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madwhitesnake posted:Ooh, lore questions. Time to put on my best Pith is fantastic and everything after the first few paragraphs of the prologue has been consistently well written, kudos to you
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Apr 7, 2020 03:47
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Well that was certainly a PGtE chapter. I'm wondering if/how she's gonna walk this one back. Also Indrani is pissed as hell and this should be fun
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Apr 7, 2020 17:16
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Sampatrick posted:Pith is fantastic and everything after the first few paragraphs of the prologue has been consistently well written, kudos to you Hard agree, second goonserial I'll keep reading, right after Evey's Home for Thirsty Lesbians
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Apr 7, 2020 22:28
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It's nice that Cat is starting to directly confront how skewed/biased her perspective of heroes is. Like she mentioned in a recent chapter, her perspective is distorted by most of the villains she's known being very atypical. For every hero who is self-righteous, there's a villain who is a thrill-killing rapist or something. The recent Archer chapter was nice. It's good to see her finally beginning to tackle the influence Ranger's abusive upbringing had on her (and everyone raised in Refuge). Regarding the Roland-related chapter, it seems a little too obvious for Olivier to be Roland, but I think that kind of has to be the case since otherwise Kairos's "the lie at the core of who you are" comment doesn't make much sense. I'm curious about what circumstances will lead to him likely confiscating his brother's magic. Maybe his brother goes villain after the House of Light comes to punish his family for practicing sorcery.
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Apr 8, 2020 06:32
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I linked it in passing a few pages ago, but since asking here more directly doesn't seem to be as tacky as I thought it was, would anyone be willing to offer some direct feedback on my own web fic, The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere? It's a fantasy/mystery thing I've been working on for the past few months. It's about a class of novice healers that get invited to an organization trying to achieve immortality, and then bad stuff happens. It's not been super successful so far and I think I basically understand why, since it doesn't hit many of the appeal beats meant to bring in the big numbers - although I make some token efforts in that respect - but I can't escape the sense that it's awkward in a way that goes beyond that? It's kind of a frakenstein of various different concepts I've been throwing at a wall for the past few years, and though I feel satisfied with how its going, I wonder how it looks to people outside of my own brain. If you give it a shot and bounce off it, I'd appreciate knowing what bored you or put you off, and when exactly you stopped, even if it was right at the start. Alternatively, if anyone actually gets into it, then great! On a different note, I've ended up reading Pith more despite saying I wasn't going to and it probably being bad for me. More than any serial I've read, it's been really good at making me feel angry in a way that's really addictive. Even if I'm not sure I enjoy it in a conventional way, the balance of the brazen injustice and cruelty depicted in the narrative with the few moments of genuine catharsis is extremely effective at making you desperately want to keep going and see something change for the better, rather than getting dejected and giving up. It shows a lot of technical skill in plotting to be able to thread that needle, as well as a higher minded approach to writing. Most web-based stuff is very indulgent, for the writers comfort as much as the reader, so seeing one willing to subject the protagonist to such a sheer amount of "ugly" suffering is a novelty in of itself.
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Apr 8, 2020 17:06
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Ytlaya posted:Speaking of Pith, I'm caught up now and to be honest I'm starting to increasingly sympathize with the humdrums/Commonplace and feel like this society is in desperate need of some sort of check on the power of projectors. That being said, it's also my understanding that the world consists of enough super-powerful projectors that prioritizing the development of talented projectors is a key national security issue (since it seems like Tau being senile is a big problem). Maybe it's just the fact our primary viewpoint character is on the very bottom of the socioeconomic/class divide, but I'm predicting a collapse into French revolution-style civil uprising. Because holy poo poo this society you paint is a despicable place to live. Your very autonomy is at risk any time a projector wants to go on a joyride with your mind and body, with no recourse, legal or otherwise.
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Apr 8, 2020 17:21
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Gonna give pith a try over the weekend and my hopes are high that it’s good!
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Apr 8, 2020 18:36
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The comments to the recent PracGuide chapter are once against reminding me how dumb a significant portion of the web serial reading base is. A whole bunch of comments were upset and confused about Archer being violent towards Concoctor and having a history of bullying at Refuge. What story are these people even reading? This has literally always been a part of Archer's characterization, with Catherine thinking on multiple occasions about how she needs to address the dubious morality of Archer and Masego at some point. Archer has a whole "character arc" of needing to heal from Ranger's abusive upbringing and how that affected her own behavior and mentality.Boogle posted:Maybe it's just the fact our primary viewpoint character is on the very bottom of the socioeconomic/class divide, but I'm predicting a collapse into French revolution-style civil uprising. Because holy poo poo this society you paint is a despicable place to live. Your very autonomy is at risk any time a projector wants to go on a joyride with your mind and body, with no recourse, legal or otherwise. To be fair, there is recourse. IIRC it's mentioned that the punishment is quite severe for taking over someone's mind like that (or nudging non-projectors in general), though people can often avoid punishment by having the victims kill themselves. I believe it's also generally not legal to use projection in public, even though people obviously do that a lot. The one aspect of the society in Pith that is a little baffling to me is how all projectors other than the elite who get into the academy seem to have no other options. Our protagonist obviously would have died if she hadn't stolen the body, but even the ex-Epistocrat is literally just thrown out onto the street with most of their skills taken away. In a world where only 1/1000 can project and projection is such a powerful and useful ability (and apparently vital to national security due to the existence of powerful foreign projectors), you'd think that it wouldn't make sense to just squander most of that talent. At the very least, it seems like it should be easy to find lucrative employment. That being said, I can understand why the Epistocracy would want to clamp down on the development of projectors outside of their elite.
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Apr 8, 2020 19:17
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Yeah (Pith) I would say that most of the society in Pith doesn't really make any sense based on the information presented in the story. Even from the beginning of the story, the premise seemed a little bizarre. If projectors are so rare and valuable, why would Clementine not want Ana as part of her organization? Offer her a decent body, and you would get her loyalty incredibly easily. I think the aristocratic stuff actually makes quite a bit more sense than any of this; I'm also baffled at how there's just the one school for projectors instead of trying to get as many as possible. This is a fairly industrialized society, I don't understand how it could have such an old fashioned approach to war. The information is out there to study and become decent at projection without ever going to Paragon - the Paragon folks might be better but they literally cannot have a monopoly on access to projection. Idk, doesn't really detract that much from the story, but it does make for some bizarre background stuff.
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Apr 8, 2020 22:14
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There are too many people posting to respond to everyone concisely, but I wanted to say thank you so, so much to everyone who’s reading Pith and enjoying it! It means the world to me, and I hope the story continues to be worthy of your time and attention.Ytlaya posted:That being said, I can understand why the Epistocracy would want to clamp down on the development of projectors outside of their elite. It’s mostly this, but with some other details that haven’t been brought up yet. WRT this and the other worldbuilding points ie. Clementine, more Projection Schools, industrialized war, etc. I do have answers for them that should hopefully become clear later in the narrative. When those come up, you can decide whether or not they’re consistent/make sense. But they’re definitely valid points, and I appreciate it.
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Apr 8, 2020 23:50
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Sampatrick posted:Yeah (Pith) I would say that most of the society in Pith doesn't really make any sense based on the information presented in the story. Even from the beginning of the story, the premise seemed a little bizarre. If projectors are so rare and valuable, why would Clementine not want Ana as part of her organization? Offer her a decent body, and you would get her loyalty incredibly easily. I think the aristocratic stuff actually makes quite a bit more sense than any of this; I'm also baffled at how there's just the one school for projectors instead of trying to get as many as possible. This is a fairly industrialized society, I don't understand how it could have such an old fashioned approach to war. The information is out there to study and become decent at projection without ever going to Paragon - the Paragon folks might be better but they literally cannot have a monopoly on access to projection. Idk, doesn't really detract that much from the story, but it does make for some bizarre background stuff. While it doesn't completely explain things, I get the impression that a powerful projector is worth countless weaker ones. While we haven't had a chance to see them in action much, it seems like the "Scholars" are almost like demi-gods or something. Weaker projectors, and particularly physical-focused ones, don't seem to be that strong (compared with people with guns and what have you), and it seems like only the sort of elites who get into Paragon are capable of learning to do things like block bullets or project with enough strength/accuracy to accomplish much more than regular people. Ana is only as effective as she is because she apparently has a uniquely powerful ability to create realistic illusions. Effective projectors are also strongly limited by the fact that you need both great intrinsic projection ability and great scholarly talent to become a powerful projector. So you're talking about people who are simultaneously very gifted in two different areas, which is probably rare.
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Apr 9, 2020 00:48
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PoorWeather posted:I linked it in passing a few pages ago, but since asking here more directly doesn't seem to be as tacky as I thought it was, would anyone be willing to offer some direct feedback on my own web fic, The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere? It's a fantasy/mystery thing I've been working on for the past few months. It's about a class of novice healers that get invited to an organization trying to achieve immortality, and then bad stuff happens. Based on the story description, the closest web serial I've gotten into is Mother of Learning. I didn't bother trying Mother of Learning until it got recommended to me dozens of times, since I am skeptical of time travel as a story element and I don't particularly like anime high school plots. I do like D&D adventures, wizard schemes, and people having fun. When I finally gave MoL a shot, the character interactions were charming, and it kept my interest until the crazy stuff started up. When I look at Flower That Bloomed Nowhere, I see three personal red flags. 1. Not a huge fan of trauma-fests 2. Another school life story 3. Time travel can really mess up a story I started reading, but after some meta this-is-a-simulation chatter (where one person is trying to cut a bunch of corners, which is pissing off the other one) it was just one person narrating their life story to me in between wandering around an abandoned school they don't know where they ended up. Major problems with telling, not showing. I started skimming ahead, looking for character interactions that didn't involve two programmers sniping at each other. Then I got to two magic school students, and one was fumbling a joke about a demon summoner. At this point we were actually getting somewhere with characterization, and the main character joking about suicides and self-immolation probably ties into the themes represented by this immortality cult that they're going to end up visiting. But I hadn't really been hooked by anything, and I decided to let it go. I'm probably not the target audience for this. I bounced off of Worm and Pith really fast, even though they did a good job generating interesting and compelling characters/relationships in the beginning. But it definitely looks like you've put a lot of effort into developing a complex world, and I could see myself getting invested in a story about a backstabbing wizard academics if it led by establishing some interesting and likeable characters. I hope that helps!
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Apr 9, 2020 01:18
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avoraciopoctules posted:Based on the story description, the closest web serial I've gotten into is Mother of Learning. I didn't bother trying Mother of Learning until it got recommended to me dozens of times, since I am skeptical of time travel as a story element and I don't particularly like anime high school plots. I do like D&D adventures, wizard schemes, and people having fun. When I finally gave MoL a shot, the character interactions were charming, and it kept my interest until the crazy stuff started up. Thanks for making a pretty high effort reply. I'm sorry that you didn't like it much! A lot of the assumptions you're making about the story aren't really quite accurate (it's not really a school life, simulation, or even really a time travel story exactly) but I'm not surprised to see you make those conclusions considering the presentation and narrative signalling I did. When writing it - especially the early parts - I tried to lean hard into elements that might appeal to more archetypal royalroad readers in the hopes of getting people to give it a chance on that site, but I think the dissonance between those elements and the actual underlying structure and focus of the story, and often going about things in a roundabout way to make them play well together, ended up creating something that was awkward and maybe worse than the sum of its parts. This is sort of what I was afraid of; it all makes sense as an elegant perfect compromise that hits the right flags in my head, but to an average reader it's probably a bit disjointed and boring. I kind of want to gut the entire first four chapters - the story doesn't start "properly" until the second half of the 4th, which is where the plot actually kicks off - but it's hard to do that now that the story is already in motion and sort of depends on plot beats being where they are. I've been thinking of trying to direct readers to just start the story at that point and see how that effects their reactions, but there are a few elements that probably wouldn't make sense, so I'm uncertain how to approach it.
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Apr 9, 2020 04:04
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I'll give it a shot starting from later if you'd like an impression of what that's like. Should I start at chapter 4? Somewhere in it?
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Apr 9, 2020 04:16
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Tom Clancy is Dead posted:I'll give it a shot starting from later if you'd like an impression of what that's like. Should I start at chapter 4? Somewhere in it? Oh, thanks for offering! The point I'm referring to is after the narration break, at the line "Our veils were off again once..." but again, I have no idea how it will read starting from there, or if it will even be comprehensible.
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Apr 9, 2020 04:59
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If I'd just stumbled on the story organically I probably would have dropped the story as soon as I discovered that chapter 4 didn't follow directly on from chapter 3. If you cut away the framing device, the first three chapters are an okay bit of mystery and exploration (although too heavy on the expository thoughts). The problem is that the end of chapter 3 basically turns the whole thing into scooby doo, with the horror-mystery being resolved with a punchline. That could maybe be a good story, but it'd need some follow up to make it clear that that's what the story is trying to do. Chapter 4 seems like a much better introduction to the story. The prologuey stuff that we clearly aren't supposed to understand is tolerably short, and I thought the awkward overly long joke worked well as an introduction to the two characters, their relationship, and the world (which is clearly quite different from ours, but not confusingly so), and it made me laugh. It then jumps straight into some plot and while the hook isn't anything amazing, there's at least something there.
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Apr 9, 2020 05:22
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PoorWeather posted:If you give it a shot and bounce off it, I'd appreciate knowing what bored you or put you off, and when exactly you stopped, even if it was right at the start. Alternatively, if anyone actually gets into it, then great! I took notes off the top of my head while skimming the first 11 chapters, though take them with a grain of salt since I'm definitely not the target audience. My TL;DR recommendations would be: Read more and write more- everyone can always stand to improve their technical writing. Less worldbuilding, more narrative- the reader needs to know what the story is and why they should care within 30-50 words. Cut the internal narration. Cut every description's length by 75%, then try to cut it again. Please, please write in third person. I'm happy to give more specific feedback if it'd help, and apologize in advance if any of my comments come off as excessively negative- that's not how they're intended!  Thanks for writing and sharing your work, and by all means keep writing and working on stuff. Anywhoo, on to the comments:The prose has an awkward, halting quality to it and is too wordy- I would recommend taking a hard look at each chapter and asking yourself what the minimum amount of text you need to convey the story is. (Then be aware that if you send this through a professional editor massaging it into a tradpub fantasy/scifi format, they’re going to insist you lose 50-75% on top of what you’ve already cut.) I’m not a fan of all the past tense and passive voice- if you don’t have a really specific narrative or structural reason to do otherwise, I always recommend writing in third-person active non-omniscient. Like, random example- this is from chapter 1: quote:Slumped against the side of a wooden dresser on the northern end, itself alongside an unlit fireplace, is a woman. She is of above-average height, narrow-framed and thin (though in the saggy fashion of the unathletic), and has blue-black hair with a slight wave that runs past her shoulders, the fringe half side-swept and half loose, partially covering her left eye. The commas, incongruent ordering, weird descriptions and excessive verboseness make this a chore to parse. All you really need is: quote:A thin, frumpily-dressed woman lay slumped against the bookshelf, a fringe of blue hair hanging loose over her left eye. You’re probably already doing this, but I would recommend reading a lot, writing a lot, and continuously work on refining and simplifying your prose; effectively-utilized short words and simple constructions often do a lot more than complex language. I’m finding this exhausting to read- I’ve plowed through multiple long paragraphs and still have no clue where I am, what’s happening, or why I should care. When it goes “Oh yeah, two other people were in the room too,” provides some dense, rambling exposition about how they both are and aren’t in the room without actually giving me any information, and then goes “Actually that doesn’t matter,” it makes me want to toss the book out the window. I can’t force myself to pay attention to what these people are saying, because I don’t know who they are, where they are, what the heck is going on, or why I should care. I cannot possibly stress enough how important not writing in the first person is. Wildbow popularized first-person narratives, but technically speaking Wildbow is a terrible writer and the format generally has a boatload of problems that third-person does not, and doesn’t buy you an awful lot in return. This is a tiny quibble that doesn’t really matter, but assuming this is faux-Japan, Utsushikome would be pronounced “U-tsu-shi-ko-me.” Tsu is a single syllable (as in ta chi tsu te to), Japanese is an astonishingly aggressive CV language. This isn’t a LitRPG, right? I’d suggest nixing the profile block, it’s jarring and doesn’t provide relevant information. Likewise, I don’t really care about this person’s backstory as an acolyte and so forth- that’s something that could be more effectively conveyed through the prose. You never want a character standing there looking straight at the camera and delivering exposition. quote:Which brought me back to the original question. What was this place? The second chapter is not nearly as rough as the first! I’m still finding it difficult to get engaged, but now that we have an obvious viewpoint character with a reasonable goal that the audience understands, it’s easier to stay with it. That having been said, I would cut all of her internal narration- it’s padding that slows everything else down without contributing much. quote:This "field" I recently contributed to a Let’s Read of a story whose author constantly used out-of-place “quotes” to highlight “words” that were kinda but not really what that word meant. It drives me absolutely bugfuck nuts when people do this, and I highly recommend you avoid it- only use quotation marks around actual speech. The flashback in chapter 2 to the Order of the Universal Panacea is a structural problem: flashbacks in general tend to undermine your structure and are often over-used by authors trying to make a simple, linear story feel more complex. I’d cut it. quote:Instead, it was Like Plorkyeran said, now that I’m in chapter 4 I wish I hadn’t slogged through 1-3 at all. Just start here. Reading this feels like I have to do pages upon pages of worldbuilding homework with no payoff- the story is asking me to learn and remember tons of stuff about its setting, but I’m six chapters in and still have no clue what the heck the story is or why I should care. Omi no Kami fucked around with this message at 11:42 on Apr 9, 2020 |
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Apr 9, 2020 11:38
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Thanks to both of you for looking it over too.Plorkyeran posted:If I'd just stumbled on the story organically I probably would have dropped the story as soon as I discovered that chapter 4 didn't follow directly on from chapter 3. If you cut away the framing device, the first three chapters are an okay bit of mystery and exploration (although too heavy on the expository thoughts). The problem is that the end of chapter 3 basically turns the whole thing into scooby doo, with the horror-mystery being resolved with a punchline. That could maybe be a good story, but it'd need some follow up to make it clear that that's what the story is trying to do. I didn't intend for the end of chapter 3 to come across that way at all (as a "punchline"), which I guess just further underlines its awkwardness compared to how I perceive it after multiple rewrite attempts. It might just be unsalvageable, at this point. Omi no Kami posted:stuff Wow, thanks for going into such depth. This was probably the most negative feedback I've had about my writing in years, and I don't mean that in a bad way - I've been throwing this in various places over the course of the past couple months and have only had praise or people who don't like it but haven't really been able to phrase why. It's really good to get a perspective on these problems from an outsider. To defend myself a little bit, I wrote this story specifically with the intent of making it a sustainable web fiction that might be palatable to the RR market while still being something I could stay interested in.That meant a style and level of quality that I could reliably churn out about 10,000 words a week for in my free time, as well as some presentational conceits that I felt might appeal to or be less alienating to the audience. A lot of my decisions in regard to the presentation that you bring up, such as the character intro boxes, the fairly blunt exposition, and highly-characterized first person PoV were rooted in reading popular western LitRPGs (though this story is not a LitRPG) and trying to match the pace and stylistic choices. A lot of them have very slow pacing and an emphasis on worldbuilding, too, and revel in a super-high wordcount. I'm aware that's the opposite of the wisdom when it comes to novel writing, and I explicitly cut it down somewhat after chapter 3. But a lot of people do seem to love it for whatever reason; I even got some praise elsewhere for the depth of the descriptions. I think this might have ended up being a worst-of-both-worlds situation, though - in retrospect, a lot of LitRPGs work in that way because their worldbuilding and systems tend to tap into genre-knowledge rather than expecting people to learn actually new things and retain that information, and because they're built around a slow progression element that is absent here. It's at least been very easy for me to write reliably, though. I've kind of lost track of the point I'm trying to make here. I guess, do you think my whole understanding of writing for this kinda audience is wrongheaded, or bad even within the scope of that goal? A couple more specific things: Omi no Kami posted:This is a tiny quibble that doesn’t really matter, but assuming this is faux-Japan, Utsushikome would be pronounced “U-tsu-shi-ko-me.” Tsu is a single syllable (as in ta chi tsu te to), Japanese is an astonishingly aggressive CV language. The setting is based around the cultures of the Bronze Age, and my understanding of proto-Japonic (or at least proto-Kra-Dai, which it's supposed to have a lot of commonality with) is that it still had hard T's in that context, but that's not something you could reasonably have inferred at that point. I actually changed it once already based on somebody who I talked about the story more with telling me that. Omi no Kami posted:Reading this feels like I have to do pages upon pages of worldbuilding homework with no payoff- the story is asking me to learn and remember tons of stuff about its setting, but I’m six chapters in and still have no clue what the heck the story is or why I should care. Again, it would be awful for a novel, but my impression reading other popular stories on RR was that readers who were invested would be much more willing to tolerate very long build-ups without a strong golden thread at first (see the Wandering Inn, etc) so long as you keep having moments that are individually compelling, and have it building to a loose goal. I'm not sure how well I succeeded at that, though - the first part of the story is meant to be introducing the characters and setting conceits in a slow-paced way while building to the actual plot, but I think I ended up over-writing it a bit. My hope was to subtly build up something interesting and complicated without it becoming overwhelming, but it went awry in a way that's hard to quantify for me. PoorWeather fucked around with this message at 14:22 on Apr 9, 2020 |
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Apr 9, 2020 13:01
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PoorWeather posted:Wow, thanks for going into such depth. This was probably the most negative feedback I've had about my writing in years, and I don't mean that in a bad way - I've been throwing this in various places over the course of the past couple months and have only had praise or people who don't like it but haven't really been able to phrase why. It's really good to get a perspective on these problems from an outsider. Yeah no problem- I feel bad about having so few highly positive things to say, but part of that's likely that I'm, not a big RR/LitRPG genre guy. PoorWeather posted:To defend myself a little bit, I wrote this story specifically with the intent of making it a sustainable web fiction that could be palatable to the RR market while still being something I could stay interested in.That meant a style and level of quality that I could reliably churn out about 10,000 words a week for in my free time, as well as some presentational conceits that I felt might appeal to or be less alienating to the audience. A lot of my decisions in regard to the presentation that you bring up, such as the character intro boxes, the fairly blunt exposition, and highly-characterized first person PoV were rooted in reading popular western LitRPGs (though this story is not a LitRPG) and trying to match the pace and stylistic choices. A lot of them have very slow pacing and an emphasis on worldbuilding, too, and revel in a super-high wordcount. That's definitely a different beast from tradpub fantasy/sci-fi, which is where my brain automatically went for this one. You've probably done some research already, but I think the two best-in-breed sustainable RR serials you might wanna look at for style tips are these guys: https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/24709/defiance-of-the-fall https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/26294/he-who-fights-with-monsters One of the things that tends to unite a lot of RR-style web serials is that the core narrative conceit is absurdly simple. DotF is "An office worker gets dumped into a fantasy isekai thingie," and HWFWM is basically "A funny Australian guy gets dumped in murder-happy isekai land and refuses to take it seriously." Both stories have stuff beyond that, but the core elements that hold up the narrative spine tend to be absurdly simple and easy to articulate in a few sentences. PoorWeather posted:I've kind of lost track of the point I'm trying to make here. I guess, do you think my whole understanding of writing for this kinda audience is wrongheaded? I wouldn't say wrong or bad, from half an hour skimming I think my main takeaway is unfocused- I consistently had trouble figuring out what the story's central conceit was or where it was going. This sounds horribly pessimistic, but I advise all writers to never, ever underestimate how short the attention span of your readers will be. If you can get people hooked they'll give you the time to build whatever you're interested in into the story, but it's hard to hook people without a really clean, concise opener. My biggest piece of advice would be to work out a one-sentence summary of your entire thing, and laser-focus the first few chapters around that. There's an exercise that I find really useful for figuring out your focus- this is kind of putting the cart before the horse, but tradpub authors usually write something called a query letter to market their thing to literary agents, it's kind of like a screenplay pitch. Writing a good query forces you to very clearly articulate some key stuff including genre, demographic, and your basic story idea, and I find that the act of laying it out really helps to clear out the cobwebs when planning your actual story. https://www.janefriedman.com/query-letters/ is a great guide to queries if you're ever bored. A couple more specific things: PoorWeather posted:The setting is based around the cultures of the Bronze Age, and my understanding of proto-Japonic (or at least proto-Kra-Dai, which it's supposed to have a lot of commonality with) is that it still had hard T's in that context, but that's not something you could reasonably have inferred at that point. I actually changed it once already based on somebody who I talked about the story more with telling me that. Oh cool, that actually works fine then! I know Proto-Kra definitely licenses alveolar stops in the coda. I think current theories of the Japonic family postulate that the features it shares with Proto-Kra come from extensive interaction, not a genetic relationship, and that even the earliest proposed reconstructions of Japonic proto-languages are pretty aggressively CV, but I can almost guarantee that no potential readers on RR are going to go "Oh my gosh, this story isn't following my preferred phonological reconstruction, I'm definitely not reading any more." PoorWeather posted:Again, it would be awful for a novel, but my impression reading other popular stories on RR was that readers who were invested would be much more willing to tolerate very long build-ups without a strong golden thread at first (see the Wandering Inn, etc) so long as you keep having moments that are individually compelling, and have it building to a loose goal. I'm not sure how well I succeeded at that, though - the first part of the story is meant to be introducing the characters and setting conceits in a slow-paced way while building to the actual plot, but I think I ended up over-writing it a bit. My hope was to subtly build up something interesting and complicated without it becoming overwhelming, but it went awry in a way that's hard to quantify for me. TWI's early draw isn't just a series of compelling moments- like HWFWM and DotF it has a very simple hook that it articulates well from the very first chapter: eccentric everywoman from modern Earth falls into a LitRPG, but instead of taking a cool class she tries to become a background NPC. That's barely even a thing anymore, but it held up an awful lot of the earliest chapters and "Weirdo does magical inn stuff, capitalism ensues" was always enough of an obvious goal and framing to keep both momentum and interest while we met other cast members and set the stage for more of the slice of life/random character stuff that I suspect most readers enjoy.
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Apr 9, 2020 14:37
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Megazver posted:I mean, that was pretty juicy! Thanks. It's got nothing on so much more stuff I hear around the community that is, unfortunately, far more difficult to substantiate beyond hearsay, hunches, and generally accepted assumptions and open secrets. PoorWeather posted:I linked it in passing a few pages ago, but since asking here more directly doesn't seem to be as tacky as I thought it was, would anyone be willing to offer some direct feedback on my own web fic, The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere? It's a fantasy/mystery thing I've been working on for the past few months. It's about a class of novice healers that get invited to an organization trying to achieve immortality, and then bad stuff happens. As the resident critic, I'm just going to say that I second basically everything Omi says. The other thing is to ask yourself, like, why are you writing this serial? What kind of feedback are you really looking for? Why are you making some of the decisions you're making as you write? For example, Omi was maybe the first person to point out that the first ten or so chapters of Not All Heroes had a really janky sense of pacing. Part of that was because I was still figuring out how to tell the story, but a lot of it was because I was embracing a slower serial format, having misjudged audience reasoning. But the janky initial pacing was probably the most consistent bit of feedback I got, so, during the current editing process I've condensed the first twelve or so chapters of story into about four.
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Apr 9, 2020 14:43
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PoorWeather posted:I linked it in passing a few pages ago, but since asking here more directly doesn't seem to be as tacky as I thought it was, would anyone be willing to offer some direct feedback on my own web fic, The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere? It's a fantasy/mystery thing I've been working on for the past few months. It's about a class of novice healers that get invited to an organization trying to achieve immortality, and then bad stuff happens. Hey guys, critique fits much better in Creative Convention. If you're looking for feedback on something, please make a thread there and put a link here. Thanks! I'm the Book Barn IK. Feel free to PM me or email bookbarnsecretsanta@gmail.com if I can help you with anything.
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Apr 9, 2020 15:26
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Omi no Kami posted:One of the things that tends to unite a lot of RR-style web serials is that the core narrative conceit is absurdly simple. DotF is "An office worker gets dumped into a fantasy isekai thingie," and HWFWM is basically "A funny Australian guy gets dumped in murder-happy isekai land and refuses to take it seriously." Both stories have stuff beyond that, but the core elements that hold up the narrative spine tend to be absurdly simple and easy to articulate in a few sentences. Yeah, I kinda alluded to this in my previous post, but the elephant in the room is that what probably makes these type of stories on RR successful isn't just the particular style of writing, but the style combined with a very simple premise that makes it easy to get into, and the very strong progression element, usually paired with LitRPG stuff. My original goal was to copy the aesthetics of that type of story to the point where readers would be more comfortable getting into something more complicated, and while I don't think this has been a total failure, it was definitely wishful thinking to some extent. Omi no Kami posted:I wouldn't say wrong or bad, from half an hour skimming I think my main takeaway is unfocused- I consistently had trouble figuring out what the story's central conceit was or where it was going. This sounds horribly pessimistic, but I advise all writers to never, ever underestimate how short the attention span of your readers will be. If you can get people hooked they'll give you the time to build whatever you're interested in into the story, but it's hard to hook people without a really clean, concise opener. My biggest piece of advice would be to work out a one-sentence summary of your entire thing, and laser-focus the first few chapters around that. The one-sentence pitch for it is probably "murder mystery with horror elements where a bunch of wizards kill each other for complicated personal/political reasons while the main character tries to figure it out", which I guess I did a worse job conveying in the prologue and general build up of the story than I'd hoped. The description of the story on RR was originally more explicit about this, but someone on reddit complained that it being too straightforward in a way that seemed tacky to them, so I changed it to something more nuanced. I've also edit the first few chapters so many times that, in order to increase readability, I probably gutted a bit of the narrative signalling. I'm painfully aware of how short reader attention spans are when it comes to serials, since they go in with 0 investment compared to a novel. The best advice I've heard about it is that it's incredibly important to make a reader experience a strong, addictive emotion right out of the gate, and to make them as comfortable with the setting and general vibe of the story as possible so you can piggyback off positive associations. I've already explained how I was trying to do the latter. For the former, I guess the emotion I'm trying to evoke is curiosity? It's not great, to be honest. I love complicated, nuanced premises that demand a reasonable amount of setup, but I've struggled to reconcile writing one with the tastes of the web fiction crowd, especially when it comes to the earliest, make-or-break chapters. Do you have any suggestions about how I could make where the narrative is going clearer? Milkfred E. Moore posted:As the resident critic, I'm just going to say that I second basically everything Omi says. The other thing is to ask yourself, like, why are you writing this serial? What kind of feedback are you really looking for? Why are you making some of the decisions you're making as you write? I started this serial as a compromise between my desire to write something that might do well in the environment and something I actually wanted to write. In that sense it's sorta been a success - I've got more positive reception than anything I've tried in the past, even if it feels in a lot of ways like an awkward mess of contradictory ideas. I'm trained more for novel writing, but I don't really like writing novels, so I've really wanted to make serial-writing work for me. A while ago, I wrote some mystery-flavored fanfic for a few things, and the speculation and back-and-forth I had between updates from readers was the most fun I've ever had writing. I've made numerous attempts to capture that same experience in an original serial I could actually make some income from, but the straightforward approaches I tried, where I didn't bend to the market at all, ended terribly. I know that there's an audience for it in some sense since stories like MoL do well, but the nature of conventional mystery stories require a slow start and setup that seems anathema to getting one. Edit: oh, sorry, i didn't see this Safety Biscuits posted:Hey guys, critique fits much better in Creative Convention. If you're looking for feedback on something, please make a thread there and put a link here. Thanks! I don't really think I'd be able to get feedback specific to writing web serials over there, which is really a completely unique beast, so I'd rather not. But if this is breaking the rules then I'll stop here. PoorWeather fucked around with this message at 16:25 on Apr 9, 2020 |
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Apr 9, 2020 15:53
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PoorWeather posted:Do you have any suggestions about how I could make where the narrative is going clearer? If "Wizard murder mystery" is your schtick, you need to hit that note hard and loud from minute one, and be really ruthless about trimming nonessential stuff- if it doesn't tie directly into "A wizard is dead, oh no! What happen?", it's going to bleed interest away. You might be surprised on how hard it is to stay slim and focused even with only one simple concept driving your thing. quote:I don't really think I'd be able to get feedback specific to writing web serials over there, which is really a completely unique beast, so I'd rather not. But if this is breaking the rules then I'll stop here. I think you'd benefit from getting writing and structural feedback from a ton of people, that's something that always helps me... the serial-specific constraints you're working with are generally "2,000 words a day 5x a week written at a 6th grade reading level." The more nuanced stuff, like some of the structural challenges unique to serials, can take a back seat to getting a really polished, refined execution of that core schtick. Plus, like I always say, read a ton of crap and write a ton of crap; the more bad words you get out of you, the easier it is to find the good ones.
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Apr 9, 2020 23:46
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Omi no Kami posted:If "Wizard murder mystery" is your schtick, you need to hit that note hard and loud from minute one, and be really ruthless about trimming nonessential stuff- if it doesn't tie directly into "A wizard is dead, oh no! What happen?", it's going to bleed interest away. You might be surprised on how hard it is to stay slim and focused even with only one simple concept driving your thing. That's not really the kind of mystery I meant, but yeah, let's leave it at that. I appreciate your advice. Omi no Kami posted:I think you'd benefit from getting writing and structural feedback from a ton of people, that's something that always helps me... the serial-specific constraints you're working with are generally "2,000 words a day 5x a week written at a 6th grade reading level." The more nuanced stuff, like some of the structural challenges unique to serials, can take a back seat to getting a really polished, refined execution of that core schtick. I guess it'll be okay to respond to this since my response is really more meta-commentary about serials than discussing my own work, at this point? I think this is a nice sentiment, but I don't know how much I really agree with it in practice. I've seen a lot of leanly-written serials on RR with a very refined shtick die in the crib because they failed to hit a set of "appeal factors", and a lot of absolute messes excel because they do so very precisely. In the web serial market, I think mastery of that is much more important than technical skill. Again, I've put out (either alone or with co-op projects with friends) content where I tried to follow the conventional wisdom of what makes for good writing, and while a lot of those were hot messes in their own ways, the amount of success I've had with even this project - where I'm making an attempt to copy those appeal points sometimes, often in a way that awkwardly clashes with the actual content - in comparison has been staggering. PoorWeather fucked around with this message at 02:02 on Apr 10, 2020 |
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Apr 10, 2020 01:37
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PoorWeather posted:That's not really the kind of mystery I meant, but yeah, let's leave it at that. I appreciate your advice. Yeah I'm definitely not the guy to speak authoritatively about serial marketing or business- if I read every serial I was familiar with in a vacuum and had to guess at which ones were the most popular I'd probably put ItM and TWI at the top of the list, PracGuide, Katalepsis, and the indie-y superhero stuff (NAH, Inheritors, Interviewing Leather) close behind, and stuff like DotF and Wildbow's output dead last. With the exception of TWI and kinda PracGuide I'd not only be wrong about the rest, but my kneejerk ratings are almost completely opposite what the ecosystem has settled on. I do think that whatever projects you're working on, though, it's always useful for everyone to work on their technical writing skills. Short stories and other limited projects like SA's own Thunderdome are particularly great for this, because it doesn't take an overhwelming commitment to bang out something, forcing yourself to tell a complete, well-structured story in 1-2k words is a great exercise in structure, it's easy to C&C something that short, and nearly any feedback you get on a short piece is going to translate to improvements in longer works.
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Apr 10, 2020 02:09
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PoorWeather posted:I don't really think I'd be able to get feedback specific to writing web serials over there, which is really a completely unique beast, so I'd rather not. But if this is breaking the rules then I'll stop here. Just to be clear - yes, it is, although I'm not going to ban anyone for it, because they're been good posts. Hieronymous Alloy posted:We've been getting a few requests lately from people who want to publicize their own works or the works of their personal friends and associates. If you want to talk about marketing your work, this is definitely not the place. Try the self-publishing thread in CC; what you're saying about hitting specific "appeal factors" sounds like some of the discussion in the OP. If the thread wants to discuss "appeal factors" in general that is welcome. Edit: vvv LOL OK. You know what I meant 
I'm the Book Barn IK. Feel free to PM me or email bookbarnsecretsanta@gmail.com if I can help you with anything. Safety Biscuits fucked around with this message at 06:21 on Apr 10, 2020 |
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Apr 10, 2020 06:08
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Safety Biscuits posted:Just to be clear - yes, it is, although I'm not going to ban anyone for it, because they're been good posts. lmao
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Apr 10, 2020 06:14
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wrap it up fellas, we can only talk about finished serials now
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Apr 10, 2020 06:15
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Safety Biscuits posted:Just to be clear - yes, it is, although I'm not going to ban anyone for it, because they're been good posts. I don't think that's unreasonable or anything - like I said earlier, I thought this was shaky ground until the stuff with Pith a few pages earlier went without comment - but since this conversation has kinda segued into meta-commentary, I think that serials are really so different and, more specifically, so loving weird in terms of what the established reader base broadly wants, that it's almost pointless to discuss them with the uninitiated. Like, there are so many quirks. An author needs to appeal to the largely very young mass-readership to drive popularity, but also to the older, more grognardy crowd who tend to actually donate money. They have to mix following one of a few very strict formulas with introducing the right amount of "safe" novelty to stand out (this is why you see so many "I got reincarnated as something weird!" progression stories). They have to be constantly hold the reader by the throat on a chapter-to-chapter basis, either through emotional manipulation or constant escalation/progression, since it's so easy to drop a serial compared to a regular book. Strangest of all is the byzantine levels of narrative signalling that's evolved in the community as a way of cultivating appeal - where stories try to evoke an association to something else in the readers mind as a way of shortcutting to popularity. This happens in all fiction to some extent, but we're at the point now where people are writing very traditional sailing stories with a LitRPG framework attached that doesn't serve the narrative at all, but seems to be there purely because the concept of a LitRPG confers a sort of comfortable familiarity. That story is a huge success, incidentally. Or, hell, the way that so many RR stories - the early parts of the wandering inn most prominently - are written in a fashion that seems intended to evoke the style of a translated Japanese web novel... Even though that style is usually the product of rushed translation rather than anything close to the authorial intent. It's a bizarre ouroboros that I'm struggling to even describe in a way that doesn't entail omitting nuance. It's also hard to categorize them as works in progress versus finished products, since many serials are written to go on literally forever - or at least until the author gets sick of it. I've written about 120k words for my project, which is coming up to the length of a proper novel, but I have no idea what I'd call it. Uh, anyway, I guess I'm going to nix the first three chapters and try to establish a bit more narrative direction around the start and see if it's salvageable. Thanks!
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Apr 10, 2020 06:58
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PoorWeather posted:Strangest of all is the byzantine levels of narrative signalling that's evolved in the community as a way of cultivating appeal - where stories try to evoke an association to something else in the readers mind as a way of shortcutting to popularity. This happens in all fiction to some extent, but we're at the point now where people are writing very traditional sailing stories with a LitRPG framework attached that doesn't serve the narrative at all, but seems to be there purely because the concept of a LitRPG confers a sort of comfortable familiarity. That's precisely it, though. The video game elements are comforting to the readership that has subsisted purely on an intellectual diet of video games, fanfiction, anime, LitRPGs, and translated foreign works. For example: quote:When he got close enough, I popped my fist into his nose. I broke it and one of my knuckles – ouch, 4% - and inflicted a stunned effect on him. If you wrote that as "I popped my fist into his nose. I broke it, cutting one of my knuckles in the process, and he fell back, blinking away the shock of the blow" the difference in reception would be night and day. I've seen it described as the audience likes 'system bullshit and jargon' because it allows them to think there's been a lot of planning done behind the scenes. I've also seen it described as, essentially, hand-holding and signposting the story. I think both of these thoughts are correct. Also, the audience doesn't really pay attention to the system stuff, and don't really care if it doesn't go anywhere - because by then the audience has sunk in however many hours into the story and will stick with it out of habit or sunk cost. It's just brain hacking. It's similar to how if you're posting on RR, you can maybe get away with tagging your story as LitRPG, GameLit and Xianxia even if your story doesn't have those elements. Why? Because the audience will ignore that those tags are listed if they find your story through them and like it.
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Apr 10, 2020 07:55
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:I've seen it described as the audience likes 'system bullshit and jargon' because it allows them to think there's been a lot of planning done behind the scenes. I've also seen it described as, essentially, hand-holding and signposting the story. I think both of these thoughts are correct. Also, the audience doesn't really pay attention to the system stuff, and don't really care if it doesn't go anywhere - because by then the audience has sunk in however many hours into the story and will stick with it out of habit or sunk cost. It's just brain hacking. Honestly, I don't even think it's that complicated, having spent more time in these communities and talked to a lot of people who specifically enjoy LitRPGs. You're right that the audience doesn't really pay close attention to the system stuff, but I think that goes even further than you suggest - the idea that it conveys a level of behind-the-scenes planning or or making the story simpler and easier to read seems to conflict with the reality of people's responses. Rather, the sole appeal of it for the vast majority of people seems to be that that it links a story to RPGs and more broadly nerd culture, which renders it massively less intimidating to someone who doesn't usually read conventional novels. It becomes self reinforcing - because the reader sees that the writer is signalling that they're into RPGs and RPG writing, a bond of trust is established where they have more faith they'll do things appealing to them and that they like in respects that go beyond just the inclusion of stat windows. It's essentially the same as fan-fic, but the "fandom" is another medium of storytelling entirely. For example, since you looked at the thing I've been writing, you can probably tell that it's kind of over-complicated and indulgent - much more so than the last idea I had about a year ago. It doesn't have much signposting, either. However, I've been making an effort to ape some stylistic choices from visual novels and video games, and as a result the amount of detail that my readers seem to be absorbing has gone up tremendously. Rather than game-elements in stories serving to simplify, they seem instead to be a device to make people tolerate complexity, or even revel in it in a way that they'd never be so charitable for with regular fiction. HPMOR is probably the paramount example of that phenomenon. (This probably makes me sound like I'm hating on my own work, but I'm still proud of the project in its own messy way.)
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Apr 10, 2020 08:59
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I started where you told me to, and the first issue I'm having is the prose. It's too messy. You have semicolons and dashed asides and italics for emphasis and emdashes and numbered lists all in the same paragraphs and sentences with complicated clausal structures. It's an overwhelming amount of stylistic clutter. I don't know if this is an intentional choice to represent the way the POV character thinks, but it's extremely distracting when I've yet to be hooked by anything. I don't understand the point of the character blocks either, or whether it's meta-knowledge for the reader or in character. To quote Chapter 5 posted:I didn’t need any extra complexity this morning. As far as the starting place in the story goes, it immediately devolves into a scholarly discussion of rather dry exposition. The hook of vastly increased lifespan/war on death using magic has gotten reduced to being academic. Instead of seeing how it affects people, which is what I'm assuming will be one of the major themes of the story, I'm getting lectured at and it's boring. I'm at the end of chapter 6 and it looks like something finally might happen but I haven't had any reason to care about or connect with any of the characters and nothing has happened yet. Starting chapter 7 and it looks like maybe not on the something happening front so I'm going to stop here. Edit: You post in a similar voice and I don't mind it here, but it doesn't work for me when reading the story. I think the difference might be I've been hooked here by your request for feedback and discussion of the form of web serials, so I'm willing to follow you through your complex thoughts in equally complex grammar. While in the story it's work that I don't want to do because I don't care about the details or nuances of what's happening or what the character thinks yet. I still think you could stand to benefit from simplifying in both cases. Tom Clancy is Dead fucked around with this message at 10:28 on Apr 10, 2020 |
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Apr 10, 2020 10:05
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Tom Clancy is Dead posted:I started where you told me to, and the first issue I'm having is the prose. Fair enough. Thanks a lot for taking a look at it. The character blocks are one of the LitRPG-esque presentational conceits I mentioned. They seem to be popular with some royalroad readers, but people outside of that grouping hate them. I went for the more academic tone for the same reason, although that's a little harder to explain. I can't defend the em dashes and semicolons, though. That's just how I end up writing if I try to churn it out at a rate of 1000 words/hour. Most of your other criticism seems to basically be the same as what other people have said already, but it's nice to get it reiterated. I am a little shocked by how completely negative the response has been here, though, since I was having trouble getting any critical feedback before this point. r/rational of all places seems to like it enough that different people link it every time I post a new chapter. I guess that just goes to show the extent to which tastes vary even within this weird niche. But yeah, uh, trying to stop making GBS threads up the thread by talking about my work specifically. edit: Oh, missed your edit. Yeah, I tend to write in a dense way when I don't actively suppress it. I got praised for it a lot in high school and college which broke my brain forever.
PoorWeather fucked around with this message at 11:20 on Apr 10, 2020 |
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Apr 10, 2020 10:29
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I'll do a post on how loving weird litRPGs are later to atone for any book barn rules we broke.
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Apr 10, 2020 10:42
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Be brief. Readers grok longer sentences. They like shorter.
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Apr 10, 2020 15:06
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I've read all of worm while it was being posted, and stayed up-to-date with Ward for a while before I kinda got burned out. I stopped right around Chris's interlude about his origin, I think like Arc 11? Is it worth going back and catching up? 9 Arcs of wildbow is a lot to read, and its not like I have anything better to do right now, but I guess I'd rather read something I will enjoy if Ward doesn't really get any better.
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Apr 10, 2020 20:37
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Pussy Quipped posted:I've read all of worm while it was being posted, and stayed up-to-date with Ward for a while before I kinda got burned out. I stopped right around Chris's interlude about his origin, I think like Arc 11? The Chris interlude was the very end of arc 10. I burnt out in the middle of arc 15. I'd say that up until the arc before I stopped the story is pretty good, but that depends on your tolerance for certain things like loads of fight scenes and a decent amount of body horror. I stopped because arc 15 is a ramp up into what seemed like another huge multi arc fight and I wasn't really feeling it, but based on the things I've heard about the more recent stuff I think I'm going to jump back in soonish. The companion podcast We've Got Worm/Ward makes the story a lot more enjoyable imho if you listen to it with each week of chapters, but I'm not gonna suggest you catch up on a couple hundred hours of podcast to get more out of a story.
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Apr 10, 2020 21:55
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the most recent arc of ward is maybe the best stuff wildbow has ever written so if you like the things he writes it's probably worth catching up
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Apr 10, 2020 23:11
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Pussy Quipped posted:I've read all of worm while it was being posted, and stayed up-to-date with Ward for a while before I kinda got burned out. I stopped right around Chris's interlude about his origin, I think like Arc 11? It doesn't. Ward flat out sucks.
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Apr 10, 2020 23:30
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violent sex idiot posted:the most recent arc of ward is maybe the best stuff wildbow has ever written so if you like the things he writes it's probably worth catching up If true, this is the best reason to not read wildbow the thread can offer. Wildbow’s best isn’t great.
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Apr 11, 2020 00:45
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