This has been covered before, and some people have changed their names on the site to make them harder to find.
Making the story content open to the internet is probably a mistake. Putting it on a site where reviewers agree to respect the copyright shouldn't be. Authors have posted here and then had their books published.
That said, publishing companies are offering contracts that are more and more unconscionable. Here's one essay of many on the topic.
Seriously, that looks like a reason to bring someone in from overseeas. Once you go back, you'll be a buried body on this side of the divide, and back home it will be your word against management's.
Hmm. Write what you know. I wonder if I can use your misfortune in my story somewhere. (Your lemon, my lemonade. Sorry.)
Oh, don't hold back. Tell us what you really feel!
You would deny Aristotle a dragon to make his point, but partake of Cedar Sanderson's donut metaphor? 
Well, I wonder how any of those agents are so steeped in a vinegrette unmingled with berry or herb that they might not even be able to taste a donut.
Yeah, that nit becomes a burr under the butt put in the chair preparatory to writing or reviewing.
I recall a part of the Poetics (in translation, of course) in which Aristotle likens a scene break from place to place as transport beyond even the speed of some famous legendary dragons.
Apart from that, my only quibble is the high/low art distinction. There's an essay for (I think) yesterday or today on the Mad Genius Club to the effect that sometimes you just want an easy pleasant read--sometimes you just want a donut. And John Dickson Carr was fond of having his characters extol improving the mind with cheap fiction.
It takes me two hours to write one, and you finish with it in an hour? Sheesh!
Still trying just to get the opening of the next day right. I blame you, Amy. You'll bug me for description for which there's no place in the story. Read The Continental Op.
But Aristotle did not even admit that.
Charles, thank you for the 8-point plot link. It's a good, succinct presentation.
The 'jump in the middle of everything' is the current fashion; the rallying cry is in media res!
The example from Jane Haddam is to show her technique for presenting character. She puts us in the character's close 3P PoV and shows their reactions in the present and to history that links to the present. (How and why did a character chose her professional name?)
Virtually no story today adheres to the one-setting, real-time restriction Writers from Shakespeare to Heinlein span long times and multiple places. You may call it sloppy, but it is effective.
This is not good enough IMO.
Which could mean that my use of the terms, which comports with the general usage, does not meet your requirements, or else that state of the art described by general usage does not meet your requirements.
In the dim past of ten or twenty years ago, discussions of software quality often involved the words 'coupling' and 'cohesion'. Great taxonomies were developed in the even deeper past, to describe varieties of these.
Unfortunately, the taxonomies were out of date before they could be popularized, and eventually people stopped worrying about good software and found new ways to write ever crappier software. (JavaScript is a signal example, an abomination both in terms of source code clarity and its effect on the near-universal virtualized memory hierarchy.)
Meanwhile, I have my own definition of 'coupling' and 'cohesion', definitions that transcend the limitations of any programming language or style. Pity I can't get anyone else to use them!
Anent the PoV struggle: Take a look at Jane Haddam's character exposition. It's not 1P but a very close 3P. Act of Darkness should be an excellent example.
Your self-imposed restrictions remind me of the restrictions Aristotle places on drama in the Poetics. He makes a well-reasoned defense of his position, but most of the history of drama has been more concerned with escaping those restrictions in ways that don't spoil the illusion of the stage, and today's theatergoers would not dream of holding a production to Aristotle's restrictions. Indeed, works that adhere to the one-setting, real-time restriction are the exception, and often are curiosities, whatever their merit (e.g. Hitchcock's Rope).
Which is not to say that you're wrong in your choices, only that you've chose to plow a very tough and stony clay.
The term PoV is usually meant, in discussions among authors, to refer to the 'illusion' or effect created by the writer, rather than the writer's own viewpoint, whether on the story or the work that tells the story. I take the original claim about a single PoV in that sense.
As to the rest, it appears that we are once more in violent agreement. But if you insist, I'll agree that we disagree.
As to why this forum: because to continue on the other one is to destroy the utility of the other one.
...
- The detailed search deserves to be more visible, too. That thing is a gem. I think it would eliminate some of the gripes about forum structure if you can easily find an old post by keywords. The detailed search could use tweaking as well. The list of groups to search should be sorted alphabetically and there should be a control that selects "all of my groups" in the list with one click.
- Ideally, it would be nice if the quick search and detailed search could treat the words in the search field as individual keywords, rather than treating the whole field as a single string. Sometimes you can remember a few keywords of an old post, but not the exact string. If someone wants a single string, they can put them in quotes.
Ideally, REGEX or even approximate word-matching (so that 'abolitionist' also matches 'abolitionism' (but not 'abiogenicist')). That latter requires deep and broad knowledge of the English lexicon and is probably best left to Google. But REGEX in its many variations is A Solved Problem. The only problems are which variant to use and whether to fold case. (The answer to the latter is Probably Yes.)
Been a while since I used (n)awk.
This is an area where the de'il is in the details--and sometimes in the concept. Examples:
For detail: When I'm on a view page for one of my chapters, if I click the main edit for that work (and not the chapter edit -- and they are not well marked) I go to a page-sequence-navigation beginning with the master info for the work. I have to click twice through the sequence to get to content.
But once the work is created, even if I go to the master edit area for the work, I'm more likely to want a chapter than the master info. That suggests that the 'content' page should be where I get, and the whole-work info should appear there, as entries above the chapters. The notion of a 'work sequence' is just the wrong model here.
For concept: Why is it necessary to have inline and regular reviews on different pages? Why can't they appear together, with indicators of which type of review each is?
On the mobile interface: There is a certain logic in putting the sidebar at the bottom of the mobile 'page'--but that sidebar includes the groups/forums. I'd prefer that near the top, with the other sidebar stuff left at the bottom.
I've suggested before that on the forum pages 'edit' and 'quote' should be on one side, and 'report' and 'delete' be on the other--the sheep separated from the goats.
Reply to CFB, from the Places To Find Reference Reading II thread:
njc wrote:So if I suggest studying algebra, that suggestion must be accomanied by a lesson? Or if I suggest that doing original study of a field might be profitable, I must conduct the study myself instead of leaving it to those to whom I recommend it?
I will repond to any further discussion of these points on the Addional Writing Feedback group, so as not to ruin this thread.
The author has to say something relevant and comprehensible about the subject before he might suggest further study elsewhere. Moreover, Freer's suggestion is more like a suggestion to "study algebra" by reading a scientific paper that employs algebra -- useless and pointless. I can say Freer tried to explain what he meant, but maybe you should pick a blogger who can write.
Why don't you answer the question: So: what else made [the cowboy genre] work – what else that is missing in modern sf/fantasy? Brokeback Mountain (it is an excellent short story by Annie Proulx before the movie) a modern Western in the same way Howey's The Silo series is a modern sf/fantasy? I say perhaps because Proulx was in no way trying to depict the cowboy as the semi-mythical cowboy of old but rather as a kind of debunking of that cowboy, but isn't that modern? Leftist deconstructionism in the same way Howey and other alleged sci-fi writers do?
deconstructionism: a theory of textual analysis positing that a text has no stable reference and questioning assumptions about the ability of language to represent reality
To argue that a text has no complete meaning without some reference to the outside is to argue that a building is unsound because it needs a foundation, or because it will collapse if you remove the bolts holding its structural frame together, or that it will crumple if you fill every floor with concrete to a depth of six feet.
If we accept any of these arguments, we'll never build a building. We'll freeze in the winter and suffer the depredations of nature in every hour. They are the counsel of despair to any kind of structural engineering, a cleverly argued despair that matches neither our experience of the world nor our success as a society.
Used like this, deconstructionism argues that writing is a useless activity and writers are fools for trying, and that the more effort and care a writer lavishes on the product, the greater the writer's folly. It is a counsel of despair for writers, readers, society, and civilization itself.
No product of human labor or ingenuity will be perfect and complete in every respect. Human beings are neither perfect nor complete in every respect. That doesn't stop up from doing good and useful things.
What stops us is despair. What stops us is making the perfect the enemy of the good. What stops us is conceding our lives and our worth to our faults, instead of taking counsel of our strengths, both moral and prudential.
If you want to see such arguments against narratives made properly and directed properly, see Out of the Silent Planet, the appearance of Weston before the Oyarsa, or The Abolition of Man, both by C. S. Lewis. (Or see the chapter about the Spirit of the Age in Lewis's The Pilgrim's Regress, and the answer to that Spirit in subsequent chapters.)
Steel building frames have been fastened with rivets, welds, and bolts (chronological order). Rivets and bolts fasten by clamping the pieces together so that the structural loads are carried by friction between the parts of the structure. (The rivets and bolts cannot carry the loads on their shafts; it would shear them.) Now ...
Before assembly at the construction site, the steel frame members receive a coat of primer paint. That means that the friction that holds the buildings up is transmitted through a double layer of paint. The building is supported by paint clamped between steel!
You can despair at this fact, or marvel at how it does, in fact, work.
True story: Some years ago (more than ten, as I recall) a drawbridge on the Jersey Shore was being replaced (at Belmar, IIRC). A new high-level bridge was being built beside it to carry the traffic on NJ 35.
The bridge's decks were to be supported by precast reinforced concrete I-beams, a very standard structural form. During the erection, something went wrong and the riggers (who lift with cranes, ropes, and cable) lost full control of the beam. They allowed it to tip over on its side.
This beam was capable of carrying its share of the load of the bridge deck and the moving and live loads on the deck when used properly. But tipped over on its side, it could not even carry its own weight. The beam broke, high in the air. To make matters worse, very large fragments of the beam fell onto the bridge being replaced, forcing its immediate closure.
A new beam was cast and installed. It carries the bridge load to this day.
If you know what you're doing, it's easy to break things. That doesn't make those things worthless or useless, unless you go and break them.
You can 'break' a text by abusing it, by treating it as what it is not. That doesn't mean it becomes useless or meaningless, only you've shown how to misuse it to the point of uselessness or meaninglessness.
To come back to the real topic at hand: You ask what lessons we might think can be taken from the cowboy genre to other genres, including Fantasy and SF. The question was answered: That an engaging story can be told allowing the narrator's voice to carry much of the ancillary action. Not everything must be seen though a character's PoV. (That the character's PoV is an illusion created by narration is true, and irrelevant, just as the optical system that projects a cinematic image does not invalidate the arts of cinema. A carpenter uses tools; that does not invalidate carpentry.)
Whether this will work in fact is yet to be determined. It has not been tested, because current fashion takes it in the other direction.
I'm replying over in the Additional Writing Feedback group.
So if I suggest studying algebra, that suggestion must be accomanied by a lesson? Or if I suggest that doing original study of a field might be profitable, I must conduct the study myself instead of leaving it to those to whom I recommend it?
I will repond to any further discussion of these points on the Addional Writing Feedback group, so as not to ruin this thread.
Yeah, there is some self promotion in MGC. Isn't self-promotion every writer's responsibility?
Charles, Freer also notes that L'Amour maintained a single PoV, rigourously. This argues against lack of craftsmanship, and for the idea that L'Amour had a different sense of what is done well and what is done ill.
I can enjoy Beethoven's Grosse Fuge, and have enjoyed it immensely. I also enjoy the music from Les Miserable. It's not the same craftsmanship and art as Beethoven, and the composer made a big change of technique, building the whole work around the interval of the fourth instead of the fifth. The musical fate of that interval tracks the fate of the protagonist.
That more people rather than fewer can enjoy a thing, and will pay for it (giving up the fruits of their labor in trade for it) should not be taken to mean that the thing is a poorer piece of work. The Grosse Fuge is a greater work than the score for Les Mis, but this is in spite of its difficulty, not because of it.
From today's Mad Genius Club, By Dave Freer:
So: what did L’Amour do right? Besides appeal to a lot of people: why? I over-analyze everything – I looked L’Amour and the cowboy genre in general when I was setting out to be a writer. Several stick out points, stylistically, are worth noticing. Sentences are generally short, shorter on action. There is a lot of action, non-action is often covered by narrator-style ‘telling’ rather than showing (the books read well aloud. You can almost imagine parts as a fireside yarn). The books themselves are short – often as little as 130 pages or less. They’re usually single point of view (trust me this is actually hard to do well). The successful authors had distinctive ‘voices’ – some of which I pinned on dialogue choice.
(Italics mine ---NJC)
So dey ain't no dry bones? Whooo, I didn't see that, no I didn't.
Troll's still there and he don't care, with the bone that he boned from its owner.
Everything the man does is YUUGE. Eversomuch Moreso.
Worldbuilding, guest article on Sarah Hoyt's blog.
In defense of the adverb--what the durn'd things ARE good for. From The Passive Guy.
So those hundreds of notes are collected (mostly; new ones arrive daily) but not yet organized. Notes I have, up the wazoo. In fact, I'm gonna need a new wazoo soon.
But I may be near the point of progress on Maurand, Day Two.
