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145 lines
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145 lines
12 KiB
Markdown
## Mother of Learning Chapter 30: A Game of Shops
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* Author: u/gamarad *LessWrong (than usual)**
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* URL: https://www.fictionpress.com/s/2961893/30/Mother-of-Learning
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* Score: 35
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* Created: 2014-12-09T23:05:55
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### Post:
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[Link to content](https://www.fictionpress.com/s/2961893/30/Mother-of-Learning)
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### Comments:
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> **u/libertarian_reddit** [+4] (3 hours later)
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>
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> Who here has read this? I'm only just now hearing of this story, is it any good?
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>
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> edit: Have read, is awesome.
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>> **u/alexanderwales** [+13] *Time flies like an arrow* (3 hours later)
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>>
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>> It's good - but good in the way that fanfic sometimes is, in that it needs an editor to ruthlessly cut out a bunch of stuff. Depending on what you look for in the stuff you read, you might not notice it.
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>>> **u/4t0m** [+6] *Chaos Legion* (5 hours later)
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>>>
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>>> What would be your main criticisms, apart from the occasional grammar problems and periods of slowness?
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>>>
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>>> (Just curious, as someone who really likes your stories and really likes Mother of Learning.)
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>>>> **u/alexanderwales** [+13] *Time flies like an arrow* (7 hours later)
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>>>>
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>>>> I have to issue a few caveats first: my own writing is imperfect, I'm not an expert storyteller, various people subscribe to various schools of thought on the subject of the written word, and I do actually like *Mother of Learning* in spite of what I see as its problems.
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>>>>
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>>>> One of Kurt Vonnegut's best pieces of advice on writing was "If a sentence, no matter how excellent, does not illuminate your subject in some new and useful way, scratch it out." There's a trap that writers fall into quite often where they're just writing without doing the primary things that a piece of writing should be doing, like adding to characterization or advancing the plot.
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>>>>
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>>>> It's pretty easy to just write a paragraph about how someone is getting his mail because you think that's what the character would do on a Tuesday morning. So you write about how he walked down the stairs, you write about how he found the small key on his key ring and opened up the mailbox that was stuck in with all the others, how he looked through everything that he'd gotten and threw away the junk ... and you know what's easier than that? "John got the mail." And if the mail isn't revealing something to us about John - the medical bills that let us know he's got cancer, the forlorn sigh when there's no letter from his pen pal, an invitation to wizarding school - then there's no point to the scene, and it should be cut.
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>>>>
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>>>> *Mother of Learning* is full of those scenes. The first chapter spends a few hundred words on Zorian helping a girl to get her bike out of the water, and I just cannot figure out the point of that. If it's to let us know that Zorian can levitate things, there are a lot better ways to accomplish that goal. If it's to tell us something about Zorian, it doesn't really do that either, and again, there are better ways of doing that. The whole story has a lot of passages like that, and that's why editors are so lovely. An editor would ask what the purpose of the scene was, and once they'd been told, they would help to make that scene more effective (or they'd cut it). Anton Chekov also gave this advice, by the way: "If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there." That's a pretty extreme way to put it, and I wouldn't go quite that far, but you do need to think about why you're including details.
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>>>>
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>>>> It's really easy to fall into the trap of just *writing* without thinking about what your purpose is. Writing is imaginative, and you can pretty seamlessly slip into narrating your imagination. The problem is that unless your imagination is really tuned to creating narratives, you're probably not going to end up with great prose, even if you've got a good story. A lot of the chapters could have 20-30% of their words cut, sometimes more, with nothing of value lost, and the piece would be better for it.
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>>>>
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>>>> **tl;dr** Yeah, it's mostly the slowness, but the slowness is a symptom of writing that's more focused on simulation of the world than stimulation of the reader. (And yes, I get the irony of using so many words to say what can be said in a single sentence.)
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>>>>> **u/daydev** [+5] (8 hours later)
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>>>>>
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>>>>> I'm pretty sure the girl with the bike *is* a Chekov's Gun, we just haven't reached the discharge yet.
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>>>>>> **u/alexanderwales** [+4] *Time flies like an arrow* (8 hours later)
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>>>>>>
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>>>>>> It's certainly possible that he'll come back to it - that's one of the major problems with making commentary on a work in progress, because it might be that the girl and her bicycle are somehow vital to the plot and I'll have egg on my face.
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>>>>>>
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>>>>>> A few times when I was reading the early parts, I thought that he was setting things up for "one perfect day", which is how Groundhog's Day ended. But I'm not sure that's going to happen now, what with people changing the timeline around from the outside, and some sort of pressure being placed on him that prevents trying over and over until he gets it right. And anyway, we've gotten far enough along that most people won't clearly remember the early chapters where that setup was, so even if it's a more conventional sort of Chekov's Gun, I'm not sure that it will elicit more than a "Oh, right, that" from the audience.
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>>>>>>> **u/daydev** [+5] (9 hours later)
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>>>>>>>
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>>>>>>> Well, that bridge and the girl were mentioned again in Chapter 12, and it's about halfway trough the story so far.
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>>>>>>>
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>>>>>>> So I overall agree with your point that the story is too stretched out in places, but I think you've chosen a poor exaple for it. That scene is too pointless to be meaningless, there's got to be more to it :)
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>>>>>>>> **u/MoralRelativity** [+3] (23 hours later)
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>>>>>>>>
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>>>>>>>> While I agree with /u/AlexanderWales comment about there being simpler ways to illustrate the points, when you say "too pointless to be meaningless" is going a bit too far for me. I thought that scene spoke loudly about Zorian's character. I don't think it will be significant overall.
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>>>>> **u/loonyphoenix** [+3] (2 days later)
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>>>>>
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>>>>> While I generally agree with the Chekhov's Gun principle, truthfully, it has its own drawbacks. The one I always think of is that it gives way too much information to the reader if used. If nothing ever described in a book is random, an unimportant generic detail or just colorful imagery, then you can be *sure* that everything has some meaning to it, some relevance to the general plot. In real life, you can't just guess that a random meeting with some stranger on the way somewhere is important just because you paid enough attention to it to describe it. It skews expectations unrealistically and leads to reading too much into every insignificant detail.
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>>>>>> **u/alexanderwales** [+0] *Time flies like an arrow* (2 days later)
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>>>>>>
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>>>>>> Well, the larger point I'm trying to make is that everything that's in the book should be there by intent. The author should be trying to *say* something. There's a whole lot more to writing that just plot, there's characterization and spectacle and a bunch of other things. If you put a sentence down on the page, that sentence should have some reason for being there. If there's a scene, that scene should reveal *something* to us. It doesn't have to be plot - it can be there to show what a character's motivations are, or their value system, or it can be exposition, but it really should have a purpose to it, and ideally it should serve multiple purposes.
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>>>>>>
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>>>>>> My problem with *Mother of Learning* is that quite a lot of the time it's not doing enough work with its prose, and I think that's why it can sometimes seem like it's moving slowly. But I fully expect people to disagree with that assessment.
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>>>>> **u/4t0m** [+2] *Chaos Legion* (8 hours later)
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>>>>>
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>>>>> Thanks for the reply. That's really interesting and I actually agree. I also think you're right that that's a very fanfiction-y quality and that its effects depend on the reader. A lot of readers don't mind fluff, or even like it, since part of the point of reading fanfiction is (I think) wasting time and spending time with characters.
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>>>>>
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>>>>> The Vonnegut quote reminds me of the Lesswrong meme about every movement needing to cut the enemy, or every step of reasoning needing to cut towards the truth, only applied to fiction.
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>>>>> **u/Bowbreaker** [+2] *Solitary Locust* (a day later)
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>>>>>
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>>>>> > The first chapter spends a few hundred words on Zorian helping a girl to get her bike out of the water, and I just cannot figure out the point of that.
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>>>>>
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>>>>> It is the first scene of impressive magic by Zorian and it sets up for the later mention in one of the restarts where he checks if anyone else fished it out and some cat sadly looks and gives him the creeps. The first message is that despite his antisocial character he is a good person while the second one shows us how him making minor different choices in subsequent restarts and not letting the happenstances of normal live guide him have repercussions that are minor to him but very major to random "bystanders" who in truth have their own lives that are just as important to them. In this particular case the fact that he now knows beforehand that the bridge is blocked leads to endlessly repeating cycles of a little girl receiving no help. And if I got the undertones right she may well have tried to get it on her own and drowned, which is why her little kitty is sadly looking at where it lost its owner.
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>>>>>
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>>>>> Or that is how I understood that scene.
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>>>>>
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>>>>> In general though I actually *like* when mundane parts of a character's life are described. It gives a feel of the character's life which in many stories seems unrealistically focused and action packed. This way of writing makes you feel like you reason and grow alongside the character. It also avoids readers trying to predict everything by judging the various "guns" laying around, which is something that plagues DMs especially. You describe a tower in the background being white and the players immediately want to go explore it because they expect treasure there.
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>>>> **u/None** [+0] (22 hours later)
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>>>>
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>>>> For me sentences like
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>>>>
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>>>> > Zorian blinked in surprise before giving the man an incredulous look.
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>>>>
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>>>> are always tough to get past.
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>> **u/josephwdye** [+6] *I love you* (3 hours later)
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>>
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>> yeah I would say it's good. it's time loop in a yummy vanilla fantasy world.
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>> **u/None** [+2] (4 hours later)
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>>
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>> I enjoy it immensely. Give it a try.
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>> **u/MoralRelativity** [+3] (7 hours later)
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>>
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>> Recommended as a worthwhile read so far.
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>> **u/Kodix** [+3] (12 hours later)
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>>
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>> New chapters are a bit of a highlight of my month, and I eagerly await them for days before they're out.
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>>
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>> I suggest reading maybe 10 chapters to check it out - if you don't like it by then, you likely won't start liking it after.
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> **u/VorpalAuroch** [+4] *Life before Death* (an hour later)
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>
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> Interesting side-story. A nice way of giving Zorian a level-up unrelated to other skills without lasting consequences.
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>
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> I'm also wondering whether the contract is going to tie in to anything. Did it happen before the loop started?
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> **u/Salaris** [+1] *Dominion Sorcerer* (2 days later)
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>
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> I'm not sure if this has been mentioned before, but the name Knyazov Dveri has been looking suspicious to me for a while. After taking a moment to ponder what was bugging me, I realized all the letters of the name Zorian are contained in Knyazov Dveri. It could be a cooincidence, but I'm wondering if it might indicate there could be a message contained in the names of locations, which could imply all sorts of things.
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>> **u/nobody103** [+7] (2 days later)
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>>
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>> It's a coincidence. The name literally means 'Doors of the Prince/Duke' in the pseudo-slavic tongue that I sometimes use in MoL, and the meaning would be pretty obvious to most slavic people in RL as well. No deeper meaning other than that.
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>>> **u/Salaris** [+1] *Dominion Sorcerer* (3 days later)
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>>>
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>>> Fair enough. Thanks for addressing my conspiracy theory. =D
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>>> **u/libertarian_reddit** [+1] (4 days later)
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>>>
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>>> NEED MORE UPDATES! I am now hooked on this series. I love the world you've created and can't wait to see what's in store.
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>>> **u/darkflagrance** [+1] (4 months later)
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>>>
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>>> I just discovered this story. Why is this story so good? Both the prose and the rationalist thought suck me in...Just when I thought I had freed myself from HPMOR too.
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---
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