moonlit-tulip

[moonlit-tulip]

Translation as Re-Compression

Translators often talk about the impossibility of producing a single perfect translation of a work, capturing all its nuance and sounding fully natural in its newly-translated form.

Non-translators often find this unintuitive.

As an intuition-aid, then: consider it through the lens of compression algorithms.

Language is a form of lossy compression which can be applied to thought in order to format it for communication with others. We have large-and-many-layered thoughts which we render into words, losing a lot of their nuance in the process.

Different languages compress the same thoughts differently, losing and keeping different details. For example, English defaults to bundling information on people's genders in with many third-person references to those people, while Japanese does a lot less of that; Japanese, meanwhile, defaults to bundling information on siblings' relative ages in many references to their siblinghood, while English does a lot less of that.

This leads to a serious problem for translators. Because it leaves them two major choices.

The first choice: take the original language—already an output of a lossy compression-process—and run further lossy compression on it in order to convert it to the target language in reasonably-efficiently-packed form. At the cost of this further loss-of-information, you can have the information that is left come out reasonably well-compressed and thus easy to consume in the new language.

The second choice: take the original language and translate it with as little further loss as possible, even at the cost of compression-efficiency. Translate every Japanese 'imouto' to 'little sister', and not just 'sister', even if the result sounds stiltedly redundant in English, because otherwise information from the Japanese will be lost. Thereby, preserve as much of the original work's content as possible, but in a far-less-efficient form in the target language than in the source language.

(As a somewhat-more-specific analogy, for those who happen to be familiar with music formats: MP3-to-AAC conversion versus MP3-to-FLAC conversion. The former is a lossy conversion of an already-lossy format; it produces an AAC which has lost information relative to the source MP3, but takes up similarly-little space. The latter is a lossless conversion of its lossy source material, so lacks that degradation-of-output-quality, but in exchange it takes up a lot more space than the AAC output would have and a lot more space than the original MP3 did.)

Notably, however, it leads to a lot less problem for original creators producing versions of a work in multiple languages. Because they're not working from a lossy base: they have access to the original thoughts which the work is a lossily-compressed rendition of. And so they can, with relative freedom, create multiple equally-compressed renditions of those thoughts with only partial overlap, rather than one being constrained to have its content be a strict subset of the other. (Like, to continue the prior analogy, converting a lossless source-file both to MP3 and to AAC, such that both output-files are well-compressed and neither output-file is unambiguously behind the other in terms of net information retained.)

Those two choices map pretty closely onto the frequently-discussed-by-translators tradeoff between translations tuned to flow well and sound good in the target language and translations tuned to preserve the full detailed nuance of the source language. But I think the compression framing can be helpful in understanding exactly why it's a forced tradeoff, why there's no magical perfect translation which succeeds in both of those goals at once. It's not just an issue of translation-skill; there are fundamental information-theoretic limits at play.

(The third option, the technically-not-translation route of the original creator producing the work multiple times in different languages from their original source thoughts and thus bypassing the tradeoff between the prior two choices, isn't one I've seen talked about as much, likely because creators with the necessary level of skill in multiple languages to pull it off are relatively rare.)

[moonlit-tulip]

I suspect you're underweighting the value of "make this story-originally-told-in-medium-A accessible to people who have a hard time consuming medium A but have an easier time consuming medium-to-which-I'm-adapting-it B" as an artistic vision. I agree that one does need vision, and that divergent-but-still-grounded-in-the-source-material visions like (for example) the Baccano! anime's differences-of-presentational-style from its source novels can work very well; but the increasing-accessibility-to-fans-of-alternate-media one strikes me as a pretty good vision too! Very much sufficient to justify an adaptation. It's not for no reason that highly-faithful manga-to-anime adaptations often bring in pretty big new audiences to their associated stories, even when they're hugging very closely to the source manga and deliberately avoiding taking it in new directions.

"this is an inaccurate adaptation" okay but is it good "this didn't happen in the book" does it make sense in the context of the new work though "they totally changed the plot" and is the new one good or bad "it's completely different" not what I asked "they changed all the stuff I like" then I get why you wouldn't be into it but I'm asking about its own artistic merits "this character is meant to be blonde" I couldn't give less of a fuck

[moonlit-tulip]

Over time, I'm growing increasingly convinced that a lot of the craft underlying what people-into-storytelling call 'writing' isn't actually really about writing at all, and it would be useful for many people—me included—to swap over to some different term, like maybe 'storytelling'.

Because, in my experience, the goals pursued by me and by most of the people in my fiction-creation-focused social circles aren't particularly constrained to what's easy to render in prose. They're much more about conveying things to audiences, in ways which prose can certainly be helpful for but which other things can also be helpful for.

To bring up a topical example: Deltarune is a game which is very effective at its storytelling, able to deliver high-impact moments at pretty high density. And it's true that a decent chunk of that is down to being well-written; Toby Fox is, in fact, a pretty skilled wordsmith. But a lot of it is also down to other things: music, art and animation, timing, et cetera. The writing is just one component of many in the overall soup of Factors Behind Deltarune Being Good.

As such, it strikes me as worthwhile to view a lot of the skills traditionally touted as writing skills—plotting, characterization, pacing, et cetera—as, instead, more general storytelling skills. Skills which are more specifically writing skills still very much exist—various elements of how to write good prose, good dialogue, et cetera—but they're not the main mass of what most people are thinking of when they talk about writing skill. The main mass of 'writing' skills apply just as well to such things as text-free comics, voice-free animation, silent-protagonist-explores-abandoned-ruins games, and so forth, even if they're made without any writing-per-se involved in the process at all.

There are many tools which can help with telling a given story. Writing is one. But the writing isn't the story; it's just a medium through which the story can be conveyed. The difference is important.

[moonlit-tulip]

You Are Your Own Greatest Tool

Most people have goals which they try to pursue.

Some of these are simple short-term goals, like eating a meal this evening. Some of these are ambitious long-term goals, like the extinction of smallpox. But they all share the trait of being outcomes which people value and are inclined to try to bring about.

Pursuit of goals is often helped along by tools. Pots and dishes can help with meal-eating, for instance, as can money or seedcorn with which to acquire food to put in those pots and dishes. Vaccines, and money with which to arrange the vaccines' spread, can help with smallpox-eradication. Et cetera.

Tools are good and useful things. Worthwhile to acquire and collect; worthwhile to maintain and keep in good condition; worthwhile, if one uses them particularly intensively, to upgrade and modify and otherwise customize to one's individual needs.

People often take an overly narrow view of what tools are in their possession, in this regard. Tangible things like pots and dishes and money and seedcorn and vaccines can be good tools, sure; but so, too, can intangible things like reputation and knowledge and beauty and so on. Anything capable of bringing about effects in the world can be wielded as a tool towards some ends.

And so, when one looks closely enough, the conclusion becomes inevitable that one's greatest tool is oneself. Because one uses oneself every time one pursues any goal at all. It's a prerequisite, for me eat a meal, that there be an 'I' capable of eating. If I were to try to help along the end of smallpox... well, once again, there's that 'I'! If I'm not there, I can't help with it. (As in fact I wasn't and couldn't, in the actual event of smallpox's eradication.)

It's on this ground that I spend as much of my time and energy as I do trying to become better at things. At skills which directly help me accomplish my goals, like eating hot food without burning my mouth in the process; at skills which indirectly help me accomplish my goals, like software-engineering in order to make money and in order to make software which does things I find useful; at skills which help me improve my ability to learn the aforementioned skills, like how to allocate my time and energy effectively towards ends I value and how to distinguish truth from falsehood and thus not convince myself that things will accomplish my goals when they won't or vice versa; at knowing as much as I can about as many things I can, because the more I know about the world the likelier I am to have a bit of information relevant to helping myself efficiently accomplish the particular tasks in front of me; and so on and so forth.

Because I'm the tool I use most often, more than any other. Making sure I'm in good condition pays off.

I think many people would benefit from taking a similar view towards themselves.

[moonlit-tulip]

now that deltarune chapters 3-4 are nearly out, I've been rereading the original novels. they're surprisingly close to the games, here's Noelle from book 2

[moonlit-tulip]

For a list-by-someone-else I've found helpful as inspiration in the past, I'd point you at https://milan.cvitkovic.net/writing/things_youre_allowed_to_do/; not everything there is specifically about spending money, but a lot of it is, and it points at a lot of good options which are probably not obvious to most people.

For a more personal list of things I've found worthwhile to spend money on for quality-of-life purposes:

Subscriptions to useful online services, including Kagi for search, MEGA Pro for general-purpose cloud-file-storage with sync functionality, and Obsidian Sync for narrower-but-with-nicer-UI cross-device-synced notetaking.

Custom-print clothing and mousepads and wall-art and so forth for my physical environment, and custom icons and banners and so forth with which to decorate my web-presence, to increase my baseline levels of aesthetic fulfillment. Art commissions, or subscriptions to paid high-quality AI-art tools like Midjourney, on the backend to produce the images to be printed-or-used-online.

Good-quality hardware in places where I used to use cheaper-and-lower-quality stuff: nice boots, a nice keyboard, a nice set of bowls to eat from, et cetera. For figuring out what to get, I've found The Wirecutter and Consumer Reports to both be pretty good as quick summaries of products-which-will-probably-be-at-least-reasonably-nice in a given field; they're not a substitute for deep ten-hour research-dives into the opinions of enthusiast communities, but they've worked a lot better for me, in cases where I don't feel like doing the full research-dive, than e.g. plain searching-by-Amazon-reviews has. (Consumer Reports is paid-subscription-gated; I find it to yield enough useful information that it would be worth the cost, if I needed to pay the cost; but, also, at least if you're in the US (I don't know about patterns elsewhere) there's a decent chance your local public library offers free access via their website. All three of the library systems I've belonged to throughout my life so far have done so.)

A cheap one-time cost, won't be a good long-run money-sink, but: side-cut can openers (example) are much nicer than the top-cut ones I grew up with. They cut the top off the can in such a way as to leave it (a) free of sharp edges and (b) shaped in such a way as to be easily re-placed on top of the can as a decently-effectively-sealing lid, while also (c) not getting their cutting-blades dirty with can-contents and thus saving on cleaning-effort. If you don't already have one, I recommend getting one.

When uncertain about whether I'll like a given good or service, erring on the side of "try it out and see how I like it" rather than erring on the side of "don't spend money on things I'm not confident will pay off"; it's one of those things I was always very hesitant to do, when I had less money, but has been pretty solidly good-for-me since I acquired more money and got into the habit, because not-too-rarely it turns out that I do like a given thing a bunch.

Can anyone recommend quality of life boosters one might spend on?

All my hobbies are far more time intensive than money intensive so I don't actually have much of a way to go through money, and no clear ideas for how to treat myself.

[moonlit-tulip]

I have this feeling about ignoring people, on platforms which support that—if someone is unpleasant to read, then I can hit the button and stop having stuff-from-them show up in my reading-zone except when I specifically seek it out, and that can be nice—but I tend to be a lot more averse to blocking in the "be invisible to them too" sense, because I'd rather not prevent people-who-are-unpleasant-to-read from reading my stuff, generally. There are very few people in this world who I specifically want to not be perceived by, as opposed to just to not perceive, and it's unfortunate that so many sites package those two functionalities together inextricably; it adds an extra cost, in foregone benefit-to-them from reading my stuff, counteracting the benefit in foregone cost-to-me from reading theirs.

It feels so good to block people. Someone annoys you can you can just say "hey, I don't want to ever have your input on anything ever again" and with a single click, it's done? It's a social fantasy that the real world can only dream of one day fulfilling.

[moonlit-tulip]

This is straightforwardly sensible and correct of the IME! I occasionally get annoyed at my Japanese-to-English dictionary of choice, jpdb, for its unreliability at properly parsing that input-format.

The trick is that, while Romanizations in that style—the Nihon-shiki Romanization style—are less accurate to how those words are pronounced in English than the more familiar 'chuuni' / 'roumaji' / etc. produced by Hepburn-shiki, they're more accurate to the underlying Japanese phonology. Phonemic rather than phonetic. Or, to put it in less technical linguistic terms: they're using one letter for each set of sounds which sound like 'the same sound' to native Japanese-speakers in the same way that, for example, the 't' at the start of 'terror' and the 't' in the middle of 'motive' sound 'the same' to English-speakers despite being in fact pretty different in their physical articulation and acoustic characteristics (and despite the second one bearing more resemblance to the Japanese sound generally Romanized as 'r' than to the Japanese sound generally Romanized as 't').

As such, while Nihon-shiki Romanizations are less good than Hepburn-shiki ones when trying to render Japanese words to be phonetically clear to English-speaking audiences, such as in Japanese-to-English translation or loanword-generation, they strike me as pretty straightforwardly simpler-and-thereby-better when just trying to do input which is then going to be read as Japanese, such as the typical IME input. Because, when targeting a Japanese-speaking audience (or a Japanese-speaking computer-system), your audience isn't likely to care about the nuances of pronunciation the Hepburn Romanization emphasizes very much more than typical English-speaking audiences or computer-systems are to care about the differences of pronunciation between those two 't' sounds; it's just extra unnecessary detail to keep track of, for both the writer and the reader.

the fact that IME accepts tyuuni is fucked up. evil.

[moonlit-tulip]

Hey! Any progress on the better ereader?

The project went on hiatus for a while due to the code spaghettifying and needing a substantial revision to stay maintainable, then went on un-hiatus for a little while when I decided to try messing with an alternate reimplementation-from-scratch where it's a command-line tool rather than a browser extension, and then went on hiatus again when my job took a turn towards instability and my personal-career-development-time that previously went into ebook-related coding projects started going into job-hunting instead. I don't know when I'll get back to it next; it does remain an item on my agenda, though.

[moonlit-tulip]

I sometimes see people talking about movies which do particularly long uninterrupted camera-shots and/or are edited to look as if they've done so. This is almost always discussed specifically in the frame of being a Fancy Directorial Gimmick to show off the creators' skill. I find this framing very weird!

When video media does particularly-long uninterrupted shots in ways that make an impact on me—ones where other movies might have used cuts—I don't find this interesting because of the technical difficulty behind it. I find it interesting because it lends clarity to the scenes. It can make it easier to follow action in fight-scenes, by letting the action all just play out continuously without any of the disorienting shaky-cam sorts of approaches other works use; it can make it easier to follow spatial arrangements of events taking place in multiple areas concurrently, by way of having the camera show the intervening space between the different places-where-things-are-happening rather than just cutting from the one to the other; et cetera.

The value of the technique, then, in my mind, isn't that it's a flourish of filmographic skill-signaling; it's that it's a tool for conveying things to the audience more effectively than they could have otherwise been conveyed.

[moonlit-tulip]

Tunnel Vision

I wrote a story!

More precisely, I wrote it more than a year ago, planned to edit it a bunch, and then never got around to doing more than a tiny amount of that. I've finally given up and decided to just post it as-is, mostly unedited. Hopefully people will enjoy it.

Synopsis:

Reyna and Liz have fought together for some time now, battling wraiths and shadows to protect their hometown and each other. And yet tonight, on what should have been an evening of shared victory, they find themselves in conflict. For Reyna's reason for fighting, above all else, is to defend Liz's happiness; and the greatest threat to Liz's happiness, now, is Liz herself.

Full-resolution cover art below the break.

[moonlit-tulip]

A thing I've noticed, about fan-analyses of fiction: often, once a given reader gets caught up on a given work and starts talking with the rest of the fandom, their readings and theories become more similar to those of the rest of the fandom. This tends, on average, to make most people's readings and theories more correct—people are able to absorb right-sounding-sounding popular analyses while rejecting the wrong-sounding ones, at least directionally even if not in all particulars—but it also tends to make them more homogeneous. Someone who's internalized more of the fandom zeitgeist is less likely to come up with a wildly-novel analysis whose premises contradict those of the fandom zeitgeist.

As such, first-time readers—particularly first-time readers doing detailed close readings, and even-more-particularly those who write down said readings as they go in order to avoid forgetting them after their eventual merge with the broader fandom—serve a valuable role in fandom ecosystems as a source of diversity and novelty of ideas. In the traditional manner of high-variance strategies, many of them will come up with bad ideas, worse than those the fandom has mostly settled on; but they'll come up with different ones, and some are likely to be new-and-good in ways that the main body of fandom would have had trouble replicating.

This is among the many reasons why it's good, when someone is liveblogging a work, to be careful about avoiding leaking any spoilers to them. It's not just valuable to that person's reading experience and (thereby) to the reading experiences of the people reading the liveblog, but also to the broader fandom which benefits from liveblogs as a source of novel analyses which would be harder for non-first-time readers to generate. And this is also among the many reasons why it's good to do liveblogs, when one happens to be in a position where doing so is logistically practical.

[moonlit-tulip]

It's often noted, in discussions of the Death Note anime, that it's much weaker than the manga in its rendition of post-timeskip events partly for pacing reasons: the pre-timeskip parts of the anime adapt ~6.5 manga-volumes in 25 episodes, while the post-timeskip parts adapt ~5.5 in 12 episodes, so a lot more important detail-work is lost and the whole thing ends up feeling kind of perfunctory.

Much less often noted as far as I've seen, but nonetheless also true, is that the Death Note anime removes some important characterization-nuance from Light, starting right near the beginning, whose presence elevates the manga to be substantially better than the anime even before the time-skip.

In particular: the Death Note manga is, at its core, a tragedy in classic "character who has everything falls into ruin due to a fatal personal flaw" style. Light is a brilliant student who, in the future ahead of him, has the potential to do practically whatever he wants. He's driven to ruin by the fatal flaw of unwillingness to admit, either to others or to himself, when he's made a mistake. This flaw is an essential piece of his characterization, in the manga. And the anime pretty much entirely skips over it.

As portrayed in the manga, Light's decision to become Kira—which ultimately leads to his downfall—is made in the following way. First, he finds the Death Note, and is led by morbid curiosity to write a name in it, killing someone. Then, still not really believing it, he kills a second person too. At which point it hits him that he's killed two people. And at that point, after a viscerally-horrified breakdown about what he's done, the inability to admit mistakes kicks in, and he proceeds to rewrite his own value-system such that it yields the result that killing those people was actually okay, and in fact morally good. Because the alternative would be for him to acknowledge himself as having made a terrible mistake, and that, more than anything else, is something he's unwilling to do if he can see any other option at all. And then, having convinced himself that those two murders were good, he proceeds to reason that, if they were good, then doing more like them is good; and thus he becomes Kira, leading eventually, far down the line, to his ruin. The anime, by contrast, substantially deemphasizes this flaw of his, portraying him as much more calmly put-together through that series of events and thus making him come across as having been tempted in becoming-Kira-ward directions all along.

Similarly, in the anime, when Light leaks a bunch of information to L about his identity by using non-public information acquired via police channels, he declares that actually this was deliberate as a means of baiting L out so he can kill him, and the anime presents this declaration pretty uncritically. The manga, by contrast, presents it as an extension of that same character-flaw: Light is unwilling to admit to having actually just straightforwardly messed up, and therefore makes up a new plan to view himself to have been following-all-along, thus leading him to take more risks in his game against L going forward and thus, once again, helping him along the path to ruin.

Et cetera.

Compared with the manga, then, the anime's version of Light's characterization ends up less interesting. And, moreover, it introduces a plot hole, when the Yotsuba arc comes around! It makes it much less clear why an amnesiac Light would be so straightforwardly aligned against Kira. In the manga, this is pretty clear: a Light who never killed anyone wouldn't have rewritten his values to consider killing people to be good, and therefore would look at Kira as straightforwardly evil. And, in fact, his amnesiac self has trouble taking the possibility of his having been Kira previously, even as the evidence starts building up, because becoming Kira would be a mistake according to his value-system of the moment, and this leaves him having a very hard time contemplating the possibility of its having in fact happened! Whereas the anime, by deemphasizing Light's big flaw, makes his amnesiac-self's differences from the way he is for most of the story up to that point come across as much more out-of-nowhere, much less narratively well-founded.

So, overall, the people who talk about the Death Note manga as superior to the anime specifically post-timeskip strike me as somewhat understating things. The manga is superior to the anime pre-timeskip, too, via that extra layer of characterization and a resulting improvement both in character-interestingness and in plot-coherence. And thus I consider the manga to be very much the definitive version of Death Note from start to finish, despite the anime's relatively-higher popularity.

[moonlit-tulip]

@worstpony:

"People talk a lot about trying to find their styles, when doing creative work. This is fine, when it comes to style-of-purpose." -- Are you sure? I think people who stick to a single style are usually people who stick to a single purpose, like Cimabue, Monet, Mondrian, Salvador Dali, Hemingway, or Flannery O'Connor. I don't know if you can tackle the same purpose in a wide variety of styles any better than you can use the same style for many different purposes. And I suspect that tackling a multitude of themes increases the complexity that you can grasp. Tolstoy's works wouldn't have been so world-comprehensive if he hadn't learned to look at lots of different issues, in lots of different ways.

This is an interesting angle which hadn't occurred to me! Purpose-formation as, itself, a practicable skill, such that there can be value in avoiding developing a style there either, in order to learn to form more interestingly-complex purposes over time.

On reflection, this seems plausible, at least if one's goal in practicing at creative endeavors is something along the lines of "create works which pursue interestingly-complex purposes". I don't think this goal-shape is universal—on a personal level, my creative goals are less about pursuing interesting purposes and more about being able to execute well on whatever purposes I happen to spontaneously form urges to pursue—but it does seem likely to be a shape many people's creative motivations take, yes. And for someone whose goals are shaped that way... yeah, I suppose there would then be some value in avoiding developing an over-rigid style-of-purpose just as there is in avoiding developing an over-rigid style-of-technique. Good point.

As for the idea that, given a rigid style-of-purpose, one can thereby get away with a rigid style-of-technique as well... I think this can sometimes be true, but it requires a particularly narrow range of purposes, narrower than I expect most people-inclined-to-spend-substantial-practice-time-on-creative-work to have. It's not enough to merely, for example, have a single core theme one wants to convey through a novel: as long as one has varied audiences one wants to convey that theme to, it may well still end up being the case that one will benefit from a variety of techniques, because (for example) readers whose tastes run towards fantasy-action-adventure stories will absorb the theme most easily via a very different delivery than readers whose tastes run towards literary romance, with different techniques being correspondingly advisable to develop in order to reach both groups across the corpus of one's work. There are some potential purposes towards which this sort of issue doesn't apply—sometimes one really does have a clear-and-rigid niche in which one's only concern is mastery within that niche, such as "find a formula people will pay a lot of money for and then, having found it, churn out minor variations on the formula repeatedly until rich" (as seems to be the approach of many of the more-financially-successful writers and artists on Patreon)—and, if one's ambitions are purely focused on those purposes, then I think I would grant that forming a rigid style-of-technique is likely to go relatively okay and not overly impair one's pursuit of one's goals. But my impression is that ambitions that narrow are unusual, such that this is likely to come up only rarely in practice.

Purpose and Technique

There are two distinct things which are both often referred to as 'style', in creative contexts like writing / art / music-composition / etc.

The first—let's call it style-of-purpose—is style in the sense of patterns in one's choices of creative objectives. What sorts of concepts or themes or emotions or aesthetics or suchlike one is looking to convey to one's audience.

The second—let's call it style-of-technique—is style in the sense of patterns in one's choices of techniques to use in pursuit of those objectives. How one fills in all the implementation-details which, while necessary to fill in to fulfill one's objectives, aren't objectives on any deeper level than that. Prose-style, in a story being told for the sake of conveying a certain plot; character-design, in an art-piece being created for the sake of conveying a certain sort of brushwork; described events, in a set of song-lyrics written for the sake of conveying a a certain sort of feeling; et cetera.

Style-of-purpose is pretty much inevitable for anyone engaging in deliberate production or presentation of creative work for an audience. There's no practical way to avoid it, and not much reason to want to. Style-of-purpose is a habit, but not a constraint: it doesn't prevent you from doing what you want to do, but rather emerges naturally from doing what you want to do.

Style-of-technique, on the other hand, can very easily turn into a constraint. A technique effective in pursuit of one work's objectives can easily be counterproductive in another work. Someone who leans heavily on Hardboiled Detective Narration might have some trouble conveying their desired tone when trying to write a (prototypical, non-subversive) cute-girls-doing-cute-things story about water-skiing, for example.

As such, it's important, when doing creative work in any field where one intends to create new material, as opposed to just variations on the same themes over and over again, to have range. To practice a varied and ideally ever-growing array of different techniques one can use in any given part of one's work, so that no matter what one's creative objectives are one can pursue them effectively. Developing a strong distinctive style-of-technique across one's works, then, is a trap: an artist with that sort of style is one who isn't getting enough practice doing anything else, and who accordingly will have trouble doing anything else when they want to.

It's very easy to fall into a feedback-loop of finding a single effective technique in a given domain—a method of narration one is good at, or of lineart-drawing, or suchlike—and then, since that's the technique with which one produces one's best work, to use it and neglect other techniques. The longer one does this for, the larger the gap in quality between one's output with that technique and others grows, and the more tempting it becomes to keep on using that technique more and others less. And thus the less able one becomes to create works up to one's quality standards with any other techniques, even when those other techniques would, if performed with the benefit of practice, lead to more effective realization of one's artistic aims.

People talk a lot about trying to find their styles, when doing creative work. This is fine, when it comes to style-of-purpose. But, for style-of-technique, I recommend against trying to develop it for oneself, and in fact recommend actively avoiding developing it; it's far too easy to become trapped in a niche narrower than one can comfortably fit in.

[moonlit-tulip]

One downside of a lot of my reading nowadays being of semi-obscure eroge: very little fanfic. I can't follow up finishing reading the Tsui no Sora remake by spending a few weeks devouring every promising-seeming Yasuko-centric fanfic I can find, because there's approximately no Tsui no Sora remake fanfic on the internet at all.

(Or at least the English-language parts of the internet; I suppose I wouldn't know if there were more on the Japanese-language parts, given not yet being good enough at the language to be able to search or read things there without a bunch of difficulty.)

I suppose this is what drives people to start writing their own fanfic, to fill that sort of void. But that's not the same, compared with the sorts of multi-week reading-dives which are practical when one finishes a Big Popular Heavily-Fanficced Story like Worm, and this is kind of sad; I'd have very much liked to get to keep feeding my mind more Yasuko-related content for longer before needing to rely entirely on generating my own.

[moonlit-tulip]

Purpose and Technique

There are two distinct things which are both often referred to as 'style', in creative contexts like writing / art / music-composition / etc.

The first—let's call it style-of-purpose—is style in the sense of patterns in one's choices of creative objectives. What sorts of concepts or themes or emotions or aesthetics or suchlike one is looking to convey to one's audience.

The second—let's call it style-of-technique—is style in the sense of patterns in one's choices of techniques to use in pursuit of those objectives. How one fills in all the implementation-details which, while necessary to fill in to fulfill one's objectives, aren't objectives on any deeper level than that. Prose-style, in a story being told for the sake of conveying a certain plot; character-design, in an art-piece being created for the sake of conveying a certain sort of brushwork; described events, in a set of song-lyrics written for the sake of conveying a a certain sort of feeling; et cetera.

Style-of-purpose is pretty much inevitable for anyone engaging in deliberate production or presentation of creative work for an audience. There's no practical way to avoid it, and not much reason to want to. Style-of-purpose is a habit, but not a constraint: it doesn't prevent you from doing what you want to do, but rather emerges naturally from doing what you want to do.

Style-of-technique, on the other hand, can very easily turn into a constraint. A technique effective in pursuit of one work's objectives can easily be counterproductive in another work. Someone who leans heavily on Hardboiled Detective Narration might have some trouble conveying their desired tone when trying to write a (prototypical, non-subversive) cute-girls-doing-cute-things story about water-skiing, for example.

As such, it's important, when doing creative work in any field where one intends to create new material, as opposed to just variations on the same themes over and over again, to have range. To practice a varied and ideally ever-growing array of different techniques one can use in any given part of one's work, so that no matter what one's creative objectives are one can pursue them effectively. Developing a strong distinctive style-of-technique across one's works, then, is a trap: an artist with that sort of style is one who isn't getting enough practice doing anything else, and who accordingly will have trouble doing anything else when they want to.

It's very easy to fall into a feedback-loop of finding a single effective technique in a given domain—a method of narration one is good at, or of lineart-drawing, or suchlike—and then, since that's the technique with which one produces one's best work, to use it and neglect other techniques. The longer one does this for, the larger the gap in quality between one's output with that technique and others grows, and the more tempting it becomes to keep on using that technique more and others less. And thus the less able one becomes to create works up to one's quality standards with any other techniques, even when those other techniques would, if performed with the benefit of practice, lead to more effective realization of one's artistic aims.

People talk a lot about trying to find their styles, when doing creative work. This is fine, when it comes to style-of-purpose. But, for style-of-technique, I recommend against trying to develop it for oneself, and in fact recommend actively avoiding developing it; it's far too easy to become trapped in a niche narrower than one can comfortably fit in.

[moonlit-tulip]

New ask game:

Reblog if you want your followers to tell you what your trademark ™️ is. Like, what’s that thing that really identifies you.