Thread by @delong

Apropos of:

Charlie Jane Anders: What Samuel Johnson Can Teach Us About Separating Art from the Artist: ‘[Johnson: "]Of Cowley… he in reality was in love but once, and then never had resolution to tell his passion...

<buttondown.email/charliejane/ar…> 1/

...This consideration cannot but abate, in some measure, the reader’s esteem for the work and the author…

I present a section from Noah Smith's & my Hexapodia XIII, with the highly estimable Cory Doctorow, also talking about the life and death of the author and the sub-... 2/

...Turing imago instantiations of the author that we absorbed readers cannot help but run on our wetware:

<braddelong.substack.com/p/podcast-hexa…>

Brad: Well, we know this is a problem. When one is dealing with an author whose work one has read a lot of—by... 3/

...reading your books.by now I've spent forty hours of my life looking at squiggles on a page or on a screen and, through a complicated mental process, downloaded to my wetware and then run on it a program that is my image of a sub-Turing instantiation of... 4/

... your mind, who has then told me many very entertaining and excellent stories. So I feel like I know you very well…

Cory: There’s this infamous and very funny old auto reply that Neal Stephenson used to send to people who emailed him. It basically went: “Ah, I get... 5/

... it. You feel like you were next to me when we were with Hero Protagonist in Alaska fighting off the right-wing militias. But while you were there with me, I wasn't there with you. And so I understand why you want to, like, sit around and talk about our old military... 6/

...campaigns. But I wasn't on that campaign with you.

Brad: Yes. It was only my own imago, my created sub-Turing instantiation of your mind that was there…

Cory: Indeed. We are getting off of interoperability, which is what I think we're mostly going to talk about. But... 7/

... this is my cogpsy theory of why fiction works, and where the fanfic dispute comes from.

Writers have this very precious thing they say. It is: “I'm writing and I'm writing and all of a sudden the characters start telling me what they want to do.” I think that what... 8/

... they actually mean by that is that we all have this completely automatic process by which we try and create models of the people we encounter. Sometimes we never encounter those people. We just encounter second-hand evidence of them. Sometimes those people don't live... 9/

... at all. Think about the people who feel great empathy for imaginary people that cruel catfishers have invented on the internet to document their imaginary battles with cancer. They then feel deeply hurt and betrayed and confused, when this person they've come to... 10/

... empathize with turns out to be a figment of someone else's imagination.

I think what happens when you write is that you generate this optical link between two parts of your brain that don't normally talk to each other. There are these words that you are explicitly... 11/

... thinking up that show up on your screen. And then those words are being processed by your eyeballs and being turned into fodder for a model in this very naive way. And then the model gets enough flesh on the bones—so it starts telling you what it wants to do. At this... 12/

...point you are basically breathing your own exhaust fumes here. But it really does take what is at first a somewhat embarrassing process of putting on a puppet show for yourself: “Like, everybody, let’s go on a quest!” “That sounds great!” “Here we go!” It just... 13/

... becomes something where you don't feel like you're explicitly telling yourself a story.

Now the corollary of this is that it sort of explains the mystery of why we like stories, right? Why we have these completely involuntary, emotional responses to the imaginary... 14/

... experiences of people who never lived and died and have no consequence. The most tragic death in literature of Romeo and Juliet is as nothing next to the death of the yogurt I digested with breakfast this morning, because that yogurt was alive and now it's dead and... 15/

... Romeo and Juliet never lived, never died, nothing that happened to them happened. Yet you hear about the Romeo and Juliet…

Noah: …except that a human reads about Romeo and Juliet and cares…

Cory: That is where it matters, yes indeed. But the mechanism by which... 16/

... we care is our build this model which is then subjected to the author's torments, and then we feel empathy for the model. What that means is that the readers, when they're done, if the book hit its aesthetic marks, if it did the thing that literature does to make it... 17/

... aesthetically pleasing—then the reader still has a persistent model in the same way that if your granny dies, you still have a model of your granny, right? You are still there.

That is why fanfic exists. The characters continue to have imagined lives. If the... 18/

... characters don't go on having imagined lives, then the book never landed for you.

And that’s why authors get so pissy about fanfic. They too have this model that they didn't set out to explicitly create, but it's there. And it's important to their writing process.... 19/

...And if someone is putting data in about that modeled person that is not consistent with the author's own perception of them, that creates enormous dissonance. I think that if we understood this, we would stop arguing about fanfic.

Noah: We argue about fanfic?... 20/END