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  • Locked thread
Darth Walrus
Feb 13, 2012

chitoryu12 posted:

One of the biggest complaints about the initial opening was that it doesn't tell enough about Wade, compresses the time too much, and doesn't give enough establishment of the setting to make what was going on clear to the reader. I could have prose good enough to make you cry and it still wouldn't solve that complaint.

The prose in a first-person narrative is the way that the viewpoint character communicates with the audience, which will help tell us who they are and what their world is like. The prose is also how you convey the setting and the passage of time - the way you structure your paragraphs and pick your words can make the characters’ situation clear or confusing. It’s not just about what you do - it’s the clarity with which you describe it.

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Sham bam bamina!
Nov 6, 2012

ƨtupid cat
I think the issue here is that chitoryu12 is construing "prose" as sentence-to-sentence style and word choice. To chitoryu12: That is not what people have been talking about.

Stuporstar
May 5, 2008

Where do fists come from?

chitoryu12 posted:

I've done another draft of this, trying to tweak it some more. I'm still not really sure on an in media res intro, but I'm trying to flesh out the details and Wade's feelings here.

Yeah, it still doesn't work. There are structural problems like describing the stacks before they're relevant and all that, but the main problem is you wrote a lot of description of something we don't give a poo poo about. Emo Wade isn't automatically more sympathetic than enthusiastic-ubernerd Wade. We have no reason to give a poo poo about Halliday's ridiculous will video (and since it was a will, why the hell does it show his corpse in the coffin already when you wrote the video as taking place at the moment of his brain death? Why, if Halliday lives in his own fantasy world, does that fantasy include his own sad withered corpse? lol).

Sham bam bamina! posted:

I think the issue here is that chitoryu12 is construing "prose" as sentence-to-sentence style and word choice. To chitoryu12: That is not what people have been talking about.

His next question is going to be, "Then what are you talking about?" Is it any clearer if we use the term voice? It's essentially this:

Mel Mudkiper posted:

Here's my advice. Spend today as your vision of Wade. Become a method actor. Go through your daily experiences in the perspective of this person as you envision them. How does Wade eat breakfast? Does wade listen to music when he commutes? How does Wade react when he gets stuck behind a red light because the car in front of him went too slowly through the intersection. For a 1st person perspective to work as a literary device, the person whose mind you are inhabiting must be plausible AS A PERSON. If you cannot spend a whole day as this person without feeling exhausted, or finding it tedious, your readers will also find it exhausting and tedious. If there are massive gaps where you are not sure how Wade would react to daily life, it means your vision of Wade is fundamentally incomplete.

Before you write another word of this story, you have to have CREATED Wade. Otherwise, you are simply tossing ornaments on a dead tree.

Again, this ties to point of view as well, which is the first thing you need to think about, because you're just ignoring it as something to be questioned and carefully chosen, instead writing on autopilot trying to match Cline's garbage pov—and not doing much better at it. This relates to choosing your prose style. Who is the Wade telling the story vs. Wade in the story? If he's looking back at himself, he's allowed to make judgements on his past behaviour, admit the will video is cheesy, and so on. Why does he feel the need to tell the story in the first place? To answer that, you need a clear picture of who Wade is at the end of all this—how he judges his addiction to the Oasis and egg hunt after going through it is allowed to show though, since you're telling it in the past tense. What fictional audience is he writing for? If you don't feel up to answering those questions (even though they will help you write the story), then switch to a nice safe third person and let your own judgement of Wade inform the voice.

Mel's writing sample is already more interesting because I can tell he actually considered these things before he started.

Also the whole argument about the prose not mattering is loving stupic when the whole point of this exercise is for the OP to get better at writing. If that's not the goal here, maybe this thread should be moved out of CC—to GBS.

chitoryu12
Apr 24, 2014

I've done up a completely new introduction that puts the focus on Wade and his neighborhood. Does this work better? It's not the entire first chapter, just the first half of it. It continues on to describe the inside of the van and some basics on Wade's life and OASIS.

quote:

The ladder was like an ice cube under my hands; the only pair of gloves I owned were haptic. The snow crunching under my sneakers as I hit the ground was a dirty gray, not the pure white crystals it was “supposed” to be. We were pretty far from the Oklahoma City industrial zone, but the sky seemed to be a permanent soupy mist even out here in the Stacks. Sometimes the fog came down far enough that the whole field of rusty corrugated steel towers looked like a cemetery for giants. Most of the time it was just my unit, all the way at the top of Stack 42, left swaying in the clouds.

Today, my focus was on the ground. Every day, my focus was on the ground. Watching for freezing mud puddles that would flow over my ankles and ruin my socks, or uneven patches of dirt that would set me stumbling. My head swiveled left and right at each intersection for any signs of life other than myself. I heard the usual noises as I passed each stack: screaming fights, electronic music blaring and someone demanding that the drat racket get turned down before they fired a gun through the ceiling, a husband pounding on a door to be let back in. Not a single person that I wanted to experience more of than hearing them as I passed.

My destination never changed. The junkyard was older than even my parents or my Aunt Alice, mostly formed from the oxidized hulks of gas-guzzlers without enough gas to guzzle. The mounds of antique cars were the only place in the neighborhood that nobody else went to, picked clean of anything more useful than disintegrating scrap metal. I had long gotten used to the smell of rust, dried oil, and occasional decomposing cat that kept everyone else away.

Even if someone decided to poke through the old vehicles and appliances, I doubted they would ever think to squeeze through the tunnel formed from where a seafoam green 2058 Chrysler Conqueror fell over and lodged against the neighboring pile. Even as skinny as I was, I still had some trouble in my winter coat without accidentally tearing another hole on a jutting piece of pure tetanus. And if they bothered to crawl all the way to the end of the cold, dark passageway of nothing, the only thing they’d run into was a pair of locked van doors. They’d try the doors, think to themselves that it might all come down on their heads if they started busting them in, and return to find an easier target that no longer existed.

I turned the old key in the lock and crawled inside, the doors latching shut behind me. I was inside my real home.

Mel Mudkiper
Jan 19, 2012

At this point, Mudman abruptly ends the conversation. He usually insists on the last word.
See what I mean

Moving around the parts doesn't fix the fundamental problem of prose or, if you prefer, voice.

Its still boring and empty and unengaging it's just boring empty and unengaging about something else

You are simply listing actions without any concern for feelings. We are in someone's head. Who goes through life just describing what they are doing devoid of internal context.

Mel Mudkiper fucked around with this message at 20:57 on Apr 19, 2018

Lex Neville
Apr 15, 2009

Mel Mudkiper posted:

You are simply listing actions without any concern for feelings. We are in someone's head. Who goes through life just describing what they are doing devoid of internal context.

I'll add to this by attempting to giving you one more simple aspect to focus on: evocative language. You're trying to be evocative but it's all over the place. What kind of person who has even a modicum of a way with words says that something cold felt like an ice cube? It's a cold rung on a ladder... the quality of being cold is literally the only thing the two have in common. The same goes for your cemetery for giants. That poo poo is played out. That is, unless he's supposed to suck at figurative speech, but then what is the permanent soupy mist, or the cold, dark passageway of nothing (which, don't get me wrong, still don't conjure up very powerful imagery, but they're pretty wordy for a guy who compares a ladder to an ice cube by virtue of them both being cold)? The way you try to evoke imagery alone makes the reader skeptical your guy could exist.

Stop scrapping entire passages and replacing them with new ones. Take the first three sentences of the first paragraph you just posted and rewrite them ten times, in different voices. Focus on consistency within those three sentences.

Also, stop doing stuff like the inverted comma's surrounding 'supposed'. You're trying too hard to make your clocks strike thirteen.

Lex Neville fucked around with this message at 21:15 on Apr 19, 2018

sebmojo
Oct 23, 2010


Legit Cyberpunk









I think that's a fine starter, I want to know what happens next, words are better than adequate, though you can probably get a better simile than ice cube lol.

chitoryu12
Apr 24, 2014

Lex Neville posted:

I'll add to this by attempting to giving you one more simple aspect to focus on: evocative language. You're trying to be evocative but it's all over the place. What kind of person who has even a modicum of a way with words says that something cold felt like an ice cube? It's a cold rung on a ladder... the quality of being cold is literally the only thing the two have in common. The same goes for your cemetery for giants. That poo poo is played out. That is, unless he's supposed to suck at figurative speech, but then what is the permanent soupy mist, or the cold, dark passageway of nothing (which, don't get me wrong, still don't conjure up very powerful imagery, but they're pretty wordy for a guy who compares a ladder to an ice cube by virtue of them both being cold)? The way you try to evoke imagery alone makes the reader skeptical your guy could exist.

Stop scrapping entire passages and replacing them with new ones. Take the first three sentences of the first paragraph you just posted and rewrite them ten times, in different voices. Focus on consistency within those three sentences.

Also, stop doing stuff like the inverted comma's surrounding 'supposed'. You're trying too hard to make your clocks strike thirteen.

I actually haven't scrapped any passages. I've still got the Anorak's Invitation chapter on my Word document for working on later. I've just moved it away from being the introduction.

Do you have any recommendations for an author who does better imagery than me so I can see what I should be aiming for? There's a fuckton of different writing styles and a lot of it is up to personal preference whether or not you think it's good, so it's hard for me to really understand which direction to go in when I don't know what my critics actually think is "good writing".

Mel Mudkiper
Jan 19, 2012

At this point, Mudman abruptly ends the conversation. He usually insists on the last word.

chitoryu12 posted:

Do you have any recommendations for an author who does better imagery than me so I can see what I should be aiming for? There's a fuckton of different writing styles and a lot of it is up to personal preference whether or not you think it's good, so it's hard for me to really understand which direction to go in when I don't know what my critics actually think is "good writing".

There's no magic author.

Here's a good start. Read every single Nobel Prize novelist. Then find ratings of the best books of the 20th and 21st century and read all of them. Read 50-100 books a year.

There's no way you can write well copying one writer. Style comes from a repertoire.

Clipperton
Dec 20, 2011
Grimey Drawer

sebmojo posted:

I think that's a fine starter, I want to know what happens next, words are better than adequate, though you can probably get a better simile than ice cube lol.

I like "ice cube" because ice cubes aren't just cold, they're slippery. If he's climbing a slippery ladder, that puts him in danger right away, and there are worse ways to hook a reader. Maybe say "cold and slippery as an ice cube" instead.

feedmyleg
Dec 25, 2004
Trying to follow Cline's story structure is folly to begin with.

If you're trying to write the best possible version of this story, then you need to shake yourself loose from what Cline has set up in terms of the where, what, and why of the story's focus. And especially on what happens in each chapter. Throw that all out. And question why the story begins where it does. In the best possible version of this, does it even start with Wade in the stacks? Or with Wade receiving the invitation? Or with Wade already on his quest? Because if you're changing Wade's character to be an outsider in all of this, then it wouldn't make more sense to have him be a guy who shuns the Oasis? Or is VR something that Wade has never been able to afford at the beginning of the story, and his introduction to the Oasis is also his introduction to Halliday and the invitation and it's all incredibly overwhelming to him because his world has always been so small and cramped? Or does it even start with Wade at all? Do you go 3rd person and have a preface with Halliday, miserable and isolated, surrounded only by empty digital avatars of all his favorite pieces of pop culture, setting up his will? Or if you're already significantly altering Wade's character, then why not go bigger and more interesting and make the story focus on Artemis and have Wade be a cringey dweeb? It all depends on how different you want to go from the original and where and why you want to deviate.

What are you trying to say with your version of the story? If, as others have pointed out, this is in first person because Wade is looking back on his youth and seeing the mistakes he made, what are those mistakes? Are you condemning escapism that distracts us from our real problems? If so, then Wade's arc needs to end with him shutting down the Oasis and this is his story why. So then everything would need to be filtered through that. Or is the Oasis more of an internet analogue, where people can choose to use it in a positive or a negative manner, but if you use it to isolate yourself and escape into fantasy it's bad, but if you build long-lasting, honest, meaningful relationships with other people who are lost, rejected, isolated, and outcast then it can be an incredibly healthy tool for growth? If so, then Wade needs to look back on himself in those early days with an eye toward how lonely and isolated he was, how his anger at losing his parents led him there, etc. But none of this seems to be in your mind at all. Your only problems with the story seem to be structural in nature, which is just incredibly narrow thinking.

Sorry, chitoryu12, but what you're doing so far isn't producing anything different than what Cline has done. You're making the same mistakes as he did, and it just feels like you're shuffling things around, not improving anything.

FWIW I liked Mudkiper's opening line and paragraph for the most part. Not saying that's where I think the story should start, but it's engaging, tells me a lot about this character, this world, and it makes me want to find out what's next.

chitoryu12
Apr 24, 2014

Mel Mudkiper posted:

There's no magic author.

Here's a good start. Read every single Nobel Prize novelist. Then find ratings of the best books of the 20th and 21st century and read all of them. Read 50-100 books a year.

There's no way you can write well copying one writer. Style comes from a repertoire.

The problem I'm having is that the criticism feels really vague and inconsistent. A few people have said they liked it, one person said it's good and just to fix some overwrought similes, and a few people have said it's horrible and dull. You said "everyone is saying this is dull", but that's not actually the feedback I'm getting. That's just four people, two of whom have explicitly said that they don't like even the idea of the project being done.

And I've read a lot of writers, including ones regarded as the best. I honestly don't like all of them! I liked Animal Farm enough to finish it the same day I got it, but I find For Whom the Bell Tolls to have the exact same problems you've said I have: long descriptions of exactly what things and people look like and what they're doing without any sort of emotional connection or indication of what they mean. It's reputed to be one of the greatest works of one of the greatest authors in history, but that doesn't mean that I personally think it's great, or that its reputation makes it objectively an example of good writing for this particular work.

I'm asking for indications of what you think is good writing because it lets me see what direction you're really trying to guide me in. It might be a direction that I really don't think is that great (because you're not an objective source of what is and isn't good), but it lets me see exactly how the criticism is looking to improve me.



feedmyleg posted:

Trying to follow Cline's story structure is folly to begin with.

If you're trying to write the best possible version of this story, then you need to shake yourself loose from what Cline has set up in terms of the where, what, and why of the story's focus. And especially on what happens in each chapter. Throw that all out. And question why the story begins where it does. In the best possible version of this, does it even start with Wade in the stacks? Or with Wade receiving the invitation? Or with Wade already on his quest? Because if you're changing Wade's character to be an outsider in all of this, then it wouldn't make more sense to have him be a guy who shuns the Oasis? Or is VR something that Wade has never been able to afford at the beginning of the story, and his introduction to the Oasis is also his introduction to Halliday and the invitation and it's all incredibly overwhelming to him because his world has always been so small and cramped? Or does it even start with Wade at all? Do you go 3rd person and have a preface with Halliday, miserable and isolated, surrounded only by empty digital avatars of all his favorite pieces of pop culture, setting up his will? Or if you're already significantly altering Wade's character, then why not go bigger and more interesting and make the story focus on Artemis and have Wade be a cringey dweeb? It all depends on how different you want to go from the original and where and why you want to deviate.

What are you trying to say with your version of the story? If, as others have pointed out, this is in first person because Wade is looking back on his youth and seeing the mistakes he made, what are those mistakes? Are you condemning escapism that distracts us from our real problems? If so, then Wade's arc needs to end with him shutting down the Oasis and this is his story why. So then everything would need to be filtered through that. Or is the Oasis more of an internet analogue, where people can choose to use it in a positive or a negative manner, but if you use it to isolate yourself and escape into fantasy it's bad, but if you build long-lasting, honest, meaningful relationships with other people who are lost, rejected, isolated, and outcast then it can be an incredibly healthy tool for growth? If so, then Wade needs to look back on himself in those early days with an eye toward how lonely and isolated he was, how his anger at losing his parents led him there, etc. But none of this seems to be in your mind at all. Your only problems with the story seem to be structural in nature, which is just incredibly narrow thinking.

Sorry, chitoryu12, but what you're doing so far isn't producing anything different than what Cline has done. You're making the same mistakes as he did, and it just feels like you're shuffling things around, not improving anything.

I find some of this criticism to be self-defeating. You say that focusing on the structure of the story and the events that occur isn't any kind of improvement, but everything that you suggest is structural, and in fact the exact same process that was previously said to be putting the cart before the horse. The very first thing that needed to be done was determining Wade's character arc because there was no way to write an intro without already knowing the direction you're going.

That process created the arc we now have at the very beginning of the thread: Wade is a lonely tech geek who accidentally stumbles into a chance to change the world and himself after previously rejecting it, struggles with the changes in his life that he thought he would have wanted (like money and attention), comes to see how the competition reflects the fatal flaws of its creator, realizes that these fatal flaws are also ones that he shares and needs to fix, and upon taking control he rejects Halliday's intent for him to become his duplicate and uses his newfound power to improve the world instead of just benefiting himself. I shuffled around and changed some of the events that occur in the original book, but I didn't throw everything out about the plot wholesale because that's not the part that needed throwing out.

But the important part about the arc is that it's an arc. Even if we assume that Wade is telling this story from the future to us, it begins with him at the low point that he rises up from. The reader doesn't need to be told at the very beginning "This is where I am now, here's the tale of how I got here." If the story begins with its ultimate message and gives the reader knowledge of how things are going to end, all the character development is simply taken for granted. I feel that the journey would be less interesting for a completely new reader if they already knew where they were going.

feedmyleg posted:

FWIW I liked Mudkiper's opening line and paragraph for the most part. Not saying that's where I think the story should start, but it's engaging, tells me a lot about this character, this world, and it makes me want to find out what's next.

I actually tried starting this chapter in the way he suggested, talking about how OASIS is used as escapism from a dull and dirty life in the ghetto and Wade bringing up the irony of viewing OASIS as the only safe and good thing in his life when OASIS-related addiction resulted in the death of his mother (as well as about how the death of his parents has left Wade almost constantly fearful of death and terrified of the idea of non-existence, with OASIS acting as a distraction from the inability to get it out of his head).

As I wrote it, I felt that it would be better suited to the second half of the chapter after using the first to set up the basics of Wade's daily life. Show the Stacks, get Wade into his hideout while also showing some of his social anxiety by hustling past any opportunity for human interaction into the most deserted part of the neighborhood where nobody can bother him, and have him turn on his VR. The commentary on his mother's death is better as a lead-in to a longer internal monologue on himself and the state of the world, which finishes establishing the basics of his character before showing how the actual plot gets started with Anorak's Invitation.

Mel Mudkiper
Jan 19, 2012

At this point, Mudman abruptly ends the conversation. He usually insists on the last word.

chitoryu12 posted:

I'm asking for indications of what you think is good writing because it lets me see what direction you're really trying to guide me in. It might be a direction that I really don't think is that great (because you're not an objective source of what is and isn't good), but it lets me see exactly how the criticism is looking to improve me.

This is what we keep trying to say. There is not a one right way to fix it. We are not trying to guide you to write in a certain way. We are telling you why what you are writing isnt working.

Think about someone telling you that your chicken is bland. You could use a million different spices to fix it and all of them would work. There is not a single correct path.

You as the artist need to go back into your toolkit and keep working until it's right. There is no formula to follow.

Lex Neville
Apr 15, 2009

chitoryu12 posted:

I actually haven't scrapped any passages. I've still got the Anorak's Invitation chapter on my Word document for working on later. I've just moved it away from being the introduction.

Right. Whether you kept what you did before doesn't matter. The thing is, you have the concept for a car in your head and you're looking to build it. You explain the concept to the group and people like it to varying degrees, but when the time comes to start building you disappear and end up coming out with a bunch of metal pipes held together lousily by some pieces of string. People then tell you, "dude, learn to weld!" and instead of going off and just welding a bunch of poo poo over and over until you've got a decent grasp on things, you return with a timber car roof held together by a bunch of tie-wraps and ask the group what they think of this part. I'm going to make an effort post of this and it's an honest attempt to help, but keep in mind that I'm not familiar with RPO. I'm trying to help you weld.

chitoryu12 posted:

Do you have any recommendations for an author who does better imagery than me so I can see what I should be aiming for? There's a fuckton of different writing styles and a lot of it is up to personal preference whether or not you think it's good, so it's hard for me to really understand which direction to go in when I don't know what my critics actually think is "good writing".

First off:

Mel Mudkiper posted:

There's no magic author.

More importantly, you don't want a magic author. Not only will a serious reader be able to pick up on what you're doing and never read anything you produce again, you will simply not be able to keep it going. You will break character and from there on out you will be lost.

As for a more feasible good start: read some of Raymond Queneau's Exercices de Style. Barbara Wright's translation is at least partially available online (it's a thirty-two-page PDF file). You can skip to page 25. Do the exercise. Take any 5 to 10 sentences you have written so far and rewrite them in different styles. Start out with several kinds of flat characters; have your guy be extremely jaded, then do one where he's indifferent, then do one where he's naïve, then do one where he's overly confident, then do five more simple ones. Then, you start gradually rounding him out; do one where he's skeptical but secretly extremely insecure, one where he's happy-go-lucky despite his better judgement, then do a whole bunch more. Then read them again and ask yourself, would a person with X (or XYZ) trait speak, think, act like this? Then stay away awhile. Revisit them after a day or two. Keep fleshing this out until you have a voice that is in line with the character traits you have in mind. And keep asking yourself if that is the case. Consistency is hard, but it's also why you also don't need a magic author. Everyone has a grasp of what kind of speech and actions go with which types of personality. You 'just' need to construct an idiom and a set of tendencies that you believe fit the amalgam of traits your character is meant to have. The best way to do that is step by step. That is, start small, on a word-level, and when you know how your guy might say something, think about what this type of person would say next. Think about what they wouldn't say; which bits of imagery would they leave out? What elements another character might consider to be crucial is your protagonist not willing to admit? That is when you start thinking about structure.

Lastly - and I really don't want to fight over this - a frozen ladder really doesn't feel like an ice cube. They share characteristics, sure, and you can list them, but you don't want your reader to go "Oh, yeah, I can see how those are both cold and slippery"; you want them to pause reading, grip an invisible ladder with their hand and think "I can see how that same hand could also be clutching X". And an ice cube is no X.

Lex Neville fucked around with this message at 23:34 on Apr 19, 2018

Mel Mudkiper
Jan 19, 2012

At this point, Mudman abruptly ends the conversation. He usually insists on the last word.
Also, as an aside, if you thought For Whom The Bell Tolls was a dispassionate listing of events, re-read that book. Hemingway does more with a word than most do with a sentence.

I am also weirdly suspicious that the only two literary books you cited are high school lit classics

Mel Mudkiper
Jan 19, 2012

At this point, Mudman abruptly ends the conversation. He usually insists on the last word.

Lex Neville posted:

Lastly - and I really don't want to fight over this - a frozen ladder really doesn't feel like an ice cube. They share characteristics, sure, and you can list them, but you don't want your reader to go "Oh, yeah, I can see how those are both cold and slippery"; you want them to pause reading, grip an invisible ladder with their hand and think "I can see how that same hand could also be clutching X". And an ice cube is no X.

Yeah I was gonna leave this alone but the ice cube sentence really doesn't work, especially as a first line.

Do you know what else feels cold and slippery? Regular ice. Just have there be ice on the ladder and be like "The ladder was frozen over with ice and chilled my sore hands" or something

chitoryu12
Apr 24, 2014

Mel Mudkiper posted:

Also, as an aside, if you thought For Whom The Bell Tolls was a dispassionate listing of events, re-read that book. Hemingway does more with a word than most do with a sentence.

I am also weirdly suspicious that the only two literary books you cited are high school lit classics

I actually never got assigned any Hemingway in school. And yes, I know that the book does more than dispassionate listing, but he also does that for incredibly long periods to a far worse degree than I ever have. The book swings between legitimately great imagery and similes, dialogue and activity scenes that are dry as a bone, and descriptions that seem to ramble off under the influence of too many daiquiris.

Lex Neville
Apr 15, 2009
Oh and the reason the feedback you're getting appears inconsistent is because some posters are still indulging you and critiquing the concept of the car you have in mind - excuse the further running into the ground of that analogy - but those of us who are saying you need to work on the fundamentals first are definitely doing so in unison.

feedmyleg
Dec 25, 2004

chitoryu12 posted:

You say that focusing on the structure of the story and the events that occur isn't any kind of improvement, but everything that you suggest is structural, and in fact the exact same process that was previously said to be putting the cart before the horse. The very first thing that needed to be done was determining Wade's character arc because there was no way to write an intro without already knowing the direction you're going.

No, I'm saying allow the character and the themes to dictate the structure.

My point was: here some structures that are different than the one that you (and Cline) are using. All of them are valid. Because at the end of the day what matters is why you're structuring it that way. If your character is significantly different than Cline's, he would start his story in a different place and for different reasons.

chitoryu12 posted:

But the important part about the arc is that it's an arc. Even if we assume that Wade is telling this story from the future to us, it begins with him at the low point that he rises up from. The reader doesn't need to be told at the very beginning "This is where I am now, here's the tale of how I got here."

I'm not saying tell the reader everything from the beginning. I'm saying if Wade is narrating his own story, he has a perspective on what he's telling, how he's telling it, and why he's telling it this particular way and starting at this particular point.

Try to think of Wade as if he were a real person, telling the story of how he went from a misguided kid in the stacks to his current enlightened state. If the whole thing is about him changing from wishing he had money and attention, then start with him doing something for money and attention. Put yourself in his shoes, think about your growth from who you were when you started high school and how you got to where you are today. Where would you start if you were to tell that story and why?

Sham bam bamina!
Nov 6, 2012

ƨtupid cat

Mel Mudkiper
Jan 19, 2012

At this point, Mudman abruptly ends the conversation. He usually insists on the last word.

chitoryu12 posted:

I actually never got assigned any Hemingway in school. And yes, I know that the book does more than dispassionate listing, but he also does that for incredibly long periods to a far worse degree than I ever have. The book swings between legitimately great imagery and similes, dialogue and activity scenes that are dry as a bone, and descriptions that seem to ramble off under the influence of too many daiquiris.

No, I am not saying there are great scenes along with the long rambling lists of dispassionate actions. I am saying the scenes you think are dispassionate listing aren't that at all, and you need to pay better attention to the writing if you think that

fridge corn
Apr 2, 2003

NO MERCY, ONLY PAIN :black101:
I think the question in the thread title has been well and truly answered

Stuporstar
May 5, 2008

Where do fists come from?

chitoryu12 posted:

But the important part about the arc is that it's an arc. Even if we assume that Wade is telling this story from the future to us, it begins with him at the low point that he rises up from. The reader doesn't need to be told at the very beginning "This is where I am now, here's the tale of how I got here." If the story begins with its ultimate message and gives the reader knowledge of how things are going to end, all the character development is simply taken for granted. I feel that the journey would be less interesting for a completely new reader if they already knew where they were going.

If this is idea you got out of me saying allow a wiser Wade's opinions to color how he tells his story, lol. It's like the only writing tool you know how to use is a hammer, and when someone hands you a screwdriver, instead of trying to figure out how this new tool works, you complain that it's a lovely hammer.

Also I said you need to know where the arc ends. I didn't say, "tell the reader the end on page one." It's called foreshadowing, which is so much more than just sticking a Chekov's in gun somewhere—I'm talking about conveying it in the tone of the writing itself, but that's maybe not a skill you're ready to tackle yet. Ok.

Stuporstar fucked around with this message at 16:35 on Apr 20, 2018

A human heart
Oct 10, 2012

Clipperton posted:

the thing is, "a good book must have good prose" (which for the record I personally agree with) is not a position shared by actual readers


I'm an actual reader and it's my position

Liquid Communism
Mar 9, 2004


Out here, everything hurts.




Ras Het posted:

The biggest literary smash success of the last few years was 50 Shades of Grey, a book whose "plot" was probably not crucial to its success, and which, whatever its possible merits, will certainly not artistically outlive Anais Nin's prose

A book that was literally Twilight fanfiction hastily edited to remove the stolen IP.

Guy A. Person
May 23, 2003

It's seriously baffling how much time has been spent arguing about the importance of prose in a thread about "fixing" a bad novel. Even if we agree that prose is third or fourth on most "readers" lists, doesn't the premise of the thread mean that we still want to tackle it as one of the flaws regardless?

If we're just going by average reader preference then this entire thread is moot because the average reader already liked RPO. If we agree there are things to improve, certainly we make a good faith attempt to improve along all fronts rather than just making this "RPO Remixed" with better representation and less Mary Sue ex machina, right?

feedmyleg
Dec 25, 2004

Guy A. Person posted:

...rather than just making this "RPO Remixed" with better representation and less Mary Sue ex machina, right?

I'm really not convinced at this point that OP wants to do or is capable of doing otherwise.

Stuporstar
May 5, 2008

Where do fists come from?
Instead of wasting my time on a big effortpost that's likely going to be ignored, I'll just link this: http://writersinthestormblog.com/2018/02/third-vs-first-person-narratives/

The biggest reason you need to switch to third person:

Think about a better novel than RPO, like Snow Crash. It's written in third, which gives the novel a satirical edge your RPO rewrite desperately needs. You're not writing for the YA market, but rather goons who don't want to be stuck in some dumbass teenager's head. You don't yet have the chops to make that compelling, so get off the motorbike before you crash and learn how to ride a bicycle first.

Sham bam bamina!
Nov 6, 2012

ƨtupid cat

chitoryu12 posted:

And I've read a lot of writers, including ones regarded as the best.
Still trying to wrap my mind around the implied premises of this sentence.

A human heart
Oct 10, 2012

Sham bam bamina! posted:

Still trying to wrap my mind around the implied premises of this sentence.

Didn't you know that the two certified Best writers are George Orwell and Ernest Hemingway?

this broken hill
Apr 10, 2018

by Lowtax
international cline poo

Mel Mudkiper
Jan 19, 2012

At this point, Mudman abruptly ends the conversation. He usually insists on the last word.
I am deeply disapointed that Chitoryu decided he would rather quit than strive to be better

Lex Neville
Apr 15, 2009

Lex Neville posted:

Then stay away awhile. Revisit them after a day or two.

I worded this poorly. Maybe it's my fault. :ohdear:

chitoryu12
Apr 24, 2014

Mel Mudkiper posted:

I am deeply disapointed that Chitoryu decided he would rather quit than strive to be better

Or maybe I've still been writing and haven't posted anything here.

feedmyleg
Dec 25, 2004
Getting feedback to grow and improve as a writer is what "striving to be better" is in this scenario. Saying "screw you guys" and writing it in private while not taking any feedback is "quitting".

But, hey, it's your project. Good luck with your Ready Player One fanfiction that makes all the same mistakes as the original.

chitoryu12
Apr 24, 2014

feedmyleg posted:

Getting feedback to grow and improve as a writer is what "striving to be better" is in this scenario. Saying "screw you guys" and writing it in private while not taking any feedback is "quitting".

I'm getting feedback from other people and locations before posting later drafts here, instead of just relying on 4 guys.

Mel Mudkiper
Jan 19, 2012

At this point, Mudman abruptly ends the conversation. He usually insists on the last word.
What is their feedback so far

chitoryu12
Apr 24, 2014

Mel Mudkiper posted:

What is their feedback so far

I'm still waiting. They only just got it sent to them.

sebmojo
Oct 23, 2010


Legit Cyberpunk









feedmyleg posted:

Getting feedback to grow and improve as a writer is what "striving to be better" is in this scenario. Saying "screw you guys" and writing it in private while not taking any feedback is "quitting".

No it’s not. There’s been plenty of feedback in the thread.

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chitoryu12
Apr 24, 2014

I also sought out feedback from outside sources because the feedback hasn't actually been 100% negative here, but the people with extremely negative opinions have been posting a lot more than the people who don't have as much criticism and I was starting to feel like I was going to be writing for an audience of four extremely critical people. So I'm trying to get a wider set of opinions from people outside Something Awful instead of using it as my sole source of critique.

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