Unknown Unknowns and the Dunning-Kreuger Effect

One of the goals of University education is developing the ability to introspect about the state of one’s own knowledge. This can involve very narrow technical issues about “unknowability,” such as the mathematical theorem that it is impossible, in general, for any computational engine to be able to always predict whether an arbitrary computer program will run to completion. But more importantly it involves being able to judge “I know thus-and-so; I know such-and-such exists but I don’t know much about it; I know there are things I don’t even know are out there.” In the famous words of Dick Cheney (actually first stated by others), these are known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns.

Tropes and Story Planning

In a recent blog post I apologized for linking to “the black hole that is TV tropes.” It’s a highly interlinked site with summaries of hundreds upon hundreds of elements that appear repeatedly in fiction of various kinds, and even sometimes in the real world. Once you follow one link, you’re likely to follow many more, until you notice that far too much time has passed and you’ve wasted spent half the afternoon reading from it.

I’ve heard that some people consider tropes bad, to be avoided, but to me it seems they’re confusing trope with stereotype or cliche. Tropes are cultural elements that have endured for a long time; they’re the background “collective unconscious” from which we can legitimately draw to inspire us. I’m not sure avoiding tropes is the least bit possible, let alone desirable. So in this post I’m going to talk about a few tropes I’ve recognized in my work in progress, and what I’m trying to do that’s at least mildly original.

Science and Sapience

I ran across a quote recently, which I’ll paraphrase: “Knowledge is recognizing that Frankenstein is not the monster. Wisdom is realizing that Frankenstein is the monster.” This is a post reflecting on science, “knowledge,” and sapience, “wisdom.”

Research, Teaching, and Scholarship

I’ve been on the faculty at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario since 1984 – one of the most secure jobs there is, once you get tenure. That makes me a professional scholar: “scholar” in Sense 2a of the Merriam-Webster dictionary (a person who has done advanced study in a specialized field), and “professional” in the sense of getting paid for it. Maybe I can even claim “scholar” definition 2b (a learned person), albeit rather more narrowly “learned” than when the word entered the lexicon centuries ago. But I’ve been a scholar in some sense since I was a child: I love learning new things, and finding ways to explain them. I noticed during this A-Z blogging challenge that I carry scholarly attitudes over into my writing hobby.

Quirks for Characters

I’ve several times heard the advice that characters (in a novel or a role-playing game) ought to have quirks that distinguish them from each other and make them more realistic, more interesting. I can see ahead that on some upcoming edit of my WiP I will need to make sure at least some of my characters have quirks, so as usual when I wasn’t sure how to do something, I did some research.

Planning, Pantsing, and Prototyping

My writing style for most of my NaNoWriMo novels (including my WiP) has started with visualizing a small number of scenes, some of them coming from the mists just before falling asleep or just after waking up. I then have to knit them together into some kind of coherent story. Initially this made me pretty much a pantser (from “seat-of-the-pants”). In the last few years I learned to do more planning, such as using 7-point structure. After a lesson for Mary Robinette Kowal’s Patreon supporters, I wrote an outline for the combined threads of the two NaNovels I’m editing together. And this month I’ve done several exercises that may have a significant influence on the story. I call these exercises “prototyping.”

Overlord Motivations

My style of writing is a mix of planning and pantsing, and for some elements of my current WiP I definitely didn’t plan as much as I now wish I had. One of the elements I introduced without a lot of planning was an invasion of my peaceful egalitarian Great Valley by a warlike patriarchal culture from over the mountains. I based this on a very brief study of one archaelogists view of what happened in ancient Eastern Europe. When I got to the point of editing two NaNovels into a coherent whole, I needed to motivate the invasion – which meant motivating the leader behind the invasion, the Big Bad Evil Guy (BBEG), and possibly Evil Overlord.