|
In 2022 I finally broke a years-long depressive streak that had been squashing all of my creative impulses. In the last six months I got a first draft hammered out from the rough vomit and notes that have been laughing at my from the depths of my hard drive. Then, while I was taking a break from that one, I got the rough "just get it out of you" draft of my second book done. Wrapped that on the day before Xmas Eve. Between the two I wrote 175,000 words and had more fun doing that than I've had in years. Years! Absolutely hooked. Used lulu to print out a paperback of the first book. I have a handful of hi-lighter pens and a bunch of those little post it flags to mark it up with while I read it this week.
|
#
?
Jan 3, 2023 00:13
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 25, 2024 13:59 |
|
|
SurreptitiousMuffin posted:Oh hey, same! I handed in Dawnhounds 2 in 2021 and still don't have the first edit letter back and I'm starting to think it's just getting quietly shitcanned. I spent all year not being allowed to write while the money ran out. It sucks! Man, that sucks  I hope your and GB's books both emerge from purgatory soon.
|
|
#
?
Jan 3, 2023 00:13
|
|
|
I hope to actually post in this thread in 2023 instead of just passively reading it. Anyway, this last year sucked! I turned in my revision to my agent, who said it was great except that I was right all along and it should be a one long standalone instead of a duology like they'd suggested, so would I mind rejiggering everything and adding a fourth act? gently caress! While I was spinning out from that, things came to head at my day job in a bad way, and I was so miserable and burned out I had to quit! I spent all summer too depressed to write or work, so I did gently caress all except take pictures and garden until November! I worked on the book all through holidays, but being that this is the fifth revision, I would kind of rather die! Now I am posting to avoid writing a sex scene and thinking about looking for a new job! Maybe this will be the one that sticks and we can go out to publishers in late spring, but at this point I've given up on outcomes and would just like to be Done.
|
|
#
?
Jan 3, 2023 08:20
|
|
|
I started 2022 thinking I'd only need a few months to edit my novel and ended up finishing Draft 3 just before New Years. Turns out gradually abandoning your premise over the course of a few years can result in things not hanging together quite right. Draft 1 was 280,000 words and right now it's hovering around 147,000. I think it's a genuinely better book for it. Or at least some days I think that, other days I think it’s just not good but I guess if it is then at least it wastes less of your time now. Anyways, I'm now ready to move onto the next stage. I'm not entirely sure what the next stage is (beta readers...?) but man am I ready to move on to it.
|
|
#
?
Jan 3, 2023 19:11
|
|
|
I kind of want to change the thread title for the new year. Any ideas?
|
|
#
?
Jan 3, 2023 20:16
|
|
|
Sitting Here posted:I kind of want to change the thread title for the new year. Any ideas? "Fiction Writing Advice & Discussion: ", with the final space and changing the 'and' to an ampersand, is 37 characters. "The act of writing itself is done in secret, like masturbation." (62 characters) --> "Fiction Writing Advice & Discussion: Writing's done in secret, like masturbation" (37 + 43 characters = 80, if that's the title length limit. The original is a quote from Stephen King.) Also found this when I was trying to attribute the above quote: "Writing is like masturbation. It might not bear fruit, but it certainly does feel good." (Charles Delmar)
|
|
#
?
Jan 3, 2023 21:14
|
|
|
Maybe a simple title: Fiction Writing Advice & Discussion: Save the draft OR Fiction Writing Advice: Read more, Write more One thing I have noticed is that new people are confused about what we can or cannot post here (Myself included). There was some meme tumblr posts, some workshopping posts, and the response was to make a new forum thread. These are things that can generate discussion if used in the correct social group, which is why I think there was some confusion over what is or isn't allowed. Maybe drop the discussion part of the title?
|
|
#
?
Jan 3, 2023 21:56
|
|
|
Sitting Here posted:I kind of want to change the thread title for the new year. Any ideas? the pens justify the memes
|
|
#
?
Jan 3, 2023 22:23
|
|
|
DropTheAnvil posted:Maybe a simple title: The thread is in fact full of all sorts of discussion! I've asked one person to limit the number of memes they post, and generally speaking if you want a deep dive on a novel or story, it's beneficial to dedicate a thread to it or put together a writing group with people who are willing to do critique. Both memes (in moderation) and workshopping are allowed in this thread, always have been, and always will be. Sorry if that's been unclear, though I definitely see discussion happening on a daily basis so I'm not terribly sure it makes sense to drop 'discussion' from the title.
|
|
#
?
Jan 3, 2023 23:04
|
|
|
Popeston posted:Anyways, I'm now ready to move onto the next stage. I'm not entirely sure what the next stage is (beta readers...?) but man am I ready to move on to it. Alpha read, if you haven't had anyone give you feedback on it yet, or if you write very clean drafts, a beta read. Post something/an excerpt in the Fiction Farm thread. And while you wait, write your blurb and/or query letter. Sitting Here posted:I kind of want to change the thread title for the new year. Any ideas? Read more, write more is always good. The main things missing are "crit more" and "repeat". My other suggestion would be: "Sit down. Write a line. Keep going." (Naomi Novik) Will Wight said a lot of good things in his livestream last year but the main one that stuck with me was "Until you write the words 'THE END' you do not have a story and you are not qualified to evaluate it" but that is far too long for a thread title.
|
|
#
?
Jan 4, 2023 00:41
|
|
|
Leng posted:Read more, write more is always good. The main things missing are "crit more" and "repeat".
|
|
#
?
Jan 4, 2023 00:53
|
|
|
Sitting Here posted:I kind of want to change the thread title for the new year. Any ideas? it's the thread title that keeps on giving (me) (two hundred and five dollars)
|
|
#
?
Jan 4, 2023 04:16
|
|
|
"a helpful void to shout into"
|
|
#
?
Jan 4, 2023 14:37
|
|
|
rohan posted:Read, write, crit, Going with a slightly truncated version of this  I like the simple directness of it.
|
|
#
?
Jan 6, 2023 09:09
|
|
|
rohan posted:Read, write, crit(ically damage your own self-worth), repeat.
|
|
#
?
Jan 6, 2023 19:01
|
|
|
I'm submitting to some arts grant thing using an excerpt of a novel I'm working on, and I kind of realize I don't really know how to revise my work properly. I'm usually a "one draft and done" kind of guy but with this I really want to put my best foot forward and polish up the writing and mechanics. Are there some writer-goon approved resources for how to edit/revise a fiction piece? I'm familiar with stuff like story coherency, I'm more after polishing at a sentence/language level. For instance I notice that despite my best efforts I keep doing the beginner thing of like: "She opened her eyes. The forest was gone. She was laying on a hard metal grating, her fingers laced through the cut-outs, knuckles turning white. She relaxed her hands and rose slowly to her feet. There was a hum here too, but nothing like whatever it was that she experienced in the forest. This hum was a deep throb. The idling, she knew, of a great engine. She looked around. She was on the bridge of a spaceship." Which yeah, this is pretty embarrassing especially since I've been at this a while. I'd like to figure out how to get better at sentence construction (inb4 read write crit repeat) so that my prose doesn't seem so... clunky. Obviously there is no book that is 100% going to cure me of this bad habit overnight, I'm just wondering if there are any resources for avoiding/working with this kind of clunkiness during the revision process. Thanks for any suggestions!
|
|
#
?
Jan 15, 2023 03:58
|
|
|
Other than lying-not-laying that's not really awful prose, depending what style you're going for. The only major issue is that if she's been on spaceships before and can recognize when she's in one then you can skip straight from "rose slowly to her feet" to "she recognized the familiar sights and sounds of a spaceship's bridge", and if she hasn't then it becomes more of a show-don't-tell exercise where you balance when she figures it out with when the reader figures it out. IMO the mechanics of sentence construction are inseparable from narrative style, which is too personal for an expert to teach you per se. It's something you develop through lots of reading and lots of writing. In between writing sessions, find a few authors whose structure and style you admire and read everything of theirs you can. As for polish, the best option is to hire a skilled editor but the expense isn't always realistic, in which case it's another skill you'll need to develop. But write the story first, then go back and work hard on polishing individual sentences and tightening individual paragraphs. Don't be me and constantly keep trying to do that while writing, you'll never actually finish the story that way (ask me how I know). I'm sorry I don't have a more direct answer than that. I'm as curious as you are if others think there is one.
|
|
#
?
Jan 15, 2023 04:56
|
|
|
The problem you're having is that every sentence in your prose is doing the same job. You mix up the actual sentence rhythm fair-ish-ish, it's not all the exact same structure, but every single sentence is just distant reportage. Either we get perception or action, but never any interaction between those two: she opens her eyes, perceives, gets up, perceives. That's it. Where are her reactions, her thoughts, the cycle of feedback from event to interiority to action to event that drives a character forward? Your narrative 'camera' is parked way way far away from your protagonist and that distance creates a sense of dispassion and disinterest. What you need is to close that gap, get in her head, write like you're not reporting what's happening but in it with her. You need to show us the cycle of perception triggering reaction, reaction pushing her to act. quote:She opened her eyes. The forest was gone. Hard metal under her fingers, her white knuckles locked in the grating, fingertips purple with blood: Christ, she couldn't make herself let go. Let go. Let go, drat it, you're not in the forest now, you can't hide. Up! I broke the paragraph in two to emphasize the change from internal experience to external scene-setting. I used a colon structure to jam a run of perception into an emotional reaction, staccato repetition to indicate distress. A visceral, tangible body-detail (swollen fingertips) counterpoints the sterile metal and the fictional strangeness of a spaceship. We get a lot of her internal emotional reaction to the sudden change: she perceives, reacts, acts on her reaction, perceives again, reacts again - if I knew more I'd give us her reaction to learning she's on a starship, and what she does about it.
|
|
#
?
Jan 15, 2023 05:37
|
|
|
General Battuta posted:The problem you're having is that every sentence in your prose is doing the same job. You mix up the actual sentence rhythm fair-ish-ish, it's not all the exact same structure, but every single sentence is just distant reportage. Either we get perception or action, but never any interaction between those two: she opens her eyes, perceives, gets up, perceives. That's it. Where are her reactions, her thoughts, the cycle of feedback from event to interiority to action to event that drives a character forward? Your narrative 'camera' is parked way way far away from your protagonist and that distance creates a sense of dispassion and disinterest. Thanks for the quick edit, I see what you're saying about the narrative camera. To be honest, that "distance" from my characters is probably my Achilles heel as a writer. I just... don't really think of my characters as three-dimensional. I'm not saying that I want to be one of those people who thinks in-character, but for some reason I really struggle with the idea that characters are not little puppets on a string doing what I need to get the story where I want it (I mean, okay, in some sense they are but the trick is to make the audience identify with the character beyond the knowledge that they're sort of textual automatons.) I guess now the question becomes how I can go about "closing that gap" in a more... conscious way? I can't think of a cleaner way to put it. Regardless, thanks for the feedback, I appreciate it!
|
|
#
?
Jan 15, 2023 07:26
|
|
|
magic cactus posted:To be honest, that "distance" from my characters is probably my Achilles heel as a writer. I just... don't really think of my characters as three-dimensional. I'm not saying that I want to be one of those people who thinks in-character, but for some reason I really struggle with the idea that characters are not little puppets on a string doing what I need to get the story where I want it (I mean, okay, in some sense they are but the trick is to make the audience identify with the character beyond the knowledge that they're sort of textual automatons.) I guess now the question becomes how I can go about "closing that gap" in a more... conscious way? You don't necessarily have to though? It's not the only way to write. Some fiction doesn't go very deep with characters because the story is more about exploring some concept or idea through the use of stock characters/archetypes. That said, if I were to go off the excerpt you posted, an idea-driven story doesn't seem to be the direction you've chosen so getting inside your characters' heads is probably what you need to do. Sanderson has two lectures that are helpful in this regard: a worldbuilding lecture where he discusses the concept of the pyramid of abstraction and a character lecture that discusses the nuts and bolts of constructing sentences and punctuation and word choice. The other way to think about it is to think of everything as nested emotional arcs. There's a book level emotional arc with act-level emotional arcs within. Each act itself contains chapter-level emotional arcs, and within the chapters too are scene-level emotional arcs. You just need to extend the concept further: break your scenes down into beat-level emotional arcs and go beyond that into paragraph-level and sentence-level emotional arcs. I'll share an example from my work. The scene is a party. The POV character is standing on the fringes. The beat is when the POV character's rival arrives. Now I could have just written something like this to convey the physical action, with a few descriptors: quote:Rahelu turned to see Nheras of Ilyn gliding up the gentle slope, her willowy form bedecked in a dazzling array of gold and silk. You get a little bit of a sense of character, but not much. The POV character is just reporting what she sees. There's no conflict implicit in that line. Now, here's my first draft: quote:Rahelu did not budge; she held her stance, turning warily to keep Nheras in view as the Ilyn girl climbed the last few strides to the top. This first line is better than the previous example because now there's the implication of conflict between the two characters. But why all the other words? To show an emotional arc. She sees her rival, she has an emotional reaction, she considers a course of action thanks to that emotion, begins to act on it...but then is prevented from doing so by an action from the other character. Which is...fine but I've taken 291 words to basically say "this person arrived". Here's the same moment post line-edits: quote:Rahelu held her defensive stance, turning warily to keep Nheras in view as the Ilyn girl climbed the last few strides to the top. 186 words and reads so much better. Anything that could be deleted without lessening the emotional arc, I deleted. Anything that could be said in fewer words and retain/intensify the emotional impact, I changed. There's probably ways to improve it further but this is the limits of where I am as a writer currently. Anyway, I hope that's useful! Leng fucked around with this message at 13:50 on Jan 15, 2023 |
|
#
?
Jan 15, 2023 08:17
|
|
|
magic cactus posted:"She opened her eyes. The forest was gone. She was laying on a hard metal grating, her fingers laced through the cut-outs, knuckles turning white. She relaxed her hands and rose slowly to her feet. There was a hum here too, but nothing like whatever it was that she experienced in the forest. This hum was a deep throb. The idling, she knew, of a great engine. She looked around. She was on the bridge of a spaceship."  I think this might also be of use to you: https://www.advancedfictionwriting.com/articles/writing-the-perfect-scene/ For books on self-editing, this is pretty good: https://www.amazon.com/Self-Editing-Fiction-Writers-Second-Yourself/dp/0060545690
|
|
#
?
Jan 15, 2023 12:58
|
|
|
Leng posted:Some really good advice Megazver posted:Even more good advice. Thank you very much for the advice! Leng's post was especially eye-opening as was Megazver's link to writing the perfect scene. It's definitely got me thinking about this stuff more as I go through my draft, especially this idea of motivation-reaction units, though I do question whether everything in a story needs to consist of these kinds of abstractions. Nevertheless it seems like a useful rule-of-thumb to keep in mind. Thank you both for the perspective, and especially to Leng's effort post that is helping me understand a little more about how I can approach this question. Although to Leng's point about my story not seeming to be idea driven, it actually is kind of high concept, but that doesn't mean that I can't work those scenebuilding suggestions in anyway.
|
|
#
?
Jan 15, 2023 23:40
|
|
|
Don't learn prose from Brandon Sanderson imo
|
|
#
?
Jan 16, 2023 00:07
|
|
|
General Battuta posted:Don't learn prose from Brandon Sanderson imo This is the same reaction my friend who works at Tor had when I told him I was watching Sanderson's worldbuilding lectures, but he wouldn't elaborate on why (I haven't read any of his stuff)
|
|
#
?
Jan 16, 2023 00:09
|
|
|
Well I think reading his stuff would show why. I'm confident there are aspects of his work that fit well with some people (he does have a big audience) but I cannot imagine prose being one of them.
|
|
#
?
Jan 16, 2023 00:16
|
|
|
He's excellent at structure and constructing stories in the broad sense but his prose is at best workmanlike. It is accessible. Sanderson knows his writing style sort of becomes invisible to the reader and that's both out of habit and by design. He experiments with different narrative voices in some of his most recent releases but the actual craft of how he assembles words, sounds, and feelings is not itself particularly exciting. It works but it is not a high bar to aspire to.
|
|
#
?
Jan 16, 2023 00:20
|
|
|
Quite a lot of readers genuinely don't really care about prose, or can't tell good from bad. There's no real way to talk about it without sounding like a terrible snob, though. But look how many people read and enjoy Dan Brown. I'm fussy as hell when it comes to prose.
|
|
#
?
Jan 16, 2023 00:23
|
|
|
HopperUK posted:Quite a lot of readers genuinely don't really care about prose, or can't tell good from bad. There's no real way to talk about it without sounding like a terrible snob, though. But look how many people read and enjoy Dan Brown. I'm fussy as hell when it comes to prose. Cf: the expanse
|
|
#
?
Jan 16, 2023 00:35
|
|
|
it feels more like prose is how you get judged by people who talk about and sell books and if your target audience is "people who read a lot of books" prose will matter a lot more than mass market appeal stuff.
|
|
#
?
Jan 16, 2023 00:36
|
|
|
Sanderson's prose is kind of on the flat, clunky side even for normie fantasy dorks who just want to read about hot elves and dragons. That said, his lecture series doesn't really have a "prose" lecture. He talks about technical things like viewpoint etc and says "look, fancy prose isn't my strong suit, I just try to write it simple to minimize the damage". The advice in his videos was pretty sensible, IMO.
|
|
#
?
Jan 16, 2023 00:41
|
|
|
General Battuta posted:Don't is the more accurate sentiment I think. It's a weakness in his writing that he is cognizant of and not high on his priorities. (He recently hired a full time editor to polish up his prose.) Megazver posted:That said, his lecture series doesn't really have a "prose" lecture. He talks about technical things like viewpoint etc and says "look, fancy prose isn't my strong suit, I just try to write it simple to minimize the damage". The advice in his videos was pretty sensible, IMO. Put it this way: Sanderson delivers better lectures than he writes prose. The concepts and frameworks he presents are very helpful as basic building blocks. But point taken. For a more in-depth breakdown from an author with great prose and who has already given us solid advice in this thread, read this: https://www.sethdickinson.com/2015/02/26/lets-hurt-sentences/ I refer to this time and time again and especially before I do line edits. It was one of the first things I read where I had that light bulb moment of "oh, this is what everybody's talking about when they're talking about prose being important".
|
|
#
?
Jan 16, 2023 06:33
|
|
|
Huh I was prepared to cringe but that's actually not bad.
|
|
#
?
Jan 16, 2023 15:36
|
|
|
Leng posted:
This is very helpful. I'm working on a scene for a worldbuilding class right now, and the prose isn't the point, but I'd like to present something that won't make me feel like crap to see read out loud. change my name fucked around with this message at 17:36 on Jan 16, 2023 |
|
#
?
Jan 16, 2023 17:32
|
|
|
magic cactus posted:I'm submitting to some arts grant thing using an excerpt of a novel I'm working on, and I kind of realize I don't really know how to revise my work properly. I'm usually a "one draft and done" kind of guy but with this I really want to put my best foot forward and polish up the writing and mechanics. Are there some writer-goon approved resources for how to edit/revise a fiction piece? I'm familiar with stuff like story coherency, I'm more after polishing at a sentence/language level. For instance I notice that despite my best efforts I keep doing the beginner thing of like: I think other goons have given pretty good advice, but here's some thoughts on the process of revising. Try leaving the story a while before you do that polish, to help you see it from a new angle. As a rule of thumb, you'll probably want to shorten your draft as you revise it by cutting and rephrasing. Having a particular goal in mind helps - something more specific than "make this prose better", maybe "check there's no spelling/grammar mistakes" or "improve characterisation". Read it out loud as you go - this will help you spot clunky bits and try out improvements. Improve your grammar and vocabulary. Pay attention to what words imply as well as what they state - think about connotations and sounds as much as denotations and meanings. More specifically, about characters: make sure that what you've written reflects your idea of them and makes sense in context. I recently read a pseudo-medieval fantasy in which the hero discovered that the king was a traitor to the country, which makes no sense if the country is the king's possession and only means anything in a modern state. Also, pay attention to what sensual information the characters receive and when they get it. For instance, your sample paragraph implies that she only grabs the grating after she opens her eyes; that she doesn't notice the humming until after she stands up; and that she doesn't see anything until after she stands up. Also, "knuckles turning white" sounds odd to me - isn't it usually pretty much instantaneous? Maybe you could rearrange it along the lines of: quote:As the force gripped her and the world darkened, she grabbed desperately for something, anything to keep her safe. She caught cold metal - a grating? - and desperately pulled herself to it as she passed out... The idea is that she feels and hears before opening her eyes, and once she does, it's the immediate detail (her fingers), then something further away (the computers, and then the acceleration couch, but still just single images), and then she looks around and realises exactly where she is. Hopefully I've made it clear what she's thinking. Good luck getting that sweet grant  !
|
|
#
?
Jan 17, 2023 15:39
|
|
|
magic cactus posted:Which yeah, this is pretty embarrassing especially since I've been at this a while. I'd like to figure out how to get better at sentence construction (inb4 read write crit repeat) so that my prose doesn't seem so... clunky. I'm not really big into poetry and I definitely don't think that people writing novels need to focus on word choices to the degree of poets, but internalizing some of that like, "okay let me work out what the overall vibe of what i'm saying here is" instinct from poetry can only help at make prose do more gooder. Wungus fucked around with this message at 23:33 on Jan 19, 2023 |
|
#
?
Jan 19, 2023 14:36
|
|
|
There's a good old Intro to Poetry thing a goonpoet made, where they compare a couple selections of well-regarded poetry and a couple poems written by the posters on the TV Tropes forums. It gets into how important word choice is to poetry, and I agree that it's something novelists should at least know about. Also, short stories! They're the middle ground between poetry and novels, because you can get away with a lot more solely through strength of voice. Ray Bradbury's a pretty prolific short story writer and that's where I got my start reading for the sake of improving my writing, but any writer that strikes your fancy will probably work. An extra benefit of short stories, similar to poems, is that because they're short, there's a lot of variety and you'll be able to see the author trying different hings. And if you don't know where to go for short stories, find a short story anthology/compilation at the library, read 'em, and follow up on any of the authors that pique your interest. When I go to the library for book runs I like to check the new arrivals for short story collections. I don't get through all of them before I have to bring them back, but reading some is better than reading none.
|
|
#
?
Jan 19, 2023 21:41
|
|
|
https://twitter.com/AmericanGwyn/status/1613154023707738119
|
|
|
#
?
Jan 27, 2023 21:57
|
|
|
Pictured: An excerpt of prose that would never in a million years get past a modern publishing-house editor if they didn't already know Cormac McCarthy wrote it.
|
|
#
?
Jan 27, 2023 22:23
|
|
|
Eric the Mauve posted:Pictured: An excerpt of prose that would never in a million years get past a modern publishing-house editor if they didn't already know Cormac McCarthy wrote it. Corm&c mc&rthy
|
|
#
?
Jan 27, 2023 22:45
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 25, 2024 13:59 |
|
|
i just wish the man would use a drat comma
|
|
#
?
Jan 27, 2023 23:06
|
|