Reddit Reddit reviews Tell It Slant: Writing and Shaping Creative Nonfiction

We found 3 Reddit comments about Tell It Slant: Writing and Shaping Creative Nonfiction. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

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Tell It Slant: Writing and Shaping Creative Nonfiction
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3 Reddit comments about Tell It Slant: Writing and Shaping Creative Nonfiction:

u/rudyred34 · 2 pointsr/SRSAuthors

I took several "creative nonfiction" courses in college, and two books that we used were Tell It Slant and On Writing Well. I remember Tell It Slant more vividly; it included several examples of various styles of nonfiction writing, several of which I enjoyed and used as inspiration for my own writing. I assume that On Writing Well is also valuable, though, considering how long it's been in print.

u/Write-y_McGee · 2 pointsr/DestructiveReaders

> I just assumed that the reader cares who I am and what I think. It might sound silly, but that really was an eye-opener.

It doesn't sound silly at all!

In fact, this is probably the single most common mistake that people make -- in all forms of interaction with others. We assume that people want to know what we are thinking, what we are doing, what we have done, etc. It is pretty much the basic bias that we all have.

This is also why the simplest hook in non-fiction is to show the reader how they are impacted by what you are discussing.

Of course, I should make it clear that this not the only approach. People read biographies all the time, and so you can get them to care about other people -- provided those other people are interesting. Or, even, perhaps the other person has a problem they find interesting or care about.

For example, another good hook that might draw the reader into a story is:

"I escaped death today."

Even though I don't really care about you yet, I might care that you were about to die. Though it is a bit salacious, it is something that people are interested in (see: rubbernecking at a car accident, where people have no idea who the people involved were, but care deeply about what happened to them).

Anyway, the point is you must make the reader care about what you are going to talk about. Same as in fiction, there are many ways to do this, but it might still be done well.



Regarding the more specific points, arguments, I am happy to discuss these further too!



>objectively most of technology couldn't be directly tied to violent motivation

I was using violence in the less common definition:

"strength of emotion or an unpleasant or destructive natural force."

I was also thinking about not just man v. man, but man v. nature, which I would maintain is the primary motivator for technological advancement.

The idea is that it is the survival instinct that provides for the 'curiosity' drive. However, the vast preponderance of 'curiosity' is linked to survival still.

Take your essay itself. By your own admission (if I am reading the story right), a major motivator for your thoughts was the idea that your survival was threatened, and could end at any given time. You then had to decide how you could live under such conditions, and this motivated the rest of the thought process. Thus, the 'curiosity' that you exhibited was inspired by a direct need to understand how one lives within a possible scenario.

Anyway, that is just my read on things.



>Yes, ultimately the simulation would be governed by the laws of physics but this places no direct limitations on computational complexity other than of course in regards to resource constraints which would impact performance, but not complexity. For example, a Turing machine can compute anything that is computable

A
theoretical Turing machine can compute anything, but a real world one cannot.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics ensures that this is the case, but you can also explain it with computation as well.

If there is a finite amount of energy in a system, then their is also a finite amount of information. I am thinking of Shannon entropy at this stage, which appears to be the most direct linkage between energy and information.

Given a finite resource, if one were to compute
anything, the computation would need to be reversible, as you could not afford to discard energy/information. Of course, a reversible computation requires three bits per computation (in terms of logic gates), and so this means that for every bit of information you wish to compute, you need three bits of information to compute it. (Here I am working from memory of The Feynman Lectures on Computation, which I read a while ago. I may have some details wrong, but the principle is the same).

The point here is thus, this: if we used all the energy (including mass energy) to store the computation, the simulation that results could only be approximately 1/3 as complex as the universe in which it is run, given the needs to run reversible computation.

Of course, you could get rid of the reversible requirement, but then this places a more fundamental limitation on the system, in terms of # of computations that could even be performed.

And, of course, reversible computation (at speeds less than infinitely slow) are also impossible, and so we run into the heat death problem anyway.

I think that is where I was coming from, when I said the simulation would, out of necessity, be simpler than the universe in which it was stored.



Anyway, I do hope that the all this is helpful. But even if it is not, at least it might be fun!

I would encourage you to keep writing stuff like this. This piece definitely shows that you have promise, you just need to practice the elements of writing non-fiction in a way that leverages the aspects of story telling to make it as engaging as possible.

I will be excited to see what else you write!

**

PS. I thought of some other books that I found useful, when I was first learning to write non-fiction.

[
Tell it Slant](http://www.amazon.com/Tell-Slant-Writing-Creative-Nonfiction/dp/0072512784): A book more generally about how to write non-fiction (not just science-based non-fiction). It is more about how to weave a story, and leverage many of the basic tricks of literature/language to your advantage.

[
Made to Stick](http://www.amazon.com/Made-Stick-Ideas-Survive-Others/dp/1400064287/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1463315481&sr=1-1&keywords=made+to+stick): A book on marketing, but one that shows us how important it is to keep a message simple and engaging, if we want people to remember the message. And if you are writing non-fiction, remembering the message/information, is often the goal.

[
Don't be such a scientist*](http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Be-Such-Scientist-Substance/dp/1597265632/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1463315517&sr=1-1&keywords=don%27t+be+such+a+scientist): If you want to concentrate on science/technology writing, you will eventually run into the problem where you are giving too much technical detail and caveats. This will bog down the writing. This book shows why this is a problem, and why (many times) you will have to accept saying things that are not 100% correct, in service of the story/message you are trying to get across. I know this sounds crazy, but I am a firm believer in this now. If you write something that is 100% correct, but boring, no one will read it. You might not have even written it. If you right something where the core message is correct, but the details are not necessarily supported strongly, but it is engaging, this is more useful. It is hard to do this justice, without going through the entirety of this book, so I would just encourage you to read it.

u/FartButtMcGillicuddy · 1 pointr/LawSchool

Same here. I went through this guide before and as I wrote it. It's pretty helpful. If you can, take big blocks of time out to read it, and take notes. You should be able to get through it in a few days. I'm also reading a book called Tell It Slant to help me write better and more creatively.

One piece of advice from both books: Just start writing. Don't worry too much about thinking of some kind of big event in your life to write about. Sometimes you can get a great story from even the most mundane happening. Just make sure you keep the focus on yourself.