So when I was 12, 13, 14 years old I would take a tennis racket and take tiny strips of duct tape and wrap it around the racket thus making it roughly twice as heavy and greatly increasing the sweet spot and "power" of the racket. I would walk a mile or so to this usually deserted place at the nearby college where there was this huge empty piece of asphalt and a huge brick wall. And there I would hit a tennis ball against that wall as hard as I could for hours. It was kind of fun in combining vigorous exercise with very precise movements that required all sorts of calculations (I'd aim for tiny bricks in the wall) and while I did it I would think. Lots of stupid stuff I mostly thought, like being this amazing professional tennis player (I had no idea how much money it took). Like I'd have the most freakish top spin forehand in history and the ball would hit the ground and bounce up into the stands.

But also I liked to try to compose music in my head amongst other things. I would spend hours composing music in my head while to outwards appearances I was practically killing myself violently hitting this silly little ball against a wall. To the degree I took things I'm sure some people thought me not right in the head.

By the time I was 14 my "tennis career" ran into a brick wall in that I hit the ball so hard strings would only last a couple hours and so I just couldn't afford to play tennis anymore. Luckily, or unluckily I was 6'3" by then and so I switched to spending hours dunking a basketball; reaching the point where I could have held my own against NBA players by the age of 16.

Anyway this music composition was funny in that when I sat down at a piano my mind went blank. If not immediately, certainly once I had actually played a few notes, then whatever was in my mind was overpowered by the sounds that were actually playing.

So I worked at it and would spend hours just trying to improvise. I spent little time playing other people's music. I prefered to just improvise and I did get somewhat better at it. To eventually I could feel inspired to write songs most times I sat down at the piano. In the short term I had quite a few such songs I wrote that sat in my memory. I tried to somewhat regularly play them, but eventually situations changed. Almost all those songs were forgotten. And that's fine. No big deal. They weren't that impressive. Hardly Beethoven. Today I can't write them as well. I need to get another piano perhaps. Or something. Probably just need to get back into spending time doing that. Have instead tried other methods. That one really worked well enough.

It's just not quite as inspiring on a synthesizer. It's touch sensitive but still not quite the same somehow. I think it may be literally a thing of magic. In that in my mind a real piano has "magic" and therefore I'm "inspired".

But real pianos are heavy.

Anyway, so then with writing stories, when I'm up and about my day I have ideas but when actually in front of a keyboard it is still partially like when I first would sit down at the piano and my mind would suddenly just go blank. The way around that was trial and error. So then the same.

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I hear in books this idea of the character changing. "A journey of self discovery." Some people emphasize it as an essential element of a good story. I don't think anyone in a Jack Vance story really ever changed at all from beginning to end. And I at least loved his work. Partially for the stoicism. Partially for the escapism. It is sadly perfect stuff for unhappy relatively intelligent people in my mind. Like sucking one's thumb in a corner; escaping from the ugly world to fantasy And learning an unemotional attitude.

Do I want to write like Vance? Certainly not exactly. In some ways his books were pitiful. He only had two characters really. Plot certainly was nothing.

Like Tolkien it was about setting, but with this added stoicism and a strange way of speaking. Just some strange little tricks. A group online wanted him to be considered serious literature instead of dismissed as pulp sci fi. I'm afraid I don't think he quite makes the cut, beautiful as his overall feel was...

I think Vance had the proper "modern" way of describing a setting. The more normal way is a few pages with no action where the writer basically is saying, "bear with me through this" and just goes to such pains to describe a setting. Perhaps before TV, and maybe just in general when people had more time for books, the length to which authors described settings was more acceptable. But still even then Vance's method is better. He is the king of world building; the king of making a setting. His key is to not just stop the action and spend pages describing the world. He instead describes it within the action. Seemingly just in passing.

But there are only two characters. Nothing is symbolic. No societal critiques. No relation to the real world but for one polemic (The Grey Prince) that wasn't very good really. Excepting his picaresques, the hero is basically Spock. The bad guy is generally Dick Cheney, if you look at Dick in interviews; very cool, calm, collected. Basically wreaking havoc without any emotion. (Well there is some range within this I guess... some more fantastical villians...) If there's a woman she's not even really there. The bit players are almost all annoying little bureaucrats whom have the strange habit of talking like a thesaurus.

Stoicism in a harsh world. People who at least sound refreshingly intelligent when they speak. Fantastic worlds beyond this one that stretch to infinity.

The picaresque (such as Eyes of the Overworld): point 2 and 3 the same. But the "hero" is a rogue whom we laugh at because he isn't a stoic.

Of course most critique of Vance mostly raves about his unique use of language. I think too much is made of that. Ultimately this isn't scrabble. Ideas are conveyed and they either are interesting, at least soothe the mind, or just bore.