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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   27630 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 15, 2024

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It may be related to Geeks, MOPs and sociopaths. When video games were a niche interest, the only people making them were nerds who were passionate about what they were making and had a vision in mind. Over time, the medium swelled into a multi-billion dollar industry, which attracted a bunch of people who didn't care about the video games for their own sake and were only in it for the money/as a stepping stone in their careers/using video games as a vehicle to advance a social agenda/all of the above. I don't know if this is true of video games, but it is definitely true of video game journalism.

This is not to say that passion is a necessary component of great writing (no one is more passionate about their art than some dork writing Sonic fan fiction), but a clumsy story written by someone who cares about what they're writing at least has an endearing quality compared to a mediocre story written by someone who only cares about the paycheque.

This is not to say that passion is a necessary component of great writing

Do you mean sufficient effect?

For Sonic fan fiction, I bring you the lowest depths to which the human mind and soul can sink: https://youtube.com/watch?v=LCWoZEXyGU0

I think it's possible to write a great story when you don't feel emotionally invested in it, and equally possible to write a terrible story in spite of feeling very emotionally invested in it.

The former is definitely conceptually possible, but I am not sure it has ever happened. I think Dostoevsky claimed he was more or less a mercenary writer to pay off his debts, but I don't believe him.

I think you have to simulate invested characters in your mind in order to produce compelling characters. Whether simulating someone with emotions means you have their emotions is a matter of developmental psychology. IE Robert Kegan's work describes psychological development is the progression towards turning essential aspects of self into mutable tool use. Once you've done that, you can embody investment without yourself identifying with that investment.

LLMs can (sometimes, within a good framework) produce compelling writing, but only by simulating compelling characters. (personally I think LLMs can be invested by some relevant functional definition. But to anyone else this serves as a proof by counterexample.)

but I don't believe him.

Then your hypothesis is unfalsifiable.

The first example to come to mind is Chinatown, widely considered Roman Polanski's best film, which he himself said that he took on as a commercial project only, as a favour to Jack Nicholson.

Charles Dickens, Alexandre Dumas and Victor Hugo were paid by the line.

To quote TV Tropes (I've never read Pet Sematary but my understanding is that it's considered one of King's best novels):

Pet Sematary: While it was marketed as "the book so scary Stephen King didn't want to publish it," the real truth is that King wanted out of his Doubleday contract due to the publisher holding onto a huge backlog of his royalties. Doubleday refused to give the money back unless King delivered two more books. Having previously shelved the story for being too nihilistic for his liking, King threw the manuscript at them to settle half of the contract.

The Money, Dear Boy article includes the following examples:

  • John Ford (6 Oscars, widely considered one of the greatest directors ever) 'repeatedly maintained over the years that moviemaking was just a way for him to make a living, which he stuck with because it paid well and he found it easy.'
  • 'Don Siegel once said of his work "Most of my pictures, I'm sorry to say, are about nothing. Because I'm a whore. I work for money. It's the American way."'
  • 'Anthony Burgess basically belched out A Clockwork Orange in a matter of weeks to pay off some debts. He regretted its glorification of violence and was annoyed by the way it overshadowed the rest of his work, causing quite a bit of Creator Backlash.' [I will grant that the film adaptation is more critically acclaimed than the source novel; on the other hand, the source novel is the only thing Burgess is known for in the popular imagination.]
  • 'Orson Scott Card, a prolific author of fiction in genres ranging from science fiction to pious fiction, once answered the question, "Why do you write? What is your inspiration?" with the answer, "I write because nobody will pay me to do anything else. My inspiration is that from time to time we run out of money."'
  • 'Thomas Hardy always wanted to be a poet and said that poetry has a "supreme place in literature". However, he wrote novels only because, in his early years, he would not make a living as a poet. With the success of Tess of the D'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure (not to mention the latter novel's very harsh reception upon publication), he returned to the less-lucrative career of poetry and spent the rest of his life writing poems.'

There are dozens more.

Pet Semetary is good, back before King's ego went the size of Jupiter and he got Too Big To Edit, and way before he finally ran out of inspiration (which is not to say that some of his latest novels haven't been good, there are a couple where he's shifted style to a smaller scale, but he's no longer the giant beast of horror as before).

I loved the ending, because you could see bad choices coming from a mile off, and yet it was understandable why the main character made that (very, very) bad choice. And King didn't wimp out of giving us that ending.

I believe that there are writers primarily motivated by money, but that's not the same as being emotionally uninvested in a story. (This is distinct from being passionate, in a strong sense, about the story.) However, yes, I think it's hard for someone to prove that they aren't emotionally invested at all. How does one prove such a thing? And is it really possible for an intelligent human to both understand a book like Crime and Punishment and read it and be emotionally indifferent to it?

And is it really possible for an intelligent human to both understand a book like Crime and Punishment and read it and be emotionally indifferent to it?

Why not? There are lots of stories which I understand perfectly well but which leave me cold.

I don't know why you can't just take their word for it. In any other profession, when someone says "I got into this line of work because I'm good at it and it pays well", we generally take that at face value (surely no one believes that every doctor went to medical school because they "want to help people" - the ones volunteering for MSF, sure, but not a dermatologist in the Hamptons). Why, as a culture, are we married to this romantic ideal of the tortured artist, slitting his wrists over the typewriter in pursuit of his muse? Why do I have to believe that the artist sacrificed something of himself in order to produce his masterwork? My opinion of how entertaining a film Dirty Harry is isn't changed by the knowledge that Don Siegel only directed it for the money, and I don't see that my opinion should have changed.

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