Writing Treatise : Part I-II Rheotric and Art Worlds

 

I.                    Rhetoric and Purpose.

 

                This is the most old hat section I chew people out about, but it is the core to all storytelling and life in the world. For in the beginning was the word. The word shapes reality, the word is power. Tales shape reality, tales are power. The one who controls the story controls the universe. Coyote sings the world into being. To the Apache stories shoot like arrows reminding you of that reality. They bind us, they lie to us, they remind us, they bring us peace and war, shape our politics, and our beliefs. The world is a conflict of stories. So, in understanding the core and purpose of a story your story is essential to your writing process and makes all the difference in the world.

 

                The true reality of the story: Everything is connected, everything affects everything else, this is a truth of cultural dynamics, biology, chemistry, physics, etc. The Latin phrase is Machina Vito: The machinery of life. So everything in your story must connect to its solid whole and reflect that whole of reality or there are problems.

 

                Rhetoric: The art of speaking or presenting well.

 

                Stories have a purpose:
                There is a notion of story and purpose: To get the truth, to perpetuate a lie, to exchange ideas, to simply make money, to be a bestseller, to produce a work of art, to entertain. A story can have many purposes, but the degree of which you decide its purpose reflects upon you and the work. The point being, everything in a work must aim towards that purpose, or there is no purpose for it in the work. The purpose is what the audience leaves with and your feeling of success in how the work’s purpose is taken from audience through medium. A work with no purpose is pointless and a waste of time. If the point is to find the purpose you are wasting your audience’s time and your talent. This is not a tale, but reflective gimmick.

                The Duality of the rhetorical triangle (or triangles):  There are three things that coexist and conflict in concern of the works purpose:

                Ethics (Ethos) versus logic (logos) versus Emotion (pathos [Emotional soundness])

                Author (you) versus Medium (text: the story you wish to tell and the place and time of being told) versus  audience (sporadic exists but doesn’t exist, you know but you don’t, Hamlin market piped, cult phenmenoned, art world jumping)

                These three things are in conflict with one another and need balanced for a works success.

                So it is the author’s ethos, logos, pathos versus the medium’s ethos, logos, and pathos versus the audience’s logos, ethos, and pathos. As you write develop a sense of writing and checking in on these things.  Ask questions about them and the work.

 

                So the you the author: Why are you writing this? What is your goal? Are you being logical, ethical emotionally sound?  Why do you care? Are you respecting the work and your audience? Are you fulfilling your own purpose?

                So the text: AGAIN! Why are you writing it? Are your tale elements fine? Who are your characters? Why does the audience care? Is it the right time and place for the tale? Does the work fulfill its purpose?

                Audience: Who is the audience? Why do they care?  Are you respecting them? What is your sway with audience? Are you losing your work to your audience? Are you fulfilling your audience’s expectations? How much of the work is yours or theirs. Is the audience taking the work’s purpose and your purpose?

 

                Logic Problems: Logic problems usually in setting and the nature of the world create plot holes. They bother expert audience members thus cutting them of as potential core audience. Logic problems hurt suspension of disbelief. Logic is the hardest sway to attract audience even though we perceive ourselves to be logical beings. Do good research; spend time world building, think of logic and the Machina Vito of what you are writing as a whole. Logic can also be tied to mechanics, do sentences make sense, does the story flow and connect sentence to paragraph to chapter to the end? Does each word and sentence fulfill its purpose? Do plot points work? Do characters and things in the setting make sense?

                Ethic problems: The spurned ethics getting the short end of the stick. Culturally we are ingrained with concepts of right and wrong, difficult to shake us of these inherited beliefs which do differ culturally, but certain notions are universal. We; however, cannot please everyone. Too high a brow of ethic superiority in character or setting and the work implodes as a logic issue and reflects awfully on you.  Are characters ethical (mainly protagonist, but remember each degree of antagonist depravity marks you and the work)? Is the work ethical? Is its purpose ethical? How does the work reflect real world ethics? If not, how is the ethics of the work balanced in comparison to our own becoming a difficult to manage logic issue. You can attract foul audience with wrong ethics and cut out good audience with bad ethics. How is violence handled? How is sex handled? How is dialogue expressed through character? Everything you do in a work strives towards the works purpose. The rule of thumb is life is not cheap and neither should be sex (things can be sexy of course; the point is sex should not be cheap).  It is also very easy to cheapen the work through watering down ethics just as much as completely ignoring it. Yet society and mediums tend to treat ethics as the bottom of the barrel, other mediums do not handle this well for entertainment. How you treat ethics can really determine the work and its audience acceptability.

                Pathos Problems: Emotion is the rule of the mind, the true gateway to the soul. This is the main fish hook and arrow that attracts people to the work. It is a double edged sword. Remember, characters have emotions and attachments to things and places. Living in an emotionless world is boring and hard to understand. Yet, nobody likes a cry baby just as much as an unemotional cur. Too much emotion you burn out a work for cheap, too little and you lack a human element. Again the rule of thumb is life and sex is not cheap: as your audience feels with these things. Rule of thumb here, we are more prepositioned for animals then our own kind so killing puppies and kitties followed by human children are severe markers against the work and you. So questions to ask yourself:  Is the character in the scene having a good and real emotional response? Are you or the narrator expressing a real emotional response?  Does the pace allow for things to digest? Is your tension expressed correctly in times of horror and conflict (aka take your time)? How is the audience supposed to feel? How do you feel?  Why must something die? What is the price of it dying to the work and your audience? Why must something live what is the price of something living to the work and your audience?  Emotion is the great blinder and motivator: easy to attract and easy to break with as it defies logic but often paints your story. There is an old dialogue between two animators both masters of their craft. One critiques the other saying they are cheap because his work contains a suffering man whose is starving on a boat, sweating alone in torn cloths. A single sweat drop drips from his nose onto the sea water that he cannot drink. The other responds with everyone in your work is always happy and never sees a sense of suffering ever in their pristine condition and thus is also cheap. Pathos determines very much how we define our reality and how we define it through the story. 

This all boils down to artist responsibility.

                Artist Responsibility Overall:
Know yourself (Learn your habits, your purpose, your reasoning, your ethics, your emotional soundness), know your medium and your tale (the art of writing, style, the things in the work, the works purpose), and know your audience (that it is ultimately unknowable, but you know the genre and there are people who read it, their age, their responses to logos, ethos. pathos, the art world they might live in, that they do control sales, but do not equal success of the work and do not control the work, you do, but what you do does effect audience).

                Respect yourself, your medium, your story, and your audience.

                For a storyteller without an audience has no story to tell, yet an author who bends too much to audience has lost their story. A story without author cannot exist, and a story without audience needs to be found to be told.

                Remember this section for it is the basis of all other sections.

 

II.                  The Nature of Art worlds and Tale World Versus Story World.

Art does not exist in a vacuum. Stories do not exist in a vacuum. Once a work is published it enters an art world; however, as the story is being created it too exists within an art world.

 

                Art Worlds: Is a sphere of which your work will exhibit whether these be genres, publishing houses, audience types, art movements they are preexisting categories marked and unmarked.

                There is also not a single art world a work exists within. There are many art worlds and art worlds overlap. Audiences also exist in overlapping art worlds, but may define themselves as only existing in one. Markets also try to define art worlds for profit and will try to define your work by them, mainly through genre which may or may not actually exist.

                This is why what you do as author is essential as it impacts art worlds, potential audience, and the work itself especially in concern of the ethics aspect of the rhetorical triangle. 

                What you do marks you in an art world, albeit there are unmarked categories as well. Humans have a habitat of auto categorization in selection of things in which they compare likes and dislikes between things they have read, other authors, what they know, and what they believe. Basically, the work you produce is entering a script of preexisting notions when it is released to the world.

 

So in summary what you write and publish you become.
If you write shit, it’s how people and future publishers may see you.
If you choose the path of fetish and erotica, it’s how people will see you.
The genres you write will be what people will associate with you.

You will begin building tropes and characteristics from your style that people will associate you with.
Once set it is hard to escape such notions.

                The nature of genre in this line of thought makes it a trapping damnation as so many claim to be SF or fantasy writers and it becomes a flooded sea despite the actual complexities and multifaceted aspect of genre. Basically be careful how you define yourself in an author’s summary as it reinforces notions of marked and unmarked category.

                Young adult: Skits you from youth audience and adult audience.

                Children’s books: Marks you away from young adult and adult. Nothing causes confusion and cascade effect when a children’s book writer is caught with their erotic novel.

                Back to ethics, logic, and emotional soundness: How you treat these three things also marks you.  Every decision you do in a work reflect you and audience even if it is not correctly your voice. Styles, habits, and tropes they build up over time becoming you in the eyes of audience. How you respect work, yourself, and audience also echoes as markings.  You can play the artistic license game, but it will still double back to you. Defend yourself, but you wrote it, you pay for it.

 

                In concern of work: Work can exist outside of genre and does not need to be defined this way. It is easier of course for publishers and audience to define this, but expressing your work in a manner which deeply expresses the genres it overlaps can stop it from reaching a dead end.  Publishing blocks may ask for you to define the work in a single word or sentence. Experimenting with this can help you explore the nature of the work on what it actually is. Know your work, know yourself, and know your audience.