COFFEE & BISCUITS

Somehow Prof Star Wars managed to tell me how to be a good economist and novelist in one sentence. 

 As advanced grad students, he said, we shouldn’t be waiting for him to give us homework problems.  To read a paper, we have to work it out, impose our own notations, write out different cases, and in short, take possession of the paper.  Take the Eaton-Kortum paper, which is a “break-through.”  He said it was very hard for him, he didn’t know what was going on there.  But you got to work on it until the concepts in the paper became very “concrete” to you.  Abstraction is our biggest enemy, he said. 

You can’t be a good novelist with just adjectives.  Who the hell care whether the character’s hair is long or what.  To have a good novel you got to reveal the nature of the characters through concrete demonstrations — from conversations.  (At this point my jaws kind of dropped because I think I have this tendency to overdose my characters and settings with adjectives, although I know that my high school creative writing teacher would have said what Prof. Star Wars said in this regard).