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Djeser posted:There was a series of writing advice tidbits I listened to a while back and one of the awkwardly-named bits was "leave gold coins for your readers to find" by which they meant always be offering some reason to keep going. If a chapter starts with a sheriff hanging out in a saloon being a generally fine fellow I might start to tune out. But if that chapter title is "Chapter Four, The Death of the Sheriff" now I've got something to pull me onward, because I know something's coming up. I know that he dies. But at the same time, I don't know how or why. I'm going to keep reading, because now I want to know if he gets into a duel with his prodigal son or if he gets vaporized by the laser eyes of the Egyptian mummy risen from the dead. I've been thinking about this kind of thing recently. There was a related discussion some pages back and someone posted a quote from (I think—I can't find it) Le Guin about plot not being a necessary element of an (engaging) story, which I think is transparently true. The more important nugget is "Why?" or "How?" I can only be sure what engages me as a reader and make some educated guesses about everyone else. Plot in writing is (experientially if not temporally) linear: every plot beat asks a free and obvious question about what happens next. And, for me, questions are at the heart of engagement. But they have to be questions that I care about answering. By the end of a story, I am (hopefully) invested enough to care if the bomb goes off; at the beginning, I don't care if the characters escape before they're made into reconstituted mash. So how do good authors maintain engagement before readers become invested? And I think the simple answer is that skilled authors set up and knock down questions constantly. While plot is one of the vehicles they use to do that, it's only the most obvious one. Interesting characters are littered with questions; wanting the answers is what makes them interesting. A great premise works because I want to know what you're going to do with it, not because basking in the radiance of a clever idea keeps me enraptured. Getting me to speculate about the relationship between two characters as they interact is going to keep me engaged much longer than just telling me that they're married and one of them is planning a divorce. Some questions are asked and answered over a paragraph or a few sentences, and some reach across an entire series, but if you aren't answering the smaller questions along the way I'm unlikely to trust you to answer the big ones later. The satisfaction of the answers has to be proportional to my investment in the question and how long I've been asking it. If you expect me to continue caring about a single question for your entire 10 book masterpiece, the revelation better be explosive.* If your entire story is riding on the Old Man Thompson reveal you've probably hosed up somewhere along the way, but if you're full steam ahead you can't afford to give the game up. If you've created a story with enough layers that your readers are engaged with questions beyond the surface level plot, then unmasking him in a chapter title may open some interesting doors. But then I could be totally full of poo poo  * Smart authors offer some nuggets along the way to keep expectations manageable, which has the additional benefit of fueling speculation and subtly changing the question over time.
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Aug 4, 2019 18:46
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Hungry posted:I think I might be able to add my own experience to this. I think you can too! I feel like it's easy to get caught in a trap of thinking about a story as an assemblage of plot points. Some authors can really pull off an incredible reveal, but it's hard to get right, and even the best reveal is going to carry your reader along for a relatively small portion of a novel. If all of your energy is going towards managing information so that you can surprise your reader on page 200, you can easily forget (or, as you note, sacrifice) pages 1-199. In The Sense of Style (which I broadly recommend though it has some rough spots), Stephen Pinker talks about the curse of knowledge being a barrier to clear writing because we're generally not very good at imagining what it would be like to not know what we know. That inability is, I think, part of what makes it difficult to actually put into practice what I'm talking about with questions; to really set up engaging questions that get answered in loops on different time-scales requires maintaining a fairly complex mental model throughout writing of what the reader knows, what they're likely to be curious about, what they can infer, and so on. That kind of information management for a big reveal is easier because you're likely to be keeping very tight control over the pieces (they're probably all on your outline, even) while the predicates for the kind of questions a reader might be engaged with regarding a particular character are likely to be a series of inferences that an engaged reader will build from small details across what might be hundreds of pages.
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Aug 7, 2019 14:24
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Stabbey_the_Clown posted:Almost every scene in a book should have a setback at the end. I think I generally disagree with this. It's one way of writing, but I find works very onenote when every (or even most) scenes end with a setback (particularly if that setback is used to set up some kind of cliffhanger). I took a scriptwriting class a few years ago; you'd write a short (5-10 page) script based on a prompt for every meeting, you'd pick some volunteers to read it, and then you'd get a critique.* I signed up because I thought it would be a great way to hone dialogue and information control (and it was), but between writing ~20 isolated scenes back-to-back with more-or-less immediate feedback and spending focused time critiquing a bunch of attempts from others, I arrived at some conclusions about what makes a scene engaging, at least for me.† A longer form work has additional constraints but it also has the benefit of leaning on what has come before to keep readers engaged. When I'm trying to decide if a scene is right, I look for two things:
That said, this bigperm posted:I have a problem with being too nice to my characters. All of my stories just sort of fade into this really boring situation where only good things are happening. * Which you were not allowed to engage with or respond to until everyone was done, thank god. † I promise this isn't a very elaborate way of saying "write more." Wallet fucked around with this message at 17:56 on Oct 5, 2019 |
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Oct 5, 2019 17:45
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Stabbey_the_Clown posted:Well obviously the scene has to accomplish something. No friggin' kidding. Stabbey_the_Clown posted:I posted the link because I didn't see the need to re-post in full something I posted just two weeks ago word-for-word. If you had followed the link (which I am not sure you did), I elaborated that there were two main types of scenes: proactive (Goal, Conflict, Setback (or Victory), and reactive (Reaction, Dilemma, Decision). "A turn, a significant success or setback" sounds like a proactive scene, and "a moment of catharsis or repression" sounds like a reactive scene. I did; it's a perfectly valid approach to writing, but it's pretty reductive to suggest that all valid/good/whatever stories are described by it. A scene can do many things that don't really fit into either of those molds, and without ending on a setback/victory/decision. "oh no, what's going to happen now?" isn't the only way to reel in an audience. quote:Disagree. Stories do need to have a driving conflict. The conflict doesn't have to be external, it could be internal, it could have both, and the scale of conflicts can vary... but there should be some kind of conflict in a story. A driving conflict isn't really the same as a story having some kind of conflict somewhere within it, but as Djeser points out stories are written that don't even have that. Some of them are good! Wallet fucked around with this message at 21:38 on Oct 5, 2019 |
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Oct 5, 2019 21:35
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sebmojo posted:surreptitious muffin self pubbed and made the point that you can go way more insane with big title fonts than you think you can. Try out some crazy ones, that looks a little bland In a similar vein on Amazon or wherever the cover is going to be pretty small when people are browsing, particularly if they're doing it on an e-reader or a phone. A quick/dirty edit, but I would consider pushing the intensity a little further and dropping the foreground the little person is standing on because it doesn't read super well when it's the size of a postage stamp:  Edit: Also independent of font-changes your title might pop a lot more if you invert it (could stylize it as white ash or something). 
Wallet fucked around with this message at 15:36 on Dec 20, 2019 |
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Dec 20, 2019 15:26
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DJ Dizzy posted:I would rather want to avoid any confusion with regards to single/plural. I thought about using 'they', but as a non-native english speaker, i've always been taught that it was plural. People pretend using singular they is some kind of shocking change to the language but it's not a new development. It's like 600 years old, it has just been traditionally used when the subject was indefinite. Eg: "Some rear end in a top hat backed their car into mine in the parking lot. They didn't leave a note."
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Feb 1, 2020 14:30
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Azza Bamboo posted:On the subject of it's, what's wrong with it's as a shortening of it has? I can't tell if this is a weird joke about people questioning extremely long standing usages or not. Merriam-Webster posted:Definition of it's
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Feb 3, 2020 15:05
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magic cactus posted:I've noticed in my writing that I tend to have a lot of paragraphs like this: Obviously I don't know what other context the reader has at this point but for example: magic cactus posted:in accordance with the traditions of old. You can also develop your characters by getting into the way they perform these actions. Are they just piling everything in the living room as quickly as they can, like a well-oiled machine that has done this a hundred times before, or are they lingering over the momentos before they stack them gently on a pire? If this is an important moment for a particular character, are they the one who throws the match or do they let someone else do it? Just my 2¢
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Mar 12, 2020 16:28
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take the moon posted:also if if I ever punked anyone for not writing w/ the pathetic excuse of they have a job im sorry lol. I have not written a word each day I've worked. Lit. Get home and pass out Only advice that applies whether you're trying to write on days you work or not: find ways to reduce the friction when you go to write. What works for you probably isn't what works for everyone else, but as others have noted I find it much easier to try to get in some writing before work rather than after. That used to be just talking to a recorder in my car on the way to work but that's kind of out the window right now. The biggest one for me when working on larger projects is that whenever I'm going to stop for the day I take five or ten minutes to write down the next thing that needs to be done and anything I've left dangling. It's much easier to get started when I don't have to figure out what I need to be doing first.
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May 26, 2020 01:43
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ultrachrist posted:I've been writing and submitting seriously for the past few years and started collecting personal rejections from fraction-of-a-percent acceptance lit mags (on duotrope). I just received another that was super detailed and encouraging (and from multiple people) but also maddening because I was so close. I've noticed a rejection trend across multiple stories and genres of 'writing not quite strong enough' or 'not smoothly written enough', which I am interpreting as meaning my sentence-level prose, like the actual craft, isn't there yet. I think a big part of my issue is I'm a lovely editor/rewriter. My rough drafts are far less rough than average, but they're still rough drafts and I don't spend enough time on them. Even then, while I feel confident pointing out the bad sentences, I don't necessarily have a grasp on which ones classify as 'not smooth enough'. I'm not sure what advice you're looking for. Some workshops (or classes with focused critique) are amazing and can really help you hone what you're doing (or not doing) and push you to grow in ways that are difficult to accomplish without outside feedback, and some of them are hot wet poo poo where you have to attempt to seriously critique absolute drivel and then politely ignore critiques from people you wouldn't let write the copy on a bag of dog food. A workshop (or a class with focused critique) is only going to be as good as the person running it and the people in it. The only way to find out which is which is to try them out. I would caution not to prejudge too much—some excellent writers are awful at giving good critique, and some mediocre writers are quite good at it. Wallet fucked around with this message at 15:28 on Jun 9, 2020 |
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Jun 9, 2020 15:25
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bessantj posted:So how do the people in this thread plan their stories? how long does it usually take? Any good tips? Thanks in advance for any answers. In contrast to most of the other folks who have posted about this so far, I'm very much on the planning/outlining side of things unless it's something very short. Like Doctor Zero said you should experiment with different approaches until you find what works for you, but for the sake of some contrast I basically just go through a bunch of refinement steps. Sorry for the  .I'm going to assume that you already have some kind of germinal idea if you're looking at planning. I'll usually ruminate on that until I think I know what kind of story I'll be telling (I'll find out later that I'm wrong). When that's developed enough that I think it's worth putting some time into, I start with an extremely loose outline—basically just a bulleted list of events for each PoV character. If there's a particular scene that was part of how I arrived at the idea that might have a bit more detail, but the entries are usually at most two sentences. I'm just paying attention to having a coherent series of events that I think is capable of being a compelling story for each major character. After the loose outline is in decent shape i'll sequence all of the bullet points together in a spreadsheet or a diagramming program (I've recently used draw.io); if there's multiple PoVs I color code each entry. Things will get reordered a bunch to make more sense or to create connections between what's going on for different characters and so on which is still very easy to do at this point. Here I'm mostly looking at the story working as a whole—are the characters and the events creating interesting contrasts? Do they intersect in satisfying ways? Does the whole thing hang together? My next step is to put some meat on the bones. If in the first step I had an entry that just said "Bob has a huge fight with his girlfriend and she leaves him" I now want to at least have some ideas recorded about why they're fighting and how Bob feels about it. I'm also looking at filling in all of the events between the other events that set them up or contextualize them or move characters into position between them. I'll start putting them into (very loose) chapters to cluster them together at this point. I'll then do another pass where I break those entries down into actual scenes, splitting some of my loose chapters in half and merging others. I'll write a few hundred words of outline for each scene often including some bits of dialogue which helps me figure out if a scene is going to work or if I need to rethink it. While I'm doing that I flag (in bold or bright red or whatever) every question that is going to be an impediment when it comes time to actually write it. If the characters are talking about the local bowling alley and it doesn't have a name, I need to figure one out and put it in there. If one of the characters has experience with basket weaving and it's going to become relevant I want that research done beforehand and the important bits written down somewhere. My final pass is answering all of those questions that I flagged previously and expanding things out into a scene that I feel ready to sit down and write. My final outline for any given scene will probably end up being somewhere between 250 and 1,000 words. Laid out that way it sounds very rigid (which I guess it is compared to winging it), but lots of things end up getting changed or reworked or added or removed causing other things to shift around them and so on. It's never too late to make major changes, it's just more work the further along you are when you do it. As far as how long it takes, that really depends on how smoothly it goes: sometimes you get near the end and realize something isn't working so you make some major changes and have to rewrite half of the outline, sometimes you do that more than once. Wallet fucked around with this message at 23:06 on Jun 16, 2020 |
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Jun 16, 2020 22:53
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ultrachrist posted:I read every day and I write almost every day. I do the thing where missing 1 day is OK but never 2 in a row. Given the content I'm guessing that all of the "she is" is for emphasis but for me it reads as unintentionally clumsy rather than intentionally emphatic. Outside of that it looks like it needs some general editing. In your original post about this you mentioned not knowing how to find the "bad" sentences that need work which seems more like an approach for copy editing than editing for style. What jumps out to me stylistically in the sample you posted is a lot of needless words that could be edited out and a few instances of sloppy/repetitive word choice.
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Jun 20, 2020 16:47
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"Don't use the passive voice for no reason" is decent advice—not using it at all is nonsensical. I think you can apply the same rule to adverbs.ultrachrist posted:Not completely following your last paragraph. To me, copyediting is finding typos or fixing tense. What I need to improve on is exactly what you described: clumsy/repetitive/unnecessary. Basically just that I don't think you need to be worried about bad sentences because the problems aren't really at the sentence level, they're at the word level. To give a concrete example of the quantity of words in here that aren't really doing any work for you (some comments in italics): quote:The first time it happens she is at a Or in a readable form (ignoring the she/Val issue): quote:The first time it happens she is at a happy hour sipping a martini that tastes like a corroded battery. She is surrounded by colleagues[:] Dave and Rahul are leaned forward listening to the new girl, Val, tell a story about her recent trip to Myanmar. The story is dull. [Val is presenting as beautiful today—][e]veryone is smiling. She is not smiling but her mask is. [M]aybe the story isn’t dull at all, and it only appears dull because [some] part of her brain has only just now flared out like a sad pink firework.
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Jun 21, 2020 02:30
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Shageletic posted:again props to the OP for posting their writing. Its a brave thing to do, esp here. Everyone is working by feel/sound. It's fine either way, to me.
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Jun 21, 2020 13:23
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ultrachrist posted:I see where you're going with this, but to me the end result feels sterilized. "so-called" sets up the tone of the story and also tells you the character isn't happy. "Or wait" further sets the tone and demonstrates a major theme in the story: the protagonist arguing with herself. Again, this isn't to say I'm using the right words or using them well, just what I am trying to convey. The story is dull, but everyone else seems interested. Protag speculates that this is because a) Dave and Rahul are thirsting after Val or b) her brain broke. I feel like that gets stripped out with the cut details. I edited it pretty aggressively, but that push back is exactly what you need to look for when doing it. The things that can get crossed out and not make you go "Hey, wait a second, I need that!" are the ones that are filler.
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Jun 22, 2020 12:54
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sebmojo posted:Sit in a cafe and write down how people speak to each other for an hour or so. Read some good literature books and notice how they do dialogue in them. People (generally) don't provide information they don't have to, and dialogue can feel extremely wooden when characters violate this. If someone's wife asks how their day was they aren't going to drop in a bunch of exposition about where they work and who they work with and what they're working on, they're just going to say "Fine" or "Francine is a bitch" or ignore the question entirely. Doctor Zero posted:This is tricky. It depends on how important the action is. It also really depends on point of view. If it's close to one of the characters then it can be helpful to think about their attention as a filter. When you're walking around in the world you aren't attending to everything around you, but when you're reading the author is deciding what you attend to. The attention itself can communicate a lot about an action. If you describe a character putting their hand on the doorknob, turning it, and pulling the door open that's going to read as the character opening the door in a very deliberate way as you've forced the reader's attention onto the mechanics of what is usually an autonomic action.
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Aug 24, 2020 15:00
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I think one of the clearest places to observe how the balance between short, medium, and long term plot setup/resolution can be handled well and poorly is in serialized TV shows that got cancelled after their first or second season. Some of them gently caress it up spectacularly and feel like a complete waste of time even if the seasons were good otherwise; others put out a single season that's entirely satisfying even if some things will never be resolved. Usually when there are abandoned series (in writing) that really piss people off it's because, in my opinion, the weight that has been put on long-term plot is totally out of proportion. Even if those series get finished they'll still have a ton of pissed off fans—if you spend a nine book epic setting up a burning question the answer has to be impossibly compelling to pay it off.
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Sep 16, 2020 18:13
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ultrachrist posted:Perhaps here it should be mentioned that the windows cannot be opened, not at all, not even after she chipped away the paint. For me there's nothing strictly wrong with this example but it isn't clear about when this is occuring, partially because I'm lacking context. The narrative voice is pulling me aside to tell me something, but I don't know if there's some kind of frame narrative/if the narrative voice is talking to me from the present. Thinking through it, assuming that these kinds of asides are usually in the present tense, the windows not being openable is basically stative so the tense there isn't an issue, but it's not clear if you're telling me: A) The windows aren't openable. She just chipped the paint away, but it didn't help. B) The windows aren't openable, even though some time in the past she had chipped all of the paint off of them. You could remove the ambiguity by either making it explicit that this isn't occurring now-ish (in whatever fashion you desire, just an example): No One posted:Perhaps here it should be mentioned that the windows cannot be opened, not at all, [even though she had once spent an afternoon chipping] away the paint. You could also remove the action entirely so this isn't an issue: No One posted:Perhaps here it should be mentioned that the windows cannot be opened, not at all, [even after all of their paint had chipped away]. ultrachrist posted:Her name is Stacey, though she often goes as Stace and for a stretch her dating profile listed her name as Thrace, that is until a pencil-dicked classical history PhD quizzed her on the global origins of such a name, which promptly led to the end of that. This one doesn't really have the same ambiguity problem because of "for a stretch" and the causal link between that stretch ending and the PhD being a dick. I do find it a little muddy to parse but I think that's partially because of how many clauses there are and partially because "which promptly led to the end of that" is a little weird when you've already prefaced the explanation with "until". I find this less confusing: No One posted:Her name is Stacey, though she often goes as Stace. For a stretch her dating profile [had] listed her name as Thrace until a pencil-dicked classical history PhD quizzed her on the global origins of such a name. Or this: No One posted:Her name is Stacey, though she often goes as Stace and for a stretch her dating profile listed her name as Thrace until a pencil-dicked classical history PhD [quizzing] her on the global origins of such a name [put an end to] that. Wallet fucked around with this message at 17:51 on Oct 9, 2020 |
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Oct 9, 2020 17:43
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queserasera posted:Can anyone suggest a bare-bones personal wiki program that's still being maintained and updated? I've been using Notebook but I'm worried it's going to crash and burn one of these days. Specifically I want something no-frills and doesn't need internet to work. Is WikidPad the only solution here? I've been using MoinMoin—I'm not sure I'd describe it as bare-bones but it does the job easily enough and it was very simple to set up to run locally. I mostly picked it from among the available options because it's maintained and because I'm comfortable with Python so it has been easy to make modifications or add little features I wanted/needed. Leng posted:I don't personally use one, I just use Evernote or a Google Doc. Dr. Kloctopussy posted:I've not talked to any writers who use a wiki program (though it seems like a pretty useful idea, actually), so I'm not sure this is the best place to ask. Wallet fucked around with this message at 14:57 on Nov 6, 2020 |
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Nov 6, 2020 14:54
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Leng posted:Enjoy the process and don't judge the output. As long as you've dedicated the time to writing and you follow through with spending that time, it's good, regardless of the actual word count or the words. I'm on board with this generally, but I also think it's really helpful to think about why you're sitting there staring at notes. When you don't have huge blocks of time to write in, small efficiencies can make a big difference. If you're sitting there because you need a good think then it's all good: that's time you're going to have to put in at some point or another, though you may be able to fit it into the rest of your life by keeping a list of open questions so that you can mull them over when you're in the shower or taking a drive or whatever. On the other hand, I find that if I'm staring at the screen it's usually for one of two reasons, both of which I can mitigate. Often it's because I just don't know where to start, so I poke around the project looking for a place to jump in. Frightening portions of my time can be devoured by context switching instead of accomplishing anything if I'm not careful. Setting aside the last ten or so minutes of any session writing down what I would be doing next if I weren't stopping makes a big difference for me. If I leave myself a brain-dump I can to pick up right where I left off instead of spending half an hour re-reading everything I worked on last time or poking around looking for the best thing to do next. The other thing that trips me up is getting caught in dependency hell: To write this scene I need to draft up a new character, but to draft up the character I have to research some obscure topic, but before I research that topic I need to make some decisions because if I change my mind that research will have no purpose, etc, etc. I try to close as many of those doors as I possibly can before I sit down to write something: any small characters I am going to need have names and I have made the necessary decisions about characterization, any research I need to do for the scene is already done, any big open questions about how I'm going to approach things I've already got an answer ready for (even if I end up being wrong, at least I have somewhere to start). If I sit down to write and I don't have all of that done, I jump directly into solving those issues instead of trying to write around them or find a better prepared scene to dig into. You might be running into totally different issues and my solutions might only work for me, but being conscious of your process is definitely worth it and time invested in figuring out better ways to do things is often paid back many times over.
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Nov 21, 2020 17:29
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Azza Bamboo posted:I noticed a few punctuation guides in the OP, but the ones I could read without shelling out money seemed to require some level of prerequisite knowledge. Are any of the books listed good for a rube who doesn't know what an independent clause is or what makes a sentence complete? I'm not asking to be told by you what those things are, just wondering if any of those guides start from the beginning instead of the middle. At the minute I'm just writing based on what sense I've made of the thing's I've read, but criticism always comes back with "this letter should not be capitalised because (some voodoo poo poo)" What you're doing is pretty much normal. Writing and editing are different things. From what I recall back when I studied developmental linguistics, people's ability to produce "correct" prose is strongly tied to how much they read as adolescents. Learning the rules in a more formal way doesn't seem to be very effective at changing people's ability to feel out what is correct when writing, though it can make you a better editor. For poo poo like capitalization rules I'd honestly suggest just looking things up as you go. You may not remember everything you look up but you'll probably remember that you don't remember the specific rule next time you run into a situation where it's relevant. For independent clauses and complete sentences you probably want to learn some formal syntax. Learning to diagram sentences is, in my opinion, a much better way to start understanding that than trying to read some kind of reference volume. I don't have a good resource on hand but the linguistics thread might. They aren't going to tell you anything about punctuation, though, that's its own thing. Wallet fucked around with this message at 14:14 on Jan 25, 2021 |
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Jan 25, 2021 14:10
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Coquito Ergo Sum posted:Does anyone have a good source or have advice on which punctuation I'm supposed to use when I'm expounding upon information presented in narration? I always second guess whether I'm supposed to use a hyphen or a semicolon, or just start a new sentence altogether. Would really need a more specific example of what you mean.
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Feb 10, 2021 18:07
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ultrachrist posted:I'd be curious if there was formal rules myself. There are formal rules but none of those examples violate them (except for the space after the —). In your example my inclination is the same as Azza's, towards the colon, but all of them are acceptable and all of them read a little differently to me. A semi-colon is saying that these are two separate but related statements; it's the most neutral. With a colon you're emphasizing the first clause by presenting the second clause as an illustration of the first. An em dash is placing syntactic emphasis on the second clause as you're presenting it as an interruption/parenthetical. 
Wallet fucked around with this message at 23:05 on Feb 10, 2021 |
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Feb 10, 2021 23:01
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ultrachrist posted:Sounds like the goon consensus is they can all be used with slightly different meanings. You should post a specific example. That's why I asked for an example at the beginning. It's very context dependent. I've been assuming this is in narration but the different ways to punctuate the two clauses accomplish different things in dialogue because they communicate something about the thought process of the speaker. I might use a colon for someone telling a story that they have told before because this pair of clauses would be premeditated/rehearsed. If it was improvisational I'd be more likely to use a period or a dash depending on the character's level of energy. I might use a semicolon if the speaker was more polished. Obviously you can just rewrite to use a coordinating conjunction, and in some cases that's likely the right choice, but as a universal solution you're foreclosing on a lot of texture that is otherwise available to you.
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Feb 11, 2021 18:15
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Djeser posted:I have in fact used comma splices frequently for effect! There's nothing wrong with breaking rules, though it's helpful to know what they are so that you're doing so intentionally. Some of them are stupid as poo poo and you should break them without thinking about it, others are important to keep in mind because breaking them without thought can make things ambiguous or confusing when you don't intend them to be. Djeser posted:Your eighth grade English teacher isn't going to be grading your manuscript, you don't have to go through and fix all the prepositions your sentences end on. This one was never a "real" rule, and it definitely isn't one now.
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Feb 11, 2021 19:51
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Azza Bamboo posted:There's a rule that you don't start your sentences with things like and or but. And everyone knows that sucks. This is also not a rule.
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Feb 12, 2021 00:33
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Gin_Rummy posted:Is there a good resource/general advice for writing dialogue that doesn't sound like a bunch of middle schoolers or insanely corny? I feel like I have most of the skills and tools needed to craft a satisfying enough world, characters, story, etc... but I think I get too hung up on how the dialogue sounds to actually churn out the rest of the prose in between. Pay attention to dialogue when you're reading or watching T.V./movies and, like everything else, practice. It's probably difficult to find right now given the state of the world but if you can find a play/script writing group or class listening to other people read your dialogue out loud makes it a lot easier to hone in on where you're doing well and where you're loving up.
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Mar 4, 2021 15:18
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bessantj posted:Are the sentences "He made outlandish claims" and "He made extraordinary claims" interchangeable? Basically no two (different) sentences are interchangeable if you're paying enough attention.
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Jun 2, 2021 23:31
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PiCroft posted:I guess I’m asking if these sound contrived, sensible or if I’m overthinking it? I’ve been trying to avoid the trap of constantly editing as I write but these questions are tormenting me and I finally decided I’d like some outside perspectives. Have you tried outlining it? I know some people just aren't into it, but for me the point of iteratively outlining something is that it avoids the problem you're having. By starting with a very high level outline and iteratively increasing the level of detail I can waste the smallest amount of time when I inevitably need/want to make changes. It also helps keep the number of decisions being made manageable because with each iteration I'm (with the occasional exception) locking in the decisions being made so I can build on them and don't have to think about them anymore. I think both of the ideas you posted are perfectly workable, but I wouldn't want to be trying to solving any issues with them while I'm trying to write them.
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Jun 17, 2021 14:17
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Black Griffon posted:I'm trying out Scrivener and it seems pretty neat, especially with the option to copy text in BBcode. I encountered a pretty lovely problem with the copy output though, which is best I like scrivener well enough, but not everything in it really works correctly—there's a lot of features that seem half baked just kind of jammed in there. It doesn't seem to be encoding special characters at all when copying to BBcode and it doesn't seem to have any BBcode specific settings.
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Jun 21, 2021 00:44
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CitizenKeen posted:Any advice, or books that have helped? I know, just write, etc. But I don't know how to convert "cool idea for setting with interesting protagonist" into "story". I mostly think about things in terms of what's driving the audience to keep reading. Compelling books have been written where nothing resembling a traditional plot occurs: what keeps a reader turning the next page? In my head they're all different kinds of questions that a reader wants an answer to. They can be about what happens next, who a character is, why something is the way it is, how something works, and on and on. No matter how you want to carry the audience along, doing it well requires controlling the flow of information. That's simpler when the question you're trying to build is "what happens next?" because chronology can do a lot of the work for you, but I think it's a useful way to think about it if you want to drive a reader with something less obvious, and I think you do, because "what happens next?" isn't a compelling question until you've pulled me far enough in that I care about who what happens next is going to happen to. If you have a cool idea for a setting and that's what you want to work off of I'd start by thinking about what would make that setting interesting to someone if you were not allowed to describe it to them. Figure out what you can use as the tip of the iceberg: some small detail of the setting or its ramifications that you can use to start getting a reader to ask questions. Think about what those questions are, then figure out which one has the most interesting answer and how you can give that answer while setting up a new series of questions. You'll want to do the same thing with at least your primary characters as well, and if the questions are any good they'll lead you to something for your characters to do while you're answering them.
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Jun 22, 2021 01:54
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General Battuta posted:Whatever works for you is the right pick, but Scrivener is what I use. I'm also using Scrivener lately for the actual writing part, mostly because I find the organizational features for scenes/chapters/etc, moving them around, searching through them, and marking how far along in the process they are fairly useful. At one point I was using Google Docs but over 20k words or so it slows to a crawl for me. I don't particularly like Scrivener's feature set for managing information (character notes and references and so on) so I also run a local Wiki (using MoinMoin because it's easy to modify and I'm comfortable with Python) for that part.
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Jul 24, 2021 15:43
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General Battuta posted:My scenes are too long. My chapters are too long. My manuscript is too long. Help. How do I structure scenes so I can get in and get out quickly??? Writing a summary of your novel isn't really going to help you on the scene level I wouldn't think. Figuring out how to cut things down is going to depend on why your scenes are so long. Are you trying to serve too many purposes with a single scene? Are you getting bogged down in details? Do your conversations peter out instead of ramping up? Are there entire scenes in there the story can live without? For getting in late I look for various things right at the beginning of the scene that help me organize what's going on in my head as a writer when I'm outlining but are entirely unnecessary on the page. There's two broad categories of poo poo I find myself aggressively cutting when I sit down to actually write the scene. One is repeated information: There's a lot of informational book-keeping that happens between people. If something exciting happens to Joe and I want Sally to react to it Joe has to tell Sally all about it first, but there's usually no reason for that to happen on the page. If my characters are explaining things to each other that the reader already knows or can figure out for themselves, it goes in the bin. The other is unnecessary context: We don't need to know how Joe got to Sally's house, got out of his car, locked it, rang the doorbell, waited for her to answer. Unless something extremely compelling is occurring in Joe's head that I can't communicate while something more interesting is going on, no one needs to read it. If I want Sally to open the door in a negligee my first inclination might be to start the scene there, but I can just as easily start the scene in the middle of their conversation with Sally yelling at Joe for being a loving idiot while she's half naked and let the reader fill in the blanks. One of these things is more interesting than the other. Sometimes I notice a scene dragging in the middle, which is an excellent sign that the scene is poorly considered or it has gone on too long. When that happens, I either cut the first half out and start after the boring poo poo in the middle, or I split it in two with the middle bit cut out. For getting out early I usually just look for places where the scene is no longer escalating. If I find one I cut back to the peak and put a bow on it.
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Aug 21, 2021 13:39
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ultrachrist posted:Workshopped a story recently that received really good feedback and I'm in the process of painstakingly editing it. The story is first person literary fiction in the past tense. There's points where a sentence describes something in the past tense (what happened that day, in the past) but then makes a global statement in the present tense (what happens always). Not sure if there is a technical name for it, but to give you an idea (not from the story), something like: The weather was bad. It always rains in July. The usage of 'where' in the original isn't formal but it also doesn't need to be. That said, while I recognize that the comma after 'humidity' in the original version might reflect your intended syncopation it also makes it less clear if what comes after is an expansion on the idea of mid-August humidity or if it's an addendum to your description of the earth. It's significantly clearer (to me) if you remove it. 'Where/when' in the past tense version feels, to me, wrong, because it's signalling something that no longer happens. In the original sentence it's part of an (informal) speech pattern signalling that you've gone from telling me something about the earth to expanding on what mid-August humidity is like. In the past-tense sentence that distinction is no longer present and the 'where/when' is now out of place. Without the where/when it doesn't bother me but I also then read it as an expansion of your description of the earth. White Chocolate posted:In my opinion and the two above me will attest to this, always write to be as clear as possible. [...] I'm not sure I've ever enjoyed a work of fiction that dedicated itself to both of these things and I'm not sure something can be accurately described as literary fiction (which is what ultrachrist called it) if it does both of these things. The bible is only literature if you aren't a literalist. Wallet fucked around with this message at 00:40 on Sep 16, 2021 |
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Sep 16, 2021 00:29
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ultrachrist posted:Honestly, I would like to be able to say "Past tense is simpler" and just do it. But those rewritten examples just feel off to me. I think it might be because of what Wallet is saying: it makes it feel as if those things happened in the past and don't happen anymore. Also probably the same reason kaom added "always" to the first sentence. I just meant that it's signalling that you're about to expand on what mid-August humidity is but you no longer do because the structure makes it read like you're just additionally describing the state of the earth, and the where/when is just a misplaced word and the tense is wonky. Commas can get a little weird when you're using them for both rhythm and syntax at the same time. I think you could also get away with a colon instead of where. quote:The earth labored in the clutch of mid-August humidity: the air drips, shade offers no balm, and the thermometer reads the same at noon as it does at midnight. Further afield you could also reformulate so the second bit doesn't need commas. quote:The earth labored in the clutch of mid-August humidity, where shade offers no balm in the dripping air and the thermometer reads the same at noon as it does at midnight.
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Sep 16, 2021 04:15
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ultrachrist posted:For context, since the first two examples are in the first two paragraphs, here's the beginning of the story. The (1) is a footnote. In context the sentence strikes me as a little abstract considering the character is experiencing the same thing the earth is. I've got ~100,000 words I'm supposed to be editing but it's easier to gently caress around with stuff someone else wrote so for funsies and/or procrastination (hope you don't mind): quote:The air dripped. I trudged through the woods with a 2 x 4 x 96 whitewood stud slung across my shoulders. The earth labored beside me in the clutch of mid-August. The darkesta shade offers no balm; the thermometer reads the same at noon as it does at midnight. Sweat washed me—soiled me—pooled in the soft hollows of my body. My neck throbbed under the pressure of the stud digging into my skin.bc When the pain reached my predetermined threshold(1) I switched positions, the stud tucked beneath my right arm with my left crossed over my body to keep it steady. The wood rubbed against my inner wrist, tempting hungry welts to rise from my skin and meet it. When the threshold was met again I slung the stud back over my shoulders. a. Connects night and shade, maybe. b. The structure of this turns the stud digging and the neck throbbing into two separate things, as if the stud wasn't digging into him before but it is now, but the next sentence suggests the opposite. c. 'Dense' is a confusing descriptor for pressure. I would kind of follow if it was supposed to be setting up a contrast with the ambient pressure of the humid air but that isn't present. (Quick/dirty ex. "Sweat washed me—soiled me—wrung by the air's weight to pool in the soft hollows of my body.") d. The ranch line is vexatious. This was the cleanest version I could come up with. e. I don't think you need to tell us that this is sentimental; the way the path is described in relation to youth etc already communicates the idea, and it does it better. e. "shorter as the crow flies" feels like an errant detail. It's like you're setting up a contrast (e.g. "shorter as the crow flies, which I can't") but it gets dropped and "shorter as the crow flies" just hangs around anyway.
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Sep 18, 2021 20:18
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ultrachrist posted:1. I see you moved the footnote. Someone else in the workshop had suggested this too since it's the first occurrence of the threshold, but to me it feels like the reader doesn't have enough understanding of what's happening until they finish that sentence. The footnote references the switches, which aren't described at the moment of the link in the main text. ultrachrist posted:2/b. Not following. I'm reading both sentences as describing almost the same thing with yours putting emphasis on the throbbing. ultrachrist posted:3/e. "as the crow flies" is an idiom. It means a direct line between two points, as opposed to a road or path that might wind around objects. I'm playing a little fast and loose with this since he's not walking a literal direct line, just a shorter route than the road. Agree it's probably not essential though animals and idioms (and animal idioms) figure heavily in the story. Wallet fucked around with this message at 14:04 on Sep 19, 2021 |
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Sep 19, 2021 13:51
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Junpei posted:-Don't want the books to be too 'weeby' (Solution: Avoid honorifics like -kun, -san, -senpai, -sensei, etc. as well as stuff like "oni-chan" and the like) I'm not entirely clear on what the question is, but I guess base it on actual historical research into the mythology you want to base it on instead of working from modern interpretations? I don't think you can really work in that space without inviting the association/comparison.
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Nov 5, 2021 16:28
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REMEMBER SPONGE MONKEYS posted:I don’t know, isn’t it better to struggle to keep up with your characters (as indicative of effusive ideas for them) than to struggle where to drag them next? I know I’m interpreting a bit, but I’d almost rather too much than too little (yes, I can see how this is ironic and/or fitting). Stuporstar posted:Action beats are overrated. Yeah, a few are nice to set the tone, but writing every action a character does after every line of dialogue because you’re avoiding the word “said” or whatever—that’s a stylistic choice. It’s not the one and only way to write
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Dec 31, 2021 17:24
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| # ¿ Apr 25, 2024 05:20 |
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I don't really focus much on the measurement. It might ultimately provide useful insight, but some scenes I end up rewriting six times while other scenes arrive fully formed in draft two and ten revisions later remain unchanged spare the addition of three dialogue tags. Trying to compare across them seems futile. I'd love to see a writing program that keeps a record of how many words I type in a session, instead of how many words the document ends up having in it.Staggy posted:I also get a lot of value out of going back and reading over my various "fix it" lists. For each draft I write, I have a "fix it" list - a separate document which is just a bulletpoint list of things to fix broken down by chapter. As I'm writing the draft, I populate this with things like "Don't like the dialogue in chapter 3 between mark and sue - go back and fix" or "Is that a realistic weight for a horse?" or "I'm pretty sure I used this name before - make sure it's not confusing". It might even be "Don't need character X - wrote chapters 4 onwards as if they don't exist, go back and remove from chapters 1-3". This is useful at the time, as it allows you to focus on writing that draft without constantly making changes on changes on changes. I do a lot of this kind of thing. I particularly try to flag things that will create a distraction while writing, like "this character doesn't have a name" or "I need to research horse weight" or whatever, and then I go through all of those at once so that when I'm writing I don't have to run off and pick a name or read about horses. Leng posted:All I know right now is if we measure by net WPH, then on average, I draft twice as fast as I revise. I've also found that I draft much faster than I revise. I've been able to speed up revision quite a lot by changing my approach to revision to be closer to my approach to drafting. For both of them I work in a bunch of narrowly focused iterative passes. That might mean that I do 10+ distinct passes on each scene before it's "done" (and then three or four or six more editing passes). It helps me avoid wasting time because I can identify structural issues before fixing them requires lots of rewriting, or I can identify dialogue issues before there's a bunch of tagging and description etc. Any issues I notice while doing a pass that are outside of the scope of that pass I just flag up and move on instead of getting bogged down trying to fix them. I've also found that I have been able to make things move along faster by keeping pages (on a local wiki) with writing reference information that's been gathered/collated to my taste, stuff like:
There's also some setting information I find useful to have organized for quick reference:
It takes some work to gather and organize all of that stuff to be useful, but it saves the much larger amount of time I would spend trying to figure out individual instances of those things if I was working on them one by one. Wallet fucked around with this message at 15:29 on Jan 11, 2022 |
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Jan 11, 2022 15:23
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