For those in SF circles, you may be aware of the Trent/gabe & friends circle jerk (no, I won’t link to him. Matt does. See link to Matt below). I guess I should just be gleeful this time around because he addressed the reader as “you” and reserved “him” for describing any character you might want to write, like a pedophile, who’s of course a default he. All he’s saying this time around is that you should “force genetic rules” on a character to make them – I mean, him, this is Trentland, after all – more interesting and “truer.”
Trent insists that people are boring and consistent and undergo no change whatsoever, or that they follow these “rules” that you can chart like math, so your characters should be boring and totally predictable, too, just like physics.
I’m sorry, what was that about physics? Theories, not facts? Oh nevermind. I mean, that’s all psychologists, you know, those people who study people, really do with their time. They make these complex math formulas that tell you that if Sara had a coke at 3pm and Shawna kicked a ball close to her at 4pm, then Sara would “turn into” a lesbian and lose all her money betting on horses when she turned 40, and marry a gay guy named Enrique at 60 who made model airplanes.
Sweet fuck, if people were boring, I would have no friends.
Anyway, people should be just like math problems. Which is why that Golden Age SF stuff had such incredibly fascinating, riveting, characters. Trent has once again stepped down from the mount to exposit to all us “newbies,” “wannabes” and “maybes” about how we’re supposed to be writing, what we’re supposed to be writing, and etc.
I think he mainly writes these things cause he’s not spending enough time writing his own damn fiction.
But I don’t have to even address this flailer, because Matt Cheney already has.
Bless you, Matt.
