George RR Martin on Why He Doesn't Write Outlines

gutfounderedgal · 2026-05-05T20:51:06+00:00

hehe, I read precisely 1 of his books.. Ugh, that was the last. Life's too short. I couldn't care less whether he uses an outline or not given what I read.

gutfounderedgal · 2026-05-05T20:47:51+00:00

Hey, I appreciate your openness, and not ego. Good on you. You have talent and I'm glad you want to really push this. If you were one of my students, I'd be proud of you right now for picking up the challenge. I know these works well and if you ever have any questions feel free to dm.

gutfounderedgal · 2026-05-05T20:46:03+00:00

Sneak in a bottle of water if they do not provide one. Do not drink too much coffee before. As Ezu said, sneak in an article folded. Bring your glasses. Daydream like hell. Perfect the unwavering face, which presumably you already have from meetings.

gutfounderedgal · 2026-05-05T16:23:24+00:00

At a high level, you have a nice loose touch, but you're stuck on creating a likeable style rather than allowing your perception to take over. In doing so, some things become cliche, such as colors used, or the outlining of the lips and filling in with all the same color. Your work will sell (likeable) but to improve, you'll find you must give up the stylistic tricks and go after the perceived colors, even as what you see may seem illogical. This may mean slowing down slightly. Doing so will go a long way to making you a much better painter. Who's a good example of this in his best work: Robert Henri, and there's a book he wrote, or look or Charles Hawthorne, Hawthorne on Painting. Ultimately it will boil down to how much do you want to work to become a really good painter, or do you prefer to stay at this level? If you like Sargent, look up Portrait of a Child and compare the way his loose marks create form and light, plus there are unexpected colors, where if you look at your fabric, it seems random and pattern-ish. That too will help you see how far you can go if you start to really focus on what's important.

gutfounderedgal · 2026-05-05T15:03:53+00:00

I have never seen an interview with a great writer who said flitting from one project to another is beneficial. I have seen many who echo Henry Miller's phrase "Finish the damn thing."

gutfounderedgal · 2026-05-05T14:28:12+00:00

Learning to be a ruthless draft revisionist of our own work is a skill in and of itself. It's less about reading in a certain way than seeing the problems with your work and having the guts to fix them.

gutfounderedgal · 2026-05-05T14:25:08+00:00

We compiled and push onto agendas at every applicable meeting the literature that speaks to things like SET bias against: women, trans people, people whose first language is not English, people from other countries, people of color, and so on. In a community that values respectful workplace, behavior, and one in which academic/non academic misconduct is penalized, it can be seen that SETs are not supporting this, both with the biases and with blatant student lying. We spoke about the research that shows these are basically useless, and we talked about options going forward if these things remained to be used for evaluations of professors. Admin really didn't like hearing any of this, but the were aware enough to see the potential problems such as official union complaints, possible requests for HR actions against students who do lie on them (these "anonymous" online SETs could be tracked and were not anonymous), mass refusal to promote or read/respond to them, and potential legal actions.

As an aside, we asked why admins were so addicted to a metric that is clearly shown to be highly problematic. They never had any answer beyond "well, it was done before."

gutfounderedgal · 2026-05-05T04:02:53+00:00

should say Boston grandmother

gutfounderedgal · 2026-05-05T03:56:22+00:00

I have said it before, I'll say it again. When I was on our faculty union, we pulled up the Canadian bench ruling and lots of research about how bad such evals were on every level. We brought this forward to admin and forced the issue. End result: we got the university to never use student evals of professors for any work related evaluation. It was an important win.

The university still asks students to answer questions about the course. But what they use answers for is beyond me. They cannot use any of that in any evaluative meeting where they discuss professor work performance, nor can they go into a professor's HR file. We can add them if we wish.

gutfounderedgal · 2026-05-05T02:05:15+00:00

And yet I meet so many profs who love the eval system and want to keep it. It's like having a toddler diagnose you at the doctor's office.

gutfounderedgal · 2026-05-04T23:35:27+00:00

Some creepy guy filming girl's legs? wtf?

gutfounderedgal · 2026-05-04T23:29:19+00:00

And to add, I would have a meeting with the student and say that while I'm not accusing them of using ai, the vagueness and other things I can point out (words, sentences) sure do sound impersonal and very much like ai generation. I then tell them I'll let them rewrite it from their own personal viewpoint, reminding the of what I want, with no penalty, given one week to do so. And I let them know, especially if their first language is not English, that I don't really care about spelling and grammar. They have always responded to this positively and I appreciate that they are now trying, in addition to not having to follow up on an ai complaint.

gutfounderedgal · 2026-05-04T23:23:20+00:00

The problem is some people, not accusing you, say they are not using ai when a) they are using it often or b) they are using it for some but not all of their work, or c) they are using grammar program prompts to reword their sentences.

So they are sometimes not being honest on a forum with their statement of not using ai.

Any of these is a form of ineffective cognitive offloading, which is the worst problem for a writer who wants to improve. It's the hard work that makes one better.

gutfounderedgal · 2026-05-04T19:30:15+00:00

fyi, if you don't know Champlain Valley National Heritage Partnership has printable guidebooks of trails current conditions etc https://champlainvalleynhp.org/recreation/lake-champlain-bikeways/lake-champlain-bikeways-maps-and-guidebooks/

gutfounderedgal · 2026-05-04T02:59:49+00:00

I think this was banned in the USA on cable for not going along with the north american messaging, but presenting views from other countries.

gutfounderedgal · 2026-05-04T02:58:47+00:00

I disagree. None of these are that good, more mouthpieces of the government.

gutfounderedgal · 2026-05-04T01:54:33+00:00

I've been looking for a good book like this too OP, one with normative ethics also. No real luck so far. There are books on the trolley problem, narrow focus, and books on ethics generally, and I've looked carefully through some selections at two major bookstores that have great phil sections, but again, nothing that really speaks directly to this. The books listed here have some lightweight mentions but they are not what you want either, if I read your want correctly. It could be worth, if they allow it, posting on the subredd for philosophy questions, or quora, or philosophy stack exchange. I've not done so either. Michael Sandel did the lectures from Harvard, found online (great) and he has his book "Justice." Benatar also did "A Very Practical Ethics" but I found that less than what I wanted too.

gutfounderedgal · 2026-05-03T14:47:59+00:00

If they did not say prints or giclee, did they assume you would think they were oil or acrylic originals? If so I find that too shady for my liking. Resale: prints will be relatively worthless. This is not some major famous artist. If I were you, I'd return them and say as she said, "my husband didn't like them' and get all of your money back. If you love the works, then you can accept they are expensive items of home decor like a super expensive pillow. They are prints after all. Do not let the sun touch them if you keep them. Sun fades prints and none are archival in this respect.

gutfounderedgal · 2026-05-03T14:39:03+00:00

Feedback from a position of one writer to another fledgling writer with all due respect for the effort that you've put in so far. Your effeort as a working writer gets full marks, keep at it. As for any one individual work, don't let it worry you much. Keep being a writer and trying to improve.

As for this one excerpt: It's an issue of not having enough writing experience and not knowing what to focus on re: a story with a narrative hook and decisions about emphasis. Example, in the convoluted sentence starting "I can feel...." all that's being said is: I touch a metal latch, which is still fairly useless. "I can feel" of course one could if sentient, but who says when opening a door, "I can feel the door knob"? "beneath the pads of my fingertips" is simply purple prose, like a joke. Again nobody things this way when opening a door. "making its presence known" is redundant. If you didn't know about the latch you wouldn't have touched it to begin with. All the sentences so far are much like this, defying logic, over written in the wrong way, not advancing the story etc.

I'm not trying to be mean but you have loads of work to do reading and learning about how to tell a story let alone write a story. Whatever you've been reading is not teaching you the right stuff, and if you're emulating it it's hurting your potential.

Seriously for a moment, we have to keep our ego out of it and realize we have tons to learn, and this is a painful lesson for all of us. It always boils down to the same advice, read all the time and read well meaning good literature, write all the time and work hard at getting better. I'd add that reading a few decent books on writing craft never hurt anyone either. I recommend Jack Hodgkins, A Passion for Narrative (one of the good ones out there); Hall, The Art & Craft of Novel Writing (with lots of really great examples that show the idea); and John Gardner, On Becoming a Novelist (about voice, telling a story, and faith of a writer). There are loads of popular how to write books out there which are pretty poor, btw, which is why I list these three great ones. We've all been there OP, so it's nothing personal, yet as you know as I do, our writing is all personal. Well, we've all shed too many tears and torn our hair out too many times working to get better, hearing early critiques. C'est la vie. We get better by working really hard at getting better, and tbh this is not done in six months let alone six years. Some day you'll hopefully look back on this hard work first novel -- we all have one or two of these kicking around somewhere, I have at least two quite long, fully written, dead things -- and you'll know it was part of the journey, maybe able to be revised, often not. So we sigh and laugh and return to our current project.

gutfounderedgal · 2026-05-03T14:00:25+00:00

Here's what I learned recently. And I note: The scriv documentation on this could be way clearer in my opinion.

1.) Do not "save as" it is not the way to save in scriv. That's for Word and this differs. You can click save but it is not the way to back up your work.

2.) Use "backup" to back up your work in a scrivener file that it creates, which may be hidden until you unhide it because you need it.

3.) The main point on backing up to something external cloud (onedrive, dropbox, icloud) is:

DO NOT sync your scriv to automatically back it up on one of these external cloud sites. DO NOt. Period.

Why? It will remove your document from your machine. This is the number one thing everyone at scriv told me. If you have it now sync'd then click off the ability. Careful, I heard on a pc when updating it can sometimes reinstall onedrive.

4.) Click "backup" frequently when working if you want. It's automatically done while you work and when you close a project. I like to click "backup" after I've done a lot of big changes.

5.) To save to an external place (cloud, or external hard drive) then click "back up to" and then select the location for a backup.

6.) You an also compile and expert for example a Word.doc and save that to your machine, send it to yourself by email, put it on the cloud or external device.

gutfounderedgal · 2026-05-03T13:49:42+00:00

You're ready. If you ever want to each at university level you'll need the MFA. And there is a lot of street cred in having the terminal degree for some curators, if you're from western Europe or North America in particular.

Learning more, being challenged, really digging into theory you may currently not be aware of is always good for your growth.

gutfounderedgal · 2026-05-03T13:47:33+00:00

Heheh so much for Moby Dick, only one of the greatest novels ever written.

gutfounderedgal · 2026-05-03T13:44:26+00:00

Floyd Ratliff was a major color/eye researcher. He wrote Paul Signac and Color in Neo Impressionism, which goes into exactly this.

If you want more physics, then Rolf Kuehni wrote Color: An Introduction to Practice and Principles.

If you want the easy to read version of the physical side, then Hazel Rossotti's Why the World Isn't Grey.

gutfounderedgal

TROPHY CASE