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EDIT: Current progress Draft Chapter 1 Draft Chapter 2 Hello everybody, I’ve recently talked about a current project of mine in the chat thread which is to re-write an old fanfiction I started when I was 16. People told me that I should just start my own thread, so here we go. The Backstory I am from rural Bavaria, and most of us came late to the whole internet thing. I found computer games as a hobby a little earlier, fell in love with Diablo 2, then did my first steps online, discovered a (German) forum dedicated to talking about the game in the most overanalytic details, and was lost for a good while. That was in 2006. I did start a LOT of dumb poo poo as the sensation of reaching a potentially infinite amount of people with my ideas and opinions overwhelmed me, and among that stuff was what would now be called fanfiction. It started from the simple but – to me at least – compelling idea “what if the Necromancer’s Golem were sentient”. I always wanted to write dumb fantasy or sci-fi stories because I loved dumb fantasy and sci-fi stories, so I said gently caress it, sat down and started to hammer out some chapters. After the tenth or so one-page chapters, I thought “this is fun and I don’t see myself stopping”, so I jumped the gun, put some of it online in the Diablo 2 forum’s CC equivalent, branded it as an episodic novel with regular updates and hoped that I wouldn’t run out of steam. I came close a few times, but as the years went on and the userbase dwindled, my dumb story became more and more a symbol: if I could finish this, despite it never being something possible to publish, with utter garbage beginnings, I could finish anything. And so, ten years after starting it, after finishing school, university, university again (Master’s) and over halfway through a PhD, I did in fact finish it. Then I finished the PhD, proven right of course. And now, three years after that, I got the itch for the same creative outlet, I still want to write fun stuff and not just scientific papers (though that’s fun in its own right for the weird nerd I am), so I decided with some little encouragement from here to rewrite the entire thing in English, in my own world, following my own story, keeping the characters as they grew over the years into my personal darlings. The Original Game There’s probably a lot of people here who know Diablo 2 well, but I shouldn’t assume. Its story is quite simple on the surface: the hero from Diablo 1 had taken the soulstone into which Diablo’s soul was imprisoned, decided that the safest place for it was within his loving head, and rammed it there. Predictably, that was a terrible loving idea, it drove them mad and they started to become possessed by the Big D. They ran off to the east, leaving a plague of monsters in their path. It’s up to the player to level up and loot like crazy, following not-yet-but-soon-fully Diablo on his way east and stop him by means of murder, ideally take the soulstone as well and do something permanent about it. There’s a bunch of poo poo around that informed by the background novels that exist for the Diablo expanded universe which I never read, but had to read up on a little when I tried to (sometimes vainly) fuse canon with actual logic – this made things complicated when I decided very early on to just follow the story as presented by the game and make the character developments and relationships the focus. Hopefully very short summary of the game’s act structure:
My Fanfiction As I said before, I intended to just follow the original quite closely, mostly out of laziness: I wouldn’t have to come up with the world itself, have all monsters to be fought just from the game, get a lot of structure and escalation from the original writing, and could skimp on the details because I’m still a little insecure about my ability to set a scene. It was intended for an audience intently familiar with the source material, and that shows in the early writing quite painfully. All of it was to be told in first person present tense from the beginning of the Golem’s existence. It would develop his self-actualization, establish conflicts with his master as he gained and demanded more independence, grow into them slowly becoming actual friends, and culminate into them being heroes in equal standing. As I immediately published it after having only written ten chapters with little plans except “follow the game” and the above for character development, I had to retcon a LOT of stuff I loosely or even firmly established at the beginning. I also just wrote and immediately published for the most part, with only a few chapters I really cared about getting right edited before puking it onto the net. Fortunately, I am quite capable of writing free-flow without too many typos or glaring errors like sentences that go nowhere. If I had to have put some actual work into this, I’d have never finished, but now’s a different time of course! I got through Act 1 by keeping very close to the source material, with some things overemphasized when I thought they’d fit the Golem’s development more than others, but I left out practically nothing. The Necro-Golem duo fought every single named boss (many boss encounters in Diablo 2 are, like the maps, randomly generated, but some are always in specific places and have set names and abilities). Sometimes I even went into ingame optional caves to have the fights take place. There was a lot of looting, the Necromancer kept pulling poo poo off corpses to wear. He “leveled up” after big fights and got to summon more and more skeletons when I thought it sensible, and I tried to adjust his abilities based on a somewhat sensible level progression – I remember agonizing before the Andariel fight if having level 18 already would be realistic. Obviously, all of this poo poo did not make for good storytelling, but I was kinda trapped in my mindset of “from a fan, for the fans” and felt like there would be something missing if I didn’t describe all five floors of the Countess’ tower (no, seriously, I sat down one weekend, sighed, and banged out a chapter per like it was a loving obligation). During the second Act, I finally began to realize that a) this was completely idiotic and b) I’m actually starting to believe in this, this is going somewhere, my characters are growing into something I like to work with – I’m going to clean up my act. I started to deviate a little, experiment with the format, added entirely new subplot, shortened some of the original quests or integrated them into my new material. I thought long and hard about where I wanted to go with the grander story, the experiences and developments I wanted my characters to go through, planned more ahead and began to nail down where I wanted to end up. I was 18 by then, finishing school and simply maturing as a person, that helped a lot as well. Act 3 is one of my favorites in retrospect, because I finally got the feeling that I was writing my story. Of course, it was still in the Diablo universe and they’d collect all the stupid organs and fight Mephisto at the end, but I got creative. I gave the game’s NPCs bigger and more fleshed-out personalities and roles in my story beyond “asks you for a quest thing once”. I recontextualized some events to make the story make more sense, had the internal struggles of Golem and also master take center stage, and was able to grasp the reins. That’s why, as I already said, Act 4 sucked so much to write because it’s the shortest, barest, just a kill-fest through some barren fields of hell filled with demons in the game. The end is quite exciting with a river of flame and Diablo’s Chaos Sanctuary, but it’s a terrible drag before. Finally, I was able to overcome my creative slump by coming up with entirely new characters that would become actual ones in Diablo 3 (the so-far missing Lesser Evils Azmodan and Belial), giving the heroes someone to work with, and establishing a fledgling mythology probably only tangentially related to the canon one. After years of one-off writing, I finally had them kill Diablo, a major accomplishment. It stood for a bit because I was intimidated by the final Act: I wanted desperately to bring all the dangling plot threads together, to finish my story I had wanted to tell since I solidified it in Act 2, so long before this point (I was 23 years old now). But could I do it? I was in the final year of my Bachelor’s, had so much better poo poo to do than this dumb project, and I also had developed standards. Could this story fulfil them? Then I got hospitalized with a nasty infection for a while, spent half the time studying, and half the time bored out of my loving skull. I recorded an entire Let’s Play during my stay, but was still aching for more things to do. So eventually, I said gently caress it, sat down and wrote an entirely, completely original intro to Act 5 to bring my characters up to speed for the final stretch of their journey. It’s at least a third of the final product, has almost nothing to do with Diablo 2 and I’m very proud of it still. I made a “I’m back” thread in the forum, didn’t stop writing and finally, at the ripe age of 26, a full ten years after starting from a single idea, finished with the final sentence, the Golem becoming a Real Boy and the Necromancer…hey, spoilers! I skipped almost all the “gameplay” of Act 5 because it’s literally mountain – plane – another plane – cave – plane – cave – plane – cave – mountaintop - final dungeon. Added an epilogue too with “sequel bait” (never planned on writing that). And that closed that chapter. Until now. The Plan, and the Thread I will start over from the very beginning. Make up my own world that has nothing to do with Diablo, set my characters in it and make them grow similarly, but informed by their new surroundings as well. I want to keep the emotional core largely intact and there will be a lot of action as well, but it will all be mine. And in the end, if I finish this, I want to bring it into the world somehow because I loving love attention. It’s exciting to write again and stretch my creative muscles in a way I’ve never done before (see: world building), and I’m only slightly worried that my style has gotten too dry with all the papers I wrote already and will continue to author, as well as it being poo poo in general because I’m just not THAT much of a creative type (I’ve got a loving PhD in Chemistry okay). However, I’m a very confident person and am well aware that practice makes basically everything, so I’m not really making this thread looking for advice (at least for now, also bear with me for a second).* My original idea for putting this stuff on SA was actually to laugh at my idiot teenage self by translating the German text as closely as possible and marvel at what I thought was poetic or dramatic. However, someone also mentioned that they’re interested in my creative process in general, so I’ll share that as well as it happens. Additionally, I’ve always viewed starting a thread as very nice motivation that kept nagging me to give the people a new chapter, some progress update, anything; it helped me finish the first story “for the fans”, it helped me for every Let’s Play I did, and it might do wonders for this thing here as well. I don’t want to give you every single chapter of the rewrite itt, that’s not the point I think, unless you’re really clamoring for it. Just in case, I’ve waited with opening it until I got something. And I will definitely post some material because it’s worthwhile progress to show. And finally, I can’t be the only one to think “man, this stupid poo poo I did as a teenager wasn’t that bad, maybe I should revisit it at some point…”. In fact, I’m sure that people have already done this rewrite thing here, and we probably all know that you can earn a shitload of money with repurposed fanfiction *cough* 50 Shades of Grey *cough*. I’m super open for someone else to come in here and post their own story about the story, get inspiration and advice to go back into their own creative writing past and dredge up the diamonds from the rough! *I’m open to advice and welcome it – please critique the poo poo out of me! I have a gigantic ego but hope that I’m at least aware enough of it to beat it down enough so I can listen to and appreciate everything people tell me about the quality of my writing and the plans for it. I’m sure this will also be a very worthwhile part of this thread. It’s just not the main reason I’m opening it. Thanks for your attention so far! I’ll give you some actual content in the second post  .
Simply Simon fucked around with this message at 19:14 on Dec 30, 2020 |
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Dec 26, 2018 22:56
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What I’ve done already Worldbuilding Everyone hates it if done in excess in a story, but for myself I of course have to establish the setting quite firmly so things make sense overall. I hope that I can restrain myself from mentioning almost all of this in the actual text. It’s a lean-ish 13 pages now going from the explanation for why my world is limited to only one continent (most fantasy stories just…do that, again I won’t bring up the explanation in the text) to the last open conflict between “heaven” and “hell” like in the Diablo original before my story starts with a fresh breakout. I’ll amend this while writing the main text to include important new details like “which countries exist and how are they called”. I’ll keep it fluid for when changing things makes for a better story than trying to keep my original idea intact. So for now, this’ll stay at 13 pages until I’ve written more. Themes I stream-of-consciousnessed some central things I’d like the story to revolve around to make it more focused this time. Most of that stuff is in the original fanfiction based on how the characters act and how their morality evolves, but I wanted to put some words down at the start to have a base to work with. I took my original NPCs (and PCs) like Deckard and Tyrael and fit them into this framework, to see if they’d support what I want to convey or if they have to go. So far I could rework them okay, but this was the very first thing I wrote of the new stuff so it’s subject to the most changes. Designs That’s a sore spot because I’m just awful at picture art. I’m okay at graphic design I think (at least I care about it more than most of my colleagues and regularly draw fancy-ish graphics for presentations and even some magazine covers), but draw a complete blank at coming up with clothing, armor, accessories. I googled a few armor pictures, looked at some Dark Souls armor for somewhat realistic fantasy stuff (you mostly get overdesigned WoW-esque crap on google, at least I do…), and have finally decided to just wing it for now; in the original fanfiction I just took the Diablo 2 designs of course, but as I said, the Necromancer would constantly “loot” stuff off corpses and get new armors all the time, I think for the story now it’s fine to give him, like, three substantial outfit changes as he matures into a more serious hero and leave it at that. And I can be vague there, really don’t have to elaborate on “leather cap” with “also there’s beads in rainbow colors his earsies are kept warm by fluff”. Have to really break a habit here because I described stuff in detail before to make the fans realize what it’s supposed to be ingame, but I absolutely do not have to do that anymore. Names I’m also garbage at those (and suspect I’m not the only one). However, I got big help from a goon already (privately), and got a whooole bunch of mythological inspiration to draw from for the demons and angels. Mostly though, I’ll make those up as I go. People and Their Motivations I know where I will arrive at the end because Act 5 was always my own story, but the backdrop is a little different now and that informs some changes. So I’ve jotted down a rough outline of goals and how they change for the characters. This is also important because my original Act 1 was a total mess where I threw some ideas and foreshadowing for stuff I might do at the wall, and I had to retcon almost all of it later. Not doing that again, so I’m making things more concrete right away. I have written this part last, after a re-read to filter for good ideas and character “beats”. The Actual Story Here’s the fun part of course – how to write my own material without changing so much I might as well write an entirely new thing? This is what I decided upon already:
New poo poo based on what you know already:
I’m keeping mum on details because a) they’re not fixed yet b) many of them won’t be mentioned in the actual story (see worldbuilding) and c) I don’t want to bore you guys to tears with just jotting down all my preliminary documents. The Process And this is how I’m doing the rewriting work so far: based on my thoughts outlined above (what to keep, what to replace), I’m writing a general outline of what has to happen physically. That means places the heroes go to, big fights they fight (and win), NPCs they meet, people who die. That’s just a single page for Act 1 so far because Diablo 2’s Act 1 is pretty good at just being a blank slate with the bigger story not hitting quite yet, and I’m keeping that. What I’m keeping absolutely open is what’s going to happen mentally. This means the journey of the Golem to become a person, the journey of the Necromancer to be less of an rear end in a top hat, the development of their friendship and of their values. Especially for Act 1 I need to start and progress completely differently as what I originally wrote is plain wrong considering what I ended up with, so this is even vaguer. If you’re taking away from this that I don’t have much respect from my original material, that’s half true: I think Act 1 is trash due to my age when it was written and due to its age relative to the story, when so many of the concepts were half-baked at best. However, I respect my growth as an author, and I have proof for myself of it happening, because I did re-read Act 2 in its entirety. It was very very interesting and a great experience, because I can tell pretty much chapter by chapter where I start giving a poo poo and believing that this is something. I see the slavish dedication to the game’s “realities” of looting and grinding slowly vanish, I already spot the first retcons of Act 1’s nonsense, and I see the firsts tentative experiments with form and style…fail but show promise. I wrote a summary of the main plot points because I had forgotten a lot after a decade of not looking at it (in fact, I had never looked at it – see the “no editing done, ever” point). I noted which of those points I still like and which I consider mistakes to avoid; I extended this to style and language choices when opportune. I paid special attention to the Golem’s character development to see where I want to end Act 1 with, and how I might get there. And finally, because I’m a goon and wanted to open this thread eventually, I made a separate file called GOODASS QUOTES where I collected the worst poo poo I wrote to laugh at. After all of this, I started writing, because I feel I’ve done enough already and if I don’t start at some point, I will get super tired of the whole “work” aspect of this and never begin. Also, a lot of this stuff is fluid until I develop things naturally, so I can’t actually put it black on white before knowing where I want to go. I also knew that redoing the “Golem wakes up” chapter would be the most demanding hurdle because a lot depends on that being good, but once I convinced myself that I could and probably would just rewrite all of it later based on later stuff and that’s fine because it’s no longer published immediately, I just did it and got eight pages of two chapters already. I’d have done more but decided to open the thread first! I’m going to leave it at this now because the two posts are nine pages already. I got the following material I could share and would like to hear your interest:
And again, if you got your own story about stories to share, please do! If you’ve done this before, I’d be super into learning about your process .
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Dec 26, 2018 22:57
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Disappointed the thread isn't called "Stay awhile, and listen".  Interested to see where this goes, though. Not related to your fic, I just found this amazing... thing... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HfmB4r2Fco
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Dec 27, 2018 01:04
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SHTAY A WHILE, AND LISHEN I might change the title if you don't mind op
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Dec 27, 2018 01:11
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Haha I guess that's also a very good fit especially considering how wordy I am. Do it (formatting up to you)! I'm off to bed now but will put out some content tomorrow. I think I'll start with something rather obviously juicy: my freshly-written probably overwrought as gently caress new first chapter compared to the very first old one. Excited to see that one again, it's really been forever.
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Dec 27, 2018 01:21
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I never played Diablo and I admittedly skimmed some parts of the OP, but posting so I don't forget to check up on your progress in this thread
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Dec 27, 2018 01:35
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Blast from the past – the first first chapter tl;dr: If you only want to read the new stuff, Ctrl+F to “The Rewrite” and skip all the analysis of the old poo poo. I’m first going to give you the text transliterated from German as best as I can, then I’m gonna talk about how I feel about it. The story is called Ich denke, also bin ich (I think, therefore I am), Act 1 is called Tönerne Taufe (baptism in clay) and Chapter 1 simply “Birth”. quote:A picture appears. Comments and critique I need to preface this by explaining the timeline: I re-read Act 2 before starting to write the new version, wrote two chapters of that, then made the OP, then re-read Act 1, Chapter 1 for this post. So if I’m saying “in the new version…”, it’s already written, and without having consulted the original first because I just couldn’t bring myself to read it. Now onto the actual critique. I think the most surprising thing to me is how much emphasis I put on the words and definitions thing, rather than the “oh poo poo, I exist part”. I feel like that would deserve more emphasis (and in the new version, it gets that). Something that’s not surprising is how much I focus on clothing and looks, but it still jumps out. As I wrote very close to the game, describing the “starting equipment” is essential to allow for future upgrades, and of course I “needed” to emphasize that my Necromancer’s design is very similar to its ingame look of gaunt, long white hair, to make the reader go “okay, I know how he looks because I played as him a bunch” and save on details. Obviously, now I know that all of those details (cheeks, nose, brow…) are not actually necessary to know and it’s perfectly fine to have the reader fill in the blanks. When starting out, I wanted to base the Necromancer on myself, what would be considered a classical self-insert in today’s terminology. Even during my teenage days, I was aware of some of my personality flaws (arrogance is a big one) and wanted to poke fun at them, though, so I don’t consider him an idealized Mary Sue type character in retrospect – he is meant to have flaws from the start, and have my flaws. I abandoned that idea pretty quickly, though, and made him his own thing really soon, but it’ll be apparent in the first few chapters of Act 1 that he has traits of myself. For this first one, the most obvious thing is that he’s left-handed, a fact that I’m pretty sure I conveniently forgot and/or never made into a plot-relevant thing later. He’s also meant to be 16 like I was, which obviously doesn’t fit with the desiccated old guy appearance from the game, and I rather desperately tried to make the two things fit together. I would later make the white hair into an important plot point, and thus it also stays in the new design, but he’s older now (not 29 like I am currently, though, rather 20), doesn’t have the ridiculous ponytail and he’s actually rather fit instead of wiry and weak. The actual progression of the writing in this chapter is something I cared a lot about when writing it, something I remember very clearly – in fact, I remember a surprising amount of things I thought about when writing the original even now, like entire sentences immediately take me back to how I agonized over how to make them “sing”. So I think I can comment on that rather well-informed, which is good. It is done very clumsily because I was just not that good with language, and I hope I brought that over to the transliteration well with the overuse of passive voice (you don’t really do that often in good literary German as well), but I made very sure that the Golem doesn’t use “I” or “me” before the Necromancer addresses him directly and he realizes that he is a person. Similarly, I very pointedly avoid talking about “life”, choosing “existence” instead, before he thinks about it. However, that he thinks about it already at the end of the very first chapter is a disaster which would bite me in the rear end severely later on, but I couldn’t redo it as it was online already and I loathed the idea of stealthily editing lines a bunch of people had already read. The Golem should struggle with the idea of being alive, should have both his master and himself (that’s a huge thing, not just self-doubts, but I won’t get into it right now) constantly lead him to question his assumption that he deserves to be a person. Another thing I really don’t like is that his first mention of life is conflated with the “master” thing, which is given more importance as the final, big line and thus overshadows it. It makes sense because I initially wanted the Golem seeing the Necromancer as the Master part of his summoning spell, something intrinsic to his nature which he would slowly have to overcome, but that produced a LOT of problems down the line when I thought more about what I wanted him to be, how he fit into a bigger story I was developing around and beyond the game’s meager offerings, and for the remake, I’m completely dropping that. Instead, the Necromancer declares himself “master”, the Golem accepts that gladly to have some sense and guidance in his racing, confused thoughts, then slowly becomes aware that he needs more from “life” and begins to question if he needs to be a slave. Overall, stuff like this is why I don’t consider Act 1 to be a very good base to start with, and why I don’t really want to re-read it as inspiration: almost all of the early characterization clashes catastrophically with how the characters would later turn out and ignores backstory to them I simply hadn’t even thought of yet. The Rewrite So, to compare and contrast, 13 years later, my new attempt at the first chapter. This will probably change a lot as I develop the new characters further and have to “retcon” stuff to fit my new mythology, but it’s a good baseline to just get started with and I’m happy to be “done with it”, so to speak. Writing on is going to be far easier now that the first step is done and I don’t dread the “responsibility” of having to write the insanely impactful and important “waking up to a new life” part super well. quote:Chapter 1 [untitled so far] Comments Compared to the original, it’s super interesting that without reading it, I still settled on the “questions asked by the Golem lead to revelations from within him” format, but greatly expanded. I also kept but expanded upon the “picture” image, which I really like and in fact kept as the first sentence of every original Act. I also kept the columns/pillars thing to describe human shapes (maybe that’s a little clumsy but idk). I think I managed to keep the “doesn’t call himself an I until he asks the right question” fairly well and natural this time. I added another wrinkle: until he discovers that he has emotions, he doesn’t use contractions. That makes the final paragraph before the “why” question a little dry, which is intentional but might still make for bad reading, I think I’ll redo that one after shaking off more rust and settling on a new, mature style a few (hundred) pages in from now. Generally, the Golem is meant to be very analytical though, on one hand because that’s how I write and think myself, on the other hand because it makes sense for him to be and because it is his main “weapon” against an uncaring world. After all, he ONLY has his thoughts to work with for a good long while. So there’s going to be a lot of introspection, a lot of careful evaluation, recontextualizing with new information and so on. I deliberately left out a lot of details about the Necromancer's appearance this time, I'd like to hear if what I describe is enough to make you get a picture. And if it's too clumsy to e.g. describe his eyes but leave out their color; I wanted to have this be a little weird to emphasize the "alien" thoughts of the Golem who doesn't quite put the same values on the same details as humans do, but maybe that's too subtle/too weird/too obvious, hard to say. Oh, and I'm suuuper not sure about the "gambeson" thing. I had to google that and don't want to have people stumble over that and google themselves when they read it. It would make sense for the Golem to have it in his "vocabulary", but just because it makes sense in-universe doesn't mean it makes for good writing... I’ll leave it at that and up for critique now. Thanks for your attention! Simply Simon fucked around with this message at 12:40 on Dec 27, 2018 |
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Dec 27, 2018 12:34
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You’re not very good motivation if you don’t comment on my thread, people . But I didn’t get much work done over the holidays anyway, now that routine is setting in again, I freshly appreciate the evening hours with a cup of tea and a to-be-filled document in front of me. As I said before, I don’t want to simply post everything I’m freshly writing, rather contrast it with the old stuff, sometimes more directly if I’m drawing direct inspiration, sometimes talking about broader strokes. As I’m dead-set against reading too much of Act 1 for fear of disgusting myself with myself, it’s gotta be the latter for a while. Today I’d like to muse about fight scenes. Because Diablo 2 consists pretty much entirely of fighting a never-ending stream of demons, I wrote a lot of fight scenes, which are admittedly really fun to me. I suspect that at least a third of my early chapters contain a fight (if someone is really interested, I could count I guess), sometimes quickly wrapped up, sometimes spanning multiple chapters. I was dead-set initially to cover every unique boss monster, and to depict every “classic” situation in the game as well: the first time you get frustrated with a Fallen Shaman resurrecting its servants over and over again, the pang of guilt you might feel for killing “evil” (or mind-controlled, or corrupted?) humans, the panic you feel when you realize that ghost-type enemies can drain your mana. I was really into the game back then, so I knew a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff, like for example that every area can only have three enemy types in it at the same time, which would often be randomly chosen among a pool of five or so possibilities. I decided to stick to that rule for ~realism~, which almost never meant that I would just omit a monster type; of course not, I wanted to write about all of those fights!!! Instead, I planned out that they had to fight the lich enemies in this area, because then I could leave them out in the next area, and write about frog demons instead, which could not spawn in the first area. I think I gave myself a brain disorder when I first discovered the internet. In retrospect, this means that the pacing used to be hosed. There would be a short chapter of the characters developing for a brief moment, interacting with the “NPCs” for a few lines, which I kind of hated to write, then they’d be off, travel to the next location on the list, and get to the fights I wanted them to have and actually wanted to write. Fortunately, very much so, I started to get sick of that eventually and finally cut out some of the monster types, decided that there just would not be another encounter with skeletons-but-green-this-time unless they were unique in some way and bring anything new to the table, and made the fights more meaningful. The characters also started to grow on me more, and I stopped hating the between-fights moments. And finally, in the end, I enjoyed writing character interactions more than fight scenes. Though I think I’ve reached a pretty happy balance there: the action is still really fun to write, but a good talky bit gives me a deeper feeling of satisfaction for having written something impactful. For the new story, I intend to cut 90% of the “random” fights. All those moments where they just encounter an enemy because “that’s what you fight here!” should be gone because they add nothing. This will still leave a lot of action, because that’s a big part of what I want the story to be: it should be entertaining first and foremost, for all the waxing I did about characters and their interactions. This poo poo needs to be fun. So there will be big dumb fantasy battles with skeletons and demons squaring off. It just won’t be ALL of that ALL the time. The Golem needs to fight just enough to be thoroughly sick of being used as a weapon, nothing more and nothing less; I hope to tread that thin line well, but I suspect that if someone with editing chops takes a look at the whole story at the end, they might say “this, this and this fight are completely superfluous, kill the pacing and need to go”, and that they will be right. Can’t really know from the get-go, though, so write the fights I will. To give you content beyond this, I’d like to present you the first fight scene of the new story. If someone is actually reading this and wants to see it, give me a holler and I will read the first fight scene of the old story and contrast it itt. I won’t bother if nobody cares .I skipped three pages from the end of the last chapter to the beginning of this one with more Golem-finds-out-about-himself and musings-during-travel stuff. I think it’s not necessary for the fight itself. quote:A swirling mass of bodies and what’s usually hidden by their fleshy outside, running here and there, trying to gain a hill that is well defended, but struggling. The top is obscured from here, but one can see sharpened stakes jutting out to prevent even the most adventurous of monsters from trying to scale it, so they try for the main entrance. Even that is up a winding path currently blocked by some boulders that were hastily rolled onto it. Behind those rocks, and behind wooden palisades further up, the defenders, mostly human women, make their stand. Simply Simon fucked around with this message at 20:27 on Jan 8, 2019 |
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Jan 8, 2019 19:09
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I think you could do with focusing on how you format your writing - there's a lot of long, comma divided, sentences and no paragraphs. That makes for a difficult wall of text, and the eye just kind of slides off after a bit. Writing-wise, I think there's just too much of it. Too wordy, too detail-focused. Take the first chunk: quote:A swirling mass of bodies and what’s usually hidden by their fleshy outside, running here and there, trying to gain a hill that is well defended, but struggling. The top is obscured from here, but one can see sharpened stakes jutting out to prevent even the most adventurous of monsters from trying to scale it, so they try for the main entrance. Even that is up a winding path currently blocked by some boulders that were hastily rolled onto it. Behind those rocks, and behind wooden palisades further up, the defenders, mostly human women, make their stand. quote:A swirling mass of bodies struggling to gain a well-defended hill. They swarm up a winding path part-blocked by boulders. Behind those rocks, and behind wooden palisades further up, the defenders make their stand.
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Jan 8, 2019 19:53
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Sorry about the formatting, I had forgotten that for the first chapter, I had added a lot of linebreaks manually. I looks way better in the Word document, but that really doesn't translate well to forums. Should I also keep it out of quote tags? Any better way to post writing on here than just c&p? As for the wordiness, I realize that is a huge problem I have, it has also been pointed out before with some samples I posted in the chat thread. I will focus on that specifically as I write further, and go back to what I have posted here already trying to prune it. Your example is good already - I think "the important bits" is a key point. I should identify those and discard the rest, and not write "the rest" in the future. I think here's where the fanfiction past bites me in the rear end the most - I've written the original over ten years and have gotten constructive feedback, like, once per year. Actually, I didn't get much feedback at all especially as the forum kept dying. That makes bad habits well ingrained. But here's to the challenge! And after all, getting rid of all the useless stuff means I have to write way less, no?
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Jan 8, 2019 20:32
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True dat. Thunderdome might be a good way of sharpening your writing with a hard word limit to guide you, if you're up for extra writing?
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Jan 8, 2019 21:15
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Read more, write less, close thread  .I guess the next thunderdome opens next week? My first chapter alone is almost 1000 words and I wrote that in an afternoon, so yeah sure might be a good idea.
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Jan 9, 2019 00:29
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So I read the OP and skipped the rest (which I'll read over the next few minutes but if I didn't post this I'd forget) One of the first good tips I got about writing (which hasn't done poo poo for me because reasons) is to Write What You Know. You a Chemistry nerd? Good, make Chemistry a key part of the magic system of the setting.
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Jan 13, 2019 00:55
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Siegkrow posted:So I read the OP and skipped the rest (which I'll read over the next few minutes but if I didn't post this I'd forget) Thanks for the read! I'll actually veto your suggestion for multiple reasons. First of all, Chemistry is my job, and in a way my passion because you can't be a Chemist without on some level loving it, but I don't need every facet of my life to be about Chemistry. In fact, most of what I'm doing in my job is looking at insanely complicated and boring reaction steps, so if I put something like that into my magic, it will be the absolute worst to read about. Most "standard" Chemistry kind of bores me, that's why I'm into the nitty-gritty-poo poo. I think I'm the only person in the whole world who started studying Chemistry without being into explosions OR drugs, I just want to know how things work on a fundamental level. Secondly, I loathe reading about over-detailed magic systems, it just seems so technical and superfluous for a good story to me. For example, I quite liked Brian Sanderson's Mistborn series, but could not stand his rules for magic which were metal-based, and every metal did something different, and you had to swallow metal pills to draw on their powers, and people were good at different metals, and ugh. So many words wasted on that. It's also something I shy away from personally because I could be writing about something in ludicrous detail and develop a system that is Perfectly Logical, but that's something I thought would be SO GOOD as a kid, and I don't think it's good writing at all. A magic system is always going to clash with science at some point, I feel that it's completely arbitrary to make the magic follow the rules of nature up to THIS point and not up to THAT point. I'm going to try not to violate conservation of energy and mass too too much, but I'm not going to do the calculations while writing, that's absurd. Imagine for example a standard fireball spell: where's the heat coming from? You can't generate energy, so it's gotta be taken from somewhere. Do I always write "oh yeah, the mystic force is cooling off the surroundings in a 10-meter-radius just a little so the fireball can gather that heat at one point", or just say "I use magic to cast fire"? My problem is too many words, not too little. I mean, I might be completely wrong in my thinking, that's why I'm putting it down in so many words so you can argue against it if you want, but that's my thoughts on the matter. I do have a bunch of rules set in the background I won't talk about in the story, but which I'll use to keep things consistent, but for magic they're probably the loosest, because the story isn't really about the magic - it's more about the tools people use for magic, and they deliberately don't understand how they work.
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Jan 13, 2019 11:39
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Crit chapter 1 Chapter 1 [untitled so far] At once, everything. A sudden picture. Light in the center, dark on the edges. Frayed edges. Irregular columns, left, right and in front. Behind, long thin objects cutting through grey above, dark green below. To be honest, I can't picture this at all and I'm usually very strong at visualizing stories in my head. That can be okay, but as the very first image in your story I feel like going abstract like this is a little weak. The center column shifts. As movement enters the picture, the moment is no longer timeless. A sense of unease begins to mount. I get what you're trying to say here, like in "a mounting tension" but the use of the verb like that sounds strange to me. Checking wiktionary for "mount" and "mounting" it looks like using the verb form that way is technically correct but not really in common usage anymore. Something needs to happen. The equilibrium is broken, but what will happen as a result? And is the action still held back, is it...waiting? Comma splices can be acceptable for the sake of voice but this one distracted me. Can the picture itself answer these questions, closing in like the edges of the frame? Is there something important in it? This means nothing to me. Distance comes to mind. Whose mind? Is this first person now? (edit: before the narrator realizes it, at least) The brown pillars connecting rolling green and churning grey: in the background. Again, fragments are more than welcome in prose, but this sentence structure brought me out of it. Unimportant. The off-white columns left and right: blending into the periphery. Unimportant. Why is this the only "important" that's not in a new line? Directly in front: the center column. Very intricate. Complicated, confusing. Has moved. Very important. You have to decide whether you want these on different paragraphs or not. Because right now you have 2 spaces between paragraphs, and then a handful of these single-spaced clumps that I don't even know what to call them. They are formatted like in-line poems or something but I don't think that's what you were going for. Again, I'm having a hard time being invested in the actions of this super abstract scene, and I don't understand the the extent of how/why the movement is important Focus. One aspect of the picture needs special study. The center juts forward, the edges soften, the distance blurs. A figure, extending downward from the viewpoint. Idk what this means. Do you mean vanishing point? Blank mass of tangles on top, somewhat darker smooth surface below. How can a mass of tangles be "blank"...? Twin rings of white surrounding rings of color surrounding black circles. An outcropping protruding even more into the foreground. Thin line separating the upper structure horizontally. The smooth surface ends, replaced by fabric. As the focus point wanders downward, the layers become hard to keep track of, the silhouette widens, the growing sense of urgency starts to become unbearable. I am not feeling the urgency. I am feeling mostly confused and straining my brain to put all these pieces together into a coherent image. What is the picture? And finally, the correct question has been asked. A desire for definition has been stated. Curiosity has entered the picture - and, miraculously, it is sated. Violently. Names, concepts, relations and explanations come crashing in. The mind instantly drowns and suffocates in the overabundance of raw knowledge that has been unleashed. For the eternity of a fraction of a second, the tiny spark, the mere possibility of a flame, lies extinguished. It is dead… And then it lives again. The overwhelming need to be, to do, the urgency that asked the hazardous question in the first place, wrenches the budding mind firmly into reality. And there, with knowledge married to understanding, can things start making sense. Saying stuff like "THE tiny spark" and "THE budding mind" about just-being-introduced concepts contributes a lot to the sense of confusion in this passage. Personally, when I read an intro like this, I'm mostly waiting for something concrete to latch onto, and I feel like most of the dramatic tension here is lost because I don't have that yet. The abundant use of passive voice here doesn't help the vagueness either. The picture is of a forest, trees with slim branches propping up a sky covered in clouds. Grass, moss and fallen leaves cover the ground up to a few steps away, where the soil is exposed. Roots, it is roots framing the scene! Held up by… Still unimportant. The figure. A human. Dirt staining snow-white hair, sweatdrops beading smooth face, gambeson armoring thin torso. Leather gloves, woolen pants, simple shoes. Mouth pressed shut, leaning back, staring intently back at the focus point’s origin. I'm still not sure what this means. Who is he looking at? Everything snaps to a standstill. Motion forgotten, the concept of time erased, the clock turned back so far that it itself ceased being. The question of “what” which gave the world meaning almost destroyed it with the force of its revelations. It is nothing compared to “who”. An eternity of reevaluation passes in the span of no time at all. And the question finally receives an answer. He is looking...at me. A being that is I. I have thoughts. Thoughts that allow me to interact with the sea of knowledge, drink from it as I choose, give it meaning. And thus, another dimension of the picture is unlocked. Is it the final one? I seem to be standing under an uprooted tree trunk, in the ditch left by it. Considering this height difference, where I am looking from should be about the same distance from the ground the human’s eyes are. Therefore, it is reasonable to think that I am humanoid myself. Two other humanoids are standing left and right from me and holding the tree trunk tilted upright, so it is possible that I was buried underneath it and just unearthed. This I like. As an opening scene, I like this image. It gives me a lot of questions but also a lot to latch onto, like "maybe he was just recently dead" which would also explain the trippy coming-(back?)-into-consciousness passage. It also gives the impression that something is happening/about to happen to this MC very soon, which makes me want to keep reading. I would honestly have preferred if this was much closer to the opening of the story though. I would maybe even entirely cut the first bit. On the other hand, a somewhat unlikely scenario, as the trunk seems heavy, probably fit rather well into the ditch, and thus I would have not survived well with it on me. But wait, this relies on an assumption I cannot make without evidence: that I am human. As far as I know, humans do not suddenly spring into existence fully conscious. Also, the two figures keeping me from being crushed (again?) are not human either. I might therefore be similar to them: devoid of skin and flesh and organs, just a skeleton. There is something not quite right there, but...my mind is going over too many things at once now that it allowed itself to do so. Among the chaos, one last pressing question keeps demanding my fullest attention above all, so I try to address it. Things are getting interesting here, though there's something holding it back and I think it may be your character's analysis of everything. Now, I love a good analytical character, especially in ontological-type stories in fantasy settings (Chronicles of Amber is good), but the stuff he's analyzing needs to be consistently engaging. I think you're probably spending too many words on the analysis, and your story would benefit from changing it to more of a, I know it sounds un-literature-like, but basically a rote list of what he is observing. I don't mean bullet points, but just to spend less words on his internal logic-ing and more on the actual concrete elements of the scene. You can use that to add more details and imagery too. Remember to apply the other senses besides sight (assuming this thing has other senses lol). Why is the human here? I look deeply into his face, the wide eyes, the slowly opening mouth, as he takes a full step back, finally finishing the motion he began to start this journey. Can I analyze his motivations by thinking about what he... feels? Oh dear. I shouldn’t have asked the last question. This is a fun chapter end, but it feels like you want me to be more amused by this than I am. The problem with that is I'm still not clear at all about what these questions have actually been... like... doing? I'm hoping this gets cleared up in the next chapter. edit after fully reading your ch1 post: Yes I had to google gambeson. Mr. Steak fucked around with this message at 08:58 on Jan 30, 2019 |
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Jan 30, 2019 05:06
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Thanks a lot for the in-depth crit! It's going to be very valuable, because the first chapter needs to be fantastic, obviously. I found it very hard to bring across a sense of confusion and helplessness from the narrator, while also not confusing the reader too much, and it's great to hear that you were, in fact, confused, but not in a good way. I will try to address that. Here is my general plan for this chapter, I think this might explain a lot of the choices; they might be very bad choices, but it's why I wrote like I wrote. There are four revelations one after another, as the Golem slowly realizes he is a thinking and feeling being. - Initially, he just sees. There is a big mess of colors and objects, and he has no way to determine what is worth focusing on. - Something moves in the center of the picture, making him realize that some things are more important than others. He does start to focus his vision* The next revelations are denoted by the questions he asks. - WHAT? This gives him a "library" of words and definitions to use. I made sure to only use the most basic vocabulary before, now he is flooded with knowledge from...somewhere (that IS actually a huge spoiler). He discovers that he knows a lot about the world, actually. - WHO? This makes him realize that he is a sentient being, who can think of himself as an "I". That's why I used passive voice before. This revelation gives everything a completely different context: trying to understand things is now important to HIM, not just out of a vague sense of "I should probably address this...everything". - WHY? And finally, he realizes that he has feelings, and feelings make things complicated. He starts using contractions from now on and starts talking like an actual character. I think this structure and buildup is generally sound, but I can easily weigh the different stages differently, and try to make it more engaging from the get-go. I'm thinking of including more feelings from the start, with him being more and more frustrated that he does not understand what the general sense of anxiety is until he realizes what feelings even are. One other thing that is a problem is the analytical thinking. Let me come right out and say it: this is going to be the central issue with this entire project. It will almost entirely be written in a first-person present narrative from the viewpoint of the Golem, so I really only have his thoughts about the world to write, and in the original, he spent chapter after chapter just thinking about things, evaluating his conclusions, re-evaluating them, silently judging his master, debating his motivations, and so on - it was probably really dry (especially when I was starting out), and I really need to figure out a way to fix this. Or rather, I'd like to be able to write in a somewhat dry, observational, navel-gazing style that is STILL engaging. That's the challenge. Because "the world filtered through newborn eyes" is one of THE central draws of the story, after all. I was actually not sure if the very static analysis of the first chapter was too much, and I should listen to myself more, I guess. If I can tone that down so it's less obviously painful to read, then once he does warm up a little, it will be an acceptable "normal" tone for the story. And yes, the final line was meant to "open" the tone a little, give a little reward to the reader after slogging through the paragraph of meticulous analysis. You said you were interested in the next chapter, which makes me super happy, because that's one goal fulfilled at least (even if it's just in the context of this thread, probably not "if I had read this first chapter in a library, I'd be buying the book now"). I did skip the next scenes in order to get critique on the fight scene, but I will post it so you can "turn the page" and see if it gets better. Not right now, because I got a plane to catch. But I'll get back at you! Thanks again! *This is something I might talk about way later, as he finds out more about himself: he is in a magically created body that does not have to be ruled by natural laws at all, so he does not need to "focus his vision" because he doesn't have two working eyes with retinas an image gets projected on. However, he IS actually made from a human soul** (that is something of a spoiler but it's not meant as a super twist or anything, he just should not be aware of that for a long time), so it helps him immensely to treat things LIKE a human would. Including a central focus for an image. **That's also why I call him unambiguously male. EDIT: forgot to address at least one thing: the "blank mass" is the Necromancer's hair. I wanted to avoid repetition of "white" with his eyes soon after. It's bad. Simply Simon fucked around with this message at 14:38 on Jan 30, 2019 |
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Jan 30, 2019 14:05
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I decided to make things a little easier on myself and will just give out the link to the Google Doc for my First Draft of this. Contains the full first three chapters, I haven't done any editing work on the third yet, but honestly? I might just keep writing until I'm finished with a significant chunk, then go back with better practice, both here and in Thunderdome (which has indeed been quite helpful already) and give everything a full pass. This will also be able to tell me about pacing and structure issues, something I can only speculate about at the moment. I know the original's pacing was hosed three ways to Sunday, but that doesn't help me beyond "maybe write less irrelevant bullshit" .I welcome any in-depth crits as they happen (thanks again onsetOutsider), and will respond gladly, and file them for later use in said editing pass. I'll also keep posting in here when I write more and when I have some concrete questions. I hope that's a good compromise between spamming my own thread with just "hey I wrote a thing!!!" and "this will be a barren space for at least half a year until I finish a meaningful chunk", because I'm in no hurry. Also, it saves me from what I had to do for the original: put [i][/i] tags loving everywhere and driving me crazy. EDIT: I've updated the link at the time of this edit, but I'll probably not continue to do so and only update the one in the OP. Reason for the link changing is that I'm writing offline most of the time and then upload the newest version, which makes it a new document. Simply Simon fucked around with this message at 18:12 on Apr 3, 2019 |
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Feb 1, 2019 16:48
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Alright, so I tried to write a bit more on my last plane ride, and ran into some issues, and after some thinking about it I think I know what they are and what I should do about it. If you want to see concrete examples, what I did write is uploaded. So basically, the chapter will be about the Golem and his master fighting their first "boss" enemy in a graveyard, for the Diablo 2 veterans: this used to be Blood Raven. It was supposed to be a pretty straightforward fight scene, but I wanted to spice it up a little (and have it make more sense than just a random graveyard in the middle of nowhere), so there's now a church attached, and that church was destroyed by the demons, and a bunch of corpses lie there slaughtered to drive home that the demons are quite evil (I realize that this is quite redundant if you put it that way). Problem 1: it's not a Christian church, so what symbol do they use instead of a cross? I just sat there for half an hour thinking about this tiny detail, and eventually just made up something (a moon and a wave) which might mean something or not, but it certainly doesn't to me. Problem 2: the Golem sees a scene of wanton slaughter, dead children horribly mutilated, and just...narrates. It's how I've always written, but I realized while doing it that this clinical detachment might make sense on a very basic level (the Golem is still completely unused to interpreting the world), but it probably feels extremely off to any reader and makes him very unsympathetic. Also, it might only make sense in the broader context of the story if I specifically decide to twist it that way, and I'd only do that to justify it in retrospect, and that is a poor way to write. I've analyzed both of those issues for myself and come to the conclusion that the approach I used to write so far simply doesn't work, which was to just have a rough idea of where the broader story would go and let "the characters fill in the blanks". Basically, I'd start with what I said at the beginning - graveyard fight, they win - and then make up situations which the characters react to. It's a very facile way to write a fanfiction narrative that has the broader plot already written, because I knew who all the big bosses were going to be, but it's going to result in a very, very bad novel. So I need to rethink it. Thing is, I did a lot of prepwork for this, but at some point decided that this has to be enough worldbuilding (because I loathe that) and just started writing. It's good that I got off my rear end and made some words, but this isn't going to lead to a good product, and it's not something that can be fixed with an editing pass - the characters, their motivations, the themes of the story, all of that is just too nebulous at the moment and I cannot leave it up to almost random chance. To illustrate, see this passage from Chapter 3: quote:She snaps at him in righteous fury. “Do not get cocky with me, boy! If you actually made a living, thinking being, tinkered with soul magics like the ancient wizards, then I cannot protect you from anything! I should cleanse you with a holy ray right now and pray to all the archangels that your soul finds peace on Elysium despite everything!” I decided pretty much on the fly to make this the Golem's main motivation for not at some very early point sitting the master the gently caress down and making it crystal clear that he can in fact think for himself - he'll do it eventually, of course, but I thought adding a little bit of drama to that decision would make the story better. And maybe it will! But I haven't planned that! I've just written down that single bolded sentence, and decided that this is going to influence the next dunno ten chapters. And I cannot allow myself to do that. I think I've come up with a solution for this, as I said. I need to step away from writing the story event-based (the fight this, go there, talk about that to this guy....), and plot with what I want to say first. The Golem's development is the centerpiece of the story, so I need to plan that out (and not the stupid fights), and then have whatever happens serve that development rather than base the development, on the fly, on what happens. This way, my themes and ideas will become way clearer and allow me to start from a fixed framework that makes sense instead of having to awkwardly thread outside and inside developments together And avoid what used to be the case - basically one chapter of "Golem thinks hard about things" and three chapters of "they fight another monster mob". And hopefully, because I will be thinking themes and meaning and symbolism first, the answer to "what should the church have on its tower" will come completely naturally. Because it will be something that makes sense for the entire story, and not for "that single faction they only interact with in Act 1 and which I spent way too much time thinking about". Because I really, really do not want to make a "design document" that's a billion pages long and details the fashion choices of every nation the protags will visit. Everything including that should serve the story, so once I know that actual story and what it needs to serve it, I can work out details like that from there. I basically wrote this down because I find it easier to remember my thoughts later when I write them down (even without re-reading them), but of course feel free to comment on if it makes sense or not! What it means for the thread is...uh, even less updates?
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Apr 3, 2019 18:32
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I completely agree with your thinking here. I like the idea of the golem hiding its sentience, that could lead to interesting areas of guilt and self-doubt for the golem - "what's wrong with me, is it something I did wrong", etc. Time to reread Frankenstein for inspiration?
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Apr 4, 2019 13:04
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The Zakarum faith used a cross, iirc.
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May 10, 2019 23:44
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lofi posted:I completely agree with your thinking here. I like the idea of the golem hiding its sentience, that could lead to interesting areas of guilt and self-doubt for the golem - "what's wrong with me, is it something I did wrong", etc. Time to reread Frankenstein for inspiration? Jack B Nimble posted:The Zakarum faith used a cross, iirc. I have a bit more concrete plans now for this and my life: I have kept writing Thunderdome entries and I feel like I'm improving a lot, so I'll keep at that for now. Especially because it's pretty said-and-done, and I can re-decide every week if I want to enter. In two months, I'll be in a different country, with a new job, and finally start living together with my wife. I'll try to find a time and place to write more consistently, and that's when I'll start working on this project again. If that doesn't work out like I think it will - too bad, but that's the way it is. Nothing until then for sure, however. Sorry if you were interested!
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May 11, 2019 00:17
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Good point on the cross. I look forward to reading more when/if you get back to it, but it sounds like you're taking a break for all the right reasons.
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May 11, 2019 12:51
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Simply Simon posted:Haha that assumes I read it in the first place Research!  Though if I recall it's not actually very good - it's been copied so many times that it feels really derivative, even if it was the original.Good luck with the writing! I try and read along to Thunderdome every so often but just can't keep up. 
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May 11, 2019 19:54
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lofi posted:Research! You should enter again, I liked your vampire piece.
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May 11, 2019 23:43
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I did a vampire bit? Huh, I thought all I'd done was the were-newt one. Thanks anyway! 
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May 11, 2019 23:49
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lofi posted:I did a vampire bit? Huh, I thought all I'd done was the were-newt one. Thanks anyway! They're basically the same thing imo
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May 12, 2019 01:41
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I've done a lot of Thunderdome since it was suggested here, and I hope I have improved with the practice. The most recent week was about writing the first chapter of a novel, so I re-did this one. Find this new attempt here! I combined some of what used to be chapter 1 and the start of chapter 2, shortened it a lot hopefully added better words. It might be too flowery now - I have a tendency to overcompensate - but I think I might be able to reach a happy medium. It's a good incentive to start working on this again!
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Apr 12, 2020 23:41
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So I decided to join NaNoWriMo this year and chose this story as my project. Because of Nano honor, and because I'm not confident in the original rewrite attempt's language/conciseness, as I've become so much more practiced, I started from scratch. I'm already further than I came at my first attempt! If you want to take a look and maybe evaluate my progress, I've uploaded the new story here: Chapter 1 - Birth The main and subchapter titles are tentative, I'm playing around with Scrivener formatting, that's also why the header is there and looks unfinished. It's completely unedited because I have no time for that - later, sure. If anyone remembers how Diablo 2 went: I haven't deviated from the story beats too far yet, this is the story of Act 1 up to the second quest, where you have to clear the graveyard.
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Nov 16, 2020 18:17
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It's kaleidoscope. This is much better than your first version, though!
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Nov 16, 2020 22:59
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sebmojo posted:It's kaleidoscope. This is much better than your first version, though! (Thank u <3) While I'm here, I do have an idle musing: I've changed the "Act 1" setting a bunch now, from the original Diablo 2 drab vaguely temperate climate sparse forests and plains to a denser autumn forest in the first rewrite attempt, and now I made it a tropical jungle because more lush life fits a bit better with my world. I'm still not quite satisfied, however, and mostly because I want to have a setting that really fits with and supports the story, but I cannot quite get there, mentally. Like, most fantasy worlds are just "yeah medieval culture, some forests some mountains okay that's it", but I want more. I just seem to lack the creativity to come up with a "me" world from scratch instead. I'm sure I'll get there (and fix it in editing, I'll just keep writing jungle for now) but it bothers me a little.
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Nov 17, 2020 16:34
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My thoughts as I excise the entire weirdass Tristram portal opening quest and just have the protagonists travel there by boat: wow the original had some pacing issues huh
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Nov 18, 2020 23:55
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said boat travel I'm having fun!
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Nov 22, 2020 22:36
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Just found this thread! Great that you're enjoying NaNoWriMo - wanted to let you know that the newer chapters are significantly improved on the first rewrite attempts. Keep it up!
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Nov 29, 2020 22:46
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Leng posted:Just found this thread! Great that you're enjoying NaNoWriMo - wanted to let you know that the newer chapters are significantly improved on the first rewrite attempts. Keep it up! I did not end up winning Nano, but it did what I wanted for me - made me pick this up again, power through a third time writing the same start, and now I can just go on when I want to. I do have a specific question which maybe someone who's following this could help with. When I first wrote the novel, my favorite chapters to write apart from dumb action were the ones where the Golem just spent some time thinking about himself, trying to evaluate his place in the world and his own self-image. I wrote a few TD stories like that and never got good feedback, mostly due to internal monologue being generally panned as dragging on, the character never being quite as interesting as I thought, and various other issues. I do realize that there's a big danger of becoming self-indulgent, and just noodling on with some half-baked philosophy for pages upon pages while the reader desperately flips the pages looking for something actually interesting to happen. So for this, I tried to just have small moments of reflection in between events that swept the protagonist along, but obviously, he will have to sit down and think about himself at some point, and that point I decided is now, and I wrote my first pure introspection chapter. I'll post in in the next post separately, and would super appreciate opinions if it gets boring to listen to his thoughts, if I maybe instead made it too shallow, and whatever else you notice. Thanks a lot .
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Dec 19, 2020 19:48
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Introspection The Master has settled into sleep beneath the drooping branches and dripping vines, oiled tentskin protecting him from the elements. I stand my restless guard nestled in a cavity between two conjoined trees, hidden as a clump of dirt, ready to spring into action the moment I sense another attack coming. But until that happens, I unfortunately have nothing to do but think. One thing at a time, lest the maelstrom be allowed to eat my self away again. Am I okay with my new relationship with the Master? When I first awakened, I had decided that just following orders was for the best, so my own existence wouldn’t overwhelm me. But now that I’ve found methods to ground my reality, this obviously isn’t enough. For better or worse, I’ve realized I want things, and I always did. My first decision was to continue existing, and I am sticking to that. And I intend to keep making decisions like this. So, let’s build on that. I’ve avoided even the word, but its echo bounces inside my head without having to be thought out loud - life. Am I alive? Oh, it wants to tear at me, the next Question. And I haven’t even resolved the Who yet. I grab the tree until it splinters, the sharp wood digs into my palms. I’m here, in this world, affect it and it affects me, this is the reality - I’ve already killed demons, I saved lives, it does not matter what the answers to the questions are. I need to make this clear to myself. No matter what conclusion I come to, the Master, the sisters, all of Purgatory have felt the ripples of my appearance in reality, and what I think about that event doesn’t matter in the slightest for the outcome. This introspection is ultimately meaningless. For anyone but myself. And it turns out I care about myself. So, further introspection it is, for peace of mind if nothing else, to pass the empty time. In fact, why not just open all the questions? Might as well be too distracted by the sheer amount of them to worry too much about the answers. Why do I care about saving lives? Why does it feel good to follow the Master’s mission to work against Chthon? Was this strange set of morals just injected into my being by him? Is the mission so important to me because he wants it to? So, am I actually thinking independently? This might be playing into another question’s answer. There’s a lot of things around me that are alive, like the tree I just hurt - sorry, by the way - but which are not intelligent. Not a higher life form. But those living beings all share one thing: a soul. The Master said something about a soul “facsimile”. Not a true one, then? Could I therefore be intelligent, but not alive? Artificial in thought and action? A tool that works better because it can convince itself of its own freedom? This is all going nowhere. I push my hands further into the wounds I made in the tree, suck moisture from them back into my body, harden the clay, and break them off. Through my feet, I replace them, having sealed the damages. There, another wrong righted. My responsibility, my choice. No orders given. I can decide that, I can make this world stay neutral at least, fix mistakes. Does it matter if I have a soul? Let’s call this living, it’s going to be easier. Cynically, if I can convince myself over time of this, maybe I will work even better. Now then, another problem. My gap in memory. Most of the last fight against the monkey demons, just gone. And me completely unhinged afterwards. I can pinpoint rather well when it happened: as I gave up trying to consciously think about the battle, letting my instincts take over as they had before. I had assumed from that previous experience that I could keep observing what happened with my body, as it acted on its own, following the apparent battle programming the spell that made me had imbued it with. But maybe something changed. Evolved. Have my “instincts” developed a mind of their own, a dangerous, wild one? It’s more than a little concerning to think about that. I’ve just reached the conclusion that I should, for my own sake, assume that my free thought gives me life. How free can that thought be when it abandons me during my sad main purpose of combat? Or is it even a blessing that I have a secondary “battle personality” that will do the dirty work for me? The image of the mutilated demons shoves itself into view. If it were that easy, this wouldn’t haunt me so. I grip the tree again, stopping myself when I hear a creak. I need to figure this problem out. And it’s not like I can talk to someone about it - I tackle it myself, or it will not get fixed. So, I grit my metaphorical teeth, summon the maelstrom by relaxing my thoughts until all the buried memories and open questions swirl around me, and jump in, just to see what happens. “What do you think you are doing?” In my left hand, the Master’s notes. My right hand, curled up almost painfully. Behind me, the Master. He snatches the notes from my limp grip. “Can you even read?” Wow, I really need more questions I can’t answer now! What happened? The Master grabs my right wrist. “Did you make these yourself?” I slowly uncurl my fingers. It turns out that I now have vicious, sharp-looking claws. They still hurt. “I mean, that is not a bad idea. A little crude - I think I can improve that.” He has a skeleton bring him the soulgem from his armor, which he slowly strokes over my fingers. I can feel the strangely painful pressure finally subside. The claws are now my new standard. “That’s not a bad idea.” He put his fists on his hips. “However, you were supposed to keep watch the entire night. Did you get bored, or something?” I can, as happens far too often, only shrug. He shakes his head, then yawns. “Just get back to the tree, okay? I still got a few hours of sleep in me. Tomorrow, we should reach Ratima, and I need to be awake for that.” I shuffle back to my hiding spot and slink back into the nook between trees. Within its embrace, I stare at my deadly hands. Clay does not seem like the right material for a slicing or stabbing weapon, but if the edge is sharp enough, anything cuts. And if I don’t want to cut? I try to make my fingers smooth again. The dull pain begins to radiate through them again, more the smoother they become. My battle personality has, with the unwitting help of the Master, turned me into more of a tool of war. I shiver against the bark. This cannot continue. It is dangerous, to me and to the Master. I do not want to be like it. Have it take over more of myself. The maelstrom needs to stay far, far away. And I need to fight my own battles from now on.
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Dec 19, 2020 19:50
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Simply Simon posted:I do have a specific question which maybe someone who's following this could help with. When I first wrote the novel, my favorite chapters to write apart from dumb action were the ones where the Golem just spent some time thinking about himself, trying to evaluate his place in the world and his own self-image. I think what would help you is to think about the purpose of all this introspection and how it is going to advance the golem's character arc. Brandon Sanderson may or may not be your cup of tea but he does a good job of covering the craft of writing. And in his lectures, he does address introspection specifically, see Sanderson’s 2020 BYU Lecture 10: https://youtu.be/fJfE-HMfSkk?t=1135 and https://youtu.be/fJfE-HMfSkk?t=2079 You can have entire stories that take place inside someone's head. But if you're going to do that, there needs to be a point to it. A realization. An insight. A decision. A change. You've tried to do this in the last excerpt which makes it better than some of your previous attempts. But there's still quite a bit of "wow more questions and I've still got no real idea" so as a reader, I feel like I read a whole bunch of words for nothing. If the questions are important, think about breaking it up and sprinkling them throughout sections where you've got action happening. There's no rule saying that introspection can only happen when the golem is standing around doing nothing. It'd be more interesting if we saw the introspection happening as a direct response to other things that are going on. This is coming from a perspective where I want to find out what's going to happen in the story. The introspection bits feel like a gigantic pause in the forward momentum. Sometimes that's needed when you've had a really fast paced sequence but usually those moments of reflection do double duty as well. The other thing you can do is reverse engineer things. See if you can find long sections of introspection that are really effective, then take a look at what they have in common.
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Dec 20, 2020 01:58
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Brandon Sanderson is, in fact, my cup of tea - I was super impressed with him finishing Wheel of Time in such an efficient manner, and I've also read the Mistborn books. Hated the latter's magic system, but you can't deny he knows how to write a tight fantasy novel! I've watched the video (thanks a lot for the links), and agree that with a better structure, interspersed with "development goal has been reached" sentences, it will be much more readable. In order to not forget, I've put a structure note into that chapter. I've decided that I'll keep on writing the draft instead of editing now, because that will bog me down. I'll have to reshuffle stuff a lot at the end, including spreading out internal thoughts and trying to nail down consistent character arcs, so it makes more sense to do that at the end. Next introspection chapter, however, will probably already be better.
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Dec 22, 2020 11:40
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 spoilers for the next part just leaked, I'm sorry
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Dec 22, 2020 15:26
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Simply Simon posted:Brandon Sanderson is, in fact, my cup of tea  Go back and take a look at some of the introspection he does in Mistborn, especially Vin's arc. I would also recommend Stormlight Archive though be warned it's a LOT of reading, however there's a lot of introspection chapters done really well. Simply Simon posted:I've watched the video (thanks a lot for the links), and agree that with a better structure, interspersed with "development goal has been reached" sentences, it will be much more readable. If you enjoyed it, I highly recommend watching all of the lecture videos. They are so good and I've found the frameworks he goes through very helpful for my own writing. Simply Simon posted:In order to not forget, I've put a structure note into that chapter. I've decided that I'll keep on writing the draft instead of editing now, because that will bog me down. Keep the momentum going, that's the important part!! Worry about the rest later, when you've roughed out what the story IS.
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Dec 22, 2020 23:51
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Wrote some more! Link to the unfinished Chapter 2 I'll declare this chapter done probably after the next scene. In Diablo 2 terms, this is Tristram.
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Dec 30, 2020 19:12
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