“Force yourself to dive into the basics day after day, until you’re good enough to riff and produce greatness under a wide variety of circumstances.”
—Paraphrase of Bruce Lee, Musashi, Stephen King, and every other person that understood tradition well enough to buck it.
Dirty Sci-Fi Buddha 
🙅
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The basics – like a morass you have to wade through to reach the higher ground where you can subvert the basics.
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Perfect analogy!
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The Basics: the long stretches of tedium between Moments of Greatness. Much like life itself.
(And BTW, my mom amassed a huge collection of Stephen King novels over the years that almost fills up my parents’ entire bookshelf. I’ve never really read them, but her fanship of him will be a part of my mother that I will continue to hold onto even after she leaves this planet.)
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Nice! Check out the Dark tower, if you’ve got a taste for bizarro fantasy. It’s my favorite series!
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Louis Sachar did this. He wrote ordinary books that were good. Then, he bucked every speck of tradition and wrote ‘Holes’ and it was a ground breaking (ooooh, PUN!) novel which was first thought to be a rotten egg. Now, others are following in his steps.
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I think that’s what happens to a lot of people who break into the mainstream. Apparently, the guy who directed La La Land had to shelve it for years and did Whiplash first. Then when he got the support, he did La La Land
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I so did like LaLaLand. Totally quirky!
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Learn the rules. Break the rules and develop your own style.
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