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Tropers just don't really get writing. "Show" a sentence that the poster above "tells" What do tropers think 'show don't tell' means? quote:Example: "The day was sunny" quote:For reference, I didn't write this. It's actually from an online comic, but it was too good to pass up. ^^ Also, it's a bit different from the presented sentence, because it's in conversation rather than presented as a description, but I feel it still fits pretty well. ^^ quote:
Okay, maybe I'm being rough on tropers. These are just writing exercises. Let's take a look at the first lines from things they've quote:From The Cherry Contract  quote:“One last group of Wolkenritter. You're closest.” Hayate told Signum. “The area is temporarily blind to teleport, probably because of their ripper. Buy some time.” quote:Pardon the all-caps, but that's the way it was originally written, to be part of a comic strip to introduce a tongue-in-cheek RPG. quote:It Was a Dark and Stormy Night, 50 years later in a place with no weather nor nights yet another day began. This was Sano's 8000th day and he had no recollection of day #7999. He didn't know that yet, nor did he know that someone had colored his hair pink and a matching miniskirt was hanging from the ceiling fan. He was still sleeping, dreaming about Earth and a dark stormy night just like those he had seen in the movies, just like the ones in the beginning of poorly written stories with run-on sentences, stories with stuff like haunted houses, screaming maids, slamming doors, pirate ships and a child that might or might not be growing up in Kansas anymore, possibly due to the weather.
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Oct 15, 2013 02:47
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EKDS5k posted:It's not like it was written by anyone who speaks any Japanese. Also the last syllable looks more like a "so" than a "n," so arguably it's Tsuropu Taso. -tan is a child's mispronunciation of -san. It's supposed to be a cute baby talk honorific. Tropers would never want to talk like adults in Japan, obviously.
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Oct 15, 2013 02:49
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To be fair to tropers, Futaba Channel started it. Or as they would say, EverythingsBetterInJapan OlderThanTheyThink BilingualBonus lampshaded GratuitousJapanese justified YouKeepUsingThatWord inverted EaglelandOsmosis
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Oct 15, 2013 03:04
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Smoking Crow posted:-tan is a child's mispronunciation of -san. It's supposed to be a cute baby talk honorific. Tropers would never want to talk like adults in Japan, obviously. That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard a white guy say in Japanese, and I once knew a guy who referred to his bike as a "mama cherry." Also why is it in katakana then, and not hiragana? Oh yeah, troopers are idiots and don't know a thing about Japanese.
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Oct 15, 2013 03:04
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A Troper needs some help with writing!quote:I'm currently mulling over this one story concept of mind about misanthropic mind reader( I know, not the the most orignal concept)who gradually comes to better understand humanity by exploring the human conflicts that surround him. There are some suggestions: quote:Make him funny. Well, then I'm pretty much ripping off Daria though. quote:Some people on here seem to have such Small Reference Pools when it comes to fiction. There's probably literally hundreds of fictional misanthropes out there, the majority of them very different. I've never seen Daria and don't expect I ever will, so how likely am I to accuse you of "plagiarizing" it? There's probably a hundred misanthropes in fiction. But maybe fewer I guess. Then he posted his idea in more detail: quote:Well, I do have something of a character in mind: As a kid he was extremly introverted and didn't spend much time in the company of others. He didn't develop much in the way of social skills, he often misinterpreted social ques and was generally very awkward in social situations. He spent much of his time observing other people, eavesdropping on conversations, making up stories in his mind for why people acted like they did. Jesus Christ
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Oct 15, 2013 03:07
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Weldon Pemberton posted:
It's at least fitting here- Swift did have a bit of a scatological obsession.
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Oct 15, 2013 03:23
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Djeser posted:Tropers just don't really get writing. The day was sunny. The day was sunny. Jo gazed across the valley and felt the sweat roll off her face. Someone is utterly evil. He pushed the knife in. "That was such a beautiful scream. A pity no one else could hear it." David felt something snap inside him. David felt something snap inside him. He dropped to his knees. The force of the kick in front and the collision with the wall in back left him wheezing, clutching his stomach in pain. His ribs were definitely broken now. ... You know, I'm not sure that last one was what the original Tropers had in mind.
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Oct 15, 2013 03:42
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crowfeathers posted:Then he posted his idea in more detail:
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Oct 15, 2013 03:43
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Djeser posted:Tropers just don't really get writing. It may be the least malformed thing there, but I'm still sort of in love with how bad the sentence "It was midday and the warm sun streaks shone brightly" is. What the gently caress is a sun streak?
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Oct 15, 2013 04:59
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Antivehicular posted:What the gently caress is a sun streak? 
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Oct 15, 2013 05:07
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quote:Antivehicular posted: I just refer to it as "the sunlight" or a "ray" or "beam" if I want to be specific, but those sound too obvious. I want to give my readers some credit and let them use their imaginations.
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Oct 15, 2013 05:44
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I stand corrected! I don't think I've ever heard the phrase before, but I can see how you'd call those sun streaks. I guess for penance I'll think a while about that weird autistic-misanthropic-psychic story concept.
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Oct 15, 2013 06:17
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You know you've been around the videogame industry too long if you only call 'em "god rays."
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Oct 15, 2013 06:39
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"Hmmm, how can I show that it's a sunny day? I know; I'll invoke a phenomenon produced by cloud cover!"
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Oct 15, 2013 06:42
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Sham bam bamina! posted:I actually like the idea of someone with autism or Asperger's syndrome who becomes a mind-reader, but I can't say that I want the narrative itself to have the same condition. Jesus Christ indeed. Say what you will about it but at least it is a self-insert that isn't blatant wish fulfillment. The character sounds pretty interesting to me, and it is somewhat telling that he hasn't used trope names once. I wonder if those two are connected. Probably one of the better troper projects.
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Oct 15, 2013 08:34
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A weird misanthropic loner that constantly judges everyone around him and is obsessed with being a hero with psychic powers doesn't sound like a self insert wish fulfillment to you?
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Oct 15, 2013 09:15
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Heath posted:A weird misanthropic loner that constantly judges everyone around him and is obsessed with being a hero with psychic powers doesn't sound like a self insert wish fulfillment to you? Its a self-insert, but not wish fulfillment. To be wish fulfillment he would be the hero and everyone around him would be wrong and should just accept his interpretation of events and bow down to his superior, rational intellect rather than live by their own weird emotions that make no sense. At least as presented it is shown that the character grows to accept the world around him, not the other way around. What kind of wish fulfillment is "And then I realize that I am a pathetic loner and work with my newly acquired power to become a productive member of society"?
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Oct 15, 2013 09:32
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"Hey mom, I wrote this cool story. It's called Knight of Lolicon. What does that mean? It means I wanna gently caress little kids, haha. Hope you enjoy reading it  "
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Oct 15, 2013 12:21
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Fine, you fuckers, you forced me to look at yet another TVT thread out of curiosity and "It's bad, but just how bad could it actually be?"Knight of Lolicon posted:A Mega Crossover Fanfiction by maestrodelvuelo. The original Spanish [Not even starting in English/Japanese? See? TVT can be diverse!] version can be found here. I... I'm not even going to read any farther than this, since I'm sure I'd end up posting the entire page here and have already done enough to sully the SA servers with that quote Sentient Data fucked around with this message at 13:04 on Oct 15, 2013 |
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Oct 15, 2013 13:01
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] in exchange for power to help Linda... and now he has to find all Genderiels [WTF are those? This synopsis tells me nothing] and restore their goddess: the Goddess of Lolicon, [We worship prepubescent loving!] in the off chance that she has the way to return them home. [Let's help them worship their goddess of prepubescent loving on the off chance we can get back to the real world!] Along the way, a rival appears: the evil Lord Xig-Lem, who thinks about lolis as just sex dolls, and his helper: a corrupted Genderiel called Shojonoe.
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I'm pretty sure it was determined at one point that the author wasn't really aware of what "loli" or "lolicon" meant, and some tropers have stated themselves that it's a very surreal, nonsensical story, so it's probably just an utterly clueless writer.
WickedHate fucked around with this message at 23:58 on Jun 26, 2014 |
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Oct 15, 2013 13:25
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ArchangeI posted:Say what you will about it but at least it is a self-insert that isn't blatant wish fulfillment. The character sounds pretty interesting to me, and it is somewhat telling that he hasn't used trope names once. I wonder if those two are connected.
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Oct 15, 2013 13:54
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Question – what is so bad about “world building?” I’ve been trying to pen a novel for the past few months. I have the plot outlined, I have the few chapters written, and the more important scenes that come later in the story are fleshed out for when I get to them. It does involves a supernatural element (without going into detail, it’s Hatfields vs. McCoys in modern day North Carolina, but with magic and witchcraft), so I came up with the “rules” for magic, along with a history for both families and the small town this all takes place in. So I have engaged in “world building,” but doing so helped me set a road map for my story and has made it easier to write without feeling lost or like I’m writing in circles. Is that a bad thing?
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Oct 15, 2013 14:11
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Calling him a misanthrophe and recognizing that fantasy worlds are escapism seems fairly self-aware to me (compared to the usual "Why don't people just make sense?"), but whatever.
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Oct 15, 2013 14:14
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Does your world-building support your story, or the other way around? Because if it's the latter (and if you're not Tolkien) you should stop.
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Oct 15, 2013 14:14
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See, there's nothing wrong with that and I think it's actually an important part of the process in its own right. The bad thing comes when you have a situation like tropers (and a lot of people trying to do fantasy, honestly) get stuck in, when it becomes all about the worldbuilding and they never do any actual writing either due to losing interest/forgetting the story's about the characters and not the setting, or getting too caught up in every little detail having to be just right.
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Oct 15, 2013 14:15
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CobiWann posted:Question – what is so bad about “world building?” World building isn't bad purely because it's world building. The problem is that a lot of fantasy and sci fi fans think that it's a replacement for actual writing, as if once you have created the setting in sufficient detail the stories will spring full formed from it without any further assistance. It can be useful for laying groundwork and ensuring internal consistency, but at some point you have to put away the maps and actually write your drat story. There's also the fact that a lot of world builders get so caught up with their works that they treat it like valuable China, and refuse to change it even when it is impeding the story they want to write.
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Oct 15, 2013 14:30
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CobiWann posted:Question – what is so bad about “world building?” Are you going to sell this to the people at TV Tropes because this sounds like something they will eat up. How many characters wear trenchcoats?
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Oct 15, 2013 14:36
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CobiWann posted:I’ve been trying to pen a novel for the past few months. I have the plot outlined, I have the few chapters written, and the more important scenes that come later in the story are fleshed out for when I get to them. It does involves a supernatural element (without going into detail, it’s Hatfields vs. McCoys in modern day North Carolina, but with magic and witchcraft), so I came up with the “rules” for magic, along with a history for both families and the small town this all takes place in.  For real though, nobody said worldbuilding was bad, it's necessary for some genres and it can improve a story if it's done well. You need to have a story for that to happen though, which is what tropers don't get, and if the plot and characters aren't good then worldbuilding isn't going to do poo poo. That, and most examples of worldbuilding (actually that's just an irritating loving word) we see in this thread are of the "American military worship MEETS nonsensical bullshit MEETS impractical horseshit MEETS animeeeee MEETS my weirdly specific fetish!" variety. e:Screw it, this comic sums it up best. Saint Drogo fucked around with this message at 14:47 on Oct 15, 2013 |
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Oct 15, 2013 14:42
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People basically read that Tolkien built an amazing world without pausing to learn that Tolkien is complete goddamn accident. They think his obsession with world building is why his books are good, and that is a part of it, but not the whole part. I am a huge Tolkien nerd and love his poo poo but he was a bad writer who somehow kept mistakenly writing good stuff. Tolkien is like Frank Drebbin from the Naked Gun movies. He is in completely over his head and makes the wrong decision every time but somehow the end result is a success and people who did not see the process assume he is a complete genius. Edit: This is basically a metaphor of Tolkien's writing process. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-S-eeInJVk WoodrowSkillson fucked around with this message at 14:55 on Oct 15, 2013 |
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Oct 15, 2013 14:50
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WoodrowSkillson posted:Are you going to sell this to the people at TV Tropes because this sounds like something they will eat up. How many characters wear trenchcoats? Are you trying to get me to stop writing? Now I'm going to be like "it's raining, he should grab a trenchcoAW SON OF A BITCH!" Or "the waitress should be a bit surly to hiCHRIST SHE WANTS THE D!" But seriously, thanks for explaining the difference. It's a bit scary to wander into this thread as an aspiring writer sometimes.
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Oct 15, 2013 14:54
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WoodrowSkillson posted:People basically read that Tolkien built an amazing world without pausing to learn that Tolkien is complete goddamn accident. "Tolkien is a bad writer who only turned out anything good completely by accident" is a pretty big claim, why do you think that's the case? And to avoid a derail, a lot of good writing advice boils down to "just loving write" because if you never actually do any writing not only will nothing get done, you'll never learn or improve the craft. Tropers need that hammered into them. Or maybe not, given we've seen what happens when they do just loving write. Edit: And then I see a metaphorical video is edited in while I was posting. Darn.
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Oct 15, 2013 15:04
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Flesnolk posted:"Tolkien is a bad writer who only turned out anything good completely by accident" is a pretty big claim, why do you think that's the case? He wrote by starting at the beginning, writing until he reached an impasse where he got stuck, and then started completely over again. He did not plan out LOTR from the beginning at all, and kept rewriting the book like waves moving up the shore. This is why it takes 100 pages to get from the preparations for the Party to Frodo even leaving the Shire, and then something like 100 more pages just to reach Rivendell. The book is amazingly dense in what should be setup, and is full of fluff that adds nothing to the story really, like Tom Bombadil, The Barrow-Downs, establishing the fake house for Frodo which is then immediately abandoned, etc etc. Later, Tolkien starts writing at a breakneck pace where Aragorn gets from Helms Deep to Minas Tirith in like 40 pages, the entire siege of Minas Tirith happens in that same time frame as well. That is pretty bad writing, and poor planning. However it creates a flow to the story where things move more quickly as the urgency and importance of the events also grows. It ends up working, if you enjoy his writing style at least. Another terrible choice is splitting the stories of Frodo and Sam up from the rest of the fellowship, for like 150-200 pages at a time. For the first time reader you can drat near forget who is who in that time. You also travel a month ahead in the timeline and then jump all the way back. However this works because it creates more tension in the story of Frodo and Sam because the book takes you all the way to the black gate without you knowing what happened to them. When the mouth of sauron tosses Aragorn Frodo's mail, the reader genuinely think Frodo has to have been captured and killed. There are also a million other nitpicks that msot real writers would probably immediately say are bad ideas. Characters that are introduced for a whole page that are then never seen again, refrences to deities that are never explained, poems in a language the reader cannot understand, etc etc. However, somehow it all comes together and make a story that is very enjoyable to people who like that kind of thing. Oh my god I just wrote all of this poo poo I am so bored at work today. Is anyone hiring?
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Oct 15, 2013 15:23
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WoodrowSkillson posted:refrences to deities that are never explained, poems in a language the reader cannot understand
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Oct 15, 2013 15:39
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I'm work posting in between working on an inventory issue so I may have been unclear. I agree that these ideas end up positive, but if it was a troper explaining their story, we would all mock those ideas. Divorced from the whole they seem really unwise if not straight up wrong.
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Oct 15, 2013 15:44
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The main trap aspiring writers (especially tropers) fall into when world building is that they get too attached to their fictional world. They plot out a complex setting with its own history but have trouble distancing themselves from the setting to see if it's something that's actually interesting to read about. Especially when they really go against show, don't tell and just drop loads and loads of unimportant minutiae in the form of an infodump (aka the stuff the an editor would take an axe to). Well, that and they can get so focused on building their fictional setting that they can forget to insert characters that aren't boring. But that's an entirely different problem right there.
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Oct 15, 2013 15:59
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Worldbuilding is really fun. However, like a lot of fun things, it is really difficult to get right. A bit like cooking: you can have a great deal of fun throwing ingredients into pans, frying and boiling and baking, but if you're just putting in anything without much attention, you're probably not going to end up with something edible. If you want to extend the cooking metaphor, since it's a rather good one, then good worldbuilding is like the finest cuisine. In the kitchens it's frantic and a whirlwind of activity, but when the plate comes out it's artistically arranged and has nothing to signify that behind the scenes there is a huge team meticulously working their given jobs. The reader does not need vast wikipedia-style infodumps so they can be aware just how much effort you put into coming up with some aspect of the world. They don't need walking exposition machines to say things like "This could be the biggest conflict seen on this continent since the Jolly Awful War back in 1844 to 1849." Especially not if someone then adds in "Good thing you specified this continent, as the Especially Large War (1876 to 1891) could be considered much larger, but took place on a different continent." Readers like a slow drip-feed of information in between the important parts: the narrative itself. Tropers don't get this, because they're operating under the delusion that what they're creating with their tepid worldbuilding is just so interesting people are going to want to hear all about it. And I say it's tepid because tropers are generally stuck in the mindset that worldbuilding requires you to go "full Tolkein" and talk about ancient wars and kings and big sweeping events that change the course of human events. Also elves. Or space-elves. If you look at any troper's worldbuilding I will guarantee you it will be 90% about the kind of poo poo you hear about in video game backstories. Grand, sweeping stuff that can basically be summed up as "there was some serious beef, they fought it out, poo poo's still iffy". Go find some troper-grade writer doing "worldbuilding" about a fantasy world and if it doesn't use "gold coins" as the principle means of currency, I'll be surprised. Money is literally one of the greatest driving forces in human history, but in troperland it'd be too dang difficult to cover an interesting topic like that. Far easier to talk about big dramatic wars where big armies of armoured douchebags slam into each other repeatedly until someone manages to win. And they're never wars about actual human topics either. Nobody in troper stories ever seems to go to war to install a puppet government, or to avenge a slight against them, or kill a bunch of stupid birds. It's all fate-of-the-world, evil-guy-raises-evil-army, aliens-invading-for-no-reason poo poo. Honestly the principle reason tropers love worldbuilding, and the reason they're so loving bad at it, is because it allows them to throw tropes together without worrying about that pesky narrative. Since there's no actual writing going on, they can just sit back and post post post on the forums about how many lovely loving tropes they're packing into their "upcoming project".
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Oct 15, 2013 16:01
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Speaking of writing,quote:Yeah, doesn’t she hang with that dork who thinks the government is run by ghouls or something? Maybe he's using her to fight fire with fire. quote:I was walking down a road of flames, barefoot. I was looking for the coolest spot, naturally, trying not to let the mud on my feet dry up too fast. The coals beneath my feet seemed to stretch on for miles in all directions, but there had to be an end to it somewhere. God forbid it end up in a men’s sauna. Unless it had Leon in it. Not that there was much time to think about that since the coals were suddenly turning into ninjas, all equipped with Fifi-repellant ninja spray. I countered by giving them an innocently flirtatious pose, causing watermelon juice to rain down and dissolve all of them into platypi. Three of them rubbed against my feet and that was when I finally woke up, got dressed, and went to school. This guy didn't explain his: quote:Ugh, this was only the second day I’d known him and I was already walking around in what looked like a Tex Avery cartoon filled with two-dimensional space-age vehicles that looked like cuckoo clocks on wheels and buildings that roared at you. Men really were a mystery.
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Oct 15, 2013 16:02
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WoodrowSkillson posted:I'm work posting in between working on an inventory issue so I may have been unclear. I agree that these ideas end up positive, but if it was a troper explaining their story, we would all mock those ideas. Divorced from the whole they seem really unwise if not straight up wrong. Sure, on paper, phrased like that, it doesn't sound great at all, but in the case of something actually written and not a troper work, execution is what carries the day, not just the raw elements of what happens. If someone is capable of taking all that and turning it into something that actually works, I don't think you can say they're a bad writer/not a "real" writer, because a horrible writer wouldn't've managed that at all. I think this line of talk actually illustrates one of the problems we keep bringing up with TV Tropes, which is that their site pretty much butchers the works they talk about (when they talk about any work actually worth talking about at least) by completely divorcing the nitty gritty from the stuff that makes them actually work. I can't really disagree that the pacing at the start was kind of terrible, though. Edit: Goddamn it, I post too slow. (Also, to be really nitpicky, the Bombadil/Barrow Downs stuff was actually really important. The latter moreso than the former, but still.) Flesnolk fucked around with this message at 16:21 on Oct 15, 2013 |
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Oct 15, 2013 16:04
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Flesnolk posted:Sure, on paper, phrased like that, it doesn't sound great at all, but in the case of something actually written and not a troper work, execution is what carries the day, not just the raw elements of what happens. If someone is capable of taking all that and turning it into something that actually works, I don't think you can say they're a bad writer/not a "real" writer, because a horrible writer wouldn't've managed that at all. I think this line of talk actually illustrates one of the problems we keep bringing up with TV Tropes, which is that their site pretty much butchers the works they talk about (when they talk about any work actually worth talking about at least) by completely divorcing the nitty gritty from the stuff that makes them actually work. I think the perfect example of this is Lolita. When Nabokov writes a story about a protagonist that's a pedophile, it's called brilliant since among other things, Nabokov could play the English language like a fiddle. But when a troper writes a story like that, it's unreadable garbage for a large variety of reasons. And tropers don't see the difference between the two because hey, both stories have the same type of protagonist therefore they have similar tropes therefore they're basically the same.
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Oct 15, 2013 16:12
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Fuego Fish posted:Readers like a slow drip-feed of information in between the important parts: the narrative itself. Tropers don't get this, because they're operating under the delusion that what they're creating with their tepid worldbuilding is just so interesting people are going to want to hear all about it. I'm not sure replacing "A brief history of the house of Not-Stark, from its founder to the present day" with "A brief treatise on the effects of lead-to-gold alchemy on the monetary market, with three graphs and five tables" is going to fix the basic problems tropers have with world building. If it did, then Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality would be the work to aspire to. It is the execution that is lacking, not the topic.
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Oct 15, 2013 16:34
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