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Hello everybody! I posted a few questions in the question thread and got some nice answers, did some more work on my current project and wanted to post about it because I think it's actually really funny in a laugh-at-my-past-self way...and also my current self for the idiocy of the idea itself. I don't know if that's actually a super common story because I don't hang with many creative types (I'm a Chemist in academia), so sorry if you've heard this a thousand times before. When I was 16, I started to write what we would now call fanfiction, but I didn't know the term back then. It was for Diablo 2, a game I was obsessed with for a long time, and I spent a lot of my early internet days on a German internet forum dedicated to discuss everything possible about the game. I wanted to write something anyway for a long time and thought it would be a good exercise to start with a simple but compelling idea: what if the Necromancer's Golem could think and develop its own personality? I just started writing, very soon had like 10 one-page chapters, and decided gently caress it, I'll post this on the creative subforum of the forum I mentioned. People surprisingly didn't hate it, so I continued, and, well...it got a little out of hand. I had some lulls in motivation as my life changed obviously drastically from when I was 16, and I changed a great deal myself as well, but it kept being and on-again-off-again hobby for me, as the forum experienced the upheaval of Diablo 3 coming out (which everyone of the conservative old guard of course hated), and the user base dwindled, so naturally my readership as well, not that it was THAT many people to begin with. Hard to tell, honestly. Some chapters would go uncommented, some would get three people saying they loved it, nothing making big waves but every comment meant a lot to me, so whenever I didn't write for months I felt a little worse and worse because I had SOMEONE wait for an update, then I'd sit down and write five more chapters eventually. Those started to become longer as well, as I stopped following the game's honestly really dumb story to a tee and molded, rearranged and outright cut the setpieces to fit the story I actually wanted to tell: the self-actualization of the Golem, his long, desparate fight to admit his own humanity to himself, and the eventual realization that he had long become the hero of his own story, with his Necromancer Master (and by that point, friend) losing sight of the actual important things. I almost quit in the game's fourth act which is gameplaywise pretty cool as a no-nonsense trip into Hell itself to punch Diablo in the face in his own home, but provides an incredibly bad backdrop for the story I wanted to tell. After probably two years or even more in limbo there I managed to punch through, reach the final act and finally got to reach the ending I had been building up in my head for a literal decade, because I was 26 when I finished it. I was really, really happy with myself that I could finish the stupid thing; of course, by that point I realized how idiotic the entire undertaking was (you know, the whole "actual fanfiction" thing), but I needed to prove to myself that I could reach the end I wanted, and by God, I did. It's been three years since then and I can't help it, I want to tell the story again, on my own terms, in my own world, and I have started building that world. I know where I'm going, I know the major events, I "just" need to rewrite everything with a new, original backdrop. Apart from my desire probably being stupid (and therefore funny) to begin with, seeing as I'm a loving married Postdoc now who has better things to do than rewrite ancient fanfiction, the truly funny thing for me at least is to read the poo poo I wrote back then. Because I didn't ever read back what I wrote, not even for a single editing pass, just typed it up and online it went. So it's been over 10 years for the first chapters and I never actually read them to begin with - it's a really weird experience. And I think it'd be funny to share. Anyone care to read about that? Posting about it would increase my motivation to do it, so it's a very selfish question, I am well aware!
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Dec 4, 2018 13:58
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I was debating if an own thread would be worth it, so it's great to hear it confirmed as a good idea unprompted from you  . I'll probably give it some time because I'm not writing anything yet, but maybe I will in fact start it "early" if I decide that the creative process itself is interesting enough to "document"? I'll think about it. To add more detail:lofi posted:As a sort of 'here's what I wrote, here's my thinking on it, here's what it looks like after an edit'? I'd be up for reading that, I like to see other people's thinking process when they create. It'd probably make most sense in its own thread, if you plan on doing the whole thing. As for the Remaster: this could eventually get published obviously, as I'm making it my own, but NOW I have the problem of thinking it a mixture between 50 Shades of Grey (which started as Twilight Fanfiction) and the "Draw it again" meme  . I'm still making it - but that's where my self-deprecative comments are coming from.All that aside: current state is that my world "mythology" is pretty much finished (around 10 pages of freeflow ideas, don't want to go overboard), I even drew a very shoddy map already to make sure the broad travel between "Acts" makes sense, I'm working on names for people and making sure the story outline has its major points set. For that, I'm re-reading the old stuff to extract ideas that might be worth keeping while laughing at some poo poo I thought cool or sensible back then. You know what? I'm gonna give you an example, just to see if that even works at all to convey what I'm doing. Now, the old stuff is in German; I've decided to rewrite in English after a short discussion in the Question thread. If I'm doing comparisons, I'll just translate the original as true to source as possible, keeping all clumsiness intact. But for this one, you have to appreciate the very original: quote:Durch die Wüste wandern weiter wir, während weiter wandern auch meine Gedanken. It's crazy - I don't remember most of this, because I wrote it over 10 years ago and never reread it. But I remember very clearly agonizing over this particular garbage sentence, pondering if the alliteration was worth breaking the grammar, if I could allow myself this stylistic ~flourish~, if I could actually be so arrogant to call myself an "author", because "authors" are ALLOWED to break the rules!!! Good on past me: actually wondering if I was good enough to go for it Bad on past me: not coming to the correct conclusion and going for it Message to learn for now: obviously, both the idea of breaking grammar for a stylistic thing and the idea of alliterations being worth anything are laughable, but there is one glimmer of a good idea in there: this was the first sentence of a chapter, and I tried to always, always start every single chapter with something special. And this is the only reason why I even wanted to make this particular sentence anything but, well, a normal sentence amongst thousands of others. And you know what? I think that's a good reason. Chapters should start "special", set the scene while drawing the reader in, making them not regret turning the page even though they wanted to sleep half an hour ago and starting a new chapter regardless. I will keep doing this. But maybe a little more...refined. How about this: "Ceaselessly we wander through the desert, though the steady motion of my feet betrays how wildly my thoughts race." (because they WERE racing in the next sentences, so the original wander - wander juxtaposition didn't even make sense!) Or to try and keep the pairing, if I were to go for a more "can't stop mulling over the poo poo that happened last chapter" vibe: "For hours without pause we keep wandering the sands, and like the dunes just seem to repeat themselves forever, the same thoughts plague my mind over and over." Simply Simon fucked around with this message at 23:15 on Dec 4, 2018 |
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Dec 4, 2018 20:50
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dreadmojo posted:They're both fairly fusty and over complicated sentences in English, without the attractively rumpy dump feel they have in German it seems to me. Try reading them aloud, I'd recommend simplifying them a bit. Let's see for both. "Ceaselessly we wander through the desert, though the steady motion of my feet betrays how wildly my thoughts race." -> "The desert seems an endless path before us, like the one already passed behind. My feet move steady in unchanging rhythm, while inside thoughts race, a chaotic competition with no winner." Less poetic and probably more in line with my USUAL style (but it's not a cool chapter opener!!!!!): "The desert we traversed seems endless, what part of it remains ahead as well. I keep a steady rhythm as I walk, but inside, my mind is a chaotic mess of thoughts." "For hours without pause we keep wandering the sands, and like the dunes just seem to repeat themselves forever, the same thoughts plague my mind over and over." -> "For hours on the dunes, we go up and down and up again, they seem repeating. And in my mind, the same thoughts come up, and down and up again."
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Dec 4, 2018 23:34
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I do be a wordy boy. It's a bad time for this writing exercise, as I'll head to bed in ten minutes and am probably not taking it as seriously as I should. I think I'll stop the impromptu finger warming* here, keep the advice in good mind and do more actual work on the project itself. Once I got something going, I will probably start my own thread and talk about how it was, how it will be, and how it is right now (probably crap because first draft). Exciting! And less words! One final try though because it IS fun: "The neverending desert will claim our lives, a normal man might ponder. And yet, for hours my thoughts were unrelated to our journey." *it really is just practice, there is no classical desert in the new version. EDIT: Oh hey I didn't see your post, dreadmojo. Own thread is for sure what will happen instead of me taking up more space here, I appreciate the "intro" a lot, though! And thanks for the tweak of what I wrote so far, I like it and it's a good compromise between "actual prose" (what the end product will be) and "poetic intro" (what I want the chapter to start with). Gives me hope that the idea will work! Simply Simon fucked around with this message at 00:01 on Dec 5, 2018 |
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Dec 4, 2018 23:58
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sebmojo posted:e: also if you want to get further into it then fiction advice or your own thread would probably be a better place, this is general arts chitchat
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Dec 26, 2018 23:21
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Have you tried anonymous yelling on twitter?
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Jan 19, 2019 12:35
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Feb 16, 2019 11:11
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I think zombies and stakes have a similar possible solution: shift of focus. You can start by just having the zombies be the problem, then that is "solved", but the next problem becomes wanting to cure the disease somehow or prevent it from spreading for good, and then you have a conflict between someone who thinks they can recover the afflicted's humanity, and others who just want to eradicate all zombies, etc. A lot of post-apoc stuff (and zombies count) goes from surviving the event to rebuilding and the hows and whats of that. It doesn't have to stay at the "actually there is an even BIGGER apocalypse" phase.
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Apr 25, 2019 12:22
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Bit hard to get transmission by being bitten when "getting swallowed whole" is more likely Also, how are human zombies threatening when Kaiju are around? Also, what does the zombie thing add, were they not mindless monsters before? You COULD make something out of zombie Kaiju blood infection humans and turning them into slaves of the not-zombie Kaiju and the entire thing was an engineered ruse But that's a very different from story.
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Apr 25, 2019 12:53
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lofi posted:I was joking with the zombie kaiju, I think they're so opposite that they'd work against each other's strengths - fear of the mindless horde vs fear of the single overwhelming entity. I'm never a big fan of 'add more stuff' with monsters, I think simple is better. Mad monster libs writing prompt! Nanomashine...mummies?
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Apr 25, 2019 14:03
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Get into the dome you scaredy cats
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May 14, 2019 19:54
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| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 03:24 |
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then don't write bad
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May 14, 2019 20:04
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