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The best writers, Harris said, don’t fall in love with their characters, or their words. They don’t mind being edited; in fact, they’re open to any suggestion that makes them better. Writers who get too close to their work and take criticism too personally never improve.

from here

Okay, first of all, I’m not sure I can really respect this kind of advice from someone whose best known work is supernatural romance novels / soap operas, and I understand the general idea of the comment, but I take strong objection to part of it.

Don’t love your characters?

To me, that kind of statement is like saying “the best parents are the ones who don’t love their children.” Really? I mean, sure, you might be able to be completely impartial and fair in your decisions, but it becomes a mechanical experience. (And those kids aren’t likely to be properly emotionally developed, either.)

If you don’t have love for your characters, I have serious doubts that other people will, either. Maybe people will read stories with characters they don’t love, but that audience will be much smaller, I think. Characters are the link that connect the reader with the story. If you don’t love them…. why are you writing about them?

I really think people keep blurring the line between “being emotionally attached to something” and “being unable to receive good criticism when it’s given.” It may be harder to admit flaws or accept that changes need to be made to something you love, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t (or can’t) love it! Yes, people who don’t incorporate constructive feedback into their work will probably never improve, but that’s true with or without love.

The best writers are the ones who have love for their characters, but are smart enough to understand when changes need to be made, even if it’s a hard decision to make.

Let’s be clear. No blog is going to satisfy everyone, and strong language (not cursing, but aggressive tone and full of “must” “should” “never” etc) is used to make a point.

But I’ll be damned if it doesn’t piss me off.

(Yes, another rant!)

The latest is a spectacular generalization about everyone’s favorite social networking privacy-killer: facebook.

“If you don’t like facebook, you hate your friends.”

How about…….. no.

I get it. Facebook is now nearly ubiquitous. I’m aware. I don’t like it. I barely use it. I wish I could erase it from my life for so many reasons. But not liking it has exactly zero bearing on how I feel about the people I’m friends with. (You know, actually friends with, not just anyone I’ve ever encountered in the course of my entire life and then added to my fb account.)

I don’t like phones. It’s no secret. People who really want to stay in touch with me understand that, or we don’t talk much. That’s just how it goes. But not wanting to use that medium absolutely does not mean I don’t want to talk to anyone – I prefer text or face-to-face contact. I’ll use it if I have to, but I rarely initiate.

Facebook is the same way. I have an account purely to keep up with a couple important friends that I wouldn’t know anything about otherwise and who rarely update outside of fb. But I don’t share much through it, and I check it infrequently. I don’t hate those friends – if I didn’t like them, I wouldn’t have an account at all!

You make compromises if you want to stay in touch with someone.
That’s how friendships work. You understand what the other person does and doesn’t like, and you either change the interaction so that it’s comfortable for both parties… or you don’t, and you drift apart.
It has nothing to do with facebook – not using facebook on principle is probably not going to lose you people who actually care about you. You’ll miss out on being friended by anyone who has ever heard your name or happened to stumble across it through their friend’s page. You’ll miss out on flash games that are huge time sucks and require cooperation with other people.

I can’t say that facebook offers anything truly valuable that other communication mediums online lack. Instant messaging? AIM, Yahoo, MSN….. Wall updates? Twitter, plurk… Sharing photos? Flickr, Picasa, Twitter image sites (yfrog, twitpic, etc)…

Or, y’know, you could just e-mail people too.

It doesn’t HAVE to be facebook. It’s never going to be facebook or nothing.
There are always alternatives. There will always be alternatives.
I don’t hate my friends.
But I do dislike facebook.

There are few things that piss me off more than people claiming that twitter was “not made for” trivial updates like where you are eating, what you are doing, what random thoughts you have.

I’m sorry, do you really think that you can be super profound all the time, in English, with just 144 characters? And that’s only the limit if you’re not replying to someone.

Oh, and of course it’s “bad form” to post multiple tweets in a row so you can say something that doesn’t fit into 144 characters without falling prey to the dreaded sms shortening disease. (Deck.ly provides a small solution to this problem, but I’m sure there are people RAEGing out there because they have to click through to read the whole message.)

Twitter is for posting whatever the hell you damn want, okay?
It’s a microblogging service, not a pretentiousness contest.

I don’t follow people because they write profound things. You want profound? Read books. Read blogs where people actually take the time to craft beautiful sentences. Sure, there’s a certain amount of cleverness required to write something without using aggravating abbreviations like “u” and make it fit within the limit, but beyond that…. I really don’t care.

I follow people I know or just like because I want to know what they’re doing, even if it’s something as “trivial” as “just had a delicious cupcake” or “doing mountains of laundry today” because it helps me feel close to them as a person. You want to keep that shine of untouchable, perfect admiration? Don’t follow anyone on twitter.

Yes, it’s better if people keep a measure of self-control (seriously do not need to know about your bathroom habits) but that’s true across the internet. Twitter accesses that impulsive need to share and magnifies it for the world to see, but that doesn’t mean it’s all bad.

Perhaps I have this view because I’ve never perceived twitter as a “get famous” tool – famous people tweet, but people don’t get famous for tweeting (on the whole – I’m sure there have been a few, but that’s not why I’m on there, and that’s not the kind of person I’d follow).

At the end this ultimately boils down to the same thing that any act of writing does – know your audience.
Create another twitter account if you need to (I’m looking at you, people who run twitter accounts for a particular site but then fill it up with your personal tweets!) – compartmentalism is not bad. Trivial is fine – life is made up of little things (sometimes I think fiction makes people forget that – not every day is about saving the world or doing something that will change history forever). It’s important to treasure little things and to enjoy sharing them with people you care about – because I’m pretty sure at least one person is really interested that you had a delicious cupcake (especially if you took a picture of it before eating!).

You want to be profound, be profound (or newsworthy, or always funny), but don’t belittle the everyday in the process.
The everyday has value. It always will.