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I did NaNo at the end of last year and wrote 50k words. I have barely touched them since. They're not great and need almost entirely reworking. I guess if you want to write 50k words then you should do it.
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Jun 1, 2015 13:43
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HopperUK posted:Nano caused me to finally stop being scared of writing a long thing. This is pretty much what I got out of it. There's value, I think, in just realizing "hey, I can, in fact, write a complete story that's more than a couple thousand words long, even if it's terrible right now". In particular, I'm someone who has trouble just getting poo poo written, because I always want to go back and tinker with what I've just done and I get stuck and just never get past those first couple hundred words because THEY ARE NEVER QUITE THE RIGHT WORDS DAMMIT and I just end up abandoning things. Nano, as well as things like Thunderdome and (more recently) the Long Walk threads have been useful just pushing me to keep up with and finish things. Also, doing Nano last year got me a 50% discount on buying Scrivener, so there's that.
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Jun 1, 2015 14:55
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angel opportunity posted:
I recently read A Mote in God's Eye on my father's recommendation. He said it was his favorite scifi book. What an insufferable disappointment. "Golden age" scifi is like 90% horrifically uninteresting world-building. The worse thing about that main female character in Mote is that at the onset of the book, she had the most compelling characterization of all the protagonists, and then . . . nothing. Her time in the concentration camp and how it hardened her is completely forgotten, in favor of describing in excruciating detail the asinine parliamentary-based human empire and its politics.
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Jun 1, 2015 16:30
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docbeard posted:This is pretty much what I got out of it. There's value, I think, in just realizing "hey, I can, in fact, write a complete story that's more than a couple thousand words long, even if it's terrible right now". The GOOD thing to come out of it though was that it got me thinking about the next Nano 6 months ahead of time - with story line, character arc, etc... so when I did the second Nano, the story was good enough, the characters were good enough, that the writing itself, while not good, got a better story on paper, and I got back into the writer's group and revised the poo poo out of the book. Hoping to publish it soon. Or just continue putting it off because publishing a book is a whole other thing than writing the goddamn thing. I was so engaged in that book, that this most recent nano, I only did 10K words.
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Jun 1, 2015 20:16
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NaNo is useful in that it teaches you to turn off your inner editor while writing drafts and just get those words on the page. It's absolutely not useful for writing anything you actually intend to publish, but the attitude that it's a place for writing "the next big thing" permeates the community for some weird reason. If you want to write YOUR NOVEL, don't wait for November, just start writing it now.
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Jun 1, 2015 21:34
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Yeah, if anything NaNo has just made me consider if I really have what it takes to write a novel. And I don't think I really do right now. I'm going to work on polishing short stories and novellas where possible (when I'm not burnt out from work) and chip away at it. I write things for work, but not proper fiction, which can burn me out a little bit. Also just adjusting from uni to work life still. Don't waste that free time, kids.
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Jun 1, 2015 23:52
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Sundae posted:The #1 standard of quality for any genre, regardless of anything else, is can you tell a story people want to read? Please empty quote above for all future genre conversations, TIA Edit: unless you want to have a conversation about what is possible to do within a given a genre, in which case, please empty quote the following: You can do anything in any genre. All genres are equally fertile ground for literature. There is nothing inherent in "genre" fiction that makes it less suitable to literary themes or construction. There are no rules that forbid existing so-called genre stories from being appreciated as literature. Divorce your literary appreciation from the very notion of genre, and you will open your eyes to a new world of possibility. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kl4hJ4j48s Dr. Kloctopussy fucked around with this message at 08:00 on Jun 2, 2015 |
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Jun 2, 2015 07:53
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I've always had a problem finding an audience for what I write -- I have a habit of writing what I want to write, and not what others want to read. Aside from "READMOREREADMOREREADMORE," what else could I do to alleviate this? Should I even worry about alleviating it, and instead focus on writing the story, and finding an audience afterward? I'm not rushing to be published, but I'd like to write things worth reading.
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Jun 2, 2015 14:43
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Do you know how bizarre people are? What the gently caress are you writing that doesn't have an audience?
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Jun 2, 2015 15:03
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Screaming Idiot posted:I've always had a problem finding an audience for what I write -- I have a habit of writing what I want to write, and not what others want to read. Aside from "READMOREREADMOREREADMORE," what else could I do to alleviate this? write a story, get it critiqued, do it again man i wish there was a thread for that
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Jun 2, 2015 15:07
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It's really rewarding to write something that people like to read, even if you yourself don't like it very much. On the other end of the spectrum, it's very rewarding to write something in your super-preferred niche, and to know you wrote it really loving well. For writing what I love, I actually cannot tell on my own if something is good or not. I have a sense, but I still need to show it to people and get feedback on it to really know for sure. This means that I need to at least write toward an existing audience, no matter how small it is. I think really prolific authors who publish constantly start to develop their own sense of whether something is good and whether something is working without 100% needing outside validation. Even at this stage though, you still need feedback to keep you in check (see famous authors that people are afraid to say 'no' to). I have sold out and I'm loving it so far. I'm writing stuff that I never in 100 years would read for my own enjoyment. I'm just starting, and even though I'm not making a lot yet, every day several people are PAYING MONEY to read stuff that I wrote. If I do what people who are very successful tell me, and if I work hard, thousands of people could be paying daily to read my writing. Even though it's a genre (erotica/romance) that I don't like reading myself, it's rewarding to try to improve the craft and create a strong product. The polar opposite of selling out completely like I have is to write your 500k-words of epic thing you love on your own without ever showing it to anyone. I wouldn't really recommend that, because you never even know if you're improving. You might just be writing total garbage for years of your life. I think no matter what you choose to write, you should target SOME existing market. If I didn't choose to sell out--if I had a good paying job etc. and dedicated as much time to getting what I love published as I have to selling out--I would be reading probably 2-3 Clarke's World, Lighspeed, Asimov's, Apex short stories per day, and I'd probably try to write 3,000 words per day of new shorts. I would just blast them out and try to submit one for publication every week or so. Probably by doing that, by getting the feedback of either "rejected" or "we want to publish this," the writing would improve and it would be very fulfilling even if it doesn't pay well. You can also take a middle road on this. If you love writing sprawling space operas with retro 50's aesthetic about transgender characters, you could try to think of a way to serialize the stories so that you can self-publish 20k words at a time on Amazon and learn from your mistakes rather than writing like 300k words at a time with zero feedback. There's a guy in the self-pub thread who is selling very well writing and self-pubbing military sci-fi, so you don't have to sell out 100% to write stuff that people will actually read. I think if you're into short stories that win awards and stuff like that, you should plug away at getting shorts published in good magazines. If you want to write a really good, literary novel that is still "genre," writing shorts and getting published seems like a really good way to get your name out there and to refine your writing. You could theoretically just finish a novel and get it published, but it's really hard to write well enough without tons of practice, and writing shorts seems like the best practice.
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Jun 2, 2015 15:10
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What do you do if you want to branch out, though? Say you get by on publishing sellout stories, and then you decide to publish something you like, something entirely unlike the stuff you churn out. If your audience knows you as the guy who writes about books with abs pounding you in the butt, what will you do when you publish your book about European railroad engineers who find love in the American midwest?
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Jun 2, 2015 15:34
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I use pen names for erotica. Even if I wrote what I love I would use a pen name because my IRL name is more generic than John Smith. Pen names are really good for experimenting.
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Jun 2, 2015 15:43
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Tyrannosaurus posted:What the gently caress are you writing that doesn't have an audience?
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Jun 2, 2015 15:49
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angel opportunity posted:I use pen names for erotica. Even if I wrote what I love I would use a pen name because my IRL name is more generic than John Smith. I wasn't implying any sort of shame from writing sellout material, by the way -- erotica is as valid a genre as any. It's just that there isn't a genre that isn't over-saturated; my concern was how to transition what notoriety one might possess to one's preferred work.
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Jun 2, 2015 16:09
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You use pseudonyms to manage your presence in genres you think might interfere with each other.
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Jun 2, 2015 16:34
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Screaming Idiot posted:It's just that there isn't a genre that isn't over-saturated; my concern was how to transition what notoriety one might possess to one's preferred work. So...what the gently caress are you writing that doesn't have an audience?
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Jun 2, 2015 18:34
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Seriously, I write talky slice-of-life poo poo about transgender characters in a gaslamp fantasy setting based on eastern europe and I have an audience. I'm not doing traditional self-publishing (I'm serialising the story on a model similar to the webcomic model) but still. There's an audience out there for anything.
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Jun 2, 2015 19:00
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Screaming Idiot posted:I've always had a problem finding an audience for what I write -- I have a habit of writing what I want to write, and not what others want to read. Aside from "READMOREREADMOREREADMORE," what else could I do to alleviate this? Should I even worry about alleviating it, and instead focus on writing the story, and finding an audience afterward? If you haven't actually finished a story how the gently caress do you expect to find an audience for it? There aren't audiences for imaginary stories. (Read more.)
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Jun 2, 2015 19:38
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Dr. Kloctopussy posted:If you haven't actually finished a story how the gently caress do you expect to find an audience for it? There aren't audiences for imaginary stories. ^^^ Tyrannosaurus posted:Do you know how bizarre people are? What the gently caress are you writing that doesn't have an audience? To be perfectly fair, "nothing" has an audience of exactly 0
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Jun 2, 2015 19:48
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Double post to specifically address this since it keeps coming up: Read some Catherynne Valente, Carol Berg and Patricia McKillip before you start ranting about how fantasy is misogynistic, terrible and/or derivative, goddamn. The sum total of all fantasy ever does not end at Tolkein and GRRM. It doesn't even start there.
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Jun 2, 2015 20:03
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I started reading Valente's Orphan's Tales book but got lost in the six layers of frame stories  Not an indictment of the book, just something I personally couldn't handle.
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Jun 2, 2015 20:10
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Scridiot you are typing your psots while attached to the biggest aggregate of human knowledge ever compiled in history and you're telling me you can't google some keywords from your plot and find some successful books and short stories that are doing something similar? I guarantee there are plenty of things in your novel that are similar to novels that have come before it, because that's how human brains work, they absorb poo poo and then spit it back out in a slightly different format. Like, I love writing about dreamy overworlds. My book involves a literal ocean of dreams. I thought I was sooo special until I read Clive Barker's The Great and Secret Show, which deals with a very similar setting. I was thrilled, because Barker has a pretty steady following, and it was really cool to see an idea very similar to mine executed in a different way. It let me think about what worked and didn't work, and go back and apply it to my story. If an author does something well, and it sells, you can bet their audience is going to be looking for more of whatever they liked about the story. That's one reason it's important to know what sells. Not saying you should rip off bestsellers, but knowing what people are already hungry for will help you target your stories appropriately.
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Jun 2, 2015 20:13
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Djeser posted:I started reading Valente's Orphan's Tales book but got lost in the six layers of frame stories Just need to train yourself up that's all. Read Ovid's Metamorphoses and Arabian Nights and you should be all set. You'll be a master at Matroyshka doll style stories. Though seriously, that was a lovely book though I can see how that convention can get on one's nerves. Give it another try sometime, it really is worth it. Scridiot should probably read it too. Valente has been brought up by a bunch of separate people now in response to his comments. That should tell him something.
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Jun 3, 2015 03:04
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Hey, I posted a thread looking for crit, if people would be so kind?
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Jun 3, 2015 17:38
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Got new reading material for work. A Canticle For Liebowitz, The Road, And Foundation (sci-fi but I . Mad Max has renewed my love for post apocalyptic and I want to write it now...so I figured I'd learn from the best. Combine that with the Tank Girl comics I've scored and I have a lot of inspiration to get through. Want to bring more than in-genre influences. Any suggestions for books/conveying a rough and tumble feeling without coming off as cheesy. Basically my core cast has found a way to make living in the wasteland enjoyable at times but they still deal with hardships and aren't always cracking jokes.
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Jun 3, 2015 21:10
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Dr. Kloctopussy posted:If you haven't actually finished a story how the gently caress do you expect to find an audience for it? There aren't audiences for imaginary stories. I've finished several, actually. I've got folders full of works that I wrote, edited, and then forgot about because I have no idea what to do with them. For the longest while my only source of entertainment was a vast library of schlock science fiction and fantasy, every episode of Red Dwarf, and my word processor. You get some stupid smoothies out of that mixture. Sitting Here posted:Scridiot you are typing your psots while attached to the biggest aggregate of human knowledge ever compiled in history and you're telling me you can't google some keywords from your plot and find some successful books and short stories that are doing something similar? I guarantee there are plenty of things in your novel that are similar to novels that have come before it, because that's how human brains work, they absorb poo poo and then spit it back out in a slightly different format. Thank you. My biggest worry wasn't that I'm a ~=special unique snowflake=~, it's that everything I've written has been done better by other people.
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Jun 3, 2015 22:58
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Screaming Idiot posted:
Anne Rice writes sexy vampires better than Stephanie Meyers, but that didn't stop Twilight from making millions. Someone is always better. You will never be the best at anything and it's very freeing when you realize that. Stop worrying if it's the best.
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Jun 3, 2015 23:39
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I liked this article. It's good to hear short and snappy, yet practical and relevant, advice from some of my favourite authors. http://www.clickhole.com/article/we..._source=twitter
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Jun 6, 2015 09:17
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newtestleper posted:I liked this article. It's good to hear short and snappy, yet practical and relevant, advice from some of my favourite authors. It's great to finally see so many women and people of color represented in an article about writers, without it being an article specifically about women/poc authors.
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Jun 6, 2015 10:51
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So I want to start giving crits in Thunderdome, but I've never really critiqued short stories/flash fiction. I was thinking I would write a short spiel on what I thought broadly of the story. Then touch on a few specific things that I liked or thought worked, and a few that I thought didn't. Is there anything more to it than that? Do you have any criteria you like to consistently touch on when critiquing in Thunderdome? Is there anything you wish every critique you received had? Or any specific processes that you find useful to you as a writer when you're critiquing someone else's work?
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Jun 7, 2015 13:52
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Hocus Pocus posted:So I want to start giving crits in Thunderdome, but I've never really critiqued short stories/flash fiction. That sounds great. I like to give someone a "next time, focus specifically on __________" that way they have a concrete takeaway from my crit and know how to apply it and improve in at least one area. blue squares fucked around with this message at 15:06 on Jun 7, 2015 |
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Jun 7, 2015 14:33
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Hocus Pocus posted:So I want to start giving crits in Thunderdome, but I've never really critiqued short stories/flash fiction. The ONE thing I'll add is do NOT bother to clarify your crit when the author wants to debate you on what you obviously missed. Just don't. There's nothing to be gained. Best of luck.
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Jun 7, 2015 18:52
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Hocus Pocus posted:So I want to start giving crits in Thunderdome, but I've never really critiqued short stories/flash fiction. That's pretty much it. There's no magic to crits, it's just telling someone what you thought of the story. It's all pretty self-evident once you start reading. Here's some basic story stuff I keep in mind when thinking about crits--I don't consider these questions methodical, I just have them kinda floating around in my head: Was there a conflict? Did I understand the conflict? Was I able to identify with the characters? Did I get lost at any point? Did the words get in the way of my understanding? Was there any part that was particularly compelling? Did the ending feel satisfying? At any point did I want to stop reading? Also, be sincere. I don't believe in the idea of wrapping up a criticism between two pieces of praise. Sometimes there's not much to praise about a story, sometimes there's not much to criticize. A critique is your opinion about a story, so don't equivocate and don't feel shy about saying you liked or didn't like it.
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Jun 7, 2015 19:28
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Goodo, sounds like I was on the right track, thanks guys.
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Jun 8, 2015 00:27
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Hocus Pocus posted:Goodo, sounds like I was on the right track, thanks guys. There are detailed critique guidelines in the first post of this very thread! Wow!
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Jun 8, 2015 00:33
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hey seafood, if youre reading this, i dont remember what pizza week was but sometimes i feel my stories are such bullshit that i dont even feel like reading the crits on them. (this is something im trying to change). if you critted me on one of those weeks thats prolly what happened. sorry for the story and for making you feel like you wasted your time
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Jun 11, 2015 05:30
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spectres of autism posted:sometimes i feel my stories are such bullshit that i dont even feel like reading the crits on them. If you feel this way please do not post your story. Just fail, save the judge some time and psychological scarring, and move on to next week. No one will care. edit: because posting stories and getting eye watering crits is the whole point. newtestleper fucked around with this message at 05:49 on Jun 11, 2015 |
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Jun 11, 2015 05:41
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spectres of autism posted:hey seafood, if youre reading this, i dont remember what pizza week was but sometimes i feel my stories are such bullshit that i dont even feel like reading the crits on them. (this is something im trying to change). if you critted me on one of those weeks thats prolly what happened. sorry for the story and for making you feel like you wasted your time Think about what you say and your attitude, man. Translating what you just said to non-useless autism guy, I read it as: quote:Hey, you know that favor you did for me a few weeks ago that took you probably 20-30 minutes even though you're busy with gradschool? The thing you did to try to help me and that you didn't get paid for at all or anything? Well, I never even bothered to look at it. You might as well have not even done it for me. By the way, you should feel bad for me. Don't worry though, I'm trying to hopefully maybe not waste your time in the future, so still feel free to do more favors for me in the future.
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Jun 11, 2015 06:07
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Like just because you're probably on "disability" for being depressed and your time is valueless doesn't mean other people's time is without value. Seafood is busy and has to TA and do a bunch of poo poo for grad school (I think, a bit hazy on this). If you're going to write off your story and not even bother to read what he spent time and effort and consideration on to try to HELP YOU, do him the favor and tell him ahead of time not to crit you, or better yet just edit out your story. Or maybe just stop writing entirely.
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Jun 11, 2015 06:10
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