50 KiB
Is rational writing actually 'good' writing?
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Author: u/None *
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URL:
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Score: 36
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Created: 2018-04-27T11:43:38
Post:
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Comments:
u/AurelianoTampa [+107] (an hour later)
Would you say that rationalist writing directly translates to good story telling?
No. I could follow the four basic rules on the sidebar, and still be a terrible storyteller. My characters could be bland and monotonous, my worldbuilding simplistic, and my plot disjointed and ultimately unfulfilling.
That said, following those rules does mean you'll (hopefully) avoid some common tropes that often ruin many stories, like deus ex machinas, Mary Sue characters, etc.
By rewriting something to be rationalist, do we make it a 'better' story?
Not necessarily... I think it makes it an inherently different story, but "better" is pretty much a matter of taste and preference. I loved HPMOR, but my SO would hate it, because to her the best part of the HP series is the child-like whimsy of magic and the interactions and growth of the canon characters.
And for some stories I think it would just make it terrible. Imagine trying to make One Hundred Years of Solitude, which revolves around magical realism, into a rational story. I think it could be done... but I bet hardly anyone would consider it better than the original unless they hate the often dream-like logic of magical realism.
And lastly, can a story be irrational, but still good ?
Absolutely. See the examples I've mentioned already. And many of the recommendations we post on the sub don't always stick to all the rational characteristics on the sidebar. There can also be deconstructions of those characteristics too - A Practical Guide to Evil deconstructs "good" and "evil" motivations as part of its meta narrative, Unsong was all about a setting where the consistent rules of the universe are breaking down, and The Erogamer has a meta structure where things happen explicitly because the plot requires it (or because the commenters vote to make it happen).
Knowing a genre and its characteristics, and then playing with them, is something I enjoy reading even more than the rationality itself.
Edit: I realized after coming back and rereading that your title referenced "rational" but the body of your post specified "rationalist." I think all my points above stand for rationalist works as well - perhaps even moreso. Rationalist writing tends to have characters who skew extremely high in intelligence and low in emotional intelligence. As a result, the author ends up with a character who acts too unrealistically and thus is unrelatable. Compounding that is the problem that the characters can only be as smart as the writer. A lot of weak or inexperienced rationalist writers end up making Mary Sue/Marty Stu characters that are cringe-worthy. They often show basic misunderstandings of the very techniques they attempt to use, and the author ends up coming off as someone worthy of /r/iamverysmart. The rationalist works that show up on this sub tend to be pretty good, thankfully.
u/OnePunchFan8 [+13] (11 hours later)
Gurren lagann is (arguably) the most irrational story ever, and despite my love of rationality, I fucking love it. To be fair it's basically parody-ing the anime mecha genre, but it's just so fun and epic.
I say arguably because it never really breaks the rules of its own universe, though the rules are nearly non-existent to begin with.
u/Escapement [+102] Ankh-Morpork City Watch (an hour later)
I feel like your whole comment is hopelessly confused by my standards - we are really far apart in terms of philosophy of art.
I think it'd be helpful to consider an example to clarify matters. That said - let's look at Harry Potter and Quidditch.
I feel like Quidditch workswell on the Doylist level, especially for the first few HP books where it is part of an explicitly children's novel series - Quidditch is intended to be a parody of the worst of sports, especially e.g. Cricket with it's strange rules and scoring, written by someone who is not really into sports for an audience that by and large was also not into sports, and was written to allow Harry to play a central role in a team's victory in an easily explained way that would nevertheless be dramatic and allow for direct contrast and conflict with his foil Draco, and also emphasize the magic in the setting, and finally add elements of danger to raise tension. For all these narrative purposes the rules of the game clearly work well and are extremely good. It's one of the most clearly 'designed for the sake of the plot' sports of all time, but for the purposes of that design (at the storycrafting level) it accomplishes most every goal Rowling could have had for it nearly flawless - the only real problem is suffering from plot holes if you think about it a lot more than 99% of the children that were the target audience for the books when it was initially created.
On a Watsonian level, it makes very little sense at all when examined closely by an adult reader. The fact that the match could last for several days or several minutes is very spectator unfriendly, just for a start - games where things could go for between twenty minutes to an hour+ are already hell for scheduling, and Quidditch increases that variance by a couple orders of magnitude. A team could easily be stuck in a lame-duck situation where they are 'playing the game' but are several hundred points behind and are stuck playing the game out anyways. There are things explicitly trying to concuss / kill / injure etc. players onfield, and it's played up in the sky with no net or other safety device!
So this story element is very irrational, yet if we removed it from the story wholesale the story as a whole would have a lot of problems, and trying to modify it to become more rational is ... difficult. You could come up with something justifying the existence of quidditch, and put into Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone a 2000 word treatise explaining and justifying every seeming inconsistency in quidditch - but taking up a huge amount of wordcount for this sort of thing, while 'rational', would also bore the target audience of children and wreck the fast pacing that was a great strength of the first few Harry Potter books. Would that make them 'better'?
Of course, this whole discussion glosses over the elephant in the room: what exactly is your theory of aesthetics, such that you think that 'better' (or for that matter 'worse') is a clear and clean primitive description of a work without reference to a specific purpose or audience?
I personally think a subjective theory of aesthetics makes the most sense to me. It's colourfully described as follows by writer Steven Brust:
“The Cool Stuff Theory of Literature is as follows: All literature consists of whatever the writer thinks is cool. The reader will like the book to the degree that he agrees with the writer about what's cool. And that works all the way from the external trappings to the level of metaphor, subtext, and the way one uses words. In other words, I happen not to think that full-plate armor and great big honking greatswords are cool. I don't like 'em. I like cloaks and rapiers. So I write stories with a lot of cloaks and rapiers in 'em, 'cause that's cool. Guys who like military hardware, who think advanced military hardware is cool, are not gonna jump all over my books, because they have other ideas about what's cool.
The novel should be understood as a structure built to accommodate the greatest possible amount of cool stuff.”
The loose collection of tropes and tendencies we call rational fiction are, to use Brust's phrasing, very cool in my opinion. But other people have differing ideas about what's cool, and are happier with a book that has lots of whatever they find cool instead. Rational books are sometimes thought to be cool by a lot of other people - there has been some mainstream success with e.g. The Martian and Ted Chiang's works making it as far as full movies - but by and large a lot of the works that maximize their 'rational' qualities do so at the expense of other qualities that other people might find cooler. Rewriting something to be rationalist often makes it cooler in the opinion of the sorts of people who think rationalist stuff is cool (i.e. me and probably you if you're reading this) - but it can sometimes loses the virtues that make the original work cool in the eyes of other people.
A story can have be completely irrational and still be very cool, by my standards of coolness. There's lots of elements of a story that I can like besides 'does the plot make a ton of sense when examined carefully and rigourously' - things like colourful and compelling characters, a unique and interesting setting, or good use of language and writing ability can each individually be enough to make a work stand out as very cool even if the plot and 'rationality' elements are garbage. But that's just in my opinion of what's cool, and other people have different opinions of what's cool.
edit: thanks for the gold!
u/ben_oni [+28] (10 hours later)
I feel like Brust's Cool Stuff Theory could use an amendment:
Good writing can convince people to agree with the author's sense of cool. So you don't like "full-plate armor and great big honking greatswords"? And then someone whose sense of cool is very like your own comes along and writes about them, and now they're cool.
An author doesn't just write cool stuff for an audience who already thinks it's cool, he needs to convince the audience that it really is cool.
u/EliezerYudkowsky [+49] Godric Gryffindor (8 hours later)
This is an excellent analysis, and Brust's Cool Stuff Theory ought to be the starting point of every non-pretentious analysis of enjoyable literature.
To it I only want to add one major point that, it seems to me, has been responsible for a lot of confusion: Specific elements of Cool Stuff are often diametrically opposed to specific elements of almost-universally-almost-objectively Awful Writing.
For example, the fact that Niven, Pournelle, and Dan Alderson worked out pages and pages of math for the Alderson Drive in "The Mote in God's Eye" is Cool Stuff. Under Brust's theory, that doesn't say you have to find it cool; it says that there's a kind of person who finds it cool and will be glad that "The Mote in God's Eye" contains this cool stuff.
There's also a kind of Awful Writing in which the FTL drive is established to behave a certain way, and then treated inconsistently in order to drive a plot event. That is, it's not just that that the author has an FTL drive in the background which neither they or you are supposed to be thinking about very hard. It's that the FTL drive is established to not be able to do X, and then, without any foreshadowing, at a key point of the story the FTL drive does X; or very nearly as bad, the climax of the story is resolved by the FTL drive doing X without any active foreshadowing that it could. At this extreme we have something close to objectively Awful Writing, though many of us will find it to be Bleah Stuff to different degrees; if you think the Alderson Drive is Cool you are likely to find this particular bit of Awful Writing to be especially Bleah.
Some of the work that goes into hardening the Alderson Drive is a kind of mental labor that draws on more universal skills and methods of good writing. "Consistency" is an underlying cognitive skill of keeping track of things; and a method of making events and people more legible to the reader, thereby heightening their impact; and a method of heightening tension, through a visible guarantee that there will not be a cheating way out of dilemmas.
This doesn't mean an Alderson Drive with pages of math is mandatory Good Writing as opposed to optional Cool Stuff, or that its absence is Bad Writing. There can be good works of science fiction that aren't focused on the particular Cool Stuff of an FTL drive that's hardened to the point where the author is calculating equations.
What we do have is that well-executed hard SF is incompatible with a certain extreme of Awful Writing; and that hard SF draws on the particular exercise of a skill of good writing that has more general applications.
To disclaim and be clear, there are no simple properties of a text that are absolutely and universally Awful Writing. Not even bad spelling; the end paragraphs in Flowers for Algernon involve some misspellings. Somebody who thinks a certain sort of narrative realism is Cool Stuff might enjoy a narrative with many more misspellings. I probably wouldn't read it because that's not my Cool Stuff and I consider misspellings pretty Bleah Stuff, but it could still be done artfully. With that said, there is still a lot of Awful Writing out there which is not the result of deliberately executed skill; although different people will still find it Bleah to different degrees.
It's in this light that we should consider the kind of Cool Stuff that goes into rational(ist) fiction. Lots of it is opposed to an extreme of Awful Writing; lots of it draws on a particular application of a skill that can be used more generally in good writing. This doesn't change its status from Cool Stuff to almost-always-mandatory Good Writing.
For example, one kind of Cool Stuff I like is bad guys who have their own coherent psychologically realistic outlook in which they are the good guys, without that actually placing them on the same moral level or reducing the story to gray-vs-grey. Executing this draws on a universal writing skill of perspective-taking and being able to imagine what the world looks like in the eyes of a person who isn't exactly like you. It's opposed to an opposite extreme of awful writing in which villains have no consistent psychology, or will act against their previously-established goals in order to drive the plot. But this is not a particular kind of Cool Stuff that appears in Tolkien, and that's fine.
I'm not going to rewrite everything I've already said about intelligent characters here, but the same theory applies. It's a kind of Cool Stuff; executing it requires more universal skills specifically applied; it's opposed to some extremes of Awful Writing; and none of that makes it merely universally Good Writing.
u/TotesMessenger [+3] (9 days later)
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u/SimoneNonvelodico [+2] Dai-Gurren Brigade (10 days later)
The fact that the match could last for several days or several minutes is very spectator unfriendly, just for a start
I mean, yeah, but on the other side, as you mentioned: cricket. Reality can be pretty nonsensical at times.
u/None [+2] (an hour later)
Well, what I was trying to ask was, is rationalism as indispensable like pacing and characters, where if you add rationality to a story, it automatically improves, and good stories that aren't rationalist suffer because of it. Tldr: is the addition of rationality universally good in the same way as the addition of good characters, pacing and setting?
u/noggin-scratcher [+27] I am a happy tree (2 hours later)
universally good in the same way as the addition of good characters, pacing and setting
You're kind of letting the word "good" do the work for you in making those things axiomatic improvements. Of course "good characters" are "good" - you just stipulated that they're "good". But what actually constitutes good characters, pacing and setting are relative to the work in which they're found.
Take any inarguably 'good' character and transplant them into a different work in a different genre, or with different themes and goals, and all their good-character-ness won't cover for the fact that they're fundamentally out of place; unless the author has specifically and deliberately chosen a pairing that does work.
Take a fast pace or a meandering pace or a varying pace; either can be 'good' if it fits the author's intent for what they're trying to write. Take a long and careful exploration of the human psyche and try to push it along at action-blockbuster pace and you'll ruin it... and vice versa.
Similarly, if we can think of "rationality" coming in degrees, the strictness and extent of the rationality in a story is then a variable that ought to be set according to what best fits with what the author is trying to accomplish. Not every story is trying to be a scrupulously realistic description of events as they would actually unfold, or to have its characters rigorously follow some internal logic.
I suspect there's almost nothing that would (truly universally, in every possible case) always improve a work of fiction. That almost everything that might be identified as 'bad' could conceivably be used to deliberate effect to accomplish some worthy goal.
u/None [+2] (4 hours later)
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u/ZeCatox [+6] (7 hours later)
Not sure Death Note's movie makers had much "exploration of the human psyche" in mind, though :/
u/ben_oni [+4] (a day later)
Various tools that rational writing relies upon can be considered good modern writing techniques (like consistent worldbuilding, intelligent characters, etc.), not all of it is. For instance, the sidebar says "characters solve problems," but a story can be good without characters who solve problems, let alone in an intelligent manner.
And of course, there are works that tend toward the absurdist end of the spectrum, where rationalism would upend everything they're about.
u/Sonderjye [+4] (an hour later)
I think that the whole point of Escapement post was to point out that people have different tastes and what good means is subjective.
What you might think is a 'good' character might differ from what someone else thinks is a 'good' character. So if someone added your version of a 'good' character to a story that makes the story worse for someone else.
That is using 'good' as meaning enjoyable though. If you think about good as meaning beneficial for society at large then I would argue that making universes rational improves critical thinking and minimizes bullshit tollerance, and thus makes society better.
u/None [+2] (4 hours later)
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u/Escapement [+8] Ankh-Morpork City Watch (4 hours later)
Sure, you could have medics on standby with potions ready, and a witches and wizard for every player with wands in hand standing around the field ready to cast lifesaving charms, shifting off in rotations every hour if the game goes long to keep themselves fresh. They could also have portkeys set up to go directly to St. Mungo's equivalent of surgery, and they could even be fast enough or magical enough to fix someone who got hit by a flying cannonball in the wrong place and broke their spine or whatever. Describing all these things that weren't mentioned at all in the novels but would make the sport make much more sense is basically writing the 2000 word essay mentioned in my comment, that would make Quidditch make more sense but would destroy the flow of the novel and it's pacing, and would hurt the attempt at tension in the game by diminishing the apparant possibility of serious injury or death.
u/None [+1] (5 hours later)
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u/SvalbardCaretaker [+6] Mouse Army (16 hours later)
In school quidditch, Harry falling off his broom is feather-falled by Dumbledore.
u/None [+1] (a day later)
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u/SvalbardCaretaker [+6] Mouse Army (a day later)
Still seems like a feckin' bloody stupid way to do things in school sports. But then on the other hand, America over the pond has no trouble braindamaging their kids playing football either.
u/None [+5] (a day later)
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u/SvalbardCaretaker [+3] Mouse Army (a day later)
True! Forgot about cheerleading. Man, America seems so messed up sometimes.
u/Icare0 [+2] (3 days later)
Sometimes.
Heh. You are a very gentle person and I congratulate you for it.
u/Geminii27 [+15] (2 hours later)
I'd consider them orthogonal. Good writing is good writing; rationality doesn't come into it. Likewise, a rational story isn't necessarily going to be well-written just because it's rational.
There may be some bias because throwing rationality into a story makes it harder to write and write well. Thus, fewer tend to get written, and the few which are completed tend to be by authors who have significant determination and/or are good enough to be able to make a serious attempt in the first place. On top of that, the better examples of rational fiction tend to be lauded and spread around, while the ones which are... less so... are more likely to wither on the vine; there aren't so many rational-story fans that authors can get away with writing crap as long as it appeals to 0.1% of the fanbase.
u/Nimelennar [+9] (3 hours later)
As far as I remember, there are four major components to a story: the theme, the setting, the plot, and the characters. There's also the technical component of how well the language is used, but unless you're Tolkien or Shakespeare, that doesn't play much into the overall quality (assuming you have a decent editor).
Rational writing is orthogonal to both theme and setting. You can write a story where the characters act completely irrationally, which speaks meaningfully to some point your are trying to make, or you can write a story where everyone's actions make perfect sense, but there's no larger point to be made at all. Similarly, you can have characters behaving rationally in an irrational world, or vice versa.
What rationality can affect is your characters and your plot. For the most part, if your already have a relatable character, having that character act for rational reasons will make the story better, and, if you have a compelling plot, having the plot proceed logically from the consequences of the characters' actions will also make the story better. However, a rational character will not always be a relatable one, and a rational plot will not always be an interesting one, and those play more directly into the overall quality of the work than rationality does.
So, given a good story being written by a good author, yes, writing the plot and the characters to be more rational will probably make it even better. However, it probably won't do much of anything at all for a story that was never going to be any good in the first place.
u/SimoneNonvelodico [+2] Dai-Gurren Brigade (10 days later)
So, given a good story being written by a good author, yes, writing the plot and the characters to be more rational will probably make it even better.
The problem with that is that writing them to be more rational might be straight at odds with the aim of the story itself. Someone here mentioned Gabriel Garcia Marquez; Isabel Allende is another (magical realism in general), but also Lewis Carroll, for example. As an example of a very good rationalist writer instead I'd suggest Nobel laureate José Saramago - who literally said that he wrote novels by choosing one outlandish premise, and then seeing how things proceeded logically from it, and who wrote "The Gospel according to Jesus Christ", which could arguably be described as a beautiful rational retelling of the gospels. So I think a good author will simply know what best fits both their story, themes, and ability. It's mostly the average ones who are more likely to bite more than they can chew; knowing one's limits is one of the true marks of mastery.
u/Trips-Over-Tail [+8] Death of Crabs (an hour later)
Rationalist writing is a genre. Or a parasitic genre attached to other genres. There can be bad writing and good writing.
Non-rationalist writing constitutes almost the entire literature canon. It is not automatically bad, though is some cases, in particular the egregious ones, it is responsible for or contributory to its being bad. See: idiot plot.
u/None [+10] (4 hours later)
Rationalist writing is a genre. Or a parasitic genre attached to other genres.
Maybe you should considere using literary element or literary technique instead.
u/Trips-Over-Tail [+5] Death of Crabs (10 hours later)
That's a good point well made, but the phrase "parasitic genre" is absolutely up my street.
u/SimoneNonvelodico [+1] Dai-Gurren Brigade (10 days later)
I'd say it's a literary movement, albeit small and limited compared to its more prestigious brethren. It doesn't concern themes or genres as much as, in general, objectives and philosophy.
u/1337_w0n [+6] (18 minutes later)
I think it is possible for a story that is written as a rational fiction can still be afflicted with poor writing, though it seems to be rarer than with other forms of literature.
Yes, stories that don't have strong rational elements can still be good. This is particularly true if you mean good to be enjoyable. Example: LotR.
u/None [+1] (35 minutes later)
By irrational, I was more meaning something that actively didn't make sense, as opposed to simply not being in the genre of rational fiction. Also, what are your thoughts about the second question?
u/None [+4] (4 hours later)
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u/SimoneNonvelodico [+1] Dai-Gurren Brigade (10 days later)
Also see the bible.
Not sure that applies, the Bible is considered important because of its added cultural value. If no one was taught that it's The Most Important Book (TM) from childhood, I doubt many would bother with it. Even from antiquity, Greek mythological texts, like Homer's poems, trump it in every respect.
u/None [+1] (10 days later)
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u/SimoneNonvelodico [+1] Dai-Gurren Brigade (10 days later)
All ancient literature at some level has scholarship attached to it, if only for its historical value. When documents are scarce, every bit matters! But my point about the Bible was that, while its historical value is undeniable, its literary value is more questionable. Of course some people will enjoy it on its own, but in our world it's really hard to separate the literary interest from the cultural and religious one. People sweat to interpret it because first and foremost they assume it has some hidden truths and it's actually some incredibly complex metaphor for multiple layers of meaning, but that's because of its significance. No one thinks the same of the Code of Hammurabi, yet Leviticus is pretty much as straightforward. Of course there are sections of the Bible that are more literary, even poetic, like the Psalms, so it varies from book to book really.
As for making sense, I don't think it makes any less sense than other mythologies, including the Greek one. There's contradictions and incoherences but those are everywhere in ancient literature - to cut them some slack, these were works often stratified across centuries, through oral tradition, written by different authors, and so on. If you took Greek myths as a guide for life they would be as incoherent and inconsistent as the Bible, but no one does that, so it's not an issue. The difference of course is though that Greek myths are simply more fun and interesting because they involve a lot of different flawed gods and heroes all busy doing very human things and being awesome rather than a single lord of all who spouts judgement on his subjects from high in heaven.
u/None [+1] (10 days later)
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u/SimoneNonvelodico [+2] Dai-Gurren Brigade (10 days later)
From what I know, the Iliad for example is very inconsistent in its timeline. Since it was pieced together by oral tradition, it uses formulaic expressions and even entire sections. I remember reading that there's one night during which the heroes have three extremely similar banquets for no discernible reason. Sometimes the same people get killed twice. Basically, it's a collection of big events tied together by filler material that the poets would use to just bridge the gaps - consider they were reciting this stuff by memory, so it was a useful tool to simply take time while remembering the next important bit.
In general, a lot of myths have different versions depending on whose work you read. I'm saying across the entire corpus of Greek literature, of course, not just Homer, which complicates matters, as that involves different peoples and cultures across a span of centuries. But then, that's basically how the Bible was born too.
u/1337_w0n [+2] (an hour later)
I think some parts of LotR and The Hobbit still qualifies.
I'm not sure. I certainly enjoy them more, and writing a story that is rational requires more skill than writing a similar story that is not rational, but beyond that the question has no more meaning to me.
u/None [+1] (3 hours later)
Would be good to post scenes/situations as examples.
u/None [+4] (4 hours later)
Some characters written to fit rationalist fiction aren't good characters.
Some feel always like mouthpieces for the author. I think it is worse when it is only sometimes. Because in those cases they act against there own (fanfic) characterization. And some explanations of concepts could be done much better without pandering too rationalists/lesswrong community. (Like explaining tabooing in pokemon the origin of species for absol's bad luck, compared too just saying: Hey, we use different definitions for luck, that's really confusing for me, could we/you describe what we/you mean instead of the word luck for this discussion? )
Also, humans are generally portrayed too rational. Not even rationalists are that rational.
That said, I absolutely hate it, when the travel time is obviously unrealistic. (Like in Stranger Thing or Star Wars, while I liked the spaceship chase idea, the execution was horrible) And the original scenes should have been rewritten to not have those (perceived) plot holes. That would make it more enjoyable for me. Subtle irrational stuff doesn't bother me that much, even if I notice. (Like people not calling the cops. Or truckers/car drivers not breaking if someone runs on the car roof.)
So back to your question: rewriting irrational stories into rationalist ones removes the conflict. For example, Star Wars spaceship chase would be conflict less. (Telling the plan would make the whole plot change. Having rational travel options would make the casino visit impossible.) The rewritten story (plot & character) changes that much, that it can't be compared. If that is not the case, the story was already rational(ist) and got only rewritten. And of course, stories can still be enjoyable (=good), even if they are irrational (Like stranger thing's travel problem)
u/Schuano [+4] (14 hours later)
Making the casino visit disappear would have improved the movie.
Also, I'd love to see a world where the "use hyper capable ships as weapons" was fully explored.
u/None [+3] (22 hours later)
The hyperspace ship weapons just breaks so many things with the old movies. Why build a death star? Just one hyperspace drive on an asteroid can destroy it. A bigger one probably could also destroy a planet and would be cheaper than the death star.
The casino visit wasn't bad, it just didn't make sense at all with the plot. Hey, let's save those slaves on our day trip, while our friends run for their lives and then we will stroll to them.
u/Schuano [+3] (2 days later)
I wasn't saying in the context of star wars. I was thinking just a sci-fi world where it is done.
u/SimoneNonvelodico [+2] Dai-Gurren Brigade (10 days later)
The casino visit wasn't bad, it just didn't make sense at all with the plot
I'd also say it was boring. Besides that, the political commentary was really in-your-face and cringey. "Oh, look, these rich dudes sell weapons and are evil!" - yeah, that's really an in-depth analysis of the problems of the military-industrial complex. "At least we hurt them" - dudes, you, like, broke a couple of shop windows. Tomorrow slaves will have fixed all of it, cursing you for the overtime they'll have to do because of it, and most customers won't have even realised. Only edgy teens who think smashing random stuff is "going against the system" would speak like that. It's so shallow it'd have been much better if they said nothing.
u/RynnisOne [+1] (20 hours later)
Making the breaking of time honored Star Wars conventions disappear would have vastly improved the movie.
Whatever that world is, it's one where the Trench Run or the use of combat ships bigger than fighters is wholly unnecessary... which is to say, all the conflicts of the previous movies.
u/Sophronius [+5] The Need to Become Stronger (a day later)
I'm seeing some pretty good analysis in this thread that I won't repeat, so let me just add something that I don't think has been stressed enough: Writing good rationalist fiction is really hard. It's very definitely a case of you deliberately making things more difficult for yourself, though the end result can definitely be worth it.
You can see a story as an optimization problem: Given the story's concepts, how do you maximize for awesome? In the case of regular fiction, you can simply maximise for excitement and drama and other aspects of good writing. When writing rationalist fiction, you still have to do that AND ALSO have it make perfect sense.
For example, to create drama you'll want your MC to interact with the villain, but then he's not allowed to capture the bad guy in act one, while the bad guy also has to fail to kill your main character. In regular fiction this can be handwaved, but if your MC is rational and smart, it's really hard to come up with convincing contrivances to let this happen. Even more difficult is putting your characters in dangerous (and therefore interesting) situations in the first place. With rationalist fiction, you have to ask yourself what you would do in your character's shoes, and the answer is almost never 'put myself in mortal danger'. And yet, that's precisely what has to happen for the story.
Remember the Wave Arc in NTBS, if you read it. Zabuza KNOWS that he is weaker than Kakashi, and yet still has to end up fighting him. Kakashi KNOWS that fighting would put his students in needless danger, and yet it still has to happen. So I had to set everything up so that the only logical outcome was for multiple rational characters to put themselves in danger, fighting evenly matched battles (which rational ninjas would never want to do!) not just once but multiple times in a row! Plotting all of that out took ten times more time than actually writing it.
You have the exact same problem when it comes to worldbuilding. Regular authors get to optimize for fun worldbuilding. But in a rationalist story, the MC has to ask all of the questions that you as the reader would also ask, and that can be really repetitive and dull. For example, The Waves Arisen is amazingly written and has great plot progression, EXCEPT for the parts where Naruto stops and does math for several pages. I would classify that as Objectively Awesome(tm), though EY might disagree.
In summary: Yes, rationalist writing is objectively better in the sense that it prevents suspension of disbelief from being broken for certain readers, but you also still have to follow all of the usual rules of writing at the same time, and that makes it objectively harder to write as well.
u/None [+2] (2 days later)
Huh. But in making every ninja character rational, aren't you stripping away their personalities and just making them all the same character at core, as in they'd all make the same rational choice when confronted with a problem? Won't this make the characters thus feel unoriginal and unvaried? Furthermore, if you have to force the characters to do things for the sake of plot, aren't you making it plot driven as opposed to character driven?
u/Sophronius [+3] The Need to Become Stronger (2 days later)
Nah. There are many different types of rational characters, each with their own qualities. For example, Naruto has the rationalist quality of looking past the popular wisdom (Or as Feynman would say it, Disregard!, though this has the disadvantage of making him socially clumsy. Sakura has the book smarts and conscientiousness, Sasuke has the iron will and sheer need to win.. etc.
Also, it's not that I'm forcing characters to do things for the sake of plot (that would be cheating, and bad writing), it's that I'm changing the given situation until the characters' realistic reaction to that situation would result in a good story.
u/phylogenik [+2] (10 hours later)
What about in terms of technical proficiency and diction and description and such? I think most of the stories I’ve read from this sub are perfectly readable compared to e.g. the overwhelming majority of fanfiction, but whenever I’ve tried recommending them to friends a common response is that they’re too long-winded or stilted or amateur or in dire need of an editor or utterly unable to kill their darlings or whatever. My partner, for example, likened some of the fics to novels and short-stories she wrote in her early-mid teens, but maybe that’s not much of a criticism insofar as a lot of the stories posted here are indeed written by teenagers? She’s gotten through some of the stories I’ve shoved on her through extensive skimming, in the sense of skipping overly rambling paragraphs and pages, which might also be why I’m not as bothered by technical failings (I also tend to skim tons and usually read while multitasking, too). And I've read tons of ugrad essays that are much poorer written than many of the pubs here, so maybe my standards are lower. Where do works from this sub fall wrt all y’all’s writing quality standards?
u/muns4colleg [+5] (14 hours later)
The fiction here tends to be what you can expect from a group of amateur storytellers who most likely get most of their writing experience from undergrad essays. It's fine, the writing works and gets across the information it needs to get across. All the grammar bits and pieces are in the right places. But they tend to lack a distinct voice or sense that the language itself is being used to tell a story.
Also word count bloat is a major issue, but that's more to do with online platforms that enable the worst most long winded instincts in writing because there's no accepted standard or enforced limit to entries in a WordPress blog like there is with a book.
u/Cariyaga [+1] Kyubey did nothing wrong (a day later)
As a reader, I'm quite grateful for word count bloat. I enjoy excessively long works. :P
u/Daniel_The_Thinker [+2] (a day later)
It's like if someone likes Italian food, does that mean they love all italian food regardless of quality? No, they just tend to prefer it.
u/Croktopus [+2] (2 days later)
I guess I'm gonna play devil's advocate here, at least to some extent.
Speaking on rational fiction rather than rationalist, I do think that it could be more or less equivalent to "good".
Consider this absurdly dumb hypothetical. We have two different stories. In almost every way, they are equivalent - they've got as much "cool stuff" as one another, they're equally well written, with equally interesting plots. But one has characters acting consistently according to their values in a world with well-understood and inviolable rules, and the other has characters that behave unpredictably in a world where the rules are violated in each chapter, but not in a self-aware kinda way.
Obviously there are no two such works, and the idea of two stories having "equivalent" whatever is dumb and silly because you can't quantify these things in a meaningful way. But I think the point still stands, that the more a work skews towards the rational, the better it becomes.
I think the main counterpoint is that it's possible that in certain works, the rational aspect might come with a trade-off in some other aspect of the fiction, but that doesn't mean that the rational stuff becomes bad, it just can't be used in those situations.
In other words, the elements that make a piece of fiction rational are also aspects that improve its quality. But they don't ensure that it lives up to some standard of "good".
-edit-
So I was thinking, take the example of Zombie Knight. It's really great, I love it, and I think Frost has done a great job on it overall. But it doesn't feel like the world is terribly consistent. As a reader, it feels a bit like at certain points the author was like "oh man, it'd be cool if this was part of how the world works," and so it became that way.
But if it was just a little bit more rational, it would go from like a 98% of perfect to a 99%. And that's what I'm talking about.
u/CouteauBleu [+1] We are the Empire. (2 days later)
That's a rational point.
"Good isn't proportional to rational" doesn't mean "Good is orthogonal to rational", and wow that was one nerdy sentence.
u/Croktopus [+1] (2 days later)
I can appreciate the nerdiness though.
u/SimoneNonvelodico [+1] Dai-Gurren Brigade (10 days later)
IMHO though that just applies to certain types of novels - sci-fi and fantasy especially. And that's fair, those genres usually benefit from being rational, but mostly because they're written to be very plot-driven anyway, by authors whose prose isn't that great, so they can only rely on the story to keep you thrilled and on the edge. But a good character-driven novel for example would suffer from being rationalised too much - the world is probably just ours, and doesn't matter much, and the characters' flaws and irrationalities are the whole point. Wasn't there a joke about rational Moby Dick in HPMOR? Achab decides it's not worth it pursuing revenge against a whale and lets the whole thing go, end of story.
u/Croktopus [+1] (10 days later)
I feel like such a joke kinda misses the point of rationality, though. It's not about setting your values or goals, it's about effective ways to reach existing goals.
I can't really speak with much authority on that sort of thing, though, because I generally find classics and really lit fic in general to be pretty boring, so I wouldn't know how much rational elements would change/improve/hurt their quality.
u/SimoneNonvelodico [+1] Dai-Gurren Brigade (10 days later)
I'd say it's also about values and goals. HPMOR makes a big deal out of Rational!Harry being fixated on defeating death, whereas other wizards like Dumbledore just sort of roll with it. His distinctive feature is that being a rationalist makes him think about magic in a different way also because he has different things he wants to accomplish (which in fact most people around him consider Dark).
Anyway even some classics could be made more fun with a rational re-writing. I really think what rational fics are in that sense is a form of parody/deconstruction: you lampshade the tropes by showing how they would disappear by simply injecting some common sense into the setting. I'm thinking of for example "The Betrothed", a seminal Italian historical novel that's centred around the adventures of two betrothed young people who are separated by the whim of an arrogant noble who wants to seduce the girl. Being a plot-driven work, it's possible that it could be funny to highlight when that plot is furthered by unjustified stupidity (though thinking about it, I can't think of any specific example in there - I think its plot is relatively tight, if taking into account the flaws of the specific characters, like the priest being a coward, the boy kind of a simpleton, etc.). But character driven stuff is different, because usually the problem of stupidity-advanced plot doesn't really present itself at all.
u/SimoneNonvelodico [+2] Dai-Gurren Brigade (10 days later)
Would you say that rationalist writing directly translates to good story telling?
No. I would say it's an artistic current, so to speak. It follows certain rules and objectives; it avoids certain tropes, but has tropes of its own. It's certainly more satisfying (when well done) if you're looking for a story that works like a puzzle, more brain teaser than emotional journey. I think it's a style that fits me to write, for example, but I would be bored writing only in it too.
By rewriting something to be rationalist, do we make it a 'better' story?
Depends on the story. Some stories set themselves to be the kind of story that requires consistent logic and worldbuilding - and then fail. In that case, yes, they probably will be made better. I would argue "Luminosity" is easily better than "Twilight", because it makes full use of its premise instead of meandering about with it. However, some stories do not care for logic, nor focus on it, and make it clear from the very beginning. A typical example would be "Alice in Wonderland", which couldn't be rational-ised without becoming awful (in fact, Tim Burton's movie was sort of an attempt at doing this, introducing some sort of consistent logic into Alice's lack of it, and it was terrible). Other stories just aren't concerned with that very much, and focus more on themes and metaphors which would be lost if they treated their subject matter too rigorously.
And lastly, can a story be irrational, but still good?
Of course. Ranging from explicitly irrational/surreal stories, to stories that just have other priorities. The important thing is that an author knows what story they're going to write, and manages the reader's expectations consequently. What's frustrating is reading the sort of story that usually relies on logic and rationality to work, and then seeing that forgotten out of laziness or incompetence. For example, reading a mystery novel where at the end it turns out the murder was committed by never before mentioned magic would be infuriating. That's the sort of story that can't be good without being also rational. It isn't about being rational or not, it's about consistency.
u/lordcirth [+2] (5 hours later)
Please keep in mind that rational fiction is a much broader category than rationalist fiction, as mentioned in the sidebar. I think that the rational fiction approach generally improves a work, barring a work that's trying to be, eg, surrealist.
Rationalist fiction is a pretty narrow category and an author doesn't have to write it unless that's their personal taste.
u/RynnisOne [+1] (20 hours later)
This is actually a really good set of definitions.
Making something rational seeks to either adjust the world in question to actually live up to its standards and rules... or defines those rules further so that they permit said work to exist in the first place. It usually results in a better, more cohesive work in general because it closes the glaringly obvious logical loopholes and explains how things work.
"Rationalist" fiction can do the above, but ideally carries the world and its rules to some extreme whilst also trying to "teach" rationalist beliefs and techniques of thought. When the latter become more important than the world or the story, things tend to go downhill.
u/TheAzureMage [+1] (3 hours later)
No. It's merely one element of storytelling. It can contribute to good writing, but there are many such rules, and for any writing rule one can think of, there's likely a successful book that's an exception.
It really depends on the book and what you're trying to do. A lot of excellent works I can think of that dramatically violate customary standards do so with a sound understanding of what those standards are. So, a wildly irrational story could work, but the author would be well served to consider rationality, and why irrationality is important to his work. Perhaps it's a tale centering on unreliable narrators, and the irrationality informs us of important aspects of that character(s). That'd make perfect sense, and is only one of many potential reasons why you'd structure a story in that way.
Or perhaps it's a morality play, and you WANT a structure of "everything becomes illogical and disjointed, because humans screw everything up". God HAS to fix it in the end, because humans can't. Such a tale would be particularly similar to ol' greek plays, and the entire origin of Deus Ex Machina. Rational? Nah. But it presents a strong and consistent theme, so it can work.
u/tadrinth [+1] (7 hours later)
No, it's a genre, if anything the writing is worse on average.
u/muns4colleg [+1] (8 hours later)
A lot of the premises of rational writing are good writing adjacent, but in a too roundabout and cobbled together way to be more useful than forming an understanding of writing and storytelling as art forms.
u/Russelsteapot42 [+1] (9 hours later)
Rationalist fiction is written to explore a particular concept and to cater to a particular niche audience.
u/Rheklr [+1] (2 days later)
Counterexample: A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.