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Stabbey_the_Clown posted:Argh, how the hell does one tell one's inner critic to shut the hell up and stop screaming "this poo poo sucks" when I'm trying to write? I cannot stop myself from trying to re-write the opening of my short story a billion times. It's driving me crazy. It seems like there are a lot of variations on the question of how one goes about not sabotaging themselves with insecurities. What you call your inner critic is your ego wanting to create something beyond criticism on the first try. We all know we're not perfect, but being reminded of it still sucks. The fact is that it doesn't matter whether or not your writing is a pile of poo poo. Literally no one cares. You shouldn't either, you should want to write. How do you feel more confident about your writing? Write. How do you shut up the inner critic so you can get past your opening? Write. In a way the "nobody gives one iota of one poo poo about your writing" approach is the most liberating. Sort of like Dr. Kolctopussy, I tend to title my working files things like "SELF INDULGENT MAGICAL FANTASY CRAP" or "shut up no one cares." It's just words on a screen that will one day be gone like everything else. A novelty. You're a monkey that can use little symbols to make loving magical pictures in another monkey's head, Like HiddenGecko said. Worry about minutiae like quality after you've let the raw material flow onto the page. If you were a visual artist, you wouldn't draw detailed eyeballs before sketching in the rest of the portrait. So don't overwork any one part of your piece just yet. You need it all to be there before you can figure out how the beginning will fit with the rest.
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Aug 12, 2012 23:55
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Sometimes I use "---" I have no idea why, the extra dash somehow makes it look more interupt-y to me. SaviourX was nice enough to point this out in a super awesome critique that I forgot to thank them for after the July fiction contest. (If you happen to see this, thank you!) I'm glad to know there is a standard. Question though. Would I use "--" if a character interrupted their own dialog with an action? Like ""blah blah blah--" so-and-so did a thing "--blah blah blahblahblah." Or would a comma work better?
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Aug 14, 2012 22:55
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Yeah, NaNo might be the laxative I need to push out a bunch of lovely writing that I can kind of mold into a little poo poo statue. And then leave on a public toilet seat for others to find. Wait what metaphor am I making again. I'm feeling anxious about it (and writing in general) because I'm at that point in my writing practice where I'm discovering how much poo poo that I don't know. I feel like I'm the equivalent of when an artist draws their subject with arms behind their back cause the artist can't sketch hands. Guns? Cars? Horses? Law enforcement? Any time period other than circa 1990-present? I'm hosed. Doomed to hide my ignorance behind flimsy plot devices. They say write what you know, but they also say no one wants to read about the adventures of a relatively boring middle class twenty-something. I read other writing, even amateur writing, and it seems chalked full of little bits of cultural observation, realistic details, and other trivia that has the effect of fleshing the story out. Obviously research is paramount, but I've spend hours or days researching something for a piece only to find out I was barking up the wrong tree because I didn't know what I didn't know. I guess the answer to this is ultimately research more and live life, but I'm curious how other people deal with this. Or do you have to be an interesting person to write interesting fiction, because if so 
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Sep 27, 2012 02:46
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Erik Shawn-Bohner posted:I think the key is information. Give us 1000 words a day. Whether they suck balls or not. Make a thread if you need a motivator, and we will come keep you accountable. Just 1000 a day. That's the best advice I ever got, and it changed me once it clicked into my thick skull and I really did it. Let's just do it. Just 1000 words of fiction and giving no fucks what people think. It's there to make sure you write as hard as you can every day even if it's not your best. It's to establish the act between the motion as you learn with us. I agree with this wholeheartedly, and I hope this is an appropriate place to thank you (and others!) for all your work on making the Thunderdome an awesome incentive to do just that. Seriously, I've probably created more material in the past 8 weeks than in any other single stretch of time. The topics forced some amount of research on a couple occasions, which is what sort of frustrated me into asking my question a couple pages back (How do authors go about acquiring and applying relevant knowledge and experience to their writing?). But I think now it's one of those things that just happens through mindfulness, through observation and daily application of that observation through writing. And then following up with critique, of course.
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Sep 30, 2012 04:30
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So the idea is that we would post an individual thread? That could be cool. Though I agree with Black Griffon, 1000 a day might be a little much some days. I propose that maybe the goal be a good faith effort to put out somewhere between 1000-5000 words a week. Maybe that would be a couple very short stories, maybe one longer piece. That sounds realistic to me for both writers and the people who will hopefully give feedback. edit: I totally plan on doing this either way, probably starting in the next few days. I'm just sort of musing out loud here.
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Sep 30, 2012 07:13
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I'd urge everyone to try to post a few hundred words daily. Gotta keep those pipes lubed up. Maybe you just transcribe a conversation you heard on the street, maybe you fictionalize some event from childhood. I think it's a lot like how our friends in the daily drawings thread would say an artist ought to be constantly observing and sketching from life. I'm at the point where I want to fill my life with art and nothing but art. I do illustration as well as hosting open mic style performances out of my house each month on top of music making and a full time job and normal life stuff. Sometimes I start to panic because I have a bad habit of double booking myself. But this past year I've seen more creative growth than any other time because I have ferociously latched on to the idea that I WILL get better, and keep getting better until I die. If I'm not writing, I'm drawing. If I'm not drawing, I'm taking pictures. If I'm not doing that, I'm taking notes or thumbnail sketches from the world around me for use in any number of projects. Eventually it all comes back around to the story, and I smash through the writer's block with new material and insight. Now writing is a horrible slog through inumerable false starts and crappy short stories that I can barely stomach after I'm done. But there is a sort of pride in the feeling that I am at a different point in my practice than I was that morning, or last week, or last year.
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Sep 30, 2012 23:19
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Re: Boobchat, I think a lot of people read fiction where there is excessive self breast examination. So it seems like the norm, especially when author's are writing in first person and aren't sure how to characterize their female character (or even let the reader know she's female in the first place). Incidentally, I just finished the book Kushiel's Dart, and while there were a few things to be desired, I really enjoyed the how sexuality was intertwined with the main character's personality. I won't say it's the BEST, but for modern high fantasy, it did a good job of not making me cringe.
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Oct 22, 2012 09:00
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Martello posted:The new thread title owns. I am going to choose to interpret it as the go ahead to keep talking about boobs. It's less that women don't like to read about boobs and more that the way they're described/presented is often eye-roll inducing. It can be really jarring if you have a book full of male characters who are only described in the vaguest sense, and then all of a sudden you have a very specific description of a very specific body part on a woman. Interestingly, in the book I mentioned above, Kushiel's Dart, there are plenty of sex scenes that don't even mention boobs specifically. Most of them don't go into detail at all, and when they do it's pretty much always relevant to the character or plot (I was actually expecting a much smuttier book). I thought that was neat.
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Oct 25, 2012 00:55
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Maybe I'm giving readers too much credit, but it seems like with the internet and sites like TV tropes, people are getting more canny to when they're reading something an author shat out because they're trying to write the next big seller (Twilight, Harry Potter, Dan Brown's poo poo, etc...). I personally like reading books where the author has fleshed out an original idea that they are passionate about. Most of us will know what genre we're writing in, and if anything I think it's better to know the market in your genre and then try to do something different. For all the readers clamoring to spend their dollars on awful vampire fiction, there is a huge silent majority waiting for something else. Regarding fan fiction, I think it's a lot like fanart, which our friends over in the daily drawing thread advise people to not spend too much time on. Copying/elaborating on something you like isn't bad and the CC police aren't going to come to your house. But I've noticed online communities that host a lot of fanart/fiction are like giant echo chambers, and it's hard to get non-fanfiction writers to critique work that isn't original. So it might be a fine thing to do for yourself or for fun or practice, but I don't think it would yield a lot of helpful feedback.
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Jan 1, 2013 03:54
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Are you drunk on Manhattans in Manhattan Also now the world knows my IRL first initial =0 You know it's funny, when I was a high school student writing sci fi "novels" in my small town starbucks while waiting for my shift at the outlet mall to start, I would always pick like 2013-2015 as my setting. My thought was that it was far enough away to be, you know, science fictiony, but close enough to be recognizable. Yeah iPhone apps aren't exactly the same as space travel or lasers but I feel more or less in the future. Still waiting for nanites so I can download my porns directly to my frontal lobe. happy new year CC, my resolution is to post some things.
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Jan 1, 2013 11:04
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JAssassin posted:Here's something I've been encountering lately. Forgive me if it's been discussed to death but I haven't been able to read the entire thread yet. I've been writing a fantasy piece for a character's backstory for D&D. I love making them short stories that encapsulate what the character is about, along with giving the DM some plot hooks to work into the campaign, or a bad guy or some such. However, since I'm trying to take my writing more seriously than I had before, I'm noticing a lot of bad habits I do. The most jarring to me is my variety, or lack there of. This is most apparent when I'm describing what a character is doing. I have a ton of trouble starting a sentence without starting it with their name, he or she. I'm not really sure how to go about fixing this, beyond just reading more. Are there any suggestions you guys can give me? Another thing to consider is that your character hopefully has a reason to be in the place they're in. Is your dude running from pursuers? About to scale a large cliff? Looking for his car keys/horse saddle to rush to the side of his beloved? Those details should all come through too. There are a lot of writers who kind of describe their character's actions happening in a void because they've been told "show, don't tell" too often. You're the narrator, no matter whose perspective you're writing in, so you have to occasionally tell us things that the character might see, experience, or know that we ourselves have no way of deriving from their actions alone. So I might have part of a scene like: "He crossed the room, arrow already nocked. Outside, the King's men dismounted and moved toward the small house with swords drawn. John faced the door and raised his bow." We (hopefully) know what the dude is doing, probably why he's doing it, and roughly where he is. It's a showdown with the law in tiny medieval hutsville. Breaking away to scenery/environment can be good when it sets the mood or maybe represents an obstacle to the character. In an action sequence, doing so can slow things down so I try to describe the things that affect/are directly affected by the character's actions.
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Jan 6, 2013 19:22
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Blarggy posted:Well that escalated quickly. I meant no disrespect by editing the quote, just thought it would make my post longer than it needed to be. I also didn't mean to offend you, I honestly meant I appreciated your feedback because I don't really know how things go in this here thread and what you've said it very useful information to me. When I begin writing the first draft I will come back and share my work to get more detailed critique, but in the mean time I have no work to show you and being that it's six in the morning I have very little time left awake to write some up. I read your piece, but most of my thoughts were addressed by people in the fiction farm thread (listen to Martello, he's big and mean but he's usually right about things). I say step away from your baby. I got some good advice recently when I was trying to write something too close to an actual event; since I knew what was "supposed" to happen, it was hard to see my story from the reader's perspective. Which meant that I wasn't telling a very complete story and the emotional gravity wasn't coming through. Having source material is good. But if you've been playing this game for 7 years, there's almost too much background, and you're going to have a personal attachment to your characters that will make it difficult to write them well. Same thing with the setting....how are you going to shave 7 years of twists, deadends, retcons, and so on into a coherent narrative? Steve Erickson is a pretty well known author who basically did what you are trying to do with his Malazan series. I made it through all ten 1000 page books. Just barely. Because he had hundreds of characters, cumbersome backstories, and a bunch of repetative, redundant POV chapters. And he even has his RP buddy writing a companion series. And there's like 2 more related trilogies coming out. It's way, way too much. Put this story away for a year. Spend time in the Thunderdome thread, work on some short stories, whatever. Write about mundane things, things you like, things you don't like. Our brethren over in the art thread like to tell people to draw everything you see. Writing is similar; you need to write on a broad range of subjects in a broad range of styles or you're going to sound like a bloody collision of hamfisted exposition and purple prose. And I am someone who loves worldbuilding. It's great to have a fleshed out world. But go work on your conventions first, so that when you tackle the story that is close to your heart, it's as good as it should be.
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Feb 15, 2013 19:47
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I just wanted to say that because of this thread, I went and downloaded yWriter5. I don't know if the pay programs are any better, but I am amazed that I've been writing on computers for so long without using something like this. I like pretty much everything about it so far. It also runs on my lovely netbook. I can feel a productive streak coming on. Question: How painstaking are you when developing the climate and geography of a non-earth world (thinking more fantasy here than literally other planets in this universe)? For example, I'm writing about people who live on an isthmus in an area that has a roughly Mediterranean climate, and since they're fishers and farmers I have to figure out what would live and grow in that area, and so on. And then what starts as a simple scene with a villager getting run down on a clam field by a guy on a horse turns into a bunch of research about whether there would even BE clam fields in an area like that, or whether they would need to dive for clams, or what. After a while it starts to feel like a pointless holdup. The clam field is kind of a silly example. But you can only write "around" so much ignorance, so at what point do you guys give yourselves creative license to just say 'gently caress it, that's how this made up world works'? I personally like stories that have that extra air of authenticity, but I find it hard to write to that standard for sheer lack of knowledge.
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Feb 26, 2013 02:59
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Erogenous Beef posted:The real question is, if you need a world that's very realistic and earthlike, then why not just use Earth? There's a ton of bizarre stuff in our backyards, and you get the benefit of real local history and mythology to draw upon, which is often weirder than anything made-up. Your clam-field example could be based off of a Japanese pearl-diving village, or it could be based off a maritime city like Boston or Halifax. What does the story require? This was a very helpful post overall, but to answer this question, I don't like the baggage that comes with writing fantasy on earth. The geography got more important as I wrote more about the culture my main character comes from, since geographical isolation contributes both to their culture and the main conflict. They live by the sea because I wanted people who worshipped a sea goddess/the tides/etc. I'm basing the region very very loosely on the area around Naples, and what would be Itally is an isthmus that bisects a large inland sea (and due to reasons, large empires and trade hubs never flourished there). A good deal of the story revolves around the character learning how different the rest of the world is, and part of that is being isolated by the sea and mountains both north and south of the isthmus. I'm working on two "big" stories right now, one of which is whimsical and a bit absurd. This one is more serious. I find I do less info-dumping in my story if I as the writer have a detailed understanding of the world I built. I guess it's because if I know why things are the way they are, it's easier to write those things as if they are second nature to the characters. Thanks for all the very helpful answers though, I enjoy reading about how other people world build.
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Feb 26, 2013 19:56
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sebmojo posted:DOES ONE OF THEM INVOLVE SEBASTIAN THE TALKING PIG Yep, that would be the whimsical one. I just have this need to torment myself with spergy world building after spending a bunch of time writing the dialog and characterization of a talking pig who rides around on a sea ship that goes in space (but it's not really space, it's like, this whole other thing [Plus there's air there {or maybe they just don't breathe, IDK}]). Thanks for the thought food, Beef. Sitting Here fucked around with this message at 18:03 on Feb 28, 2013 |
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Feb 27, 2013 01:31
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sebmojo posted:Yay! Have you read Gene Wolfe's Urth of the New Sun? It's not a great book (and marks the point after which I stopped liking his stuff) but it has one hell of a void schooner or w/e the heck you want to call it. No, Gene Wolfe is one of those names in Fantasy/Scifi that I hear so often that I never actually get around to reading his stuff. It's like the Beatles, of course I "liked" the Beatles, but I never got around to giving them a proper listen until recently because they're so ubiquitous. Both Sebastian and the spaceboat come from a dream I had when I was like 13. It stuck in my brain for more than ten years so I figure it's time to give the little guy his shot at being a big fiction star. Martello posted:I try not to breath either, I find it more effective to breathe. I have no idea what you're talking about there was no typo there. Go look. You clearly edited the quote to smear my world-renowned spelling. Another question, what do you think about linking two sentence clauses with a comma instead of and, where and would link two actions? I'm sure there is a better way to articulate this but my grammar sucks. An example would be something like "He looked up at the sky, watched the clouds morph into giant dongs." Now, my understanding is that that sentence should have an and instead of a comma, but I see authors do this constantly and I like it a lot better than just a plain ol' and. What do you guys think?
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Feb 28, 2013 18:31
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Martello posted:Where is this Sebastian the Talking Pig story? Did you post it in Thunderdome and I missed it? I wanna read it. It was my Thunderdome action entry! From two weeks ago, I think? I was just playing around with the characters/setting. I'll be posting more work from that story in the Farm here in a short bit, I think. Martello posted:It's called comma-splicing and the Bohner hates it. I love them but since he sees a lot of my stuff I usually reluctantly cut 'em. He can elaborate on why they're so awful, or conversely why he's such an awful person. Ah I knew it was called something. Bohner hates them? Even better. I'm doubling my comma splice quota for my next piece.
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Feb 28, 2013 19:12
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^^^ fakeedit yeah what Boner said.Jimmy4400nav posted:I'm trying to write a story right now set in the era of Imperialism. My premise is that a new rare element was discovered in Antarctica that can be incredibly useful. This leads to a colonization races for the continent, and eventually war was well (complete with cool weapons created because of said rare minerals). This is my first real attempt at writing something, so I had a couple of questions. If you look at fiction, you'll find that authors have made just about every sort of gimmick work. Most readers of genre fiction will be willing to suspend disbelief somewhat, so long as you give them reason to care about the story. Come back when you've written something and we will tell you how well it works. The merit of your ideas will become self evident once you actually have something for people to read.
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Mar 6, 2013 21:11
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I love it when I forget that I've even submitted anything and get a reminder in the form of a rejection. Martello posted:
Hmmmm sometimes I find it helpful to hear how other people manage their time, especially people whose writing I like. One thing I've noticed is that many people I talk to through CC have an impressive repository of worldy knowledge, or a lot of knowledge in one particular area, and it shows in their writing. Makes it feel fleshed out and real. For whatever reason I am an idiot, and can't write even the most banal of slice-of-life sequences without looking up some piece of information or another, and usually I find out that it's common knowledge. You say 'write how it works for you,' but the reason that I posted in the first place is because I feel stuck and how I write is NOT working for me. So maybe a better way to phrase my original question would be to ask if anyone has any clever tips or tricks to cover up your own glaring lack of trivial knowledge.
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Mar 17, 2013 01:26
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CantDecideOnAName I am refreshing CC fervently waiting for your post.
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Mar 28, 2013 01:02
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E Depois do Adeus posted:What do you guys do when you can't come up with anything good to write? I just got back from a writers group in my area and it was the most unproductive hour of writing I've ever had. I tried envisioning a true moment, coming up with caricatures for people walking by, and writing starting with song lyrics, but all my sentences just came out flat and uninteresting. Does anyone here have a trick they like to use to help them get started? For me, it helps to have a prompt. Perhaps a weekly prompt. And some kind of incentive, such as shame, in the event that I don't complete the prompt. And maybe a competitive aspect, just to spice it up. Hmmm. We need a thread like that.
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Mar 28, 2013 03:57
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Beantown posted:Does anyone here ever have to deal with "writing anxiety"? No I am a cool dude about it all of the time. Do you have a story you want to tell? Like it's just itching to get out there? If not, try to put those ideas into one sentence. One central conflict. I'm working on one right now, and I have all sorts of characters and notes and snippets of ideas for it. But in my case, I can boil it down to: "A girl is transported to another world, and learns that she must save her own universe from nightmarish creatures beyond her understanding." And then I have all sorts of neat world-building things that make it not the same as every other story with that basic plot. So get your really big, vague conflict sorted out. Then pick a moment in time; maybe it's when the character first encounters the conflict, maybe it's some inciting event that disrupts their lives and forces them into a greater conflict. Just pick something that gets them moving. Then set a clock, or a pick a time to start, or whatever, and write for 15, 20, 30 minutes. Or however long. Whatever time frame you pick, keep writing for that duration and don't stop or edit yourself. When you hit the end, go back and clean it up enough to post it in the Fiction Farm. Then post it in the Fiction Farm. People will give you feedback, and then demand more writing for the writing god. Or join Thunderdome.
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Mar 28, 2013 19:06
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edit: drat YOU ^^^^^^CantDecideOnAName posted:One of these days, magnificent7, I'm gonna challenge you to a throwdown. I demand that I preside over this. Random question I already posed to some people, to a mixed response: When writing about ancient/prehistoric people, do you prefer "made up" sounding names, or more literal ones? Like I might call a cave man Grud or something. But since in his language "Grud" means "that greenish moss stuff that grows on rocks," maybe to his people the literal name is actually something like GreenRock or whatever. I have seen both approaches done to carying degrees of success, but I was wondering what your guys' feelings were.
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Apr 28, 2013 22:46
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crabrock posted:fellow thunderdomers: what do you do when the story you're working on is just complete garbage and you realize the idea just doesn't work? Do you scrap it and start over with a new (rushed) idea or do you try to edit it and make it work? I had this problem a bit ago, and I'm having it again. I don't want to be a "no-show" but I also don't wan't to submit something that I think is lovely even as I'm writing it. The first draft of any of my stories is always the unloveable, neglected and slightly roughed up red-headed stepchild of my creative effort. I go into it knowing that I will savagely hate whatever comes out of my brain on a first attempt. But I write the story anyway. It's like those first awful moments when you realize that, yes, you are in fact waking up with a hangover and, no, you don't get to sleep through it. The sooner you get up, spit out errant bits of vomit and take a watery dump, the sooner you can get on with your day. But that's just me. I like to keep a certain parity between my writing and drinking habits. So to answer your question: Just get really drunk and then post post post.
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May 14, 2013 20:37
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I have some thoughts on dialog so I am going to unchange the subject, sorry Chillmatic. I think writing good dialog is a lot like gossiping about someone. Real juicy gossip, where you don't even care if you're putting words in the other person's mouth because even if it's not -exactly- what they said, you know what they meant to say. Real life conversations come with things like context, body language, tone, eye contact, and a million other little clues that we subconsciously use to determine meaning, mood, intention, and so on. Good writers seem to describe very few of those things in detail, so we're left with the story context and the dialog itself, and maybe a few fancy dialog tags like "moaned", "shouted," "ejaculated." (I think using 'ejaculated' to describe an abrupt bit of dialog is something that published authors do to prove they've really made it and thus can get away with that poo poo) But you should absolutely hone your ear for conversation. Good dialog shouldn't always read like real conversation, but real conversations can certainly resemble good dialog. When you as a listener can glean things about people from how they talk and what they're saying, you will inevitably have a better sense of how to imbue characters with that sort of depth. Our brains are already pretty good at shrugging off the details and keeping only the gist of our experiences. So when writing dialog, I approach it as if I were the neighborhood gossip giving someone the "true" version of events, even if it isn't the real version. See you gotta take a big hunk of unrefined reality and whittle it down to some nice purestrain truth. So yeah. Whenever I'm stuck on what a character is supposed to be saying, I imagine the conversation as if I were relating it to someone else, and I really want them to get the gist of it even if that means embellishing/smoothing over some bits. I also keep a mental catalog of trusty quotes from real people that I found poignant,funny, or particularly awful. Public transportation is also a good place for inspiration. We don't call someone who's particularly off or eccentric a 'character' for nothing.
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May 20, 2013 00:57
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I was on the bus today, heard an older-but-not-elderly woman talking with some guy about how she had to move. She was gonna leave her cat, Daisy, with the neighbors, cause Daisy couldn't stand being locked up somewhere tiny with no outside to explore. But I think she was thinking of herself more than that cat; the impression I got was that she was leaving her own large house and moving into an apartment with/near people who could look after her. The whole conversation was pretty much story-ready, smooth with no mumbling or weird pauses. Perhaps she was particularly theatrical, maybe she's a writer herself. For my part, when I got to my computer at work, the first thing I did was open up a blank document and write 700 or so words of story, starting with an eccentric older woman talking about her cat while in the waiting room of an ominous rehab facility. I have no idea where this is going but my protagonist (not the old lady) is currently wandering stark halls with a conspicuously hip and chill "nurse" named Brian. Brian scares me. So thanks thread. I feel extra vindicated for being a eavesdropper now. Imagining the subtext of a conversation can be pretty interesting, writer or no.
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May 21, 2013 06:29
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Well you are funny so it is funny
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May 21, 2013 16:11
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It's the accent I guess
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May 21, 2013 16:58
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HaitianDivorce posted:Nothing ventured nothing gained. Also I would like to point out that if you look far enough back in my post history, my first postings in CC were confused and grandiose. I am literally an ok writer right now because some people on the internet created some dumb thread where we write every week. I've improved more in the past year than in the rest of my life combined, barring that first bit where you learn about how to write a sentence in the correct order, of course. After I realized I could write ~1000 words a week, I realized that I could write 1000 words of chapter a week. And those chapters were better because I gained(and am still gaining) an understanding of how to create tension in a small space. Come to the dome, asap-salafi. You can fix your av but you can't fix a lifetime of being a mediocre writer because you didn't ever put anything on the line. It may just be a forums thread, but look at all of the people who've shown noticeable improvement. We may hand out a lot of losertars but the people who improve and really make an effort don't go unremarked either. Sitting Here fucked around with this message at 04:05 on May 22, 2013 |
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May 22, 2013 04:02
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Hey guys, just so you know, Thunderdome isn't really a thing you need to be "good enough" for. Thunderdome is the sort of thing you do while you're trying to get good enough for other things. Consider this permission to stop giving worthless fucks about avatars or losing in a stupid internet thread. Consider this permission to write whatever the gently caress you want, and lots of it.
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May 30, 2013 04:23
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So the thing is, none of us really actually care if anyone else here gets to be a great published writer or whatever. Even in this thread, we're all more concerned with being right than making authors. The reason I say write whatever the gently caress you want and as much of it as you want is because, in this forum in particular, over enough time you'll get a lot of critiques. More feedback is good. Some of it will be poo poo; I'd advise you learn to ignore mean things on the internet and focus on the stuff that seems like cohesive feedback. You write a lot so that you have a lot of feedback to sift through and look for paterns in. You write whatever the gently caress you want because you want people to critique your most sincere effort, not some bullshit you tailored to appeal to Thunderdome/CC/whoever. Be loving honest with us and yourself. So, for example, if you really really wanna write about 50 foot zombie Ant-o-saurus Rex, Magnificent7, you should. Because if that's what drives you and makes you excited to write, that's where we're going to see at your best, whatever that may be, and so we'll be able to give more relevant feedback. There's a case to be made for writing out of your comfort zone, too. When I got assigned an alternate history prompt, I promptly crapped my pants and dove into wikipedia for 3 days. And the resulting effort wasn't super great or anything, but I could feel my brain muscles working, more subconscious things clicking into place. But really, no one cares. Either you'll write or you won't. The universe will keep going if you(any of us) never write another word of fiction.
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May 30, 2013 23:36
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^^^ That was a really cool story and one of the few short stories I've felt moved by. I'd never read it before so thanks for linking bro. Chillmatic made a pretty valid critique of my most recent Thunderdome piece, which was that my character used childish terms instead of the more contextually appropriate dick, rear end, bitch, etc. If you didn't read it (and I wouldn't blame you), it was a story written from the perspective of a woman who was willingly being tortured and murdered for the purpose of having the most metal sex ever, I guess. True story. Anyway I originally wrote it with a lot more ugly language, but it seemed too gratuitous and I thought it would be interesting if the narrator used more "cutesy" language that was completely unsuited for the context. I ended up reading a lot about her story, and the usenet newsgroups that kinda validated her torture fetish, and in my head her personality ended up being sort of similar to the character Annie from Stephen King's Misery. Only masochistic instead of weirdly maternal and possessive. Annie was a funny sort because, while she was perfectly OK with kidnapping and hobbling dudes, she would call the protagonist a "dirty-birdy" and wouldn't let him swear. I didn't want to carry on in the TD thread, but I was interested in any feedback as to how I might have done that juxtaposition better, or whether I should have just gone for the more visceral language.
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Jun 5, 2013 00:24
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Chillmatic posted:My issue (and this is very, very personal and subjective on my part) with using heavily juxtaposed language is that if it's going to be done, it ought to be done very deliberately, and with a specific goal in mind. I agree completely, and thank you for scratching the itch that was in the back of my head as I was posting it. I picked kind of an unnecessarily challenging piece, if only because I felt like I was walking the line between a sincere story and grimdark gore porn. Maybe I'm just oversensitive to the subject matter, but about 3/4 of the way through I was kind of anxious to just get the thing done and posted. I had some wordcount to eat up still, and in retrospect I think I would've spent a little more time developing her character so that the weird aversion to dirty talk made more sense. In any case, silly as it sounds, I learned a thing from this.
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Jun 5, 2013 03:17
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magnificent7 posted:I get this. People slip in and out of correct tense in casual speech all the time. If it were me, I'd say something like: Ever since we been living here, John'll go to the store every Thursday to pick up those scratch-off lotto tickets. But it depends on the particular voice of the narrator, and whether this is dialog or pure narration. In this random example, what is being conveyed is that the narrator and John currently live somewhere, and for as long as they have lived there John has gone down to get scratch tickets. I think with first person narration/dialog you can do all sorts of fun things with the way you describe time/how events relate to each other in time. There are also other cues you can give that you're not just being grammatically challenged. In this example, I'd drop the contraction from "we've", and made "John will" into "john'll," to give the overall impression that the person telling the story/talking isn't terribly concerned with being an adroit speaker/narrator. But yeah, I don't think Muffin's point was about experimenting with narration. People have a LOT of issues with tense, or jumping around character perspectives in 3rd person limited. There's definitely not as much room for experimenting with voice, but a lot of stories work better when the narration is, as Muffin said, invisible. IMO the only real rule is "don't suck," follow that rule and you can do anything.
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Jun 18, 2013 19:08
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There's an e-book that tells you how to do an awesome ritual with goat blood that generates Thunderdome plots. Just PM me 100 bitcoins and I'll send you the download. Make sure to disable any anti-virus programs first, tho This past week I started early and my piece sucked, meanwhile whenever I win it's literally by scraping the leftover tar-like substance out of my brain tubes and throwing it into a post minutes before the deadline. I usually think of a plot that sucks. Then I throw a wrench in it. When creating the basic idea for a plot, I like to let my inner little kid come out a bit. Lets say I wanna write a story about a baseball player getting ready for a big game. But WHAT IF he's been abducted by aliens, and has to play against his will on an intergalactic allstar team. But then WHAT IF his sports star status gains the affections of a green-skinned babe from Venus, who wants him to throw the game due to _____________ Yeah it's pretty much like that. "But what if" is probably one of the more important phrases to keep in mind when conjuring tales.
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Jun 27, 2013 03:04
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I tend to lean toward dialog-heavy writing a lot of the time. Dialog is cool because it can do double duty as characterization and exposition. The big issue is if your characters are talking in empty space and there's no action. I suppose if you posted a sample of your dialog, it'd be easier to tell you whether it's pulling its weight.
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Jul 3, 2013 02:31
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In Orson Scott Card's example,the biggest issue in the first example is that the characters are telling each other stuff for the reader's benefit, which instantly makes it sound unnatural to the reader because we know people don't talk about that. You can use dialog to advance the plot, I think, but not if it's as ham-fisted as that example. People in stories are ostensibly "real" people, in that they don't know that their lives are a plot (unless they do I guess). So they wouldn't talk like they know that there's a plot. If pushed into a very tight and uncomfortable corner by scary people, I would say that I try to rotate between dialog, action, and exposition as often as fluidity and plot allow. There's no way to tell you how to create a nice rhythm of those three elements. Though I will say, if I write a full page that seems to be mostly dialog, I definitely go back and make sure my characters aren't repeating themselves or prattling on about things that no one cares about. If I have to drop a bunch of exposition somewhere, I try to do it in one of two ways: 1) When I need some amount of time to pass in between action/dialog sequences. If I'm writing in first person, the exposition will usually come in the form of the character reflecting on something they already know. If it's 3rd person, I guess it's more the narrator informing the reader of things that at least one character knows. I almost never write exposition about things the characters don't know, unless I'm writing 3rd person omniscient for some reason. Oooor 2)As summarized dialog. This is mainly in situations where one character is explaining a bunch of stuff to another character. Sometimes telling vs showing can happen in dialog too; slipping back into the narrative voice when a character would otherwise be yammering your reader's mental ear off frees you up to be a little more creative in terms of voice and style. You aren't restricted to that character's way of talking. Of course dropping a paragraph or so of exposition is good too, sometimes it's a much needed step away from whatever is going on in the scene, so you can move on to other things. IDK if anyone is like me, but I tend to get "stuck" in a scene, and have trouble moving my characters along. As for your sample--Work on making your dialog work harder. Also, I see that you seem to be doing period writing but your dudes all have kinda the same voice. It could be that it's such a short scene, but they need more color. Not knowing all that much about the characters in general, it's hard to say how to characterize them better. But I will say that as you write dialog, you should constantly have that character's motivations and state of mind in the front of your brain. They are characters in that they do and say exactly what you make them do and say, no more, no less. They aren't characters in the sense that, within the world of their story, they would be real people with real backgrounds that influence everything they do and say.
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Jul 4, 2013 01:14
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I like being able to carry my whole reading collection with me at all times, I like the number of free classic books (and sometimes authors will even release the first book in a series for free to build interest for the rest of their books), love the near-instant downloads, love that at least with the Kindle it's pretty easy to get a free replacement (At least the first time you inevitably break it). Oh, and for some reason, reading real books in a moving vehicle makes me sick, but reading an e-reader doesn't. That discovery was a seminal moment in my bus-riding career, I tell you. I don't understand people's attachment to the medium of physical books. For me, the words and the paper and even the plastic and circuitry are really an obstacle to the story, no matter how unobtrusive we try to make it. The story happens in the brains of the author and the readers. The rest is just instructions, the blueprints to a building. So I just can't really give any shits about the medium of the writing except in the case of books like House of Leaves or Infinite Jest where flipping through the pages is actually part of the experience. But most books do not intentionally do that. Also I like anything that makes me feel like I'm living in the future, like tablets out the rear end.
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Aug 7, 2013 19:28
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Yeah looking up words is awesome, and also being able to save passages that I find particularly interesting. I think in general, all of the arts are undergoing a sort of renaissance, insofar as the tools to create and distribute original material are more accessible than ever. Some people say this is a bad thing, and that mediocre E-book self-pub authors are a dime a dozen, as are prolific Deviant Art furries and lovely Soundcloud "musicians". But if it makes exposure more accessible to lazy disaffected oblivious schmucks like me, more power to it, whatever it is. I mean lets say I finish my totally original talking pig fiction masterpiece and no one wants it, at least I can throw it up on Kindle or w/e and hope someone out there has the kindness and compassion to read my poo poo and maybe feel a thing about it.
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Aug 8, 2013 04:17
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On the topic at hand, I recently made a sort of informal decision to back off from the 'dome for a while, for some of the reasons being discussed this past page. For some reason, though, without the perpetual deadline looming (even if it is a bullshit deadline), I can't write anything. Even my 'real' writing seemed to benefit from the pressure of the weekly competitions, even if I didn't have as much time to get around to it as I liked. I mean I sit down, open up my documents, physically force my hands to depress the keys in some sort of sensible order, and I'm lucky to have a grand total of like, three additional words on my word count when I finally close my laptop in disgust and flee my house. I don't THINK I'm one of those people who ought to just give up and go be something else, largely because I love words more than anything, and even if I'm not a "novelist" or whatever, I can't help that the thing I want most of all is to put words in some order that moves someone to feel some emotion at all (I'm not picky). Every time an author moves me to laugh or cry or put down the book just to fully absorb a passage, I'm so profoundly grateful. The best thing in the world would be to cause someone else that same sense of empathy with a total stranger. ...Incidentally, my struggles lately have me looking for literally any way to back on track. One thing I noticed is that I don't really have a space to write anymore. I used to have a little window seat with a lovely view, but my living situation changed and due to Reasons, I no longer have a set spot to just dive in and work. Where do you guys do most of your writing? Does anyone have a particularly cool or inspiring setup that helps them get into the right space? How about while living in close proximity with a lot of people? Has anyone engineered noise-canceling privacy pods for introverted creative types yet???? It's just amazing to me that all of the media-consuming ingrates of the world will slobber and gnash their teeth over the next Song of Ice and Fire release date, but when it comes to my writing (or the writing of anyone they know personally) they don't understand why I can't be writing a book and also drinking beer and marathoning sitcoms with them at the same time. Fuckers.
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Aug 12, 2013 23:59
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