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chitoryu12 posted:I'm referencing one of the most famous early cyberpunk novels in a quasi-cyberpunk book that's structured around 80s references. This isn't hard. The other dude's multicolored sky opening was better because it actually set up a vivid image of the world, the false world of more primary concern to the character, than yours did. quote:Because more detail about Wade's daily life in the stacks is coming in the next chapter. This is following the same rough structure where it opens with a quasi-flashback to 5 years ago to the Hunt beginning, with the second chapter returning to the main story of 2095 after the basics of the Hunt have been established. If you don't need the details about the character's daily life until later, don't bring them in until later. As a few people have already said, if his life in the OASIS is more important to him, start the story inside it. quote:Not only is that not how the text is meant to be read, I preemptively answered the question about that paragraph when I posted the sample: it's showing the irrelevancy of the details of Halliday's death to Wade at the time by putting them on the same dramatic level as the weather that day. If someone reads something wrong, that's on you as the writer. Your aim, when you get misread like that, is to figure out how to correct that impression by making your intentions clearer in your draft. This is why explaining what you meant is discouraged vs. shutting up, redrafting, and reposting your work because that's where you need to be doing your speaking here. Asking for clarification, of why someone thought what they did, is fine, but don't do it like this. Take a long break before responding to criticism that goads you. quote:The virtual classroom isn't meant to be a satirical image. Maybe it should be. A little self-awareness can only make this lovely story world better, like Paul Verhoven did to Starship Troopers. quote:One of the worst parts of the original is that it assumes the readers are idiots who need to have every single detail about OASIS, the current state of the world, and a full biography of Wade Watts and James Halliday explained in multiple chapter-long info dumps occasionally interrupted by a few sentences of story. The solution is not to go the total opposite though, explaining nothing. What you're doing right now is fanfic, which leans heavily on the original to make sense. If you're out to write a better novel than RPO, you have to pretend you're starting with a reader from scratch. The trick is to balance small bits of exposition with relevant details. How are you going to do that? How about you first decide who your narrator is telling the story to. You've already started with first person, and you need to think about why beyond "but that's how Earnest Cline chose to tell it" because he loving sucks. It's not too late to change at this point because good first person is hard compared to limited third. A first person narrator has to have a distinctive voice, filled with opinions and musings and a bit of bullshit artistry, otherwise it falls flat. Who would Wade be telling this story to? Is he writing it for posterity or to entertain his grandkids or what? Is he telling it as someone wiser after the fact? That decision is going to affect not only the tone you tell it in, but how much your fictional audience is expected to know. Choosing an audience that isn't already inside that world means he has to make concessions to them, therefore giving you a reason to furnish the actual reader with details they need. On the other hand, telling it in third person means you can tell the reader exactly what they need to know when they need to know it without all the literary acrobatics, which is why it's the preferred POV for genre writers and learning ones too. Amatuerish first person suuuuuucks. quote:After your last "contributions" to the thread, your reading of the text is so bad that I'm pretty sure it's intentional. If your thread is going to survive in CC, you need to get better at taking people's criticism even when it's not delivered nicely. BoTL may be "the most ignored user the Book Barn" but he actually took the time to look at what you'd written and give you criticism and all you did was whinge and backtalk, which does not go down well here. I'm trying to be helpful by saying stop that. People are only going to want to honestly help you if you keep your cool.
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Apr 19, 2018 04:19
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chitoryu12 posted:I've done another draft of this, trying to tweak it some more. I'm still not really sure on an in media res intro, but I'm trying to flesh out the details and Wade's feelings here. Yeah, it still doesn't work. There are structural problems like describing the stacks before they're relevant and all that, but the main problem is you wrote a lot of description of something we don't give a poo poo about. Emo Wade isn't automatically more sympathetic than enthusiastic-ubernerd Wade. We have no reason to give a poo poo about Halliday's ridiculous will video (and since it was a will, why the hell does it show his corpse in the coffin already when you wrote the video as taking place at the moment of his brain death? Why, if Halliday lives in his own fantasy world, does that fantasy include his own sad withered corpse? lol). Sham bam bamina! posted:I think the issue here is that chitoryu12 is construing "prose" as sentence-to-sentence style and word choice. To chitoryu12: That is not what people have been talking about. His next question is going to be, "Then what are you talking about?" Is it any clearer if we use the term voice? It's essentially this: Mel Mudkiper posted:Here's my advice. Spend today as your vision of Wade. Become a method actor. Go through your daily experiences in the perspective of this person as you envision them. How does Wade eat breakfast? Does wade listen to music when he commutes? How does Wade react when he gets stuck behind a red light because the car in front of him went too slowly through the intersection. For a 1st person perspective to work as a literary device, the person whose mind you are inhabiting must be plausible AS A PERSON. If you cannot spend a whole day as this person without feeling exhausted, or finding it tedious, your readers will also find it exhausting and tedious. If there are massive gaps where you are not sure how Wade would react to daily life, it means your vision of Wade is fundamentally incomplete. Again, this ties to point of view as well, which is the first thing you need to think about, because you're just ignoring it as something to be questioned and carefully chosen, instead writing on autopilot trying to match Cline's garbage pov—and not doing much better at it. This relates to choosing your prose style. Who is the Wade telling the story vs. Wade in the story? If he's looking back at himself, he's allowed to make judgements on his past behaviour, admit the will video is cheesy, and so on. Why does he feel the need to tell the story in the first place? To answer that, you need a clear picture of who Wade is at the end of all this—how he judges his addiction to the Oasis and egg hunt after going through it is allowed to show though, since you're telling it in the past tense. What fictional audience is he writing for? If you don't feel up to answering those questions (even though they will help you write the story), then switch to a nice safe third person and let your own judgement of Wade inform the voice. Mel's writing sample is already more interesting because I can tell he actually considered these things before he started. Also the whole argument about the prose not mattering is loving stupic when the whole point of this exercise is for the OP to get better at writing. If that's not the goal here, maybe this thread should be moved out of CC—to GBS.
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Apr 19, 2018 20:25
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chitoryu12 posted:But the important part about the arc is that it's an arc. Even if we assume that Wade is telling this story from the future to us, it begins with him at the low point that he rises up from. The reader doesn't need to be told at the very beginning "This is where I am now, here's the tale of how I got here." If the story begins with its ultimate message and gives the reader knowledge of how things are going to end, all the character development is simply taken for granted. I feel that the journey would be less interesting for a completely new reader if they already knew where they were going. If this is idea you got out of me saying allow a wiser Wade's opinions to color how he tells his story, lol. It's like the only writing tool you know how to use is a hammer, and when someone hands you a screwdriver, instead of trying to figure out how this new tool works, you complain that it's a lovely hammer. Also I said you need to know where the arc ends. I didn't say, "tell the reader the end on page one." It's called foreshadowing, which is so much more than just sticking a Chekov's in gun somewhere—I'm talking about conveying it in the tone of the writing itself, but that's maybe not a skill you're ready to tackle yet. Ok. Stuporstar fucked around with this message at 16:35 on Apr 20, 2018 |
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Apr 19, 2018 23:30
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Instead of wasting my time on a big effortpost that's likely going to be ignored, I'll just link this: http://writersinthestormblog.com/2018/02/third-vs-first-person-narratives/ The biggest reason you need to switch to third person: Think about a better novel than RPO, like Snow Crash. It's written in third, which gives the novel a satirical edge your RPO rewrite desperately needs. You're not writing for the YA market, but rather goons who don't want to be stuck in some dumbass teenager's head. You don't yet have the chops to make that compelling, so get off the motorbike before you crash and learn how to ride a bicycle first.
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Apr 20, 2018 17:06
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Dave Syndrome posted:I thought for a long time that the first-person perspective was an integral part of the story, but strangely enough, it does seem to read a lot better in third person. It'll be interesting to see how well third person perspective holds up when it comes to scenes in which Wade's internal thought processes become central to the plot. chitoryu12 posted:If we're doing third person omniscient, we can still have his internal thought processes. It'll just be coming from the perspective of an omniscient narrator rather than Wade describing his own thoughts to the reader. Third person omniscient is when the narrator knows the thoughts of all the characters. You're allowed to reveal the viewpoint character's thoughts in third person limited. Limited means only what that character experiences, which includes direct thoughts. What you're both probably thinking of is what's called "camera eye" third person, where no internal thoughts or the narrator's judgments are allowed. That's type of third person is not recommended for this kind of novel. But if you, as the storyteller, want to get all judgey on the main character's rear end, the omnicient viewpoint is the one you're looking for.
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May 18, 2018 00:09
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