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anime was right
Jun 27, 2008

death is certain
keep yr cool
keep slamming the wall with your face and hope the wall breaks first. got it.

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General Battuta
Feb 7, 2011

This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

anime was right posted:

keep slamming the wall with your face and hope the wall breaks first. got it.

Exactly but every time you do your face gets a little sharper and harder

change my name
Aug 27, 2007

Legends die but anime is forever.

RIP The Lost Otakus.

Think of writing as being one of those North Korean soldiers who have chairs smashed over their backs every day so that they grow more bone mass.

General Battuta
Feb 7, 2011

This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

General Battuta posted:

Exactly but every time you do your face gets a little sharper and harder

Also, study the faces of those who have broken the wall before you, and seek to imitate their expressions.

Sulla Faex
May 14, 2010

No man ever did me so much good, or enemy so much harm, but I repaid him with ENDLESS SHITPOSTING

change my name posted:

Think of writing as being one of those North Korean soldiers who have chairs smashed over their backs every day so that they grow more bone mass.

it's good to see the north korean domestic chair manufacturers lobby making such strong headway in their protectionist agenda

Szmitten
Apr 26, 2008

change my name posted:

Think of writing as being one of those North Korean soldiers who have chairs smashed over their backs every day so that they grow more bone mass.
Wood, steel, or plastic this is important

Music Theory
Aug 7, 2013

Avatar by Garden Walker
Why write with a specific genre in mind?

flerp
Feb 25, 2014

Music Theory posted:

Why write with a specific genre in mind?

you like writing (or reading) the genre, that genre has a better paying market than another, youre better at writing in one genre than the other, you want to try something new, books of certain genres sell better (probably, i dont actually know just guessing), etc. etc.

flerp
Feb 25, 2014
also having a specific genre lets you keep things more cohesive and easier for your reader to understand. when something's fantasy, most readers understand what that means and you dont really have to explain what elves/dwarves are and then can use that extra time of not needing to explain to tell a good story

change my name
Aug 27, 2007

Legends die but anime is forever.

RIP The Lost Otakus.

Also I guess it stops "genre bleed" before it starts, and keeps you on topic? For instance, if you were writing sci-fi and started throwing in magical realism because you had a cool idea or whatever. Sometimes having set limitations forces you to come up with interesting ideas (although genres are pretty broad anyways).

anime was right
Jun 27, 2008

death is certain
keep yr cool
familiar thing but unfamiliar concept or familiar thing + familiar thing seems like the most basic way of marketing something so genre limitations with a twist of lemon seems like the most basic way of selling your idea to someone who likes familiar thing

newtestleper
Oct 30, 2003
Battuta that's such a telling little anecdote, and gels 100% with my understanding of how the journal editorial process works.

newtestleper fucked around with this message at 01:10 on Jan 9, 2017

Djeser
Mar 22, 2013


it's crow time again

Krunge asked for some tips on taking your prose beyond a basic level, so here's a rambling meander of a post.

There's a filmmaking principle called the Kuleshov Effect, and it says that two shots placed together create more meaning than a single shot. Because they're placed together, the audience draws relations between these two shots. If you show a skyscraper from outside, then the interior of an office, the audience goes "ah, the office is in the building." If you show a distant shot of a battleship and then someone at a periscope, the audience goes "ah, that's what they're looking at." Meaning exists not just in the content of the shots, but in the placement and structure of the scene as a whole.

You can probably guess the analogy to fiction here. In critiques I've said before, "Your story is just what's on the page," which is true, but maybe not entirely accurate. Your story isn't what's in your head, but there's more to it than just the words. What the words imply is just as much a part of the story as what they say outright.

That's enough faffing though, let's get to some actual tips.

1. You can show a lot with a little.
It doesn't take a ton of detail to draw a quick picture, and the audience's brains will fill in the rest. Think of something you want to convey, some detail that gets across the idea you're going for, and let it act like a sketch. Say someone's got "a smile like an uncle over for Thanksgiving." That gets you a whole lot with just a little, because it's not just the smile you're thinking about now, it's the vaguely familial social obligation and the sense of someone who's trying to be your friend, and maybe even the image of a middle-aged man with a mustache. This is something that poetry uses a lot, and it can be worthwhile to read some poetry to see how people are able to get at images with only a few words. Here's a few lines from a Carl Sandburg poem I enjoy a lot: "And at the window one day in summer / Yellow of the new crock of butter / Stood against the red of new climbing roses…" It's just describing colors, it's doing it in a particular way that creates a sense of soft domesticity. Just from reading that, I imagine a house with yellow stucco walls and a wooden lattice with roses climbing up the beams.

2. Sense, thought, action.
This is one of those rules that you should probably break, but it's a good way to think about things. So, there's generally three things you can be doing in a story: you can be describing a sensory image, you can be providing someone's internal monologue, or you can be giving exposition. Sense, thought, and action is a rough estimate of the mental loop people go through. You see(/taste/smell/hear/feel) something new, you think about it, you do something. "Emily began to cry. How could she get emotional at a time like this? I offered her my handkerchief." It's not wrong to do it in a different order or to sustain one of the phases for longer, but I've found it to be a good way to move through a series of events.

3. Specifics and action.
When it comes to anything involving action, being specific is better than being general. Enemies didn't pour in from three different directions, they poured in through the doors and came charging toward us. He didn't miss his throw, his rock hit a foot to the left. The reason that specificity is important is because action is something that needs to be clear in the reader's mind. And not just actions, but spaces too. If you're climbing onto a ledge to escape the snakes, is it a ledge big enough to curl up into a ball and weep or are your sneakers barely big enough to fit? With action scenes, the physical details become important to the conflict, and being vague on them is like being vague on whether it's the protagonist's mother or father who died.

4. Voice is important.
Even outside of dialogue, the voice you write in can add a lot of meaning to a story. Sebmojo's Dave: is a great example of this, where the story is narrated by someone who's berating the main character for his incompetence, but in a lot of cases, you'll be writing in something close to the voice of your main character, and that's an excellent space to give them personality. Show the way that they reflect on things. Let them be impartial. Show them so frustrated at a crying kid that they start to refer to the kid as 'a football'. A lot of the time when I'm judging Thunderdome a story that has a good voice will stick out of the ground against stories with more dry and narratorly voices.

I hope some of this is vaguely helpful. I tried to write more but I was just rambling by then.

magnificent7
Sep 22, 2005

THUNDERDOME LOSER

Djeser posted:

DAMMIT YOU KNOW SO MUCH GOOD STUFF AND YOU SHARE IT
So, is Utopian Fiction a thing anymore? I know dystopian fiction is super popular, I suppose because it wasn't that easy to imagine. But now, something something trump/brexit/isis/climate change/mad cow/pissgate.

Wouldn't it be great to have fiction that ends with the perfect world not being flawed? Or does that lack so much conflict that it'd be filed under YAWN instead?

What about utopian and some guy hates utopia? That'd be the conflict, right?

magnificent7 fucked around with this message at 16:57 on Jan 11, 2017

Chairchucker
Nov 14, 2006

to ride eternal, shiny and chrome

THUNDERDOME LOSER 2022




Dystopian Fiction is probably popular, as you imply, because the setting inherently possesses conflict. Conflict is very important to a narrative.

If some guy hates Utopia, is he your protagonist, or your antagonist? If he is your protagonist, what is it about the Utopia that he hates, and is it something that would push elements of it towards being a Dystopia?

crabrock
Aug 2, 2002

I

AM

MAGNIFICENT






magnificent7 posted:

What about utopian and some guy hates utopia? That'd be the conflict, right?

I think you're thinking of Brave New World

Utopia fiction is impossible to write because it's impossible for humans to create a utopia. Even if you nailed all the logistics, economics, social institutions, etc., you'd get some sociopath that self-radicalizes and decides that he needs to stab an elementary school full of children in the neck. You can't suspend your disbelief enough. I guess you could write from the POV of the sociopath as you goes on a killing rampage because he needs to finish what anakin started or whatever.

crabrock fucked around with this message at 19:49 on Jan 11, 2017

TooMuchAbstraction
Oct 14, 2012

I spent four years making
Waves of Steel
Hell yes I'm going to turn my avatar into an ad for it.
Fun Shoe

magnificent7 posted:

So, is Utopian Fiction a thing anymore? I know dystopian fiction is super popular, I suppose because it wasn't that easy to imagine. But now, something something trump/brexit/isis/climate change/mad cow/pissgate.

Wouldn't it be great to have fiction that ends with the perfect world not being flawed? Or does that lack so much conflict that it'd be filed under YAWN instead?

What about utopian and some guy hates utopia? That'd be the conflict, right?

Iain M Banks' Culture novels feature a non-flawed utopia; at least, while the utopia still has actual people in it (as opposed to e.g. implausible perfectly selfless angels), everyone's happy with their lot, and not because they've been drugged, mind-controlled, etc. either. The focus isn't generally on the Culture as a culture/society, but rather on their interactions with other, less-utopic civilizations. Or sometimes the focus is on the gigantic AIs that make the human-level utopic civilization possible; while the AIs generally get along there are disagreements that can have potentially huge ramifications, so it's not really a utopia for them.

I guess the AIs make the Culture sort of like Omelas, in that the society is only really stable because there are AI guardians that are willing to sacrifice their own happiness to preserve the utopia. And then you start getting into interesting philosophical domains: the Culture creates these AIs whose skillsets are optimized towards performing certain tasks (including warfare) on behalf of the utopia. Banks makes it clear that every AI is given the choice of either doing their intended job or just being another citizen in the Culture, but that doesn't change that the AIs are specifically "bred" with certain goals in mind.

EDIT: to address the sociopath/antisocial issue: the Culture, being significantly post-singularity, has basically perfect genemodding and psychological analysis. If we accept that sociopathy is some combination of genetic and environmental factors, then in the Culture you literally can't get the genetic precursors (they've been identified and excised ages ago), and the environment is too "soft/friendly" to provoke antisocial behaviors.

There is one asocial character in one of the books, who is basically extraordinarily introverted and who refuses all offers to "fix" him. They find him a hermitage in a remote location where he happily lives out the rest of his life away from everyone else.

TooMuchAbstraction fucked around with this message at 19:54 on Jan 11, 2017

POOL IS CLOSED
Jul 14, 2011

I'm just exploding with mackerel. This is the aji wo kutta of my discontent.
Pillbug
This just reminds me that Banks passed away and we won't be getting any more of his fantastic work. :sigh:

Sitting Here
Dec 31, 2007
assuming you can write a plausible utopia, IMO the most obvious conflict would be something external that threatens the utopia. Or a character has to leave the utopia, then has difficulty returning. or something. I dunno, I kinda see the merit in creating a world that is super appealing to the reader, then threatening it or separating the protagonist(s) from it.

but writing an appealing, plausible utopia is probably really hard, i dunno i've never tried it.

crabrock
Aug 2, 2002

I

AM

MAGNIFICENT






in those utopias you'd still have a guy crushing on a girl that didn't love him back, and getting mopey about it.

utopia ruined.

Music Theory
Aug 7, 2013

Avatar by Garden Walker

crabrock posted:

in those utopias you'd still have a guy crushing on a girl that didn't love him back, and getting mopey about it.

utopia ruined.

holodeck; then you can write about whether holodeck experiences are worth as much as real ones

General Battuta
Feb 7, 2011

This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.
Read The Dispossessed, it owns. It's about two planets that each seem utopian (or dystopian) to the inhabitants of the other — one is a lush world of wealth and achievement, but with all the inequity, violence, and decadence of capitalism. The other is a barren pain in the rear end committed to true anarchy, where everybody does whatever they want and things sort of work: but you get all the petty power politics, interpersonal conflict, and mob behavior that you'd expect from people.

LeGuin generally likes the anarchists better (because she is anticapitalist) but I think the book does a good job of painting both as flawed and interesting.

POOL IS CLOSED
Jul 14, 2011

I'm just exploding with mackerel. This is the aji wo kutta of my discontent.
Pillbug
LeGuin's handling of the officially unofficial hierarchy among the anarchists is just really fascinating stuff. I read it around the time I finished up the Ancillary books, though, and wound up with the same unsatisfied feeling that the conflicts I was most invested in weren't resolved. I don't know whether those were conscious decisions on the authors' parts; I assume they were. I took away some thoughts from that on my own craft, though -- I don't want to invest much time in subplots I don't intend to wrap up one way or another. (Or in Ancillary's case, potentially confuse readers about which conflict is actually the primary question the work is exploring.) It's not profound, but it's still something to keep in mind. IF you're choosing not to conclude an open question in your work, be conscious about why.

Djeser
Mar 22, 2013


it's crow time again

Utopian fiction is absolutely possible, take a look at most early Star Trek episodes. Just because your society is post-scarcity doesn't mean that you won't run into border disputes or negative space wedgies or the holodeck breaking down and sending waves of orcs to take over your ship. Even on a personal level you can have an ideal society that works and yet people within it have their own challenges--they want to pass a test, they want to win an athletic competition, et cetera. Star Trek gets a lot of mileage out of principles versus pragmatism and whether, say, the long-term costs of violating a law are worth alleviating someone's suffering in the short-term.

Screaming Idiot
Nov 26, 2007

JUST POSTING WHILE JERKIN' MY GHERKIN SITTIN' IN A PERKINS!

BEATS SELLING MERKINS.
The roots of a utopia society must sometimes be watered with the blood of redshirts.

crabrock
Aug 2, 2002

I

AM

MAGNIFICENT






i dunno if a society where you have to bury your own kids becasue cpt. kirk just had to see what was behind that gas cloud is a utopia

POOL IS CLOSED
Jul 14, 2011

I'm just exploding with mackerel. This is the aji wo kutta of my discontent.
Pillbug
You probably won't get enough of them back to bury, so it's fine!

Djeser
Mar 22, 2013


it's crow time again

crabrock posted:

i dunno if a society where you have to bury your own kids becasue cpt. kirk just had to see what was behind that gas cloud is a utopia

I never watched TOS because it's bad

HIJK
Nov 25, 2012
in the room where you sleep
But if its a true utopia than nothing is going to happen. DS9 pointed out how foolish that was and that the Federation still had problems.

Djeser
Mar 22, 2013


it's crow time again

Then we get into a dumb and stupid argument about No True Utopia Scotsman, and that's not what the question was about.

Ideal societies can still have conflict, it's just that the conflict is going to be of a different character.

Grizzled Patriarch
Mar 27, 2014

These dentures won't stop me from tearing out jugulars in Thunderdome.



Surprised nobody has brought up The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, though I think it would take some seriously crazy chops to keep that conceit rolling for an entire novel. (edit: TooMuchAbstraction mentioned it actually, my bad)

I think a lot of interesting conflict w/r/t utopian societies can come from that general wellspring - they are fundamentally egalitarian, which doesn't mean have to mean things are perfect (or even good) for everyone.

Grizzled Patriarch fucked around with this message at 02:44 on Jan 12, 2017

Stuporstar
May 5, 2008

Where do fists come from?
I've written the misfit-goes-crazy-in-utopia scenario. I love conflict that comes from people with good intentions doing the wrong thing. It's so much more realistic to me than coloring every antagonist different shades of evil.

SimonChris
Apr 24, 2008

The Baron's daughter is missing, and you are the man to find her. No problem. With your inexhaustible arsenal of hard-boiled similes, there is nothing you can't handle.
Grimey Drawer
https://itch.io/jam/utopia-jam

If you want try writing an utopia, consider participating in Utopia Jam! Submissions do not have to be games.

HIJK
Nov 25, 2012
in the room where you sleep

Grizzled Patriarch posted:

Surprised nobody has brought up The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, though I think it would take some seriously crazy chops to keep that conceit rolling for an entire novel. (edit: TooMuchAbstraction mentioned it actually, my bad)

I think a lot of interesting conflict w/r/t utopian societies can come from that general wellspring - they are fundamentally egalitarian, which doesn't mean have to mean things are perfect (or even good) for everyone.

But doesn't that mean it isn't actually a utopia?

TooMuchAbstraction
Oct 14, 2012

I spent four years making
Waves of Steel
Hell yes I'm going to turn my avatar into an ad for it.
Fun Shoe

HIJK posted:

But doesn't that mean it isn't actually a utopia?

"Utopia" isn't necessarily a strictly-defined term; it's loosely used to refer to any "ideal society". That doesn't demand that everyone be happy all the time or that there be no conflict, but it usually implicitly indicates that there is no "underclass" and that conflict between members of the utopia isn't existential.

POOL IS CLOSED
Jul 14, 2011

I'm just exploding with mackerel. This is the aji wo kutta of my discontent.
Pillbug
Yeah, getting into the no true Scotsman thing about Utopias is something best avoided. Even in a society where the institutions of power aren't systematically stacked against any particular group of people, there will still be micro and macro level conflicts. Those don't even need to be tied to scarcity. Sometimes you've just got bitch eatin' crackers issues. Sometimes you've got massive philosophical conflicts.

Sitting Here
Dec 31, 2007
So, the amazing DocKloc wrote up a fresh new fiction advice thread. This one has been good, but it's gotten really long. Just an FYI for anyone who has this thread bookmarked.

take the moon
Feb 13, 2011

by sebmojo
f it imma start posting here

losers~

just write w/e and worry l8r who tf cares.

maybe take chems

please scream in word form also

k driveby peaaaaace

ninja: looooooool rip

swamp waste
Nov 4, 2009

There is some very sensual touching going on in the cutscene there. i don't actually think it means anything sexual but it's cool how it contrasts with modern ideas of what bad ass stuff should be like. It even seems authentic to some kind of chivalric masculine touching from a tyme longe gone

magnificent7 posted:

What I'm asking, I think, is it just great skill and effort to craft books like McCarthy's stuff? His stuff reads like fables or mythology to me. I honestly can't say what exactly it is... I get a similar sense from reading Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer. His book is called "weird fiction" and I get that, but the way he tells the story is this odd very direct kind of style, that, when I read it, I love it, but couldn't tell you where it comes from beyond just "well, it's just a really good book."

Maybe I'm over-complicating / procrastinating. NAAAAH.

Totally get that, and maybe Girl on the Train is a bad example to use - it's definitely OF a specific genre, and it's "Rear Window" with booze and a train.

I think it's a little more than that.

Those books aren't about a badass yet unfairly put-upon hero who defeats an antagonist and is implicitly rewarded with someone hot to gently caress. There definitely is great skill and effort, but it's being put to a specific end-- to connect to something real in the experience of being human. The conflict is not just a matter of plot mechanics; the protagonist is experiencing something that is conflicting. Maybe something that's shameful or painful, maybe that undermines the way a person tends to think of themselves, maybe that pits some emotional need against a practical need.

Like No Country For Old Men-- you could spin a 100% normal genre story out of that premise, but he doesn't. Moss, for example, isn't that great of a guy, but it's because of that that he's understandable and interesting. He pursues pretty much exclusively selfish goals, but in a way that anyone can understand. Wouldn't you take somebody's $2 million and take off with the cute hitchhiker if it was easy and your life was kind of lovely anyway and you felt like you could probably handle the consequences? In a worse novel, he would be able to handle them, through violence or cunning. It just wouldn't be an issue the way it would be for a real person.

Similar thing with The Girl on the Train. Rachel's life is hosed up, she has done dangerously irresponsible stuff and probably is going to again because she's totally emotionally reliant on drinking. Trying to do the right thing here exposes herself to scrutiny in a way that is genuinely scary. She's truly not sure whether her past or future behavior will expose her as despicable, even violent, or just kind of a sad mess.

This wouldn't be a problem for a low-effort genre-cliche character-- they'd be mysteriously self-assured in a way that undermines the idea that there was ever any risk, or they just wouldn't have that kind of complexity in the first place because they'd have too much plot stuff to do. The plot would exist outside the character as a list tasks to fulfill.

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take the moon
Feb 13, 2011

by sebmojo
stop posting in an old thread

mods???

e: lol

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