tf_talk | Gloves Off

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Gloves Off

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AYRT
I see your point and maybe my phrasing was wrong. I couldn't finish a monstrosuty that is DAYD, but I feel like if a person has a persistence and patience to write something that big and not quit in the middle of it (which I usually do, so any finished fiction of mine is usually not more than 5k words), with enough education, he might become... not exactly a good writer, but at least reach the level of the cheap books that people read to pass the time during a train ride. He also could learn to imitate decent character development, since he can learn ways to appeal to the people he targets. Even if it would be a copying of other authors' ideas, he could find his niche.
Problem is, he thinks that he's naturally so good at it, he doesn't need to be taught. I wouldn't be surprised if he actually gave writing advice to people and/or revised their writing.
(Sorry if my wording is weird, I'm not an English speaker).

Problem is, he thinks that he's naturally so good at it, he doesn't need to be taught. I wouldn't be surprised if he actually gave writing advice to people and/or revised their writing.

He did: http://plot-with-plot.livejournal.com/2492.html

Wow. Thank you for the link. I don't even know where to start. It kinda feels like it deserves it's own thread or something.

A writer is not a solitary creature. They CANNOT be, because if you isolate yourself, you cut yourself off from your own raw materials, which are not letters or words, but people and experiences. You also cannot use writing as an escape from life, nor as a means of living vicariously. You cannot tell a good story if you are not willing to take your characters far beyond their own comfort zones, and if you don't know what it is to shatter your own, your work will read like a virgin writing about an orgy.

I mean, really? Does he have even one piece of writing that's not an escape from reality or a glaring self-insert? Did he base any of his writing on actual experience?
I knew that he loves to brag about his skills, but if he really thinks so highly of himself, then there really is no hope for an improvement.

DA

As a virgin who has written orgies and various other kinds of carnality (and my PWPs and erotic stories happen to have a lot of positive feedback), I resent his implication! Just because I haven't gotten up close and personal with somebody else's genitals doesn't mean I don't know what it's like to be turned on or get off, and I have had meaningful relationships with actual people with nonsexual intimacy that I can draw from.

Andy, on the other hand, clearly has no idea what it's actually like to care about another human being or to genuinely admire someone else, and you bet that shows in his terrible writing.

NA

Rememeber that this "virgins can't write orgies" bullshit comes from the same person who bragged about writing fic from the viewpoint of the cis man that he is. In particular, he explained in his infamous FFR comment that he writes his male teenage characters as 24/7 horny beasts because that's what testosterone does to teenage boys, and he knows because he's a cis man who used to be one of those testosterone-fueled cis boys.

If he can reinvent himself as having been a testosterone-fueled teenage cis boy, I'm sure virginal you can imagine what orgies are like. Not to mention all these cis women writing m/m porn: not all of them get it "wrong".

DA
To be fair, you don't have to be a guy to write about guys (and vice versa). And the trope of constantly horny male teens is quite popular in fanfiction written by female fans.
What Andy lacks is a skill of observation. You don't need to live through anything you write about, but you have to interact with different people and notice all the small details in everyday life, and be able to look at things from different perspectives. Andy's social interactions are probably all centered around him, as is his writing. That's why it's not enough for him to write about a character, he has to be that character. That's why he probably won't write anything from a female perspective, since he is misogynistic as hell and doesn't want to associate himself with any female traits.

To be fair, you don't have to be a guy to write about guys (and vice versa).

I never meant to say otherwise! My apologies if I seemed to imply that. My point wasn't that you have to have lived something to be able to write about it. My point was just that Andy Blake is a massive hypocrite, and that AIRT needn't be offended by some standard of writing Andy spouted, when he himself completely defied said standard.

What Andy lacks is a skill of observation. You don't need to live through anything you write about, but you have to interact with different people and notice all the small details in everyday life, and be able to look at things from different perspectives.

I don't think I can agree with that. I would say that Andy has the capacity to be *extremely* observant. When he wants to (in other words: when it serves his current plan), he knows very well how to read people. That's one reason he's so good at manipulating people: because he's learned through observation that with people of Type A, when you push Button B, you usually get Response C. He knows exactly how to get people to feel and think what he wants them to feel and think, and I think it takes a very good sense of observation to get there.

NA Yeah, I think he lacks empathy, but not observation, and that's how he can fake it. People who lack both stick out like sore thumbs. He can observe, and knows that action A leads to response C, but he doesn't necessarily understand the feelings that happen at point B. When he's writing about emotions it seems to be words that he's observed other people using to write those emotions; the ~depth~ of feeling is missing.

he knows because he's a cis man who used to be one of those testosterone-fueled cis boys.

Not just that: on his tumblr, he claimed to have fucked 50 different people in 3 months, "plus a couple of threesomes". That's one new person every other day, without ever repeating an encounter twice. And since he claims to have only screwed three men in his whole life, at least 47 of those were supposedly women.

YMMV but in my opinion, the odds of a non-rich, non-celebrity, non-supermodel male who is 5'7" (AND who has to explain to his prospective sexual partners that he has "female" body parts) managing to convince that many women to sleep with him is almost non-existent.

And then there was the "low hundreds" of women he claimed to have fucked back in the DAYD days before the age of 18, including a married woman while her kids played in the next room. Unfortunately for him, his old LJ is still around, where he claims to have only slept with his long-term boyfriend by that age. I'll leave it to ya'll to decide which is more likely to be true.

Basically, Andy is filled with more sexual insecurity than a highschool locker room. Don't let his bullshit get you down, virgin!anon.

"low hundreds"

My mistake, it was "high double digits" before 18.

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