What I'm Not Quite Done Doing Yet, But Close

[mrissa]

Chapters remaining:
27, 28

The great big fella in this book? Is not stupid. Nor does anybody ever think he's stupid. Even for, like, five seconds. Unsophisticated, a bit. But definitely not stupid.

I just get so sick of the "big dumb ox" character, even when he's subverted and secretly a big smart ox, but nobody knows it until two-thirds of the way through the book or more. Maybe it's that I'm a geek in Minnesota, but I know a bunch of really big, really smart guys. So there are probably a disproportionate number of them in my books.

Also, if you get the big smart guy to help you haul corpses through the city streets, he lifts with his legs, not his back, so you don't have to spend the rest of the book tending your big person's backache. Which is a plus for most revolutionaries of various stripes, I find.

My mantra for today is: A bad book and the rough draft of a good book are not the same, unless or until you quit.

Which I won't. So.

Comments

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Go Mris Go!

[diatryma.livejournal.com]

I think the Big Dumb and Small Clever thing is reinforced-- not started, because I can think of a lot of myths and such that work with it, but reinforced-- by cartoons and such. There's the big slow nice thing, and the small frenetic, often mean-spirited thing.
So yes. Agreeing with Big Smart Guys, even though I don't know as many of them as you do. Also, book! Yay for you!

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yes. It's a really, really pervasive cultural meme.

Well, and -- timprov and I had a conversation once when it hit me that he couldn't display some of the same personality traits and behaviors as I do. A man of his size with some of my social intensity/energy would be utterly terrifying. This doesn't mean that I'm less of a nice person than some of my big smart guy friends -- although I am less of a nice person than some of my big smart guy friends -- but that I'm allowed a wider range of behavior in some regards than they are before I get social censure for it. And "frenetic" definitely counts there.

(And, of course, a narrower range in some regards; discussion of how to determine where to sit on a half-full subway car makes that abundantly clear.)

[katallen.livejournal.com]

Gogogo!

Also entirely with you on the dumb ox thing -- I loved James White's first Sector General story almost entirely because he made that prejudice something his protag had to deal with.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

My class's president senior year in high school was on the football team and in the school play. He was also a pretty nice guy. He did get rejected by Columbia University but I think it was their loss more than his. There was also a big dumb football player who was actually nicknamed Ox. This taught me early on that size/athletic ability are not inherently tied to brains, not to mention that the usual high school clique stereotypes are often pretty far off.