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screenwritersblues posted:So what's the general opinion of Fan Fiction? I know that most of it is really bad, but I've come across some really well written ones, but not really good, just well written. Is there really such a thing as good fan fiction or is it all bad and is it strange that I want to dabble in it? I don't understand why anyone would want to write fanfiction. If you want to write something similar to something that already exists, you can. In fact, it's pretty much unavoidable. So why not just do that? I think a lot of people just write fanfiction because they're not interested in learning to write something good, they just want people to tell them they already have. It's like people who say they have a lot of ideas but never do anything with them. They want the recognition you get from having done something but without actually having to do it first.
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Jan 1, 2013 11:10
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I don't understand how you don't understand why anyone would want to write fanfiction. I think it's one of the most natural things for the human mind to do - search for interesting what-ifs involving familiar things, in this case, familiar characters and settings. Then you either don't realize that you're trying to write a fanfic, or you're alright with it. In other news, I couldn't finish my story for Short Story contest, and woke up too late to enter last Thunderdome. And somehow I have a ton of free time and nothing to write. (By the way, my username may seem familiar to you, but it's a totally different by one letter from that guy from a couple pages back who said he was above Thunderdome.) Where do people steal ideas when they're tired of their own? Edit: I'm a retard. Or, I always Google "writing prompts" and get bullshit, but I suddenly decided to search for "writing exercises" and got a medium-sized jackpot. http://mysite.du.edu/~bkiteley/exercises.html if anyone's interested. Sitting Here posted:Yeah iPhone apps aren't exactly the same as space travel or lasers but I feel more or less in the future. Still waiting for nanites so I can download my porns directly to my frontal lobe. At least you should soon be able to live in a porn-augmented reality. supermikhail fucked around with this message at 22:58 on Jan 1, 2013 |
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Jan 1, 2013 13:46
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I can understand why people would want to write fanfiction, but for the most part, it just doesn't resonate with me. I'd rather create my own characters and settings, and continue to let myself be surprised by the things my favorite fictional characters do, say, or experience within their own stories. I think I've only been tempted to write fanfiction when a show, movie, or book has seriously screwed the pooch somewhere, and I find myself wishing they would've just given the reins to me, if only as a consultant. Ah, here's a question: For you as a reader, which is more suspenseful and compelling: knowing something that the character doesn't know yet, and waiting in anticipation for them to learn it, or being as equally in the dark as the character, and journeying alongside them as they work to uncover the truth? Are there certain ingredients that allow one or the other to really work? Are there certain things that cause one or the other to fail, in your eyes?
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Jan 1, 2013 17:33
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Tartarus Sauce posted:I can understand why people would want to write fanfiction, but for the most part, it just doesn't resonate with me. I'd rather create my own characters and settings, and continue to let myself be surprised by the things my favorite fictional characters do, say, or experience within their own stories. (In my almost non-existent experience with fanfiction,) This is exactly what motivates most fanfic writers: feeling that a work of fiction really could use a gay romance theme.
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Jan 1, 2013 18:17
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Just stopping by to say that lurking in this thread (and other, related ones) helped me immensely several months ago, when I was trying to stay motivated with the writing project I know I must continue to survive. Awesome and abundant free advice, I kept several tabs open for weeks. Now I'm registered! Thanks
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Jan 1, 2013 20:05
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Tartarus Sauce posted:I can understand why people would want to write fanfiction, but for the most part, it just doesn't resonate with me. I'd rather create my own characters and settings, and continue to let myself be surprised by the things my favorite fictional characters do, say, or experience within their own stories. I confess: I've written fanfiction before, mostly for the game EarthBound. This was like ten, fifteen years ago, and it was pretty much for the reasons you listed; in this case, it wasn't that the game screwed any pooches, it's just that there weren't any pooches to screw. I'll explain: for those who don't know, the game was about four kids, around 12-15 years old, who are called on to save the world. A lot of the backstory and character details were deliberately left blank, likely owing to the limitations of the Super Nintendo / the development team's resources, but possibly because you were supposed to bring your own experiences and background to the table. They even ask you to name each character, implying that they should be named after yourself and your friends. They even ask you for your favorite food and your favorite thing; they become factors in the game itself. So it's not so much about four adolescent characters saving the world, it's about you and your friends saving the world... ...unless you're creatively inclined and not satisfied by a 1:1 transition from your real life to the game's universe. In that case, you use the default names and you build characters that are heavily influenced by your life. Then you play through with them, imagining all the conversations they have with each other, their inner lives, their backgrounds, their feelings, their personalities...and if you want to get a little crazy, you think about all the fun things they would be doing if only the game had the capacity to let them do it. Along the way the game gives you scraps of information, little grains of sand that you build on. When I finished with the game, I found that I had built this little universe from the grains I'd been given, and I decided I wanted to play around in it a little more. If it sounds crazy to you that's because, in retrospect, it probably is. But if I thought I was crazy, I thought it was the kind of crazy I shouldn't try to "fix", nor should it be something I kept to myself. So I wrote about these characters; that was my hobby. At the very least, it gave me a chance to develop my thick skin early. While one look at the old stuff will tell you that I hadn't ever "mastered" these things, I also got a basic feel for the rhythms of a good story, building characters, writing dialogue (my biggest strength, even if I've still got a lot to learn), and all the while I was entertaining others, building my confidence. Eventually I got to the point where I realized I was being hamstrung by working in a pre-established universe. I took off the training wheels, so to speak, and I started building new worlds from scratch. I look back at those stories -- they're still up on fanfiction.net -- and they're just straight-up unreadable to me. (Seriously, I'm no stranger to sharing crappy writing I'm responsible fore, but if you want to read it, you're probably going to have to wine and dine me like you're trying to take my virginity.) But it was a fun way to warm myself up, and I gotta tell you: just a couple of months ago, the site notified me of a couple of new reviews that went up, both commenting on how much they connected with what they read. That made me feel really good, and in the end, as a writer, that's all I give a poo poo about : I want to share myself, but I want to entertain others doing it. Whether I do it through some crappy fanfic I wrote when I was young and stupid, or through the new, classy hotness I'm working on right now...well, either way, I win. I guess I win a little more with the new classy hotness since it could actually make me a little money (if God be willing), but pride will always feel pretty good, no matter what you take it in or how much you take in it. I don't know, maybe I get laughed out of the thread for all this, but I felt a need to share my side. Tartarus Sauce posted:Ah, here's a question: I've got an interesting case study here: Tell No One by Harlan Coben. This has a HELL of a hook: This guy's wife was abducted and murdered by a serial killer 8 years ago. He's never gotten over it, never cleaned out the closets, never left the house, always refuses to let his friends hook him up. He's outwardly functional but completely broken emotionally. Close to the anniversary of the wife's death, he gets an e-mail that contains a link to a webcam, and a piece of information that only his wife would know. When he clicks the link at a designated time, a live traffic cam feed pops up, and his wife walks into the frame, mouthing the words "I'm sorry" before disappearing again. (If that got your attention, you can get the book off Amazon here. I'm about to spoil it below. I've masked the more blatant spoilers, but you might still be able to infer what happens from what I left untagged, so be careful. If you want, experienced readers could probably blow through the book in an afternoon or two, so you can come back after you're done.) At this point the whole story is written in first person, and I'm thinking "This is either going to be a slick conspiracy thriller or a slick psychological thriller, but either way it's going to be loving slick." Coben eventually switches off to third-person omniscient (he'll go back and forth between perspectives throughout the book), showing his hand a bit early. I still liked the book -- actually, I loved it, as expected it was pretty loving slick -- but in those early chapters there was a lot of fun to be had from the question of "Is his wife really alive, or has he snapped?" Coben gives the main character an orgy of evidence to bring his hopes up, while instilling just a little doubt in the reader to suggest he's being set up for a huge fall. He plays on the reader's expectation that the main character be crushed so he could rebuild and move forward with his life in a healthy way. Once he starts alternating perspectives, you know something is off, and if you know something's off, you know there's some chicanery surrounding the wife's death and the jig's pretty much up. So he kind of abandons the "WHAT THE gently caress IS GOING ON?" aspect of the story, but he does so to efficiently reveal -- and even humanize! -- the breadth of the forces his protagonist is up against. There's definitely a part of me that wants to read the version of the story that's all first-person and milks the "Sane or Insane?" question for all its worth, but there's another part of me that wonders if he really could cut all the third-person material and still give his ending any weight. So as usual, the question of "what do you think is more suspenseful" is a question, really, of what kind of story you want / need to tell. I think Tell No One is a great story, even if the question of the main hook is effectively settled early. (For the record, even as Coben settles the big question he puts forward a few other "big questions" to replace it, and provides answers that are about as batshit insane as they are satisfying.) Now, if we're talking about personal preference -- and something tells me we probably are -- I clearly prefer to be taken on a ride, though I'm open to knowing the answers ahead of the protagonist(s). Taking readers on a ride is definitely how I prefer to go as a writer, possibly because dramatic irony is a weak point of mine; I have very little idea about the best way to use it. DivisionPost fucked around with this message at 23:09 on Jan 1, 2013 |
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Jan 1, 2013 22:55
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quote:I look back at those stories -- they're still up on fanfiction.net -- and they're just straight-up unreadable to me. But it was a fun way to warm myself up, and I gotta tell you: just a couple of months ago, the site notified me of a couple of new reviews that went up, both commenting on how much they connected with what they read. That made me feel really good, and in the end, as a writer, that's really all I give a poo poo about : I want to share myself, but I want to entertain others doing it. Whether I do it through some crappy fanfic I wrote when I was young and stupid, or through the new, classy hotness I'm working on right now...well, either way, I win. It's cool that you feel like you're connecting with an audience and all, but getting that feeling from fanfiction.net commenters is a low, low standard. Most of those people forget how to swallow food if they turn their heads too fast, if you get my meaning.
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Jan 1, 2013 23:09
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Oxxidation posted:It's cool that you feel like you're connecting with an audience and all, but getting that feeling from fanfiction.net commenters is a low, low standard. Most of those people forget how to swallow food if they turn their heads too fast, if you get my meaning. Point well taken. Believe me, I'm accounting for taste and I'm shooting for higher standards, but I can be happy making anyone happy. (A previous version of this post was phrased in a way that could be viewed as insulting. If you read it, sorry I offended you / pussed out.) DivisionPost fucked around with this message at 23:17 on Jan 1, 2013 |
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Jan 1, 2013 23:14
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edit: actually, that stuff is irrelevant. Point is, you're allowed to enjoy praise but don't let it go to your head. SurreptitiousMuffin fucked around with this message at 23:47 on Jan 1, 2013 |
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Jan 1, 2013 23:26
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This is really basic question, but how do you motivate yourselves to write? I know everyone says "Just start writing," but I can't seem to get myself that far. I got absolutely nothing done in December. I know I'm not self-motivated but this is ridiculous. I go out of my way to convince myself why not to write.  On that note, is there enough interest for another daily writing pledge thread this month? I know there's the daily thread, but what I write is usually over 500 words (unless that's not a hard rule?) and nowhere near good or complete enough to warrant individual threads. The pledge thread's emphasis on just writing regardless of quality (or lack thereof) made it the only place I felt comfortable posting.
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Jan 1, 2013 23:53
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I usually have to remove distraction, I love writing but if friends are trying to come over or have me come over. So I sometimes have to ignore people and go to a place where I can't really use the internet--like some place without wifi, which is getting harder and harder to find.Tiggum posted:I don't understand why anyone would want to write fanfiction. If you want to write something similar to something that already exists, you can. In fact, it's pretty much unavoidable. So why not just do that? I think a lot of people just write fanfiction because they're not interested in learning to write something good, they just want people to tell them they already have. It's like people who say they have a lot of ideas but never do anything with them. They want the recognition you get from having done something but without actually having to do it first. This isn't condescending at all, you sound like one of those people who thinks ever person who wants to take pictures should learn to be a grade A photographer and be completely original and artistic. Some people just have ideas set in other worlds, the same way people publish under the Lovecraft Mythos, or people write novels based on video games, or people write Sherlock Holmes mysteries. Saying that just because it's for free online makes it automatically bad is just silly and pompous. There are good fan fiction stories out there, a great deal of them and some of them end up being more involved and longer than the original works and even creative with the ideas and takes they give on things. I don't understand how someone who claims to have a creative mind, like a writer, can't see how someone else wouldn't mind creating stories within the confines of a world that isn't all of their making or using characters that aren't entirely of their making. Maybe you don't want to do it, but it's narrow minded not to understand how someone else could like it. CB_Tube_Knight fucked around with this message at 00:20 on Jan 2, 2013 |
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Jan 2, 2013 00:13
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Echo Cian posted:This is really basic question, but how do you motivate yourselves to write? I know everyone says "Just start writing," but I can't seem to get myself that far. I got absolutely nothing done in December. I know I'm not self-motivated but this is ridiculous. I go out of my way to convince myself why not to write. For Christmas I asked for (and got) the 2013 Hark! A Vagrant literary wall calendar (titled "There She Blows"). It's a cool little calendar, chock full of funny comic strips and interesting facts about famous literary figures. Because of said facts, you can't really use it to mark down important personal events, but I'm not going to. Instead, I have a big red marker clipped to the calendar, and every time I make any forward progress on my book I'm going to cross off the current day with a big red X. Doesn't matter if I write five words or five hundred: If I'm a little closer to the end than the beginning, the day gets marked. The goal is to have a long, unbroken string of Xs, showing that I've been writing a little every day. And when the string gets long enough, say three or four weeks, THAT'S when I'll start setting word count goals: I figure I'll start with 250 since my words tend to pass like kidney stones, and I'll just keep working my way up until I'm one of those awesome people that'll sit down and crank out five thousand quality words every day. Every habit starts small. Don't focus on hitting word-count goals, just sit down and worry about going forward. Even if you're only doing five words a day, that's five words closer to the end. And if you've got a visual aid to remind you that you keep bringing yourself closer to that end, like a calendar with a whole bunch of Xs marking your progress, that's gonna give you positive feedback. And if you keep pushing yourself to do better, to EARN that positive feedback...no matter how small those pushes might be, you're still a step ahead of half the yahoos who think of themselves as writers. DivisionPost fucked around with this message at 00:22 on Jan 2, 2013 |
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Jan 2, 2013 00:20
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DivisionPost posted:I confess: I've written fanfiction before, mostly for the game EarthBound. Thanks for sharing. It sounds like EarthBound provides you with a "blank slate," from which you can construct characters (if I understood you right). It provides the setting and the events, but you fill in the character details. That sounds reasonable to me--and, to be fair, many of the stories I wrote as a kid also used frames, settings, and story arcs from some of my favorite stories, only with my own plots and characters spliced in. It's also great that this provided you with an early opportunity to hone your skills and experiment with tropes and styles. We all have to start somewhere, after all, and you have to crawl before you can run. Starting out on fanfiction.net--especially as a kid--is totally appropriate; what's shameful is if you post there exclusively for fifteen years. quote:I've got an interesting case study here: Tell No One by Harlan Coben. This has a HELL of a hook: This guy's wife was abducted and murdered by a serial killer 8 years ago. He's never gotten over it, never cleaned out the closets, never left the house, always refuses to let his friends hook him up. He's outwardly functional but completely broken emotionally. Close to the anniversary of the wife's death, he gets an e-mail that contains a link to a webcam, and a piece of information that only his wife would know. When he clicks the link at a designated time, a live traffic cam feed pops up, and his wife walks into the frame, mouthing the words "I'm sorry" before disappearing again. Nice hook indeed. I'll have to check that out. quote:Now, if we're talking about personal preference -- and something tells me we probably are -- I clearly prefer to be taken on a ride, though I'm open to knowing the answers ahead of the protagonist(s). Taking readers on a ride is definitely how I prefer to go as a writer, possibly because dramatic irony is a weak point of mine; I have very little idea about the best way to use it. I think that's what I tend to prefer as well--though, I have enjoyed the other kind of story, where the suspense is built around us hoping the character doesn't fall into the traps we can see on the path ahead, or cursing the character when they miss the clues we know to be important. Echio Cian--I find that reading good books, watching great movies, and even, having exciting adventures out in the real world tend to whet my appetite to write. I also get the urge to write, when I hear other people discuss the writing process, or when I read manuals on the writing process. I also typically need to sleep well, and eat well, before I even have the energy to write.
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Jan 2, 2013 00:33
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Echo Cian posted:This is really basic question, but how do you motivate yourselves to write? I know everyone says "Just start writing," but I can't seem to get myself that far. I got absolutely nothing done in December. I know I'm not self-motivated but this is ridiculous. I go out of my way to convince myself why not to write. Don't put yourself down. Don't put your writing up to some external standard that really exists only in your head. We all write crap, by and large the majority of the words we throw down on paper will be crap, especially first drafts. If you haven't heavily invested in your craft you're going to churn out hundreds of thousands of words of crap that will and should never see the light of day. Write because you want to, start off with small goals and work your way up to bigger stuff. Just write something small like 250 word flash. Or join in Thunderdome, where losing is winning.
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Jan 2, 2013 00:34
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 Happy New Year, CC! Tartarus Sauce posted:I can understand why people would want to write fanfiction, but for the most part, it just doesn't resonate with me. I'd rather create my own characters and settings, and continue to let myself be surprised by the things my favorite fictional characters do, say, or experience within their own stories. Eventually I stumbled onto fanworks, and it was great because not only did they satiate the desire for more of my favorite stories, the authors and artists Got it. They loved the same things I did, and also found it frustrating that we only got to have these adventures for a couple hundred pages. At least half of them were recent fans like me (teens with little to no writing experience), so of course most of it wasn't amazing, but I was grateful for the new content. If I had made the mental leap that the only difference in what I was doing by making things up in my head and what they were doing was the simple act of putting it in a doc, then I probably would have written a lot earlier, but at the time writing was just something other people did. Regardless, it was all in fun and helped form a community and sense of camaraderie. At the time nobody was wondering how fic would develop the writer's craft, because the whole point was "X IS AMAZING, let's make more!" not development. And I still think that's a totally fine motivation as long as you're aware of it, though granted it's a different motivation from what most readers of a "Writing Advice" thread are used to. Now that I'm older and I have made that mental leap, I still understand the attraction to fanworks, but am much more interested in my own ideas. Tartarus Sauce posted:For you as a reader, which is more suspenseful and compelling: knowing something that the character doesn't know yet, and waiting in anticipation for them to learn it, or being as equally in the dark as the character, and journeying alongside them as they work to uncover the truth? Are there certain ingredients that allow one or the other to really work? Are there certain things that cause one or the other to fail, in your eyes? Take the French farmhouse scene in Inglorious Basterds: the Nazi interrogation could have been a slow character/setting piece that ended in a shocking reveal, but since the audience knew the Jews were hidden under the floorboards the whole time, every second was laced with tension. But like the dairy farmer who was hiding them, we had no idea how the scenario would play out, so we get both types of suspense used to great effect. Crisco Kid fucked around with this message at 01:28 on Jan 2, 2013 |
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Jan 2, 2013 01:25
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Echo Cian posted:This is really basic question, but how do you motivate yourselves to write? I know everyone says "Just start writing," but I can't seem to get myself that far. I got absolutely nothing done in December. I know I'm not self-motivated but this is ridiculous. I go out of my way to convince myself why not to write. My dirty secret is that one and a half years ago I learned that my attention span was clinically sub-par. This managed to convince me to start trying to manage my commitment and educational problems. What I have ended up with is a pomodoro http://www.pomodorotechnique.com/ time management app. Also a number of hobbies. I suppose it helps to keep up enthusiasm and tolearance for routine, when you always have some routine which you're looking forward to. I don't know how much it is on topic, but at first it was pretty bad for me and I had to do 15 minutes or routine and 30 minutes of break. And that's how I became a little wiser and learned to start small (this could be my motto).  There are lessons in this ramble.I also until recently put writing in front of other hobbies, and I think it didn't really work out, but I don't recall why. Possibly because I worked 5/2 10 am - 7 pm, and trying to write every day harmed my other hobbies.
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Jan 2, 2013 01:29
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An aside: if you want to write, you should read. Get in on the Book Barn's 2013 Reading Challenge.
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Jan 2, 2013 02:31
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Tartarus Sauce posted:For you as a reader, which is more suspenseful and compelling: knowing something that the character doesn't know yet, and waiting in anticipation for them to learn it, or being as equally in the dark as the character, and journeying alongside them as they work to uncover the truth? I definitely prefer the latter. I generally feel that if I know something the character doesn't, I'm kind of just waiting for them to get there so the plot can move forward again. Even though it actually is still moving, mentally I'm already in the future and waiting for the protagonist to catch up with me. Echo Cian posted:This is really basic question, but how do you motivate yourselves to write? I know everyone says "Just start writing," but I can't seem to get myself that far. I got absolutely nothing done in December. I know I'm not self-motivated but this is ridiculous. I go out of my way to convince myself why not to write. I generally find there's one easy way to make myself do anything I want to get done but don't feel like starting. Just deny myself something I want until I've done it. Like, if I have dishes to wash, I won't let myself have a beer or play videogames until I've done them. CB_Tube_Knight posted:This isn't condescending at all, you sound like one of those people who thinks ever person who wants to take pictures should learn to be a grade A photographer and be completely original and artistic. I seem to have come across poorly. I'm not saying everyone should try to be the best, or that fanfiction can't be good. I just don't understand the desire to write it. I just don't see the appeal. If you liked a story and want to write something like it, well, you can do that without it being fanfiction, you can just write something similar. The same applies if you think there was a glaring flaw in the original and you would have done it differently. Just do that then. Write your own version.
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Jan 2, 2013 04:57
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Tiggum posted:I seem to have come across poorly. I'm not saying everyone should try to be the best, or that fanfiction can't be good. I just don't understand the desire to write it. I just don't see the appeal. I once again posit the theory that the main attraction is to externalize one's ruminations on the vision of fictional characters rockin each other's bodies ('til the break of dawn). Obviously there are exceptions, like the authors who have giddily written (and published!) Sherlock Holmes or Lovecraft fanfic, but I'm comfortable sticking with the above as a generalization.
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Jan 2, 2013 05:26
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All this talk about fan fiction reminds me of how I got into writing. Funny enough, I hadn't really done any creative writing at all, until I was working on an a Let's Play of Divine Divinity. The thing about that game is that it starts out VERY slowly - the main plot doesn't even start for several hours, but the early parts couldn't be skipped over because later on some characters from the first village become important to the main plot, and there was a very long dungeon. If I tried to stick to just dry informative stuff, I'd have run out of things to talk about quickly. That's when I got the idea to staple on a story of my own to the game's narrative - not to interfere with it, but to blend as seamlessly as I could. I wanted to answer some questions that the game's story left open, and add in even more dramatic impact than what the main story already had. The main character by default could be one of several generic classes, and they literally had no past, no default name, and no character except the occasional sarcastic jab, so I was basically creating him from nothing. Even though I was setting the story in a world someone else created, and was blending my story to fill in the holes there with more detail, I still feel like I created something unique. I didn't just take the first terrible drafts I wrote, I asked others for feedback and harsh criticism, I bought a book on writing to improve the craft. It was quite a lot of fun to write, and it also taught me how to use Photoshop better so I could provide unique screenshots to support the story. I re-read it recently, I still see I made a lot of stylistic mistakes, but overall, I still like how well it worked. I don't like to call what I did "fan fiction" because of all the negative connotations it brings to mind, but because of that LP, I'm now working on my own settings and worlds.
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Jan 2, 2013 13:41
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Stabbey_the_Clown posted:All this talk about fan fiction reminds me of how I got into writing... Lots of people do seem to get into writing through imitation, which isn't very surprising. After all, imitation of classical literature or adaptations of other people's works used to be one of the main ways writers would learn their craft. Lots of writers even made a distinguished career out of imitation, just by livening the same plot with more believable characters and more eloquent prose. For those of you getting hung up on original settings and characters, bear in mind that before about 1750, the concept of originality did not exist: 'originality' is tied to romanticism. Some theorists, such as Foucalt, even believe that the entire idea of an Author as originator of work is a product of capitalism. Look up "What is An Author?" by him if you're interested. That aside, I'm one of the few writers I know who didn't get started by consciously imitating other people's work. From the age of about eight I wrote little fantasy stories to entertain myself, in much the same way you see kids of that age drawing pictures of animals or their house. As a kid I read a lot of pulpy young adult fantasy and sci-fi, so that became my model. When I got a bit older, probably around the age of twelve, I started to pay attention to the craft of writing, rather than just writing to entertain myself. I posted a few things on forums and tried to understand the advice I was given. Sometimes I'm asked when I started writing. I say when I was twelve. When I was about fifteen I read a collection of Edgar Allan Poe. It was hard for me to get through at first, because I was used to contemporary writing styles, but when I managed to get through the baroque language I really enjoyed it. Here was someone who used the same tropes I was used to, but made them mean something! From there, I moved onto progressively more literary books, and my writing began to reflect that. I don't think about my writing, not in the way some writers do. Trying to get too logical about my writing is counterproductive for me: I can't write under such strict guidelines. Nor do I deliberately imitate other authors. Often what happens is I'll read a book, enjoy it, then do some writing, and realise I'm copying how that author writes. Sometimes I do take cues from other authors, but they tend to be more 'using myths can give your writing a universal quality' (Angela Carter!) than 'using the subjunctive tense to emphasise a particular character's lack of concreteness': macro, not micro. My advice to people who want to write would be to read. Read everything. But especially read 'literary' authors. Normally they're considered literary because they did something new or perfected an existing technique (Wuthering Heights and free indirect speech, Joyce and stream of consciousness), so the more literary books you read, the more you expand your 'toolbox' of techniques. And the larger your toolbox is, the more flexibility you have to tell the story you want to tell in the way you want to tell it. This post is getting long, rambling, and pretentious: it stops here.
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Jan 2, 2013 19:41
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Holy poo poo I get really drunk in Manhattan and get thrown outta a bar for singing "The Wild Rover" too loud, come back to the thread and we've been talking about fanfiction for two pages. Not a good start to 2013. Sitting Here posted:Are you drunk on Manhattans in Manhattan  No I was drinking tequila primarily. quote:You know it's funny, when I was a high school student writing sci fi "novels" in my small town starbucks while waiting for my shift at the outlet mall to start, I would always pick like 2013-2015 as my setting. My thought was that it was far enough away to be, you know, science fictiony, but close enough to be recognizable. This is actually a good topic for discussion - better than fanfiction that's for loving sure - how do you other spec fiction writers handle future technology, society and politics? It's a very broad topic, obviously, but as a guy who primarily writes postcyberpunk I'm very interested in how we as writers do that. For example, I like to postulate that as much as the world changes it also stays the same, so my future version of the earth (2030s-70s so far) has much the same geopolitical layout even after a third world war and significant technological advances. Yes, there are orbital habitats from the 2050s on, China is balkanized, Italy is a loose confederation of nation-states, and so on. But humans are still humans. We still use guns because lasers suck and getting past the drawbacks are still pretty far in he future from what I've read, and bullets work so well that I doubt there will be significant investment in switching to a whole new type of weapon when we have billions of guns and rounds floating around the world and all the manufacturing and logistics support is already in place. I still want to explore some transhumanist themes and the effect of advanced technology on humanity and society, but I all that will still exist alongside completely normal people squatting outside mud huts in some backwater watching YouTube videos of posthuman sea-dwellers live-broadcasting their eyecam views of skin diving in the Marianas Trench. quote:happy new year CC, my resolution is to post some things. Post that post-apocalyptic thing in the Cascades already. 
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Jan 2, 2013 20:35
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I'd like to post some writing for critique, but have reservations about the whole 'prior publication' can of worms if I try to get it published later on. I know !pipes! mentions being able to close critique threads to the public (so as to avoid that complication) but does anyone around here have experience to demonstrate this works/is adequate?
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Jan 3, 2013 09:30
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I was thinking about that as well. And does that work for poetry as well, or is it not an issue in that case? One solution I could think of off the top of my head would be to maybe have some kind of "writing swap" set up, where people pair up to critique each other's work. You don't get as much critique that way, but at least you'd get some without having to worry about needing to put the story up online and still get all of the benefits of anonymous criticism. If a thread already exists for this, then nevermind me.
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Jan 3, 2013 13:41
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We've been talking about forming small (3-6 people) critique groups over in Thunderdome. I'm gonna let Erik Shawn-Bohner handle it when he gets back from his little "vacation."
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Jan 3, 2013 15:14
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Here's something I've been encountering lately. Forgive me if it's been discussed to death but I haven't been able to read the entire thread yet. I've been writing a fantasy piece for a character's backstory for D&D. I love making them short stories that encapsulate what the character is about, along with giving the DM some plot hooks to work into the campaign, or a bad guy or some such. However, since I'm trying to take my writing more seriously than I had before, I'm noticing a lot of bad habits I do. The most jarring to me is my variety, or lack there of. This is most apparent when I'm describing what a character is doing. I have a ton of trouble starting a sentence without starting it with their name, he or she. I'm not really sure how to go about fixing this, beyond just reading more. Are there any suggestions you guys can give me? In the meantime, I'm going to try and break my other terrible habit: editing while in the middle of writing. It's my number one thing stopping me from putting anything out. CascadeBeta fucked around with this message at 03:41 on Jan 5, 2013 |
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Jan 5, 2013 03:36
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JAssassin posted:The most jarring to me is my variety, or lack there of. This is most apparent when I'm describing what a character is doing. I have a ton of trouble starting a sentence without starting it with their name, he or she. I'm not really sure how to go about fixing this, beyond just reading more. Are there any suggestions you guys can give me? So, just to be clear, you're talking about something like, "He drew his bow," or "John sat by the fire?" Well, you could do something like, "Crossing the room, he drew his bow," or "As the sun was setting, John lit the fire." You could introduce some variety by alternating between scene description, descriptions of characters' actions, descriptions of characters thoughts or feelings, other events, and dialogue, so that readers get a full sense of a given scene, and everything that is occurring within it. You could also introduce more variety, of course, by employing different sentence rhythms and lengths, as appropriate. Short sentences prompt focus. Longer sentences tend to create a feeling of movement, of flow, of complexity. Too much of one or the other tends to result in a kind of droning monotony. Punctuation, too, helps to convey tone, and create a sense of mood--it can snap us to attention, or calm us down; used well, it can provide a sense of timing and flow and movement. This help at all?
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Jan 5, 2013 04:49
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Tartarus Sauce posted:You could introduce some variety by alternating between scene description, descriptions of characters' actions, descriptions of characters thoughts or feelings, other events, and dialogue, so that readers get a full sense of a given scene, and everything that is occurring within it.
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Jan 5, 2013 05:23
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JAssassin posted:Here's something I've been encountering lately. Forgive me if it's been discussed to death but I haven't been able to read the entire thread yet. I've been writing a fantasy piece for a character's backstory for D&D. I love making them short stories that encapsulate what the character is about, along with giving the DM some plot hooks to work into the campaign, or a bad guy or some such. However, since I'm trying to take my writing more seriously than I had before, I'm noticing a lot of bad habits I do. The most jarring to me is my variety, or lack there of. This is most apparent when I'm describing what a character is doing. I have a ton of trouble starting a sentence without starting it with their name, he or she. I'm not really sure how to go about fixing this, beyond just reading more. Are there any suggestions you guys can give me? The best advice anyone can give you is to read more books and to pay attention to what you read.
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Jan 5, 2013 05:29
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I Am Hydrogen posted:The best advice anyone can give you is to read more books and to pay attention to what you read. This. Find a (good) book that you really enjoy and go through a paragraph, breaking down the structure of each sentence. Make sure to not only note sentence diversity, but how different structures evoke different tones and when their use is most appropriate. Keep it by you for when you get stuck. You'll discover a lot of ways to vary structure, but a word of caution: be really careful with present participle phrases. Ex: "Putting his key in the door, he leaped up the stairs and got his revolver out of the bureau." Firstly, they're very easy to overdo if you're a new writer, and secondly, they're easy to do wrong. For instance, the example I just used is impossible because there is no way a person can be leaping up stairs and fetching their revolver WHILE putting a key in the door. Don't let your phrasing muddy the sequence of events.
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Jan 5, 2013 05:49
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Crisco Kid posted:Firstly, they're very easy to overdo if you're a new writer, and secondly, they're easy to do wrong. For instance, the example I just used is impossible because there is no way a person can be leaping up stairs and fetching their revolver WHILE putting a key in the door. Don't let your phrasing muddy the sequence of events. Exactly right, on both counts.
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Jan 5, 2013 23:38
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Crisco Kid posted:This. Find a (good) book that you really enjoy and go through a paragraph, breaking down the structure of each sentence. Make sure to not only note sentence diversity, but how different structures evoke different tones and when their use is most appropriate. Keep it by you for when you get stuck. Thanks for the advice guys! I definitely need to read more, that's for sure. I'm gonna keep working at it in the meantime. 
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Jan 5, 2013 23:40
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First time posting here, so hopefully this hasn't been covered somewhere else. Basically I have an idea for a story (it's in its infancy, so I don't know if it'll be a novella/novel/play/etc), but as I've been thinking about it, I've realized that there are a few things on the emotional level that I really want to get RIGHT. Unfortunately, these are things that I have zero personal experience with, and am incapable of gaining personal experience with. When it's something emotional like that, particularly involving very specific circumstances, what are some good ways to go about getting information, or anecdotes? I've thought about making a few threads in A/T, but I don't think I've ever seen something like that in there before.
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Jan 6, 2013 12:16
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yahoo answers
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Jan 6, 2013 12:46
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God help me, but I used to go into the Reference Desk section of the NaNoWriMo forums to try to help people with personal experiences. You actually did get some good info there, every now and then. Some other writer's forums have an 'ask the experts' section. I know there was talk of starting an 'ask the arms expert' thread, but I fear a general 'ask the expert' thread wouldn't get seen by enough people without, say, a recruitment drive in A/T.
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Jan 6, 2013 12:50
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Have any novels, short stories, biographies, or autobiographies been written about your topic, or some analogous topic, Uber? You might begin there.
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Jan 6, 2013 15:58
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Crisco Kid posted:You'll discover a lot of ways to vary structure, but a word of caution: be really careful with present participle phrases. Ex: "Putting his key in the door, he leaped up the stairs and got his revolver out of the bureau." Firstly, they're very easy to overdo if you're a new writer, and secondly, they're easy to do wrong. For instance, the example I just used is impossible because there is no way a person can be leaping up stairs and fetching their revolver WHILE putting a key in the door. Don't let your phrasing muddy the sequence of events. Not to restart the "infinite verb phrase" debate again, but in addition to the problems you described, the trouble with having sentences like: "Rising slowly from the bushes, he drew his gun" is that you're giving me the action before you tell me who the actor is, which jumbles up the sentence and reduces clarity. This is something to avoid especially in a scene with many actors.
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Jan 6, 2013 15:58
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Chillmatic posted:Not to restart the "infinite verb phrase" debate again, but in addition to the problems you described, the trouble with having sentences like: I was following that advice maybe a bit too strictly, and some critique I got for my CC contest entry noted that I kept starting sentences with "He" or "Rick". If I establish the actor first, then is it okay to change it up in different sentences of the paragraph?
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Jan 6, 2013 16:36
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Stabbey_the_Clown posted:I was following that advice maybe a bit too strictly, and some critique I got for my CC contest entry noted that I kept starting sentences with "He" or "Rick". If I establish the actor first, then is it okay to change it up in different sentences of the paragraph? If there is only one actor in a given paragraph, and he/she is established up front, then it's possible to get away with this. Just understand that leaning on it heavily --as with any device-- will detach and distance your reader from the action on the page. One easy way to avoid this kind of thing altogether is by actively describing setting, like: "As the sun began to rise, Rick noticed that he blah blah blah." "The air was growing bitter and more cold with each passing hour. Rick wrapped his jacket around him tightly and wondered blah blah blah."
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Jan 6, 2013 17:06
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JAssassin posted:Here's something I've been encountering lately. Forgive me if it's been discussed to death but I haven't been able to read the entire thread yet. I've been writing a fantasy piece for a character's backstory for D&D. I love making them short stories that encapsulate what the character is about, along with giving the DM some plot hooks to work into the campaign, or a bad guy or some such. However, since I'm trying to take my writing more seriously than I had before, I'm noticing a lot of bad habits I do. The most jarring to me is my variety, or lack there of. This is most apparent when I'm describing what a character is doing. I have a ton of trouble starting a sentence without starting it with their name, he or she. I'm not really sure how to go about fixing this, beyond just reading more. Are there any suggestions you guys can give me? Another thing to consider is that your character hopefully has a reason to be in the place they're in. Is your dude running from pursuers? About to scale a large cliff? Looking for his car keys/horse saddle to rush to the side of his beloved? Those details should all come through too. There are a lot of writers who kind of describe their character's actions happening in a void because they've been told "show, don't tell" too often. You're the narrator, no matter whose perspective you're writing in, so you have to occasionally tell us things that the character might see, experience, or know that we ourselves have no way of deriving from their actions alone. So I might have part of a scene like: "He crossed the room, arrow already nocked. Outside, the King's men dismounted and moved toward the small house with swords drawn. John faced the door and raised his bow." We (hopefully) know what the dude is doing, probably why he's doing it, and roughly where he is. It's a showdown with the law in tiny medieval hutsville. Breaking away to scenery/environment can be good when it sets the mood or maybe represents an obstacle to the character. In an action sequence, doing so can slow things down so I try to describe the things that affect/are directly affected by the character's actions.
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Jan 6, 2013 19:22
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