|
Pardon the mess, but I wanted to offer a cheatsheet to my Thunderdome entry this week, which was more an Eleventh Hour/Where's Waldo puzzle than a story. Behind it all is the idea of a conspiracy that leaves tracks by dropping threes everywhere. I wanted to give the reader an experience similar to a character within a conspiracy novel, where the first read is intentionally puzzling, but there's hints of patterns beneath the surface text. Further careful reads allow the dedicated reader to puzzle out references and clues. (Where it failed was to build the clues into something more than a bunch of references. For that, I'd need to change the framing device from a letter directly read by you, the reader, to something received piecemeal by an investigatory character, with each successively recovered passage providing clues as to where more might be found.) When Kaishai posted her prompt that it be about "the Tripartite Integer", my mind went immediately to the Tripartite Pact and it unrolled from there. And yes, you can check all the dates, it lines up with history.  The recurring pattern is not just multiples of three, but often powers of three, that is, threes multiplied together. The most significant, of course, being 27, which is three to the third power (3 * 3 * 3). In the Illuminatus! trilogy, there's a lot of numerological disassembling, and that was my most direct inspiration. And now an annotated cheatsheet: Erogenous Beef posted:Find Them And You Can Resist 6 words (520 words) 19 * 27 Erogenous Beef fucked around with this message at 13:37 on Jul 2, 2013 |
#
¿
Jul 2, 2013 11:42
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 26, 2024 19:02 |
|
|
Sitting Here posted:Dang, I don't really have any significant critiques, but I kind of am sorry I won this week Nah, it's a fun puzzle, but yours was actually a human story. I have no problems taking second to something good. I didn't even expect to place, honestly.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 3, 2013 00:27
|
|
|
Jeza posted:good advice One more thing, not just for Cervid, but for most folks - if you feel that the critiquer didn't understand something in your story which was intended to have a certain effect, the problem is often not the reviewer, but you. Yes, it is possible for Lazy Reader Syndrome to kick in and for people to miss important details. However, if you want to improve, you need to first point the finger of blame at yourself; try to recognize and fix your own deficiencies before assuming the reader is stupid. Your job, rule one, is to communicate your story clearly. If you find yourself having to explain plot points, character actions, etc., then you have failed at this and you should focus on improving your next piece's clarity.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 15, 2013 13:53
|
|
|
Mercedes posted:Do you guys have a checklist or ritual you go through when editing to make sure everything is correct? I've always had issues with tenses. Lately I've been catching most of my errors while editing, but this past week, well, I lacked focus and a lot of things slipped through. I feel it could have been avoided if I had a list or ritual or something. Good grammar, and thereby good tense usage, is a habit. You will start out doing it poorly. Save your piece and read it again, slowly, a day or two later. Read it in a different medium than it was written. Do not stop and edit - just read and maybe jot down some notes. The point is to get you into the mind of a reader, as opposed to a writer - read as if you were reading your piece for the first time. Get bothered by your misspellings, grammar mistakes, poor tense usages. If you can recognize them as a reader, then try to enter the reader's mindset before proofing your stuff. After getting some practice with correcting your own prose, you should start making fewer errors in drafting. Even if not, you'll have enough practice editing to catch them. My "ritual" involves exporting my work from my composition software into another format, which presents it in a different font and spacing scheme. This helps me read it with a fresher mindset. Then I re-read it again after pasting it into SA, using the preview-reply function. Preview has saved me from barbarous misspellings several times.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 16, 2013 00:59
|
|
|
Chillmatic posted:"You're never around when I need you," he said, angrily. These are both bad. Use an exclamation point for this situation. Similar for "asked" and the question mark. Both "asked" and "shouted" are unnecessary attributions. When editing, if you come across any attributive verb aside from "said", you should stop, step away from your writing and think very very carefully about why that word is being used. As with any literary rule, you can violate it if you know specifically why you're doing it and cannot find any other way to express what you need. If you're trying to tell the reader that the line is a question or exclamation, use punctuation (!/?). If you're trying to convey an emotion, then use word choice, pacing, and sentence structure. Also consider using a non-dialogue flash of action. If you just need to attribute dialogue, either eliminate the attribution or change it to "said".
|
|
#
¿
Aug 23, 2013 14:36
|
|
|
Mechanically, you're fine. As for the explanation, I was basically with you until roughly the last three lines of your spoilertext; that stuff didn't come through in the prose at all when I read it. Once the situation went off the rails, I thought the composer was some kind of future-Unabomber, algorithmically destroying the minds of those who had destroyed his beloved artform. With that in mind, the rewind bits came out of left field and didn't make any sense. For 1000 words, I'd suggest cutting the obscure string-theory backstory and make it a bit more personal, as you're simply not going to have the words to show us all that framing information without an infodump somewhere. I had much the same problem this week - see how many notes are needed to explain, well, every other sentence? We both violated the writer's Prime Directive. Clarity is Job Number One.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 7, 2013 13:04
|
|
|
Homework from the 'dome incoming, as penance for my sins:Bad Seafood posted:Erogenous Beef - Sharp Harmony Catch (696 words) Andri launched Gullborg to sea, crewless, the morning the throat of Fáskruðsfjorður was clear of ice. He steered from the wheelhouse as Elín stood big-bellied on the dock, hands at her sides. The bare stone slopes of the fjord rose above him like the arms of an ebon giant sunk deep in a frigid bath. Beneath them, his boat was a toy. Gullborg was two paces across, six long. Her wheelhouse was a wooden coffin with a window cut from the front. A sawn-off broom was the hatch’s lock. Andri kept the hatch open to air the smoke from the motor at his feet. As a lad, he had salvaged it from a cousin’s Model T and installed it overwinter. His father had neither smiled nor commanded it removed. Skin lay tight over his face. The winter had been lean. His father had spent his final season in bed, staring out a window at empty Gullborg bobbing alone in the harbor, not speaking. Land slipped away and Andri was alone between the grey sky and sea. The water was glassy and he chewed his white beard. Still meant storm. There was little time to fish and the family was hungry. He had rigged her three lines before dawn and had filled his bait-bucket with last week’s boiled haddock, sliced large. He stilled the motor and went out to the lines. He took the gold ring from his finger, kissed it, tucked it into his coveralls, then impaled fish on the hooks dangling from each line and tossed them over. Andri sat on a barrel, arms outstretched as though waiting for nails through his wrists. He held the wheels of two lines, winding and unwinding them. He needed Oðinn and Hjalti. They were salted men and had worked for his father since Andri could walk. They had been in his parlor last night, drinking brennivín beneath the old man’s portrait, swapping tales of fish landed and lost. He had asked them to work today. They had left after the drink. Wind in, feed out, slow and long, like breathing. The lines both tightened, then slacked. Andri reeled in frayed stumps. The wheel at the fore spun and line plunged into the sea. Fish. Andri snatched the line and pulled. The line did not come in. A strong fish. He knelt and braced his shoulders beneath the rope. His legs shook and his back cracked. A great fish. The boat moved. He cleated the line twice, then wrapped it about himself, wedged boots against hull and lay in frigid bilge-water. Water soaked through the wool sweater Elín had knit. The fish towed him. A squall came. Rain lashed the boat as it bounced from wave to wave. Saltwater dripped from his beard and numbed his hands, but the line would break before he. The square broke instead. The line slackened, went limp. Andri reeled in line and chewed his beard. No great fish expired so easily. Leviathan surfaced. A great smooth beast with skin green like the summer sea. A thick fin rose from its back, exhaling diesel smoke from a tube. Andri’s line was snarled amidst fin and tube. A door opened on the fin. Men in olive drab emerged on the great boat’s deck, some holding rifles. An old man stood amidst the riflemen. He wore a hat with a big red star. He held binoculars to his eyes, shouted something. The riflemen aimed. Andri took his father’s knife from his boot and cut the line. The men marched back into the fin and the beast submerged. He slouched to the wheelhouse, started the motor and set rudder for Fáskruðsfjorður. The sun sank low and two black stone motes came over the horizon - the fjord’s mouth. Cod big as cows swarmed in the water. Two ships lolled nearby, both painted slate grey. One was wide and fat and gorged its nets on Andri’s fish. The other was lean, with a gun fore and the Union Jack on its tower. Andri sailed toothless Gullborg home, hungrier than his father had ever been. He took the ring from his pocket, kissed it, and prayed.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 8, 2013 00:41
|
|
|
TheRamblingSoul posted:Is it really important for the audience to know exactly what hosed up things April had to do before she and her dad reunited (eg eating raw chicken hearts and stuff)? Or is it better just to leave the reader to wonder what the hell happened to her that traumatized her so much instead of being explicit? (I think it's the latter)? General checklist for short fiction editing. Does the sentence/paragraph: - Provide information vital to the reader's understanding of the plot? (1) - Show us an interesting or important aspect of a character? - Show us an interesting or important aspect of the setting? (2) If not, you have identified a candidate for cutting. Note that not all sentences need meet the above - there's places for foreshadowing, scene-setting, and so on - but a good majority should. Delete the sentence. Re-read the paragraph and the ones preceding/following it. Does everything still make sense? Read it out loud, both with and without the sentence. Is the cadence better? Worse? For this, your ear and judgment will be vastly improved by reading a lot; do so. (1) To help decide this, write down a summary of your plot. You get one sentence and it must identify the protagonist, the antagonist, and the conflict between them. Now read the sentence you're scrutinizing and compare it to understanding the sentence you just wrote. (2) Use this far more sparingly than the prior two; in shorts, you don't have the space to do massive worldbuilding like you would in a thousand-page fantasy tome. This is mostly here for Chekov's Gun.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 26, 2013 17:19
|
|
|
Mr_Wolf posted:Thanks for the input fellas. I know it's rough - OK, very rough - but i ended up liking the story and will try to finish it. So, a flashback, then? There's plenty of ways. The two simplest ones are tenses and scene breaks. In both cases, you'll want to signpost YOU ARE NOW IN A FLASHBACK with a lead-in phrase like "Back when XYZ happened..." For tenses, you use the appropriate tense to distinguish stuff that happened in the past from the stuff in the present. If you're writing the present in present tense ("We do this, I eat ham" - see: Yiddish Policeman's Union), write the past in the simple past tense ("We did that, I ate ham"). If your story is written normally in the past tense, then the flashback goes in the pluperfect/past-perfect tense ("We had done this, I had eaten ham"). The latter form can tire readers if it goes on for more than a few sentences. I try to avoid using the pluperfect if I need over one paragraph of it; in that case, I prefer to use scene breaks. For scene breaks, simply put your flashback in its own scene. Lead into that scene with the appropriate cueing phrase, and then in the scene after immediately show us something that informs the reader that we're back in the past. A cueing phrase or an action/description that picks up where the pre-flashback scene left off. Quick off-the-cuff example: quote:I sat at a computer typing an example about tenses. It was terse. The hashmarks are from standard manuscript format. They indicate an extra blank line between the paragraphs, were your story to be printed on real paper, which provides a visual cue that a scene break has occurred. (Some variations on manuscript format prefer the asterisk. Your choice.)
|
|
#
¿
Jan 3, 2014 12:16
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 26, 2024 19:02 |
|
|
crabrock posted:Just to play some devil's advocate, and to remind everybody that one writer's way isn't the ONLY way. Totally cool, and sure, there's more than one way to do this thing. quote:what. neither of these are "common" or particularly useful. A google search for "tick tock writing" returns info on the kesha song and deadlines. I won't even start on hitting somebody with an acronym that you never use again. The jargon is totally unneeded. The tick-tock analogy I included because I figured it'd be helpful. I didn't say it was a common analogy - I wrote the explanation on the spot to illustrate a concept: a story is repeated cycle of characters grappling with problems. The stakes and scale of the problem(s) grow over the course of the story - that's "rising action". The final resolution of the problem (whether positive or negative) is the "climax". Those are certainly common terms. The MRU is easily Googlable and brings up >1000 articles explaining the concept. Just because you're not familiar with it doesn't make it "uncommon", dude. As for not being useful, sorry, I completely disagree. I think it's a useful framework for structuring clear writing, and it's helped me out. Is it the only way to do it? No, of course not, but trying different tools when you're learning to write is vital to developing your own process. quote:Here's a story by sebmojo that many consider to be quite good. It suffers from the same "problems" you say elfdude does. I disagree. Sebmojo's story's climax is the reveal of the murder; it's a vignette predicated on a slow, creeping realization that a murder has occurred. Elfdude's story starts out with the murder in plain sight and then fails to grapple with it. Edit: ^^^^ elfdude posted:It's difficult to understand the issue inherent in the ending. The ending's point was that the character just killed a bunch of people for no reason, or rather that the reason he thought he had wasn't real. "Difficult to understand" - as a writer, clarity is your job. If you have to explain the point, you failed. Write another story and try again. quote:I don't know what the character can solve. The contract has no bearing other than it is invalid. Since this story's conflict was internally focused, you could develop the character's obvious mental instabilities (how does he overcome his rage issues?) or the character coming to terms with his relationship with his father (does he resent his old man? this is hinted at, but should be drawn out more). As Crabrock said, the big problem with the ending is that the solution comes from outside - the character himself did not have to come to terms with his own problem, nor was he destroyed by the mistakes he'd made. Erogenous Beef fucked around with this message at 23:59 on Feb 26, 2014 |
|
#
¿
Feb 26, 2014 23:54
|
|