I feel like most artists make their rules after the fact. The stuff comes from the sky, and it’s only afterward that you convince yourself you had something to do with it.
Oh yes, the romantic notion of "inspiration" from the gods. I guess this works if you are gentleman poet, having the leisure time to "wait for inspiration". But for most professional writers without a family fortune, you have deadlines to meet and you need to understand the creative process just as any artist need to know the tools they use.
You can have whatever ruleset you want, your ass ain’t making Reservoir Dogs or writing Old Man and the Sea. Now imagine either of those two writers gave you a list of rules to follow. You’d throw that piece of paper in the garbage.
It’s a like a hot girl giving you work-out and diet advice. Thanks, I’m sure that’s what really got you your beauty.
It’s from the SKY.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Manual
This book has been the inspiration for/method for a lot of hit records.
I think you are underestimating how much method, methodology, effort and development goes into something like Reservoir Dogs. Tarantino may have apparently emerged fully-formed, but he had spent decades learning about cinema the hard way -- watching it, studying it, absorbing the logic/form of cinema. It is (and Pulp Fiction is) not a work of pure intuition; it's clearly a work of homage.
So you think he took an academic approach? Dude dropped out of high school and worked in a video rental store. You are only applying the pastel of studious (the puns are just flying today) because he didn't make absolute shit. If he did make absolute shit, we'd say "gee my god, that's what happens when you drop out of high school and think watching movies is enough to write a good movie".
Right? No seriously, right?
Me and you disagreeing is proof enough we have no idea where this stuff comes from.
After a fashion, yes. He took a research-heavy approach, in the same way that many unconventional, outsider thinkers do.
And no, I'm not post-rationalising it.
You can see that work in the films, in the way they reference and invert cinematic tropes, in the choice and timing of lines, and even in the way they rip up stereotypes.
He's an obsessive, but he has definitely studied. For example you can see a deep understanding of B-movies, exploitation movies, and of films like The Taking of Pelham 123.
There's huge evidence of studying, of thinking through the logic and the flow of cinema. He didn't just watch films and luck out. It's much more considered than that. There's clearly an element of an unwritten manifesto in it all (most clearly to me this appears early on in his influence over Four Rooms, which could almost have been the foundation of a Dogme 95 type movement, had they all chosen it)
> Me and you disagreeing is proof enough we have no idea where this stuff comes from.
I think you're assuming magic where in fact there is considerable evidence of effort. Is Tarantino a maverick brat who grew up within the landscape of cinema? Yeah. But it doesn't mean he doesn't work at it, or defend his opinions with study.
I'm going to get a little reductionist here. What you said is no different than arguing for creationism (not ironic, we are discussing creating ultimately). Just because Earth is a perfect planet, and we get to drive around in self driving cars, doesn't mean there is any evidence for a grand plan (or any effort of it).
Talent and intuition is kind of like discussing recursion. To first understand recursion ...
Tarantino is just a lucky talented shit, and there's no rhyme or reason for it. Any explanation he gives you after the fact, is just that, after the fact. And the rest of us trying to explain it is no different than trading derivatives.
Tell me the study and rigor that went into the Big Kahuna Burger.
Surely rules can improve someone’s writing but what do they have to say? That’s up to them, their curiosity, drive, obsessions - and is completely unique.
I posit that the tendency to stick with writing and have discipline and honing the craft is one of the gifts.
Cinema is an excellent example of this. Good cinematographers follow a set of cinematic conventions that have emerged as "rules" and around which the industry has evolved (like the single-camera convention).
Great cinematographers invent rules and convey them to the viewer in the first act and use them to communicate the rest of the film.
And to make this point even more clear you could substitute throughout the above for animation/animators, and everyone would get it.
On the one hand you're not wrong, but this observation applies to most of life, not just art. As much as people like to think they're rational beings because of the media they consume or the knowledge they've acquired, a lot of life just happens and you justify your decisions with a reasonable sounding narrative.
But within that framework, you're really misunderstanding the purpose and value of these rules. It's not a map to get you to a specific destination like "writing the greatest novel", it's instructions to make sure that you don't run out of gas, take enough water with you and rest enough to make sure you don't crash the car on your way to wherever you're going.
Whether your novel is great, whether it resonates with people, whether you'll die and only after that people will recognize the value of your work, that comes from the sky. But to get your ass to sit on the chair and bang those keys, that does not come from the sky, anyone who has actually tried will tell you that.
But I’ll concede, I don’t understand the purpose of offering general life rules under the guise of writing well. I really don’t. Is it an exercise in authority, or flexing a mandate, or what exactly is it? It sure as hell ain’t any real insight into writing.
But to get your ass to sit on the chair and bang those keys, that does not come from the sky, anyone who has actually tried will tell you that.
Writers block, right? Or, when the sky stops talking to you. Now that’s a phenomenon that’s worth describing.
But alas, pace yourself, got it. I’ll try not finish the entire burger, and save the rest for later. Shocked they didn’t mention a small walk, or coffee with an old friend.
What’s up my ass today I guess.
Start before you feel ready. Stop before you feel done.
This is a surprising antidote for a lot of behaviours I struggle with (that come from a mix of definite OCD and likely ADHD. It's absolutely a tool for rejecting waiting for inspiration and focussing instead on control of inner drive.
I think they were fucking nuts when the sky hit them.
The advice they give you is for the life they managed afterwards, which you can get from any reasonable person on earth.
But hey, I never wrote anything worth a shit. So, I have no credibility.
You're right, there really are no rules, except for the one that says WRITE. Everyone's process is different. There are many techniques, many suggestions, many methods. But none of them work unless you write.
What is it? It's good rules to write consistently. This is one of the ways to beat writer's block, and there's myriads of other rules and advice for that too, it's not that mystical a phenomena.
These rules are fairly specific to writing and fairly valuable. In fact there's some common ground with Henry Miller's commandments: https://www.themarginalian.org/2012/02/22/henry-miller-on-wr...
Since the actual rules from the article are about keeping yourself mentally healthy during the process of writing, the comment is obscure: does it refer to some other set of rules about art? (In which case it's off-topic.) Or is it making the claim that you could work in blocks of multiple hours and never socialise with other writers and see the same results? (In which case, why not clearly state a position so it can be discussed?)
claim that you could work in blocks of multiple hours and never socialise with other writers and see the same results?
Yep. There were some writers that were straight up bed-ridden. They would laugh at your little ruleset.
Lastly, I wasn’t downvoted. A reasonable amount of people seem to agree.
C'mon, we all know exceptions just prove the rules :)
I'm sure there's many coders out there who write their code with only one finger in each hand. That does not render "learn to touch type with all 10 fingers" as invalid advice.
I can't really know what you mean based on this one sentence (or the parent comment from that one sentence), but the really good artists I know absolutely lay down rules for themselves.
All art, fundamentally, emerges in part from creative constraints and from practice of communicating within them. And good artists absolutely know this (whether they would express it in this generalised way or not).
Good artists can switch from medium to medium by exploring the constraints (beyond just the physical limits of charcoal or clay or stacking stones) and then figuring out how to communicate with them. But you don't really get very far without imposing additional restrictions on the work that help frame the message you're trying to convey.
Artists who invent new mediums of expression do this same thing implicitly; the medium at some level is its constraints.
So experienced artists usually do make up rules for themselves (or at least positive schemes and negative no-go areas) whether they write them down or not.
OTOH, most succesful artists seem to work quite hard, AFAICT.