It also tends to specifically drive away history, literature, art history, english type people.
The causes of that, and how to counteract them, would be a topic very much worth investigating. We cannot get by on matter-oriented skills alone.
will involve an absolutely massive expenditure of time and effort
Well, yes. I´m just beginning to set the foundations and attempting to gather interested, like-minded people. The easy part is to look at an old book and go
A typical example would be to switch from an Omniscient Narrator who judges characters for the reader, to a narrator that doesn't spell things out so much, while also avoiding the alienating extremes of a Cameraman Narrator who only shows the externalities of actions. Third Person POV narration seems to be the modern standard, with character thoughts referenced to obliquely (instead of "'She´ll kill me!' she thought", use "She would kill her!") so as to get past the subconscious separation between reader and character, and make the story more immersive.
Another would be to take old stories that used to follow Random Event Plots and Nested Stories and shave off anything extraneous to whatever the tale´s "about". Part One of Don Quixote had lots of little stories and backstories in it that had nothing to do with the plot, the themes, or the message (heck, sometimes they sort of undermined it; a pastoral fantasy in a chivalry lampoon?), and which didn't even serve the purpose of being allegories or reflections of it, and which might have been better off as separate stuff. Many nineteenth century Doorstoppers were compilations of serialized works where the author was paid by the word, encouraging them to verbosity and filler.
when there's no clear payoff
There is; fun, and improvement of writing and critical skills, and all the secondary skills that go with that. There is also focus; an interesting, challenging goal, with clearly-set parameters, and with all the usual facilities of fanfiction.
There's already a bit of a tradition of writing fanfiction of classics (from the Aeneid, to Avellaneda's Quixote, to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies), and there's a bit of a tradition in the fanfiction community of writing fics that change something about the original that audiences found unsatisfactory, and "Better Than Cannon" is not all that uncommon a praise.
The only thing about this project that is novel and dangerous and exciting is that, instead of starting from works that come under heavy fire for their flows, one starts from works that are so sanctified and canonized as to be nigh-untouchable. Setting out to "improve" them is a twofold task:
This optimization process, and its defiance of blind faith, bias, and halo effects, is gratifying in itself, and very much in the spirit of Less Wrong. Failure, at first, is, of course, inevitable, as part of the process called deliberate practice.
Almost everyone who spends their entire lives perfecting their writing and trying to write great literature fails completely.
Irrelevant; we're not trying to write new great literature; we're just updating stuff that's allegedly (allegedly) great.
LW is a community that generally selects against writing talent.
Are you conflating academic interest in the history of the arts with proficiency of creative writing skills? More importantly, what is this "talent" you are talking about?
From EY's Facebook page, there were two posts that got me thinking about fiction and how to work it better and make it stronger:
I was wondering if we could apply this process to older fiction, Great Literature that is historically praised, and excellent by its own time's standards, but which, if published by a modern author, would seem substandard or inappropriate in one way or another.
Given our community's propensity for challenging sacred cows, and the unique tool-set available to us, I am sure we could take some great works of the past and turn them into awesome works of the present.
Of course, it doesn't have to be a laboratory where we rewrite the whole damn things. Just proprely-grounded suggestions on how to improve this or that work would be great.
P.S. This post is itself a work in progress, and will update and improve as comments come. It's been a long time since I've last posted on LW, so advice is quite welcome. Our work is never over.
EDIT: Well, I like that this thread has turned out so lively, but I've got finals to prepare for and I can't afford to keep participating in the discussion to my satisfaction. I'll be back in July, and apologize in advance for being such a poor OP. That said, cheers!