. It's quite consistent, for instance, with the view - which seems to me to have been JRRT's view - that careful, sincere creation will manifest laws of which the the author is not even aware. Shippey discusses examples of this in JRRT's own work and reflection on his own work.The idea that careful, sincere creation will manifest laws follows from further, ultimately theological, beliefs about the nature of humans and their relationship to and place in &quot;creation&quot;.The passage you've quoted doesn't suggest this. It suggests that a successful story-maker creates a &quot;secondary&quot;, imagined world that accords with its own laws. But he says nothing about where the laws come from, nor what (if anything) their role is in creation. I entirely agree with [USER=56488]@gban007[/USER] that JRRT is describing a goal, not a technique. And as [USER=56488]@gban007[/USER] has posted, and as Shippey talks about, JRRT's own methods of authorship did not consist in first imagining laws, than deriving their consequences. He used a whole variety of techniques, including reflecting on the etymology of words (real or imagined) and constructing worlds and their laws to explain those etymological musings. In some cases, as the musings changed, so did the imagined world and its laws.I don't know why you would.What distinguishes simulaionism from (say) narrativism/&quot;story now&quot; is not that it produces, or aims to produce, consistent fiction whereas narrativism does not. It's that it treats internal cause as king - that is to say, it relies on no other principle to determine what happens next in the shared fiction.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 9071666, member: 42582"] This isn't my experience. I don't know what examples you have in mind - if you've shared one (or some) I apologise that I don't recall it/them. What you quote JRRT as writing is "What really happens is that the story-maker proves a successful "sub-creator." He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is "true:" it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside." This does not assert, nor even imply, that the author should have in mind the laws of that world. It's quite consistent, for instance, with the view - which seems to me to have been JRRT's view - that careful, sincere creation will manifest laws of which the the author is not even aware. Shippey discusses examples of this in JRRT's own work and reflection on his own work. The idea that [I]careful, sincere creation will manifest laws[/I] follows from further, ultimately theological, beliefs about the nature of humans and their relationship to and place in "creation". The passage you've quoted doesn't suggest this. It suggests that a successful story-maker creates a "secondary", imagined world that accords with its own laws. But he says nothing about where the laws come from, nor what (if anything) their role is in creation. I entirely agree with [USER=56488]@gban007[/USER] that JRRT is describing a goal, not a technique. And as [USER=56488]@gban007[/USER] has posted, and as Shippey talks about, JRRT's own methods of authorship did not consist in first imagining laws, than deriving their consequences. He used a whole variety of techniques, including reflecting on the etymology of words (real or imagined) and constructing worlds and their laws to explain those etymological musings. In some cases, as the musings changed, so did the imagined world and its laws. I don't know why you would. What distinguishes simulaionism from (say) narrativism/"story now" is not that it produces, or aims to produce, consistent fiction whereas narrativism does not. It's that it treats [I]internal cause as king[/I] - that is to say, it relies on no other principle to determine what happens next in the shared fiction. [/QUOTE]

Verification