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You didn't lose anything particularly genius. It'll just feel that way. Start over and be surprised by a) how quickly it comes back and b) how different it ends up being
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Feb 18, 2015 17:25
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One of my favorite writers lost his novel-length draft and had to rewrite the book from scratch. In doing so parts of the book changed and a side character started taking on a more major role, and he ran with the changes. The rest of the series became much better for it. It's still in your head. Just start over! (I hope you back up your work from now on, though.)
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Feb 19, 2015 15:07
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Schneider Heim posted:(I hope you back up your work from now on, though.) Oh, yeah, absolutely. As I said, my mistake was in assuming, "I'll just put it on a memory stick and port it over; nothing's ever gone wrong for me with a memory stick before!" and, well, I was wrong on that front. 
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Feb 19, 2015 16:14
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Wheat Loaf posted:Oh, yeah, absolutely. As I said, my mistake was in assuming, "I'll just put it on a memory stick and port it over; nothing's ever gone wrong for me with a memory stick before!" and, well, I was wrong on that front. We've all been there. When I first started writing at a computer years ago I, like most people, had various things in various states of being not finished yet. Then one day I lost everything. A crappy power supply ruined the whole PC and it took me a long time to want to ever go back to it. I did eventually and though my stuff syncs with google drive, I periodically back stuff up to another drive just to be on the safe side. It's a good lesson though. There's a lot of setbacks in writing, the best thing you can do is roll with them.
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Feb 19, 2015 16:47
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Benny the Snake posted:I really, really wanted to sign up for this week's prompt but this week was really stressful for me and the signup deadline passed me by. Is there anybody here who'd be willing to crit a 500 word noir written by me? In exchange for a crit from me, of course. My story and matching crit would be posted on this thread, of course. Thanks. Benny I'm sorry this is quite late, but I'd take a look. I was thinking the same thing as you actually but never ended up writing anything. PM me, we don't have to do it in the thread.
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Feb 20, 2015 10:18
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I've come to a horrible realisation that having a scathing critique of your work is a lot more soothing than editing your own work yourself. Is there something wrong with me?
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Feb 21, 2015 15:21
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Superb Owls posted:I've come to a horrible realisation that having a scathing critique of your work is a lot more soothing than editing your own work yourself. Is there something wrong with me? Sounds correct to me, so that makes at least two of us.
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Feb 21, 2015 17:42
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Scaramouche posted:Benny I'm sorry this is quite late, but I'd take a look. I was thinking the same thing as you actually but never ended up writing anything. PM me, we don't have to do it in the thread. Speaking of which, I need help writing a scene where one character uses another's suspicions against them. All I've got going on is a confusing roundabout of "I know you know that you know I know" and it's making my head spin. Any suggestions?
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Feb 22, 2015 20:45
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Superb Owls posted:I've come to a horrible realisation that having a scathing critique of your work is a lot more soothing than editing your own work yourself. Is there something wrong with me? I generally find that I'm a pretty good judge of what's wrong with what I write so I lean towards editing more than seeking critiques. I'm still fine with them and I show my work to people and I prefer to hear more what's wrong with it rather than what works, but generally after some time away I'm pretty good with making a list of what doesn't feel right. It's usually redundancy and repetition for me, but that's a habit I'm getting further and further away from. But like everything in writing, it's just down to what works for you.
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Feb 24, 2015 11:51
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Benny the Snake posted:Thanks, I'll PM you when I get around to it, this week's TD is keeping me busy. You make it subtext of a conversation they're having. You have both characters acknowledge the suspicions without ever stating it. It's hard to tell you what to write without knowing more about it, but generally that's an effective way to do it.
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Feb 24, 2015 11:53
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Hey this is loving awesome, and I'm going to start using this approach to writing chapters (again). He talks about a bunch of different problems with writing: - writers block - trajectory of your writing, (ie, what you're saying vs. what you meant to say) - preserving those great passages you're just too scared to delete TIMELAPSE VIDEO of writing 1,000-word-essay https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D85NqSrpzew
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Feb 26, 2015 17:04
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On impulse I wrote some poo poo about a specific type of sentence I hate: connective sentences that waste energy on unclear structure and waste a chance to tell us about a character. Here it is if it's interesting! I'm up to argue about exactly how they should be handled.
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Feb 26, 2015 18:24
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General Battuta posted:On impulse I wrote some poo poo about a specific type of sentence I hate: connective sentences that waste energy on unclear structure and waste a chance to tell us about a character. Here it is if it's interesting! I'm up to argue about exactly how they should be handled. Just want to say I read your essay and it's neat. Might refer back to it as I keep working on this revision. (Also glad to know that someone else thinks accounting is a fundamentally overlooked aspect of scifi.  )
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Feb 26, 2015 19:04
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General Battuta posted:On impulse I wrote some poo poo about a specific type of sentence I hate: connective sentences that waste energy on unclear structure and waste a chance to tell us about a character. Here it is if it's interesting! I'm up to argue about exactly how they should be handled. Thank you for sharing! This is a great essay on that type of sentence. I think these often slip under the radar, because something is happening, after all. The sentence has a point, so it's easy to just leave it. Plus, these sentences can stay in a book and not many people will particularly notice, the story goes on, etc. On a certain level, they are good enough, even if they're not great. It requires a lot of stamina to take on every sentence with such detail. quote:Every sentence should have a mission, and in the prose style I’m using here, every sentence should be a double agent, achieving a surface goal — say, moving a character through a door — and a deeper goal, hinting at emotion, motivation, past, future. Every sentence should have a voice, an owner. Ideally, the reader should know, at least subconsciously, who that owner is. This advice, though, is applicable everywhere and all writers should strive to meet this standard ....cry.
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Feb 27, 2015 07:12
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As a fledgling writer are there any particular platforms you guys would recommend for blogging unpublished fiction? I've obviously looked at a million different options. Just wanted to gauge what the goon preferred platforms were? Are they all pretty much the same?
Ol Sweepy fucked around with this message at 07:43 on Feb 27, 2015 |
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Feb 27, 2015 07:40
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I don't think any platform will make it more likely that anyone actually bothers to read any of it, so you might as well go with whatever you like the look of best.
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Feb 27, 2015 07:46
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Bompacho posted:As a fledgling writer are there any particular platforms you guys would recommend for blogging unpublished fiction? I've obviously looked at a million different options. Just wanted to gauge what the goon preferred platforms were? Are they all pretty much the same? Do you mean platform as in software (e.g. wordpress, tumblr, blogspot etc.) or more a marketplace or community? If the former blogspot is dead simple.
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Feb 27, 2015 07:56
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Bompacho posted:As a fledgling writer are there any particular platforms you guys would recommend for blogging unpublished fiction? I've obviously looked at a million different options. Just wanted to gauge what the goon preferred platforms were? Are they all pretty much the same? Megazver posted:I don't think any platform will make it more likely that anyone actually bothers to read any of it, so you might as well go with whatever you like the look of best. truth
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Feb 27, 2015 08:02
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sebmojo posted:truth
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Feb 27, 2015 09:22
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Blogspot is without a doubt the easiest, but wordpress is a lot more customizable and it's not that much harder. Tumblr has the dubious benefit of being a well established community, which might help you reach a wider audience of tumbler users that would've probably never noticed your work otherwise. My opinion? Just go with a Blogspot for starters, do some PR on the different writer communities and social media, then if you feel it's going well, take the time to move it to Wordpress and maybe even get a cheap domain so that it looks cleaner. Whatever the case, it's your legwork the one that's going to bring on the readers. Just publishing on X platform won't do poo poo if you don't network quite a bit with other writers and avid readers. People are not actively looking for something new to read on the internet since they're constantly bombarded with new poo poo, you need to fish for them and get their attention yourself.
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Feb 27, 2015 09:41
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Just use the notes section of Facebook, and it will pop up in all your Facebook friends' feed.
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Feb 27, 2015 11:59
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Print a bunch of copies and throw them from the top of a building.
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Feb 27, 2015 12:21
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Hugoon Chavez posted:Print a bunch of copies and
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Feb 27, 2015 12:23
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get your book banned that always works
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Feb 27, 2015 18:48
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I really liked Medium.com - it's a community of writers, you assign your posts to various tags, you can follow groups, so anything published into that group, (like, writing, music, movies, mushroom pizza) will appear to the subscribers. And the layout is great for reading articles. Check it out.
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Feb 27, 2015 19:17
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Doesn't goodreads have blog capability?
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Feb 28, 2015 03:10
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General Battuta posted:On impulse I wrote some poo poo about a specific type of sentence I hate: connective sentences that waste energy on unclear structure and waste a chance to tell us about a character. Here it is if it's interesting! I'm up to argue about exactly how they should be handled. Seconding that this is a really drat good essay. This is something I've struggled with for years, and I was never really satisfied with any writing at all until I started to dig around in sentence guts like that.
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Feb 28, 2015 16:04
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Yeah thanks for that, battuta. It's cool to see how conscious you ate of what you're words are doing.
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Feb 28, 2015 20:45
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Sitting Here posted:I'm hey so I'm sure everyone was on the edge of their seat about this so FYI I did manage to complete a draft. I completely changed genres aaaand it's a terrible mess, but it's about ~7500 words of story that didn't exist one month ago. I guess  was all the incentive I needed. I don't really feel great about posting a link to the whole draft, but I guess if anyone really cares I can have one of the people who offered to crit it verify that I did actually write a story, and that it's not just the word gently caress thousands of times.
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Mar 1, 2015 07:41
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ing myself to have the first draft done by February 28th.
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Sitting Here posted:hey so I'm sure everyone was on the edge of their seat about this so FYI I did manage to complete a draft. I completely changed genres aaaand it's a terrible mess, but it's about ~7500 words of story that didn't exist one month ago. I guess pm it me with the quickness u untrustworthy blaggard
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Mar 1, 2015 07:55
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Sitting Here posted:hey so I'm sure everyone was on the edge of their seat about this so FYI I did manage to complete a draft. I completely changed genres aaaand it's a terrible mess, but it's about ~7500 words of story that didn't exist one month ago. I guess Yes, bless me with your toxx awfulness. I was on the edge of my seat the entire time, and didn't rent out the rest of my seat so I blame you for lost profits RE: my seat. PM me as well and with greater alacrity than you do with sebmojo who is super lame.
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Mar 1, 2015 08:43
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I'm back in the TD IRC and I'm curious to see this.
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Mar 1, 2015 14:47
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sebmojo posted:pm it me with the quickness u untrustworthy blaggard
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Mar 1, 2015 15:08
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I've got a problem. As early as a month ago I could write anywhere I had access to a keyboard, but in recent weeks I've found that I can only get myself to write when I'm drunk or over-caffeinated. Since I'm trying to quit drinking and lower my caffeine intake, it's become difficult to articulate my ideas. I have no lack of inspiration, but the ideas are like kidney stones passing through a narrow urethra. On top of that, I don't have nearly as much time as I used to due to hosed up hours at work. I know this is a common question, but should I go back to drinking too much? I need to make what little time I have for writing work, and the only way to do that is get drunk or loaded on coffee/energy drinks. It's not healthy, but I really don't give a poo poo about my well-being anymore -- the only thing that matters to me is writing. I'm going to fail this week's Thunderdome because I can't get my story right no matter how many times I rewrite it, and after losing my last entry I'm really losing hope. sebmojo posted:pm it me with the quickness u untrustworthy blaggard this this this lemme see
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Mar 1, 2015 21:58
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Screaming Idiot posted:
No.
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Mar 1, 2015 22:02
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Screaming Idiot posted:I've got a problem. just write it dude
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Mar 1, 2015 22:05
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Screaming Idiot posted:I've got a problem. That's a good reason to keep trying to quit drinking and low your caffeine.
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Mar 1, 2015 22:11
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Stephen King gave up drinking and then wrote some of the worst best sellers of his career. I don't know if this helps or not but he is now rich, so all in all, confusing.
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Mar 1, 2015 22:13
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I know King has no memory of writing some books, and his family staged an intervention after The Tommyknockers. Tommyknockers isn't terrible, but I've never read a more blatant cry for help in any other work of fiction.
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Mar 1, 2015 22:25
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Screaming Idiot posted:I know this is a common question, but should I go back to drinking too much? No. If you need to lower your inhibitions to get writing, start writing when you're half-asleep. If you're the kind of person who wakes up groggy, force yourself to get up an hour earlier and write. No breakfast. No caffeine. Just sit down and loving write until your normal wake-up time. If you're already a morning person, do the opposite, making yourself stay up a little longer before bed. Sit in bed with a paper and pen (rather than sitting at your computer, which will just give you insomnia) and scribble your story until your head lolls forward and you're out for the night. Do not fall into the trap of thinking your vices give you writing power, because that is stupid.
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Mar 1, 2015 22:32
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