Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…I am, yes. I’ve given lectures on craft, but I think that’s a bit different. You can be good at lecturing about craft, and you can deliver talks to an audience, but I’m thinking about writing instructors who work with you over a sustained period of time and read and critique your work. I’ve only worked with one of these, Jeanne Cavelos, who runs the Odyssey Writing Workshop, which used to be a six-week sci-fi–fantasy writing workshop in New Hampshire but now has become a year-long, more accessible model. I think she was absolutely fantastic. I’m just trying to figure out exactly what it was about her approach that I found so effective. I think one thing is that she recognized that she was very good at isolating the problem but gave you space to generate the solution. People say this about editors as well. When editors point out flaws in a manuscript, they’re almost always right about the problem — a point of data that says this sentence, this plot twist, this piece of character development is not sticking, not resonating. But the solutions they offer aren’t necessarily the right ones. Jeanne was very good at explaining to you where structurally things had fallen apart and then stepping back and letting you figure out how to fix it, because you can’t fix it in the voice of somebody who thinks they know their story better than you. You have to find an organic solution that helps you express what you were trying to say all along. I think that would make for a good writing instructor: someone who’s not too overbearing, basically. There’s a lot of history in your novels. Early on in Yellowface, you mentioned, I think, the Treaty of Versailles. Was China treated fairly in the Treaty of Versailles? The Chinese certainly didn’t think so, and it kicked off a whole lot of domestic protests that led to — a lot of people would argue — some sense of national awakening. The development of national consciousness, a rally-around-the-flag motivating effect. Certainly, the Chinese did not get what they were hoping for from the Treaty of Versailles.…

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