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https://drive.google.com/file/d/1H-uP37EjADumqw_v0-9GvABbdmP14yFv/view?usp=sharing I had an idea for a mod for Skyrim where you travel to the middle of the war between the Falmer and the Nords. There were a couple of times in the game where it seem to promise you could go back to that time and I thought it would be nice to be able to wander around in Skyrim in that very different setup. Nothing came of the mod but the story idea got really specific and it grew. It's gotten close to novel size. The first half or so is in the link. I'm at a point where it would be nice to get some input. The last three chapters are typed up along with the first nine in the PDF. I know where I want to go with the remaining but it would be nice to get some feedback. If there are flaws in the writing style it would be nice to know it now. Plus it would be nice to get some encouragement (assuming it doesn't just straight up suck.)
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Jul 31, 2020 06:37
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Sure I'll have a look. Could you post it as a gdoc so I can add comments? One quick note though, it's only ever means it is. Is this for a book to be found in the game?
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Aug 3, 2020 22:07
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I thought at one point of making a mod where you had to search for each chapter. Each book would be found where that part of the story took place. I wonder if I could make a Ebook and sell it on Amazon. I'll try and put it us as a google doc tonight. Darth Brooks fucked around with this message at 18:08 on Aug 4, 2020 |
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Aug 4, 2020 17:53
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https://docs.google.com/document/d/1L8hAZztxGPLMfwoAWOU48CijjbAhZR9t9Ou9Kzenf1k/edit?usp=sharing
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Aug 5, 2020 06:01
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I took a look at it but there's some basic grammar mistakes that google docs is underlining for you that you haven't corrected. I'd take a swing at the grammar and formatting and then pursue further critique.
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Aug 10, 2020 04:52
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This is really the first large writing that I've undertaken other than some posts on reddit about old football teams. This https://www.deviantart.com/darth-brooks/gallery is my usual area. There's a number of grammar rules that I need help on (for example, exactly when to start paragraphs) which is why I was reaching out. I've gone through the document from top to bottom. There was some weird line spacing in places because I first put it in PDF. I've tried cleaning them up but I may have missed some. It seems that each time I re-read through the story different things are underlined with blue. I want to keep the line "You are not the same as the low beast races" Part of the story is how the Falmeri ranked species and how they feel it frees them to do some pretty nasty stuff to other sentient beings. It's part of the driving force of the war. It is unnatural and forced, and deep in their hearts they know it. I also went through and emboldened the chapter titles. Darth Brooks fucked around with this message at 06:37 on Aug 10, 2020 |
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Aug 10, 2020 06:34
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It looks like interest in this has died down so I'll ask this. When I posted this thread I was hoping to get advice on the quality of the story, I was hoping to hear about story structure and characters but so far all the comments on the story were about grammar and spelling. It has me wondering if good writing is 90% getting the basics right. Is it that it's just easier to see, or does grammar make or break a story?
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Aug 24, 2020 00:32
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Sorry, I didn't come back to it! I'll look at it in the next day or so.
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Aug 24, 2020 03:14
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Darth Brooks posted:It looks like interest in this has died down so I'll ask this. When I posted this thread I was hoping to get advice on the quality of the story, I was hoping to hear about story structure and characters but so far all the comments on the story were about grammar and spelling. It has me wondering if good writing is 90% getting the basics right. Is it that it's just easier to see, or does grammar make or break a story? People are probably focusing on grammar because it has concrete rules so it's easy to provide fixes, and because it can make the underlying story hard to parse. War of the Forges posted:“Come with me inside,” Aristagoras said, gesturing inside the broken door. In the quote here, the paragraph break made me think on first glance that Aristagoras had finished speaking and Dane said the bit about Quosoe, which made me think he was somehow familiar with him, presumably by lodging past complaints, which obviously wasn't your intention. Assuming I'm understanding it correctly, it should be punctuated as below: War of the Forges posted:“Come with me inside,” Aristagoras said, gesturing inside the broken door. “Quosoe Mar-chal is not in. He usually handles dealings with the Atmorean trade.” I didn't read past the first scene, but my main comment would be everything is presented very factually. As in the bit I just quoted, Dane notices that Aristagoras hesitates over using the proper name for his people rather than a slur. Great detail! But what would help more is knowing how Dane feels about it. Is he so resigned to Falmari racism that a microagression barely registers? Is he angry at the near-slip or does he warm to Aristagoras for showing the barest minimum of politeness? Knowing the answer would tell us a lot about Dane, Aristagoras, and the setting as a whole. You obviously don't have to do anything with this particular example, but it's something I noticed throughout the entirety of the section I read, and it makes it hard to feel anything about both the characters and what's happening to them when we don't know what they feel.
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Aug 25, 2020 18:48
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Darth Brooks posted:It looks like interest in this has died down so I'll ask this. When I posted this thread I was hoping to get advice on the quality of the story, I was hoping to hear about story structure and characters but so far all the comments on the story were about grammar and spelling. It has me wondering if good writing is 90% getting the basics right. Is it that it's just easier to see, or does grammar make or break a story? Not sure if you're still looking for feedback on this but here's my thoughts for what they're worth. For context, I've read Brightanbleek, Jofinor's Sword and maybe halfway through Forel, before I gave up. While I've played about ~100 hours of Skyrim, I didn't go very deep into the lore so I can't comment on the accuracy of that. I went in thinking this was a collection of short stories based on how each section has a "title" rather than being labelled as individual chapters, but then as I started reading, it became apparent that this is supposed to be a novella (you're at about 23,000 words). Your opening paragraph has a prologue-y kind of function which means I was expecting it to be the theme of your short stories. The hook (or implied hook) is "the Falmer are a fallen once-great race" and the promise is we're going to find out about their greatness and how they fell from grace. Is this right? What perspective are you intending to tell the story in? Your "prologue" is written as a direct address to the reader, which means an omniscient narrator. What is very confusing though is once I jump into Brightanbleek, we're in a close third person limited (Dane's POV). Jofinor's Sword has multiple POVs but constantly switches between third omniscient and third limited (between Finna and Otanes there's a bunch of paragraphs in omniscient, then after Otanes starts running we go back to omniscient). This makes the narrative extremely hard to follow - it's the novel equivalent of a lot of fast camera angle cuts. I'm bouncing around so much between characters (and you have a LOT of them, most of whom are indistinct) that I'm having trouble keeping them straight, especially when very few of them are named. Who are your main protagonists? Is it Dane? Agular? Finna? Ysgrammor? I dropped out at the part where "Lomisceau" was introduced (~4500 words in) and I still can't really tell because of the frequent POV switches. I'm assuming it's Dane because he's the only character that got a solid POV chapter in close third so I can vaguely recall he's a Nord blacksmith who made a necklace for some chick he's into but a Falmeri patrol confiscated it and he's going into their city to get it back (because presumably he wants to give it to his love interest). I couldn't tell you a thing about Agular or Finna or Ysgrammor's motiviations, and every other background character that's mentioned is kind of a blobby shadow in my mind. When you have long sections of dialogue, I actually find it very hard to figure out who's speaking - not just because of the formatting, grammar etc issues that others have already mentioned, but because the characters don't have distinctive voices (and they should - we're talking about a Nord vs a Falmeri leader vs a giant, etc). I will go through and leave some detailed mark ups and comments in your Google Doc on Brightanbleek, but you should consider their implications for the rest of the draft. So anyway, in answer to your questions: 1. You might have a good story - your premise is intriguing but I'm not getting drawn in to your story because I'm in too many people's heads at once. 2. The only character who's sort of fleshed out is Dane, via his POV. 3. Work on your overall plot arc and character arcs - I can't tell what the main conflict is just by reading what you've written, and this needs to be pretty obvious from the first few pages. 4. Grammar, punctuation, formatting etc doesn't make or break the story itself but it can either enhance or detract from your ability to tell that story. It's the kind of thing that when you get it right, readers won't notice, but when you get it wrong, readers will bounce off hard.
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Oct 1, 2020 08:42
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The lead characters jump around a bit because that's how the story unfolded. I've never been a fan of those stories where the main guy is at every single event in the story. The movie Pearl Harbor is bad about this, having fighter pilots suddenly becoming bomber pilots just so they can be in on the Doolittle raid. Dane starts out as the main character and then the narrative moves to Saraimorea but certain chapters really needed to be told from a different character's view. Giving characters their own voice is something I need to work on. I knew Agular (the Giant) needs something distinctive about his speech but I didn't want to do full Yoda Speech. At least with his dialogue what's in there now is a stand in for what I settle on later. The background in the story is the Falmer reaction to the growing power of the Nords, who were first invited to Skyrim and then begin to thrive. The reaction to this was to get more xenophobic, to the point where they making parts of their city off limits to others and the growing influence of a cult of ritual murder. The xenophobia creates pressure that explodes after the initial attack on Miala. There was an essay by Lee Sandlin’s called Losing The War and the parts in it talking about the Viking words “Berserker” and “Fey” and how they applied to people (and nations) in war interesting. From the essay “The Vikings knew, for instance, that prolonged exposure to combat can goad some men into a state of uncontrolled psychic fury. They might be the most placid men in the world in peacetime, but on the battlefield they begin to act with the most inexplicable and gratuitous cruelty. They become convinced that they’re invincible, above all rules and restraints, literally transformed into supermen or werewolves. The Vikings called such men ‘berserkers.’ In battle after battle soldiers on all sides were observed killing wantonly and indiscriminately, defying all orders to stop, in a kind of collective blood rage. Another Viking term was ‘fey.’ People now understand it to mean effeminate. Previously it meant odd, and before that uncanny, fairylike. That was back when fairyland was the most sinister place people could imagine. The Old Norse word meant ‘doomed.’ It was used to refer to an eerie mood that would come over people in battle, a kind of transcendent despair. I wondered what happened when an entire society began showing these traits of stress under battle. As the story progressed the Nords would go from angry farmers with no idea of what their goals are to becoming the military equivalent of a war hammer, where as the Falmeri would first treat the threat very lightly and then after being shocked repeatedly begin to buckle under the strain and become demoralized as a nation. The point of the first chapter was to show how things were before the war exploded. I know there are flaws and it is helpful to have them pointed out. What I've written is about half of the story and I want to fix the flaws now (If I can) before writing out the rest.
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Oct 2, 2020 07:46
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Darth Brooks posted:The lead characters jump around a bit because that's how the story unfolded. I've never been a fan of those stories where the main guy is at every single event in the story. The movie Pearl Harbor is bad about this, having fighter pilots suddenly becoming bomber pilots just so they can be in on the Doolittle raid. Dane starts out as the main character and then the narrative moves to Saraimorea but certain chapters really needed to be told from a different character's view. Your concept sounds interesting; what kind of time scale are we talking about in terms of the Falmeri going from "eh, these Nords" to "no outsiders allowed" and ritualized murder? Having multiple POVs is not a bad thing and it can be done even in very short stories. Note that the shorter the planned work, the more efficient you're going to have to be in establishing strong characters. 50k words (roughly double what you have right now) is short for fantasy, which usually runs 100k-150k, though arguably you have the benefit in that you'd be marketing this to Skyrim fans so you don't need to do too much world building so that might give you more word count to play with. For example, Sanderson can get away with opening The Way of Kings with three prologues through three different POV characters (~1300 words, ~6100 words and ~4500 words) before properly starting the story with a main protagonist POV because the book is 400k words long, and he was an established author before the book came out - his fans trusted him enough that they were confident there would be a payoff for the slow start. There are much smaller POVs later on - one as short as 146 words - which work because he's jumping temporarily to somebody close to a main protagonist for them to notice something that the main protagonist doesn't. In all cases of the very short POVs, the hard work establishing character, etc has all been done before. What is problematic for you is your readers don't trust you yet, there's a lot of POVs switches early on in a relatively short work for the genre, and you are still working on making characters distinctive. Here's some things you can try and see if it would help:
*By my count, you have like 13 shifts between 8 POVs (omniscient narrator, Dane, Finna, omniscient narrator, Ostanes, omniscient narrator, a Junior Officer, Junior Officer Kartin (or is that the same guy as the first Junior Officer?), back to omniscient narrator, then to Dane, then I'm not really sure if we're still in Dane's POV or we've gone back to omniscient narrator, and then Lomisceau (possibly?) and then either omniscient narrator or Rhodogune) in the first 13 pages (~5000 words) in your Google Doc. If I average 5000 words across 8 POVs, that's less than 625 per POV. Brightanbleek is the strongest story because we have some 1600 words where we are solidly in Dane's head; if I take that out of the count, you've got 3400 words spread across 8 POVs which is 425 words per POV, meaning we're deep in flash fiction territory. **If what I've counted is not what you intended, that should tell you something about whether you're writing a close enough third person limited perspective for a reader to be able to tell which character's POV they're in.
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Oct 2, 2020 13:26
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