From: "Chris" 
Subject: Re: (urth) delany, etc.
Date: Tue, 29 Jul 2003 18:55:12 +0000

>On Monday, July 28, 2003, at 11:15 PM, maa32 wrote:
>   "You have a wonderful idea here.
>>Many wonderful ideas.  But you will have to get much better at writing 
>>before
>>you can do justice to them.  You explain yourself way too much."
>>
>>I was infinitely grateful for his input - and I regard it as extremely
>>positive - yet here is the rub: everyone who has ever read my work says I 
>>need
>>to explain more, because it doesn't make sense - that I make too many 
>>quantum
>>leaps that should be explained.
>>
>>
>
>Don butts in with two maybe three comments:
>
>Having never read anything you've written I would instinctively say that 
>Mr. Wolfe's advice will give you critical longevity and "everyone" else's 
>advice will give you more marketability.  I'm a

Perhaps it's a certain confusion of terms. It sounds like your "everyone 
else's" advice is telling you that they don't understand what the story is 
getting at, and what they really want is more information to be able to work 
it out. But what Wolfe is telling you is that you should give them this 
information in more subtle ways than outright explaining it to the reader 
with the voice-of-god: give them circumstancial clues, pieces from which 
they can infer what you want them to know.

I haven't read your writing either so please don't take offense if I'm 
guessing wrong. But the reason I guess this is because Wolfe has, on other 
occasions, said that the tendency of a writer to try and "explain" things 
explicitly is one of the main things a potential writer has to overcome. So 
it sounds like just the kind of thing he would caution you against.

Civet

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