fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #2513 ]

⌈ Secret Post #2513 ⌋

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Notes:

Early post!

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 048 secrets from Secret Submission Post #359.
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Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Well I think people don't quite get that writers are not psychologists (for the most part). You can't write a sociopath if you don't know what that actually entails. A lot of writers were writing before this information existed even. (This continues today obviously, but back then even more so.) So the characters they write are based on their own understanding of human beings and reality, not human beings as they actually are. Like how many artists draw stylized humans to their taste and understanding of anatomy, writers write stylized human beings. So when you do this it's less "modern sensibilities" and more trying to criticize the unrealistic anatomy in Steamboat Willie or something. That's an extreme example but I think it's the same principle.

This may sound like a dour way of viewing written fiction but eh, I mean it in the best way.

....Libraries existed even back in Ye Olden Times. Writers who wanted to write about such things could certainly do research. So, uh, no, I don't subscribe to the idea that writers can only write things that they know intimately.

(And, what artists can't look at people and think "Yeah, so there's obviously some proportions things going on. Let's see..." All of those old reports from the Renaissance of artists and doctors using dead people as models must be fabrications!)

...I'm talking about personality disorders and things along those lines. You know, things that are barely understood today? Writers can of course write things they don't know intimately with just regular imagination and empathy. My point is writers can't possibly know everything intimately. They have to substitute what they don't know with what they do, like everything in life. Fiction will always be a approximation of reality, comparable only in certain ways.

For example, in Ayn Rand's Deadly Serious books on Objectivism addressing it as a philosophy she used examples from her other books, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. Her fictional fucking books and characters were used as viable examples for a system she was trying to explain. That's absurd. In the same sense using Sherlock as a totally legit example of someone with Asperger's or what have you is silly when Doyle probably didn't even know what the F that was. We might just have to agree to disagree because I don't think an author can just accidentally write something that effects someone's life to such a degree without knowing. In his mind, Asperger's may not even exist, so how could it exist in his world in a plausible way? Saying "writers can do research" is beyond not the point. These things weren't known about and even if a writer WANTED to know, they couldn't find out for a large period of history.

And I don't know what your last paragraph is even saying. Are you speaking in code.

What about Dickens? Battered wife syndrome wasn't understood in his time, but he looked at battered wives and portrayed how one acted, and he did so quite accurately. (When her characterization was criticized as unbelievable, Dickens countered that he was just writing what he saw.)

I don't really get how this contradicts what I said? He's writing about reality as he understands it.

I don't blame your confusion though, my thoughts on this are vague, and I didn't articulate them very well.

But most writers write about things they've seen--even fantasists often have characters based on people they've met. Assuming that sociopaths have existed all throughout history, then even if for much of human history no one knew what a sociopath was, it's likely there were authors who wrote a depiction of a sociopath just by writing about their old rival Timothy or their father-in-law Paul. In that sense, we at least can't rule out that there are fictional characters from a time before sociopathy was a known condition who nonetheless are "sociopathic" characters.

(Actually, I think this is what the previous poster meant, the one you said was "speaking in code." I hope this was clearer.)

Edit: I saw your post below about them only being able to identify "sociopathic traits." Does the dividing line really matter? A post above mentioned monomania--that's no longer an existing diagnosis, but an author who wrote about monomania can still be recognized today as writing symptoms of currently defined illnesses.

Edited 2013-11-20 06:59 (UTC)

My grand summation is that a writer can't write what they don't know. I don't mean haven't experienced. I mean literally don't know exist. (I'm not talking about Ray Bradbury predicting headphones by the way.) Like if someone who has never stepped foot in a physics classroom and couldn't add two and two tried to write a thesis on gravity it would obviously be nonsense beyond basic observations like "shit goes to the floor". People are not the same, but similar in the sense that a lot of writers don't have an intense deep understanding of every person, and so they have an image of people as they see them, and then they write them into a story so you end up with a creation a few layers removed from reality. So when you compare that to reality itself you will (probably, probably, PROBABLY) have to twist and stretch and reach in order to get it to line up with anything as concrete as the modern definition will be. It's not reality. It exists on it's own terms.

(I was only referring to that person's last paragraph, which made no sense to me.)

Er, sociopathy existed before modern psychiatry. Not having a modern understanding of how it works doesn't mean that writers weren't able to write about people with sociopathic traits. Their grasp on it might be incomplete, but it wasn't nonexistent.

I know. I think someone who doesn't know what sociopaths are would only be able to create someone with "sociopathic traits", not an actual sociopath.

But in 10 years they'll change the definition of "sociopath" and what then? Did anyone who write a sociopath based on today's understanding of the disorder suddenly go from having written an actual sociopath to a character with with "sociopathic traits"?

Don't imagine for a second that modern psychology is an absolute authority on anything. It's not.

Yeah.

I know.

You can't write a sociopath if you don't know what that actually entails. A lot of writers were writing before this information existed even.

So no author could properly describe a sociopath before the existence of the DSM-V? LOL.

Explained in another comment. LOL.

[ SECRET POST #2513 ]

Is this Captain Obvious shit, I dunno

Re: Is this Captain Obvious shit, I dunno

Re: Is this Captain Obvious shit, I dunno

Re: Is this Captain Obvious shit, I dunno

Re: Is this Captain Obvious shit, I dunno

Re: Is this Captain Obvious shit, I dunno

Re: Is this Captain Obvious shit, I dunno

Re: Is this Captain Obvious shit, I dunno

Re: Is this Captain Obvious shit, I dunno

Re: Is this Captain Obvious shit, I dunno

Re: Is this Captain Obvious shit, I dunno

Re: Is this Captain Obvious shit, I dunno

Re: Is this Captain Obvious shit, I dunno