hi, new viewer here. cheers! congrats on being picked up by our algorithm overlord. anyway, your videos are making me want to get back into writing, so, congrats for that too :) you're good!
Aaah! It was only a matter of time before this channel really caught on. It's full of good, useful information and its usefulness will not diminish with time.
Hey! Just found your channel today from your video "How to Read Poetry". I'm so thoroughly impressed with your quality and thoughtfulness! It's awesome seeing some literature-based channels on this platform, so please keep it up!
Andrew, I have to thank you for all the explanations and trails you offer your viewers in your videos : they are of great help ! I hope you’ll see this comment 😉 Take care
This is one of those rare RU-vid videos that gets more interesting with every passing minute. Your arguments are compelling, and you write shockingly good copy. Watching this for the third time right now simply to study how you construct your arguments in a conversational register. Thanks for doing such good work, Andrew!
This is one of my favorite channels I’ve found on RU-vid. I know this is about writing, but I’ve been thinking a lot about finding meaning in my own life lately, and the concept of exigence seems very applicable :)
whoah, thanks for this video! for the poems i've written, edited, and felt satisfied with so far, there was always a conflict that needed to be resolved, not necessarily from a plot standpoint but rather, an emotional arc standpoint, as you say. that wasn't something i was consciously aware of until after watching this video and reading over my past writings. i realize that the pieces i've felt a "dead end" with doesn't have that exigence; they're just essentially pretty words on paper but without that "purpose" infused, it feels hollow and incomplete to me and i'm sure a reader will also feel that sentiment.
Yup, just found the channel. You cut to the very heart of human communication. Love your videos of rhetoric and aristotle especially. Keep making videos.
@@WritingwithAndrew Good to hear. Your pragmatic explanation for the purpose of Rhetoric, i.e sparta invading, made my mind click in the kind of way that brings me a lot of joy. Your videos made it crystal clear the value of what seems like a lost art especially when good rhetoric is very much needed for a democractic country to function. I feel like taking that idea and bringing it to new places. It ties in such discussions like the limitations of empiricism in studying the humanities and economics. Great stuff!
Thanks--I think that's kind of how it was for me when I first discovered it, like my mind clicked. I really do think it's useful (and needed!) in the ways you've pointed out, so I'm glad to hear it's not just me
Can you present a video on the difference between "style" and "voice?", (and particularly differentiating between "author's voice" and "characters' voice.")
I've heard people comment on the Story Problem of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Indy isn't necessary for the resolution of the story: the Nazis would've found the ark and would've opened it and died. But Indy was necessary for the story, if not that plot thread, because he responded to the exigency as best he was able. He and Marion worked out the important details ("Don't look!"), even if they weren't able to stop the Nazis.
Cool, very interesting! It's been ages since I've seen Raiders, but it's a great point that once the initial spark gets set, the path to the resolution and the resolution itself can take many different forms
I think that this is also strongly related with the idea "the medium is the message". The manner in which the message is delivered says a lot about the qualities of the urgency and the imperfection being addressed by the message. A poem implies that the author is addressing an ephemeral experience that would not be conveyed through rote description. So even before you know the content of the poem, receiving a poem tells us a lot about who wrote it. But as a designer, what intrigues me is that the way a message is received (even in good faith) can differ radically from the intent. The exigence the reader detects in the writing seems to be divorced from the author's actual intent, as though it exists outside of the writer. A writer then has a choice; They can lean into this new exigence, or they can try again. And in my experience, the exigence that a writer discovers in their own writing is often much more valuable and meaningful than the conscious, literal intent was.
Cool--I like the connection to design. It's true that readers will go where they want to. Knowing that ahead of time can help writers try to prevent misunderstanding, but it's only to reduce the chances, never eliminate it entirely 😅 And, sometimes, that misunderstanding turns out to be better than the intended message anyway
Woah! I didnt expect thise statistics! RU-vid has a way of never doing things gradually when people get picked up. Seems like youre in for even more of a meteroic rise! Just watched your series on Rheteroic and came here from "How to Read Poetry" got that name wrong in another comment. I really appreciate your videos, Im so glad to have gotten you suggested. I really appreciate your sense of humor, whether it be subtle references or amazing alliteration. No soup for you! Does the skull have a name? I havent seen enough of your backlog to know.
Really lovely breakdown. I'm curious though, how might one--how might Blitzer--respond to the comment that there isn't a lot lot of exigence in Joyce's the Dead, often cited the greatest short story in English lit. We witness Gabriel's sorrowful epiphany at the very end, but it comes out of the blue after almost 40 pages of 'slice of life-ing.' (Come to think of it, there isn't a whole lot of exigence in Dubliners at large.)
It's been a while since I've read any Joyce (ages since I've read The Dead)...but I'd expect something in all that slice of life-ing that gives us enough to make that epiphany meaningful. That said, though, the moderns were up to some shenanigans, so it could also be that the exigence is external to the work--that the piece itself is a response to or refusal of previous literary trends or forms
Anti-novel, slice-of-life genre (a slice of life story has all the technical elements of a story except that it has no agents in the plot that would allow it to gain traction) and other similar phenomenon of fiction that doesn't rely on plot (as a logically and chronologically connected A-B-C-D-[...] sequence of events) do exist though, albeit at a much smaller scale compared to conventional fiction. The Waves by Virginia Woolf, Peace by Gene Wolfe, Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick, The Stranger, Nausea. Just a few examples of brilliant works of literature that have plotting which ranges from minimalistic, usually in the form of events that just "happen around" the protagonist without any driving urgency, climax and obvious clear-cut resolution of any kind, to zero plot whatsoever. So it's not the lack of plot, but the lack of any kind of structure that supports themes within the narrative which leads to dissatisfaction. Ambient music, for example, doesn't rely on melody, rhythm or tonality, but it has structure and some kind of palpable feel to it nonetheless.
Cool, yeah. Even those pieces that seem to resist purpose still must have one--even if that purpose is to resist the norm of purpose lol. Your observation that there are other organizing motives at work in those cases is a great one--thanks!
The sound effect for the skull, besides it making the video seem creepy is very distracting. I end up wondering why it's included, instead of focusing on the content.
But surely not every good poem (or considered good poem) has an exigence, even though I realize most do. Take "The Bells" or "The Tyger" for example. What are their exigences?
I don't think we'd consider them good if they truly had no reason to exist. Exigences look different in different kinds of writing, but any piece of writing should probably make some kind of case for its existence (and the time it asks readers to spend on it)
I can't say why you feel the way you do. I can say that most of my videos are direct responses to common patterns I've observed from years of teaching writers. These ideas aren't so self-evident to many, and they do make a difference for writers who put them to work
@@WritingwithAndrew As a psychologist I suspect that something is happening in my mind that has to do with the ratio of length to value in your videos. I find it a bit fluffy I guess. Maybe overly editorialized. But I might not be your target audience. The same reason I don't read much of what anyone writes anymore, to be fair. Have you seen Larry McEnerney's two LEADERSHIP LAB videos? best writing advice I ever got in my career.
I can't say I'm familiar with McEnerney, but it looks like he studied with Williams and Colomb, so I'm sure he has good things to say. Better than the many who claim expertise without having any training in the discipline.
