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I have a question: I've noticed in my writing that I tend to have a lot of paragraphs like this: quote:It was over in minutes. When they had confirmed the old woman no longer had a sign of life they shut off the engine and placed the key face up on the dashboard, taking any photos and mementos, emptying out the ashtray and shattering the mirrors and lights in accordance with the traditions of old. This done, they took a bottle of bleach from the laundry room and poured it into the engine to ensure that the car died with its driver. They took the spare cans of gasoline in the garage and set about dousing the house with it, piling all photographs and reminders into a makeshift pyre in the center of the living room. When they were finished they threw a match into it and watched the house consume itself from a safe distance. Which is the classic telling instead of showing style. My question is, I know these things are first-drafty as all hell and usually come out in editing, but whatever I do, these drat things sneak back in. Is there some way to catch these as they form? (outside of "write more" obviously). For instance this is kind of a load bearing scene in my current draft (the main character is part of an automobile based nomadic cult of sorts and his family are burning down his paternal grandmother's home after she dies because they believe a permanent dwelling place is a kind of sin), but none of this really gets conveyed (outside of the phrase "in accordance with the traditions of old"), and the next scene is the father basically doing an expodump as the house burns. I guess to clarify, are there some questions that I might ask myself to go "deeper" into a scene? Part of the problem is that I really struggle with characterization. Most of my characters feel "flat" compared to what I have pictured in my head, so as a result I kind of just picture the scene with some vague person going through the motions of the scene in my head which results in these kinds of "paint-by-numbers" scenes in my stories.
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Mar 12, 2020 05:42
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sebmojo posted:That's not telling v showing, imo. Reads fine to me, it's a bit formal and cool which suits the events: it's like a procedures manual. As suggested above, you could drop in a bit of errant emotion to spice it up. I suppose I chose a poor example from my own work considering this is the one scene where this style actually kind of works, but the emotion thing is a good idea. Thanks for the advice!
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Mar 12, 2020 06:05
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Wallet posted:Just my 2¢ Safety Biscuits posted:General advice: This is excellent advice, and having gone over my latest draft asking the questions you guys recommended I ask myself really has helped me see what is missing from my writing (in this draft at least). Thank you very much!
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Mar 14, 2020 06:52
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Does anyone have any ideas for writing a character without an "inner life", so to speak? I'm working on a story and I want to incorporate the idea of philosophical zombie. The philosophical zombie is a kind of thought experiment in philosophy of mind that proposes someone who acts as though they were conscious and has inner experience when really they do not. So for instance from the perspective of a different, fully conscious character, if this zombie character were to (say) drink a beer and say something like "wow this beer tastes good!" the other characters would believe them, since they don't know (or maybe some of them do, I haven't quite figured that part out yet) that this character has no inner experience of their own. But from the perspective of the zombie character, there would be... nothing, I guess. One way I've thought of doing this is via something like using italics for the things the character thinks they feel as a way to distinguish zombie thoughts from real thoughts, but this feels.... clunky and hard to justify in the story. If it helps, this is supposed to be tied to the withdrawl of a powerful and illegal hallucinogen in the story. The one thing I'm trying to avoid is leaning too much on stuff like "he felt slimy alien tentacles probing his mind" kind of phrasing. I was thinking of modeling it on something like Alzheimer's disease, where you have neurological degradation that leads to a kind of phenomenological unmooring of temporal experience, but I'm not sure how to get that across because this character can't really have access to their inner experience (because they don't, strictly speaking, have any), and I don't really want to give some long expo-dump-by-proxy via another character (like say the medical officer on a ship saying something like "interesting it appears brain area x and y are degrading due to drug use, it looks like he's in effect turning into a philosophical zombie, which is...." So yeah, I'm at a bit of an impasse here. Ideas appreciated.
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May 8, 2020 19:08
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General Battuta posted:Have you seen American Psycho? I have yeah, but it's been a while and I'm not seeing the connection. What were you thinking?
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May 8, 2020 19:22
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take the moon posted:lol I'm writing a pzombie too. great minds!!!! At the risk of starting a derail, how do you figure there would be tells? You'd need a character who would be able to know for sure that the zombie in question has no inner experience. I'm genuinely curious what your solution would look like. Because if i recall my grad classes correctly, a p-zombie should theoretically not have any knowledge of being a zombie. So anything it says or does would just be seen as normal human action, except if we were able to see inside it's head or "access its experience" in some manner to see that it does not have any kind of inner experience. So yeah, I'm genuinely curious what your tells would be. The best I can think of is lack of emotion, since emotion (on some readings) is both public and private experience. So maybe on some reading sociopaths like Bateman might have zombie-adjacent characteristics but (I guess?) textually speaking he can't be a zombie because the audience has some level of epistemic access to his thoughts. (I'd flip your idea on its head and say that the fact that there is an "I" in bateman's monologue is a tell that he is not a zombie, unless I'm misreading and that is your thesis, in which case sorry, dumb mistake on my part.)
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May 8, 2020 20:48
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Yeah I mean I have no idea how to do this either so I'm just spitballing. I suppose the problem is that if you want to go "full p-zombie" so to speak, then the audience has nothing to hold on to. At best what you have is a character with no inner monologue who just does things. You couldn't even really do some kind of traditional "mind is in a fog" kind of thing because there would be nothing for the character to introspect on. I suppose textually speaking you could do something like dropping indexicals ("I" "he" and so on) as the condition gets worse, but that's it really.
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May 8, 2020 21:06
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D-Pad posted:Stephen King has a collection of short stories that came out maybe 3-5? years ago and one of them deals with a guy who invents a device that detects consciousness and to his horror discovers that the vast majority of people are pzombies. I'm sorry I can't remember the name of the book or story, but I would suggest tracking that down to give you some ideas. I'll look for it, thanks!
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May 8, 2020 22:25
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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!
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Jan 15, 2023 03:58
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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!
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Jan 15, 2023 07:26
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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.
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Jan 15, 2023 23:40
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I have kind of a weird question: So this novel that I'm working is kind of high concept. One of the ideas I'm playing with is the idea of noise in text. In universe, this is represented by a mysterious sound my protagonists encounter. Now, I want to represent this textually in some way. A friend of mine who is Armenian recommended I use the Armenian script, as it has interesting graphetic properties. I've been doing that so far for the draft I'm working on. Additionally, some stuff I'm concerned about with this work is highlighting the conceptual-tracking (or lack thereof) that happens when you translate a sentence from one language to another and back again, so I've been bouncing my written work through google translate for Armenian and having my friend double check the translation, and then translating that into English. It's an interesting technique that creates interesting versions of what is ostensibly the same sentence. Recently however I've begun to worry that I might not be ethically correct in using this technique. My friend speaks Armenian as a second language, and I don't speak it at all. Am I accidentally doing some kind of linguistic colonialism? I'll admit that a big draw for using this language is the way it looks (purely aesthetically speaking) on the page. But I also do combine English sentences, machine-translated Armenian sentences, and my friends original translations, frequently in one paragraph. I'm not trying to use the Armenian script to "other" the Armenian population or draw false equivalencies between other language speakers and cosmic horrors. I'm more trying to explore the concept of noise on a variety of levels both in fiction and in text. I could do a conlang thing I suppose, but the point of all the translation tennis is to highlight conceptual similarity or dis-similarity across languages, and I feel like conlangs just aren't going to have the depth that real languages have. Wonder if the thread has any thoughts about it. I feel a bit dumb, but this quite literally just occurred to me.
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Jan 31, 2023 05:49
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HopperUK posted:I don't think you should use a real language to suggest alienness. But I'm not suggesting alieness, I'm using it to suggest the sonic concept of noise at a textual level. The graphetic equivalent of say, a distorted wave form or feedback, because one of the questions I'm trying to explore is how to write that kind of sound without just mashing together onomatopoeia. But the second point is that I'm using different translation techniques to highlight the conceptual loss that often times happens during translation of a source language to English and back again. If I had written something like "oh yeah these aliens are called <armenian word> and they're unknowable cosmic horrors" then yeah, you'd be right. But to the best of my ability I'm explicitly trying not to do so. I do see the concern however. That's kind of why I'm on the fence.
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Jan 31, 2023 06:06
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Gaius Marius posted:It's an incredibly stupid concern. Let me try and clarify: 1). The script, graphetically speaking represents noise in the text, but also in the fiction. That is to say, the reader will know the characters have encountered the sound in fiction by the script showing up in the text itself 2). An in-fictional consequence of the characters being exposed to this noise is conceptual fuzziness, represented by the translation tennis which shows up in the text itself as cue for concept loss or change or whatever 3). I'm not sure about what level of diligence because I'm still writing the story itself, and playing around with how to write "noise" in an interesting way. That's why I posed the question to the community re: does this work if I'm trying to do my due diligence to avoid the Lovecraft trap of foreigners = scary, because I've been thinking about this subject and I'm not sure what to think. Hopefully this clears things up.
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Jan 31, 2023 06:24
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Admiralty Flag posted:Let me challenge you with your own admission: you're using the Armenian alphabet because you like the way it looks. What are your feelings about people who get random phrases in Chinese or Japanese tattooed on themselves because they look cool? Well see, that's the question. Originally, my Armenian friend was the person who suggested I use the language. So I did. Now after thinking about it, I don't know if I'm in the right to do so, but I also recognize that I have tunnel-vision here. The "random Chinese phrases" objection is one I've been thinking about as well. My answer to that is I'm explicitly not slapping words together willy-nilly ala "this character says peace but actually it means something entirely different." I'm taking care to make whatever words I use be as accurate as I can get them, and taking care to have them make sense in the text itself. However I recognize that I am not a professional translator and neither is my friend, who speaks this language at home, albeit as a second language and not at native level. The problem with the conlang route is that I'm not sure that it conveys the relevant information in sufficient depth. Real human languages have a conceptual depth that most conlangs (with the exception of Tolkien, maybe Magma) don't seem to have. Tolkien, being a linguist, is the exception. You can learn several dialects of elvish as fully featured languages. I personally don't have the linguistic background to be able to whip up such a feature-rich language, I imagine most people don't. The tl;dr as to why I don't whip up my own conlang is that I don't think I can make it as feature rich as an actual spoken and written language, and thus won't be able to adequately illustrate the concept loss that comes with translation from a source language to another target language.
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Jan 31, 2023 06:46
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Gaius Marius posted:Even discarding that I don't think the way your going about it is going to have the intended effect. People when reading are searching for coherence, seeing something they cannot make sense of doesn't prompt aesthetic consideration so much as cause the eyes to glide to the next coherent text. See that is actually something I'm interested in, the fact that the readers search for coherence when confronted with something that doesn't make sense textually. That's the kind of thing I'm interested in exploring through the text of my story. I actually did try Wingdings in an earlier draft (and the Zalgo "spooky text") or whatever. I settled on Armenian because graphetically it resembles how I tend to perceive text in my dreams, and dream experiences are a pretty strong example of conceptual "fuzziness" or "weirdness." Also Admiralty Flag posted:Edit because you posted while I was writing: re your point 1: This seems like it might be extremely distracting to the reader unless it's done very well, and I'm not sure what that would look like. Not saying you can't pull it off, but maybe workshop a chapter or two featuring it to neutral audiences and see what they say Yeah I've been thinking a lot about this point too. It's difficult for sure, and frankly I don't know if I have the skill to do it, but I haven't read much else exploring these issues in the way I want( if you know of anything fictional that works with those ideas, please let me know, I'd love to have more references.) If I get laughed out of the Feedback thread in CC when I post or whatever that's fine, but I'd rather give it a shot. magic cactus fucked around with this message at 07:07 on Jan 31, 2023 |
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Jan 31, 2023 06:53
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Sailor Viy posted:fwiw I think it's a cool concept. The other posters are probably right that you shouldn't use a real language as a signifier for "weirdness", but it's hard to say for sure without seeing an excerpt. So I actually haven't implemented this idea yet beyond a brief proof-of-concept, because I want to get the actual story down before I start experimenting, but here's a short snippet The source is my writing ---> armenian ----> machine translation "excerpt from draft" posted:
Obviously, it's quick and dirty but it should get the idea across. magic cactus fucked around with this message at 19:34 on Jan 31, 2023 |
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Jan 31, 2023 18:58
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Stuporstar posted:Yeah, I don’t think you should use a living language’s script for that. I'm still sort of playing around with it as a concept, but the idea is the translated text will follow the script. The script is more of a textual marker for the noise in-fiction. A consequence of being exposed to this noise in-fiction is conceptual decoherence or fuzziness, represented in-text by the machine translation. If you're a fan of noise/drone/shoegaze at all, a big part of what is personally motivating me to write this is I want to try and capture the essence of how those genres sound to me in text, beyond just onomatopoeia and description. You can think of the script as like, a jolt of feedback you weren't expecting. It's kind of jarring, and the machine translation is sort of like a delay chorus pedal or something, where it's the same "note" (text), with a different "sound" (words, sentence structure etc.) the analogy breaks down because sound and text are different things fundamentally, but my medium of choice is writing and not music so I'm trying to figure out how to capture the texture of those genres through the medium I can sort of work with. I've been playing around with different techniques to capture those properties. Right now I'm messing around with just running my textual corpus through a cut-up program and doing some Burroughs style stuff, but this feels a little too artificial, too much noise. Using the Armenian script (until I thought about the ethical implications) was a good compromise because it was connected with the machine translation that follows. Having taken some time to think about it though, I think you're right and it's better to just invent a font/script to cover the machine translation. I don't think I actually need to use Armenian itself. I can create an empty script that should get the job done (I mean, I don't know anything about font creation per se, but it's possible.) magic cactus fucked around with this message at 20:57 on Jan 31, 2023 |
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Jan 31, 2023 20:48
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HopperUK posted:Honestly reading that paragraph I just looked at the text I couldn't read long enough to know I couldn't read it and skipped to the next word I *could* read. It could have been anything. Yeah that's kind of what I'm getting from the thread feedback, it doesn't have to be Armenian script, just scriptlike. Like trying to read in a dream. Thanks very much for the feedback and resultant course correction, I would have ended up with egg on my face.
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Jan 31, 2023 21:00
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Stuporstar posted:I think you could get the right effect with a zalgo-like script so the reader could see the distorted English underneath the strange squiggles. It would make the reader try to read the off-translation through the noise rather than just skimming over a huge chunk of unreadable script. You’d have to learn to make a font or commission one, but it’d be worth the extra effort. I don't know if you read the previous posts but I mentioned trying Zalgo and Wingdings as alternatives. My problem with Zalgo is it's been over-used in internet creepypastas and such, plus as I was experimenting with it I set some sliders high enough to capture the effect I wanted it ended up breaking my word file unfortunately. Wingdings felt too far away from "real" language. It captured the "weirdness" or "noise" or "glitches" fine, but only as a surface aesthetic, which is not exactly what I'm trying to do. But maybe the graphitic qualities of Armenian script (not the script, just the way it is written) with the addition of Zalgo is the way to go here. It's a starting point at least, thank you for the suggestion!
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Jan 31, 2023 21:19
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Okua posted:Maybe it's a bit out there, but it is possible to hire someone else to make a conlang for you. Look into the Language Creation Society. They can let you put up a post on their job board. I think I'm just going to go with creating a unique font for now, but it's a back pocket idea for sure.
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Feb 1, 2023 00:36
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I have a bit of a specific craft request. I've been reading through a collection of Beckett's short prose, and it's really struck me how much craft the guy puts into a single sentence. I'm wondering if there are any books or resources out there that adress craft at a sentence level. Less "How 2 Write Like Beckett" and more "how to treat sentences as a part of the craft of writing." Obligatory read more, write more etc.
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Feb 3, 2024 00:18
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Stuporstar posted:Ursula K LeGuin’s Steering the Craft only has a few chapters on sentence level writing, but it’s probably the closest I’ve read to what you’re looking for. Some of the best writing advice I’ve ever read in that book I'll take a look, thanks for the suggestion!
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Feb 3, 2024 11:26
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A Bunch of Really Good Posts posted:This is probably what you're looking for Thanks very much for all the recs, I will be checking these out post-haste!
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Feb 5, 2024 13:15
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Wungus posted:If you're not into poetry, try reading a bit of it and analyzing it. When it comes to deliberate sentence crafting and deliberate word choice, you can't really go past a good poem. I kind of prefer doing this to more strict texts on how to structure a sentence, because poems are often pretty deep in the wind about vibes, and I think if you're going to get deep into finding your own voice with how to structure a sentence, you can't go past seeing how poets do it. Or at least, I can't; I bounce off the more strict prescriptive text poo poo, but studying poems makes my brain sentences think more gooder. It's funny because the whole impetus for my previous post hinged on (finally) noticing the poetry of Beckett's prose. I think he might be the first writer where I've consciously tried to turn off the reflex of looking at a piece as a story, and instead just enjoy the writing at a sentence level. What does "Under the blind sky close with your own hands the eyes soon sockets, then quick into carrion not to mislead the crows," actually mean? No idea, but to me it feels strangely poetic. I'm not saying I want to write exactly like Beckett, but I do want to write something in this style from time to time to spice up my own work.
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Feb 5, 2024 22:45
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I've got a question for the thread. What do you do when a work just... isn't coming together in the way you envisioned? I'm not talking about something like a "happy accident" where some random tangent develops into something more interesting than what you had planned, more this idea of whatever voice or style you try for the piece just doesn't feel right for the work. I've been working on this book for the better part of four years off and on, but stylistically it's all over the place. One draft is a star trek style space opera. Another is a kind of lovecraftian style thing, another is just William Burrough's cutup worship. The problem is, none of these drafts are giving me that "click," that feeling of "yeah, this is good, we've got something here." I'm just trying to enjoy all the left hand turns and adjacent art these drafts have introduced me to (the Burroughs style draft got me interested in playing around with recordings of reading the text and spoken word in general,) but it's also a little frustrating because I'd like to finish at least one draft, but I can't seem to commit to a voice the whole way through, even though I have scenes and beats and the whole general plot written out. It's a bit like the work is actively fighting me. I guess my question is, should you roll with the punches, or is there a moment where you buckle down and think "right, do or die, a draft is getting finished." ? magic cactus fucked around with this message at 18:58 on Mar 30, 2024 |
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Mar 30, 2024 18:56
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