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SurreptitiousMuffin posted:we honestly don't know how it happened but CC is like 70% Wellingtonian at this point, whole thing's a right bloody state My favorite dessert is pavlova and the average house in my hellstate costs >1mm, can I get honorary citizenship?
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Feb 17, 2022 06:09
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I have a tiny grammar/word choice question. quote:That was odd. He’d never been so consciously aware of what someone else wanted and yet feel no compulsion to act. Was she doing it? Was he? ‘Feel’ seems like the correct tense to me, but I can’t articulate why. Google Docs and real human people think ‘felt’ would be better.
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Feb 17, 2022 15:32
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This is the past perfect tense ("He’d never [...] felt"), so the past participle "felt" is correct.
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Feb 17, 2022 15:57
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I will go with ‘felt’ then. Thanks for the help!
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Feb 17, 2022 19:46
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Nae posted:Donald Maass's "Writing the Breakout Novel" has a section on pace in novels about two-thirds of the way through, and is a useful resource in general. He also talks a lot about stakes, including what they are and how to raise them. For creating tension, Robert McKee talks about how to dispense information through suspense, mystery, and dramatic irony in "Story," which is another great general resource. Thanks for the recommendations! I've got all of them zooming toward me now via Interlibrary loan. All except for K. M. Weiland's book which I'm a little sad isn't requestable (only two copies in the state and all marked as unavailable) because I have her website bookmarked: https://www.helpingwritersbecomeauthors.com (in case anyone hasn't perused.) I'm sure most of the information is there too, but it's easier for me to pull out a physical book and read than it is for me to find time on a computer/phone to read these things. But I'll have to make a point of it.
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Feb 18, 2022 01:19
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newts posted:I have a tiny grammar/word choice question. I think I get why you intuitively prefer feel here, even though it’s not grammatically correct. First, past sets the basic tense of the whole thing. That was odd. He’d never been - puts the past in the perfect aspect so consciously aware of what someone else wanted - perfective aspect and yet feel - present tense no compulsion to act. Was she doing it? Was he? - imperfect (continuous) aspect, still in past What you wanted to do was shift aspect, because “felt” is essentially perfective, contained in a single envelope seen from the outside. But you want to open up feeling into the imperfect aspect, because you’re now zooming in and examining that feeling. But instead you accidentally made it present tense. Unforunately the continuous aspect in English is kinda clunky, requiring you to turn it into the past participle “he was feeling.”
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Feb 18, 2022 17:14
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Thank you! I’m not a tense expert. I tried the sentence using ‘felt’ and it just doesn’t sit right on a read through—it’s not getting across what I want to say. I think I might have to just rewrite the paragraph to make it less problematic.
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Feb 18, 2022 17:57
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Here's an option for a basic rewrite:quote:He’d never been so consciously aware of what someone else wanted while feeling no compulsion to act. Djeser fucked around with this message at 21:34 on Feb 18, 2022 |
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Feb 18, 2022 21:32
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It’s amazing how much grammar I’ve force-injected into my formerly unwilling brain while trying to build a conlang based on Ancient Egyptian. You learn poo poo like: – They don’t require a verb to make a sentence, and neither do other Semitic languages like Arabic. They don’t have a verb “is.” You can just make a verbless sentence that says, “Thing this,” and have it be perfectly grammatical. – They don’t have a verb for “have” either. You can give and be given, but basic possession is just genitive constructions like (no poo poo) “lord of donkeys” to mean you have a few of them. – They have no tense marking on the verb. No past and present. Just aspects like perfect, imperfect, perfective, stative, and even prospective (which can kinda stand in as future tense), but you want actual past tense you have to use the perfective of be (wn) before the main verb. So it’s kinda the opposite of English, where we use has, have and had to form the perfect—they got that bundled into the verb with a suffix, and instead need an auxiliary to say “was.” Just quoting to tag you because, Djeser, this is all your fault ^^ Stuporstar fucked around with this message at 00:57 on Feb 19, 2022 |
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Feb 19, 2022 00:53
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^ This is fascinating, I had no idea how those languages work. I guess I’ll also roll in with my tense problems. The TL;DR is that after positive feedback I’m slowly reworking my manuscript from past to present tense. It works better for my story and the YA market didn’t balk at Hunger Games being written this way, so it seems like a good call. (Or at least, less out there than I was initially worried about.) Except I have no dang clue how to write in present tense. It’s uncommon enough that I don’t have the same ear for it as I do past tense. Here my character is in the present, thinking about how they were thinking about the future in the past (RIP me): quote:My eyes land on the window. Can I? That was the deal. But I pictured wearing practical clothing when I left—fur-lined boots, layers of coats, my favourite hat… Here I have a shift in tense as the character goes outside: quote:[…] My fingers sting, but they aren’t going numb. Honestly it’s sad because I learned French as a second language and we spent an exhaustive amount of time learning about verb tense, but English as a first language wasn’t treated the same.  I’m planning on professional edits so it isn’t critical path to correct this on my own, but it bugs me that I don’t know the answers.
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Feb 19, 2022 03:39
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kaom posted:Except I have no dang clue how to write in present tense. It’s uncommon enough that I don’t have the same ear for it as I do past tense. It’s perfectly fine because you’ve established that entire sentence as past tense with “pictured.” When you write in present tense, it’s ok to shift into past tense once in a while to express action in the past in relation to the story’s present. This is the difference between absolute and relative tense. Absolute tense is time in relation to the speaker. This is the tense you choose for your story and try to stick to. However, you can shift within that story using relative tense, which marks time in relation to context. (Note: this is entirely how Ancient Egyptian did tenses, what they didn’t have is a marked absolute tense like English does.) So you pick present, but you can shift into past or future from that present reference point. You can project into the future or remember something that happened earlier—all that’s allowed so long as it’s always within the envelope of the present tense speaker. Now, if you ever wanna read someone who just went buck wild with present tense, give Damon Runyon a read. He never slipped out of present tense for a moment and went into hilarious contortions to stay in it, even using shall instead of should every time. It would have made an Oulipo writer proud. He also invented like half the gangster lingo of New York in the 30s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damon_Runyon quote:Here I have a shift in tense as the character goes outside: “Clouds blowing” is perfectly fine, nothing ungrammatical about it. This is another aspect shift rather than tense, expressing the continuous aspect. It would probably be a great help if grammar teachers stopped conflating aspect with tense, because once you realize how decoupled they actually are from each other they’re a lot easier to get a mental handle on. All tense is is the time reference. Aspect handles all the manners of action, like whether it’s a finite event/complete action or a continuous action. English really only has two, the perfect (complete action) and imperfect (continuous/progressive action). AAVE has the habitual aspect using the verb be: “He be drinking,” meaning dude’s a drunk. And “used to” is also used the same way by. This is another imperfect aspect. You can use pretty much any of these aspects with any tense to make the past perfect, future progressive, or whatever.
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Feb 19, 2022 05:54
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This is so incredibly helpful, thank you. I didn’t realize I was so far away from even having the vocabulary needed to talk about this, there’s no way I was going to be able to look it up on my own.
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Feb 19, 2022 06:23
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kaom posted:“Clouds are blowing around in a way that’s completely disorienting, making the moonlight and shadows dance over the mounds of snow.” I actually wanna get into this one more, because it’s doing a cool thing grammar teachers don’t talk much about re. English. What you’ve made here is a Stative construction. I have to get to what this sentence is doing the long way round. So, Ancient Egyptian has what they call the stative verb form. It’s a complementary aspect to the perfect: Perfect = action completed, or more accurately “achieved” because it has relevance to the present. If you “have eaten,” you’re saying it because you don’t need to eat again right now, vs. the simple past “I ate” which says nothing about the now. Stative = state attained, and currently sustained. Ancient Egyptains had a verb form to say, “Ra is risen,” because—look, the sun is in the sky right now. You can use the perfect, “the sun has risen,” and have it make perfect sense, but there are times when the stative does cool poo poo the perfect can’t. It all comes down to transitive and intransitive verbs. The former being where the action of the verb has to be transferred to an object, and the latter something the subject does with themself. An intransitive verb with the perfect is, “He has gone.” It describes the action (he left) and the result of it (he’s no longer here). An intransitive verb with the stative is, “He is gone.” It says nothing about how that was done, just that’s he’s not here. Sometimes you want this different shade of meaning. With transitive verbs, the perfect and stative are completely different. Perfect: “The horse has thrown a shoe.” Active voice. Stative: “The horse’s shoe is thrown.” Passive voice. Transitive verbs become passive when in the stative form in Ancient Egyptian, and it was one of their more common forms of passive voice, so it’s how it’s translated. English has the grammar tools to translate this and we even make stative statements like this without knowing that’s what we’re doing. Could be because we had a stative but mostly dropped it along with, “Jesus is come” and the thees and thous of the Bible, but German has it and still uses it. We can still use it too, it’s not gone. What makes the stative “shoe is thrown” different from other passive constructions is that it describes the condition of the horse. If you say, “The horse’s shoe was thrown,” it’s like… where? It says more about the horseshoe than the horse. The perfect, “horse has thrown a shoe” has the same thing to say regarding the horse’s condition, but it blames the horse for something that just happened to it. Sometimes the passive voice is what you want. When you use the stative with a ditransitive verb, one that can be either transitive or intransitive, they’re different yet again. Perfect: “He has broken it.” Active, has to be transitive and take an object – dude broke a thing and it’s broken. Stative: “He is broken.” Passive, no longer transitive – describes the sad state the dude is in. So, “Clouds are blowing around” is a continuous stative statement: they’re doing a thing and keeping on doing it. But it’s stative because the “blowing” part is ambiguous. The clouds aren’t blowing themselves, they’re being blown by the wind, but since wind isn’t mentioned it should be passive, if you were going to be boring about it and use, “are being blown around.” You could make it active by, “the wind is blowing the…” Ugh, yawn, we know the wind does that. You’ve made the clouds almost active instead. I say almost because it is stative, kinda sitting in between active and passive, a continous shifting state, and that is way loving cool, linguisticly. It works for what you’re going for, which is to turn the clouds into a mesmerizing mystery. e. Hell, it’s so cool I wanna stick it in my conlang along with the regular stative. Hot drat Stuporstar fucked around with this message at 18:18 on Feb 19, 2022 |
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Feb 19, 2022 16:54
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I enjoyed that post. 
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Feb 19, 2022 19:43
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Very cool grammar science stuff!
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Feb 20, 2022 01:40
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I did not in any way expect this kind of effort but I’m really glad you shared this, Stuporstar! This is seriously cool.
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Feb 20, 2022 04:04
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Sending good vibes to everyone writing today  
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Feb 20, 2022 23:24
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Thanks for all the grammar help and the interesting discussion. I couldn’t find a way to make that paragraph work as is, so I rewrote it a bit. I finished a complete draft of my second novel today  I mean, it’s felt finished for a while because I edit as I go, but there were sections here and there that needed attention. They still need attention, but it’s actually, technically complete for the first time. Now I need to go back and read through again. Edits #3-5 incoming.
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Feb 21, 2022 00:11
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I think fanfic is a really interesting incubator for talent, and whenever a 19 year-old appears outta nowhere with a solid complete highly-quality MS (I am not insanely jealous of Chloe Gong why would you suggest that) you can put good money on it that they've been writing fanfic all throughout high school. That said, a pretty major caveat: fanfic – in large part because the tag system – tends to be extremely tropey, and fanfic writers sometimes stumble over the expectations of readers unfamiliar with those tropes. Particularly WRT shipping, there's a whole internal universe of understandings and expectations that vanish as soon as you leave Ao3, and you need to be mindful that you're writing for a broader audience. I've worked in publishing but I don't read fanfic, and I've come to recognise aa bunch of them, and I really do worry that they're not going to fly with broader audiences unless handled with a lot of care. You can't just be like "it's enemies to lovers!" or "it's a coffeeshop AU!" and instantly get a bunch of people picking it up, y'know? Because outside of fanfic circles, readers don't care. SurreptitiousMuffin fucked around with this message at 01:57 on Feb 21, 2022 |
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Feb 21, 2022 01:48
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SurreptitiousMuffin posted:You can't just be like "it's enemies to lovers!" or "it's a coffeeshop AU!" and instantly get a bunch of people picking it up, y'know? Because outside of fanfic circles, readers don't care. I think Coffeeshop AU (and other alternate universe concepts, like High School/Office) are non-starters because they rely too heavily on the original IP as a point of reference. You can't have an alternate universe when there's no original universe you're subverting. On the other hand, tropes like enemies-to-lovers/friends-to-lovers are just relationship paradigms and can pretty easily be transferred to original stories. If you're trying to file the serial numbers off your fanfic about Cloud and Tifa, you're going to do a lot better if your plot has more meat than 'they work together in a coffee shop and it's cute.' The relationship paradigm tropes can fit in any number of plots, but coffee shop and the like aren't as likely to work unless there's some other conflict beyond the cute. I try to keep up with the queries being posted on r/PubTips to see what else people are shopping around, and there's one query that keeps coming back that's very clearly using the Hanahaki flower disease* with a different coat of paint. If the pages are any good, I suspect it'll sell, because it's a clever concept and I'm shocked no one's stolen it from fanfic sooner. Like the other relationship paradigm stuff, you can drop it into any number of settings and it works, because it's a pre-made plot that only requires two characters in love. Throw together some decent characters and an interesting setting and it basically writes itself. *This is a fanfic trope where someone who falls in unrequited love starts barfing up flowers and it's fatal unless they agree to have their memories of their beloved removed (or something like that). I don't know where it came from, but it's big enough now that it exists as its own tag as part of Soulmate Alternate universes. Jesus, I didn't think I read that much fanfic...
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Feb 21, 2022 02:07
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Stuporstar posted:It’s amazing how much grammar I’ve force-injected into my formerly unwilling brain while trying to build a conlang based on Ancient Egyptian. Adding to the general  at your awesome deconstruction of grammar. Because I suck at grammar, do you have a list of resources you used to research all this in your conlang quest, because I'd love to upskill myself in this regard.Nae posted:the Hanahaki flower disease* I...what?  How did this even get started as a trope? Is it the kind of thing where one fic takes off and spawns a thousand imitators as a result and becomes insanely popular?
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Feb 21, 2022 04:01
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Nae posted:I think Coffeeshop AU (and other alternate universe concepts, like High School/Office) are non-starters because they rely too heavily on the original IP as a point of reference. You can't have an alternate universe when there's no original universe you're subverting. On the other hand, tropes like enemies-to-lovers/friends-to-lovers are just relationship paradigms and can pretty easily be transferred to original stories.
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Feb 21, 2022 04:28
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Like, I read a piece of original fiction recently that I did not like because it felt too fanficcy, in that the author clearly seemed bored with everything that wasn't the ships, and it telegraphed its big trope moments in really obvious ways because it wanted the reader to squee about them, the world felt poorly-realized and then in critical plot scenes it kinda just blew past everything, because it felt single-mindedly focussed on, well ... fanfic stuff. I still stand by fanfic as a valuable form of prose, I just think people who only read and write fanfic need to be cognizant of the world outside their scene. It's not just them that has the problem either: fantasy written by people who only read fantasy is dire, I'm just seeing a lot more fanficcy submissions than bad fantasy ones so it's on the brain.
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Feb 21, 2022 04:34
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I agree that fanfic is okay. I just worry that fanfic authors don't get much chance to develop their skills at world-building or characterization, because they can work off the world-building and characters that the original creators already developed instead of putting in their own effort. In conclusion, fanfic is a land of contrasts
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Feb 21, 2022 04:39
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I remember once reading a thing (though I can't seem to find it) is that tropes are like... individual ingredients, and the original work is like a general recipe type. "It's a My Hero Academia fluff fic where there's only one bed" is basically the equivalent of "This is an angel food cake that contains nutmeg and cinnamon". But that doesn't work with regular literature. Saying that someone will like this book because there's a friends to lovers in it is like recommending a recipe to someone just because it has one ingredient they like in it, completely divorced from the context of, say, only enjoying that ingredient/trope with a specific character pairing or based on a certain show or whatever. Edit: Found the thing 
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Feb 21, 2022 04:40
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Leng posted:Adding to the general I actually went and looked it up because you made me curious, and here's what this Fanlore site has to say: quote:The Hanahaki Disease trope was popularized with the Japanese shoujo manga,「花吐き乙女」(Hanahaki Otome), or The Girl Who Spit Flowers by Naoko Matsuda (松田奈緒子), which was released in 2009. The symptoms of the disease are summarized to strong pain, having flowers blooming in the heart and lungs, and then throwing them up. So the answer is who knows, but the author of Hanahaki Otome probably holds the rights to it. Go figure.
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Feb 21, 2022 04:46
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Leng posted:Adding to the general The two best things I ever did to get a better handle on English was: 1. Pick up a few linguistic books instead of grammar books. 2. Decide to learn another language. When I started, I didn’t even want to learn all this nitty-gritty grammar poo poo, because the way grammar instruction is done is so prescriptive and dry. I said I’d never go full Tolkien on making up future slang, just Clockwork Orange it up a bit, but once I got into it—well, now I guess I’m going full Tolkien with a conlang, god help me, because it turns out to be hella fun and this pandemic project has kept me insane in a good way rather than bad. Anyway. So I picked up a few books on linguistics that explains things our language actually does in the wild, rather than what English is supposed to do according to a couple centuries of convention, and it opened up so many possibilities, I was finally motivated to look grammar poo poo up. So find a few accessible linguistic books: I haven’t read this one yet, but I’ve seen it recommended in the linguistics thread (with a caveat to stay away from his non-linguistic books) as one of the best for getting a handle on the basics, and will definitely give it a read: https://www.amazon.com/Our-Magnificent-Bastard-Tongue-History-ebook/dp/B001JOHCHU/ I have read a couple of his other books, which were great. Power of Babel focuses on how language changes over time, gets into stuff like dialects and creolization, and has a few great examples of how other languages have features English doesn’t have: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/006052085X/ Unfortunately that one’s not out in ebook format. This one is loving great, because it in the process of explaining how and why we say rude poo poo, it explains a lot about how swearing is one of our most flexible modes of expression, does cool poo poo with grammar, invents new grammar, and also gets into AAVE, which is kickass: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08H1965LG/ And this one was great for talking about the fun poo poo we’re doing with English right now: https://www.amazon.com/Because-Internet-Understanding-Rules-Language/dp/0735210934/ Liguists also seem to have a better vocabulary for the mechanics of language than I’ve seen from a lot of grammar websites. I do a lot of searches for specific grammar questions and end up reading a wide variety of them. Mostly though, I default to wikipedia because it explains various points of grammar really well—but it will uselessly drown you in too much information unless you have specific questions you want answered. Like one thing I’ve learned just by looking up questions and randomly stumbling on poo poo is that the difference between types of verbals like infinitives and gerunds and when a word like “doings” ends up actually being a noun (which is why it can take the plural -s)—is entirely contextual. The grammatical context a word is in, what it’s doing syntactically, is more important than its form*. That’s because we do poo poo like verb nouns all the time, and once you learn how nouns get verbed, or vise versa, you can learn how to use words in more creative ways. That saying about learning the rules before you break them—gently caress grammar websites for that, learn this poo poo from linguists. The problem with a lot of grammar instruction is it’s done by a lot of people who’ve barely glanced at languages other than English. So learning a second language (even a dead one, but I’ve been learning a bit of Arabic grammar comparing Ancient Egyptian to a living Semitic language to help figure poo poo out), is one of the best ways to learn what English does, because a lot of learning materials explain how that language differs from English. It helps expand your idea of what language can do, and in turn stuff that English does that we don’t even think about. Like this https://www.amazon.com/Middle-Egyptian-Introduction-Language-Hieroglyphs-ebook/dp/B00J8LQI26/ has turned out to be one of the most helpful books I’ve ever read about English grammar because he explains really well how it works in relation to Ancient Egyptian grammar. Also learning a second language is a great goal to actually motivate you to learn more about language in general. And, if your interest lies in fiddling about with a conlang, this video series is great. He explains the absolute core basics of grammar in the process as well, as in the cool poo poo grammar teaching doesn’t even cover: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHK1gO2Mh68&list=PL6xPxnYMQpqsooCDYtQQSiD2O3YO0b2nN *I learned how much more important syntax is for a language that relies on it (some don’t in favor of case marking), like English and Ancient Egyptian, because AEL is almost entirely made of up of verbs which then get used as nouns or adjectives, often without any change in form. The only way you know what’s what is through its context in the sentence. So nfr (nafir probably) could mean “being good” or the adjective good or even “the good one” just standing there alone as a noun. Language is really flexible, and its hard to get a sense of how flexible until you see how other languages get along just fine without features English has, or have features English does not. Stuporstar fucked around with this message at 18:46 on Feb 21, 2022 |
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Feb 21, 2022 17:33
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More Grammar poo poo, for those who care I’m gonna go into the “doings” thing further, because learning this has finally made all that bullshit with infinitives and gerunds (and the total lack of teaching participles) finally click, which are an absolute brain-bitch. First, participles and infinitives are non-finite verb forms, meaning they don’t inflect for tense or aspect (or mood). Participles are verbal adjectives. I am doing it. – The verb is “am” and “doing” a participle because it describes what the action is. Verbal adjectives are basically adverbs, because adverbs are adjectives for verbs, but making this distinction rather than calling them adverbs is helpful because the category “adverb” is way too broad.* We also have past participles, which normally end in -ed, but the past participle of “doing” is “done.” He is done. – The verb “is” followed by a description of what is “done.” Infinitives are not -ing words, they are to + non-finite verb - just the bare-rear end verb hanging out there, not covering its butt with inflections. I’m going to do it. – The verb “am” followed by participle “going” followed by its infinitival complement “to do.” It is a verb form that forms a verb phrase. I can do it. – This is a called bare infinitive because it doesn’t need the word “to” but it’s still an infinitive because the verb is “can” – “do” is its infinitival complement. This is how we do grammatical moods in English, with a modal verb + infinitival complement. It’s a verb phrase. This is all syntax difference because: She did it. – Here “do” is a finite verb, inflected for past tense. Gerunds look like participles but instead they are treated like nouns. It’s defined entirely by context. If the -ing word is being used like an adverb, it’s a participle. If it’s being used like a noun, it’s a gerund. A gerund can be the subject or object of a verb, which a participle cannot. I am going swimming. – Here “swimming” is the object of the verb phrase “am going” (verb + participle). You can replace it with the infinitive “to swim” and this is why the two get confused all the time.** But here’s the thing: -ing words can also be true nouns. Compare: I work in that building. – Noun. A building is a thing. I like building things. – Gerund. It’s being treated like a noun, as in it exists as the object of the subject+verb “I like,” but it’s referring to an action, not a thing, and it takes “thing” as its object. So this is why doings is a noun and not a gerund. It was his doing. – Here “doing” is a noun because it is a thing that was done. You can pluralize the noun to “doings” as in “things which were done” but cannot do that with a gerund. You can’t make an action plural, only true nouns. A noun can’t take an adverb or an object or do any things a verb can do, which a gerund does. What we did was nominalize the gerund “doing” into a noun, entirely by using it in a different grammatical context. Use a verb as a noun, it becomes a noun. Use a noun as a verb, it becomes a verb. **Here’s what wikipedia has to say. “An -ing form is termed gerund when it behaves as a verb within a clause (so that it may be modified by an adverb or have an object); but the resulting clause as a whole (sometimes consisting of only one word, the gerund itself) functions as a noun within the larger sentence. For example, consider the sentence "Eating this cake is easy." Here, the gerund is the verb eating, which takes an object this cake. The entire clause eating this cake is then used as a noun, which in this case serves as the subject of the larger sentence.” When you look up this poo poo in google it pulls up a bunch of English learning websites that throw up their hands and go “I dunno” when it gets to the part about why a gerund is used vs. an infinitive and when. It’s entirely contextual. Infinitives are used in verb clauses, and gerunds in noun clauses, even though both are functioning like verbs inside their clause. If you know this, you can figure out which one to use when it’s ambiguous and you need to fix poo poo. *Wikipedia mentions that participles were only taught “traditionally” and modern grammar classes no longer distinguish between participles and gerunds, which is stupid because there is a difference, and it does in fact matter whether you’re using an -ing form as and adverb or a noun. You can’t just go, “if it looks alike, what’s the diff?” in a syntactic language like English, because context matters more than form. With that realization comes so much freedom to play with the language. You can’t really master it without getting this, so conflating participles with gerunds is a goddamn crime. You don’t need to know all this poo poo to write because as a first language we pick it all up in context and learn to use it just fine without pulling it apart and examining its workings. I really helps though when you want to play with the language, just run rampant with coining new words and doing funky poo poo to phrasing. Like, that dude who wrote 30s gangster stories I mentioned earlier, Damon Runyon. Goddamn that dude had to know his poo poo to be able to write like that and have it work. Emberto Eco too (no surpise, a linguist). e. One more handy link: https://www.link.cs.cmu.edu/link/ If you ever need to figure out wtf your sentence is doing, click the link to their sentence parser (direct linking it doesn’t work for some reason). You have to know the basic terminology to figure out what it tells you, but it can really clear up a messy-rear end sentence once you figure it out. Stuporstar fucked around with this message at 20:52 on Feb 21, 2022 |
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Feb 21, 2022 20:43
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SurreptitiousMuffin posted:Like, I read a piece of original fiction recently that I did not like because it felt too fanficcy, in that the author clearly seemed bored with everything that wasn't the ships, and it telegraphed its big trope moments in really obvious ways because it wanted the reader to squee about them, the world felt poorly-realized and then in critical plot scenes it kinda just blew past everything, because it felt single-mindedly focussed on, well ... fanfic stuff. I still stand by fanfic as a valuable form of prose, I just think people who only read and write fanfic need to be cognizant of the world outside their scene. It's not just them that has the problem either: fantasy written by people who only read fantasy is dire, I'm just seeing a lot more fanficcy submissions than bad fantasy ones so it's on the brain. This made me think of this for some reason: 
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Feb 21, 2022 20:53
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Junpei posted:This made me think of this for some reason: ah good another meme right after stuporstars amazing effort posts that basically make this forum worth the cost of admission. Please don't post in this thread unless you're willing to also post a paragraph or two about your own thoughts.
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Feb 21, 2022 23:29
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I mean, I don't read a lot of fanfiction so I can't really give any deeper thoughts. Most of the fanfic I do read is stuff like canon retellings, stuff that could be canon, or that "character ends up flashing back to just before the story started and getting a second chance to do it over, but better" stuff, not angst or fluff or smut.
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Feb 21, 2022 23:33
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Why not post about things you do read?
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Feb 21, 2022 23:38
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Junpei posted:I mean, I don't read a lot of fanfiction so I can't really give any deeper thoughts. Most of the fanfic I do read is stuff like canon retellings, stuff that could be canon, or that "character ends up flashing back to just before the story started and getting a second chance to do it over, but better" stuff, not angst or fluff or smut. Then I advise either getting some of your own deep thoughts about fanfiction, or maybe don't post about things you haven't developed your own thoughts about! I wish I had more to contribute to the linguistics discussion. I'm trying to build an argot/cant for my setting, on top of creating a lot of nouns/proper nouns from other languages around my fictional world. I'm struggling a little bit with how much to make the argot a language with distinct grammar vs something more like carnie speak, where you're going to have jargon intermixed with english. Mostly I want to give my main characters a way to verbally alienate their colonialist AI-hivemind-having neighbors, but it's hard to walk the line between "credible secret language" and "annoying slang the reader will skim past".
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Feb 21, 2022 23:44
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It was suggested to me that there might be room to create a dump thread for writing/art memes that people might find encouraging. Is this something people would be into? I'm gonna crosspost about it in the chat thread, too.
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Feb 21, 2022 23:46
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I'm sorry, I just like to share things I find funny or insightful. There's nothing inherently wrong from quoting from other sources. Sometimes, they can be quite useful, or funny, or just interesting to think about! I don't share them to be lazy, I share them because I think they'll spark discussion, or that people will get a chuckle out of them!
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Feb 21, 2022 23:47
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Stuporstar posted:The two best things I ever did to get a better handle on English was: I was raised bilingual but I've never tried learning another language as an adult! Even trying to learn more of my native language now as an adult I'm so focused on vocabulary most of the time that I don't really focus on the linguistics bit. It doesn't help that Cantonese has both formal and informal forms for both vocabulary (this does my head in) and grammar (I think...) too. Stuporstar posted:And, if your interest lies in fiddling about with a conlang, this video series is great. He explains the absolute core basics of grammar in the process as well, as in the cool poo poo grammar teaching doesn’t even cover: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHK1gO2Mh68&list=PL6xPxnYMQpqsooCDYtQQSiD2O3YO0b2nN I stumbled across this last year when I was trying to come up with names that would sound like they all came from a certain region. The whole series just absolutely blew my mind with the intricacies involved in making a conlang. Sitting Here posted:stuporstars amazing effort posts that basically make this forum worth the cost of admission Could we please get links or those effort posts added to the OP? Because stuporstars just dropped some amazing knowledge. I honestly am going to have to bookmark those posts and come back and read them repeatedly, because I'm not sure that I 100% followed all of it.
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Feb 21, 2022 23:58
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Yeah, I'm happy to add ST's posts to the relevant part of the OP if she's cool with it (dockloc has said this is cool)
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Feb 22, 2022 00:05
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Sitting Here posted:Yeah, I'm happy to add ST's posts to the relevant part of the OP if she's cool with it (dockloc has said this is cool) Yeah, this is cool Sitting Here posted:Then I advise either getting some of your own deep thoughts about fanfiction, or maybe don't post about things you haven't developed your own thoughts about! For jargon intermixed with English, I’d recommend two of those linguistic books I linked, which are fun reads in themselves. The Power of Babel gets into pidgins and other trade languages and some of the common features they all have, which helped me out immensely coming up with “Spacer Creole.” And the Hell poo poo drat book is an excellent one on slang.
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Feb 22, 2022 00:16
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Junpei posted:There's nothing inherently wrong from quoting from other sources. you'd think so! it appears you have found the exception that proves the rule.
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Feb 22, 2022 00:34
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Stuporstar posted:More Grammar poo poo, for those who care I’ll throw another thing in here that grammar software and humans have offered me various opinions on (and this isn’t directed at you specifically Stuporstar, please do not feel obliged). Character is climbing up a big, melting chunk of ice when this happens: quote:Part of the ice sloughs off, taking my axe with it. I release my white knuckled grip on the handle as soon as I realize what’s happening. It misses me on the way down, but I was too slow to react—I’m moving backwards, momentum all wrong. This one I spent a lot of time trying to research on my own, and I believe it’s an “adverbial clause,” but I had a hard time finding an example that lined up with what I’d written. So TBH, I’m still not sure about this one and whether I even found the right name for what I was trying to do.
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Feb 22, 2022 03:06
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