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TheRamblingSoul posted:I've been reading more on fiction advice and there seems to be a general consensus of "to be a better writer, just keep writing." I find somewhere quiet and sit down to write for at least 20 minutes... Often that 20 minutes becomes an hour or two. I tend to cycle between 2 or 3 different things I'm working on. Also find somewhere quiet and read every day. I wouldn't worry about writing exercises or doing cliché things. That sort of irons itself out the more you write. I think the best way it was explained to me is, "Don't think of writing a story as building a house, that sounds like too much work. Instead imagine it as if you are tending a garden... every day you pull some weeds and plant a few seeds. Eventually you've cultivated something magical." Then share it with goons so they can laugh at your lovely garden.
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Sep 4, 2014 03:25
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TheRamblingSoul posted:I've been reading more on fiction advice and there seems to be a general consensus of "to be a better writer, just keep writing." I agree with the consensus, but there's another side to being a better writer, which is being a better person. I don't mean in the sense of being a moral, upstanding citizen, I mean that fiction has to come from somewhere. Which is you, by the way. Have you ever had an original thought in your head? Have you ever truly felt something? You can't write it if you never had it. Meet new people. Listen to them, know them. Dabble in different hobbies. Travel. Take care of yourself (very important). The brilliant, best-selling author who's cloistered and antisocial is a stupid cliche--where do they get their ideas? Your writing must come from something, namely yourself, so you have to fill yourself with meaningful life experiences in order to produce sincere, if not good ideas. Writing is a lot more enjoyable and better if it's sincere. As for being good, that's what the "keep writing" advice is for. You don't even need to turn your actual life experience into a story. You're writing fiction, so you're free to make things up without anyone knowing better. You could just take the core feeling and use it to drive your protagonist's character arc. Maybe someone looked up to you so much and you let them down by loving up and it's nagged at you ever since. You could use that. If you can't have it, then you cheat by reading. For me, the chief reason why reading is so useful for writing is to pick up experiences that are normally outside our reach. I'm not a girl, so I read stories with female characters (and preferably by female authors) to get an understanding on how they act and think. The other benefit is that every book is more or less a successful case study in writing, as long as the publisher is reputable (lol), since you are guaranteed that several people have taken a look at the story, improved it, and decided that murdering a bunch of trees to print said story on is worthwhile and profitable. But reading alone isn't enough, either. There's another cliche, that of the best-selling romance writer who is totally clueless about romance, because she (another cliche) has never been in a romantic relationship. So how come she's so good? Because she's read a lot of romance books, duh, but they paint a very different world from reality, and that's why she can't just get a date! You get the picture. By all means read a lot, but don't forget to live your life well--you'll become a better person (if not a better writer) at the very least. SO TO ACTUALLY ANSWER YOUR QUESTION, I just think real hard about something significant that I felt (first-hand or second-hand, even), then play around with that feeling until I have a character whose arc revolves around it. Or I freewrite until something comes out.
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Sep 4, 2014 03:25
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Oh and don't beat yourself up over what people say about your work... Every rear end in a top hat is a critic but not every rear end in a top hat can write. I had a friend tell me he wanted to beta read my book. I figured he'd just tell me what he thought about it. I sent him a copy and he went on and on about how I couldn't start my book the way I did... Gave me this huge lecture about how my book was going to fail. A year later, he sees all my hype and he messages me up on Facebook going, "Ok man... where can I buy your book?"  ... I still sold him a book though. Zip fucked around with this message at 03:45 on Sep 4, 2014 |
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Sep 4, 2014 03:32
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Writing a book is like committing an atrocity: you serve it one sentence at a time.
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Sep 4, 2014 03:35
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I know that when I'm up and around and doing things, I feel like I've got more ideas brewing in me than days when I spend it all sitting around at home. I just blew through writing my TD entry for this week on a Wednesday, and I'm the kind of person who has trouble with deadlines. I think the thing is that, over the weekend, I went on a trip, got to see new things, and generally put myself out of my comfort zone. But what's really interesting is that my inspiration had nothing to do with the things I'd seen during the trip. It's more about introducing some kind of variety into your thought patterns, because if you sit around and play Dark Souls for eight hours a day (which I did for a few weeks) you aren't going to be thinking about things in any new ways. I had a major creative block for that time, and then when I broke my routine and did something entirely new, suddenly I've got new thought patterns and I could pick up on a new idea and write about that. Sometimes, you just can't get yourself out there and do new things, and like Schneider Heim said, that's where books can come in. Doesn't need to be fiction, I've read some great nonfiction books that get me thinking about new things and making new associations. All it takes is shoving some new ideas into your brain, and then they can start to mix around and change things up and before you know it, you're finding all new patterns of relations that you can work with.
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Sep 4, 2014 03:37
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Djeser posted:Wise words about gaming and inspiration. Ya I am considering giving up gaming because of that exact reason. :\ Gaming just leaves me feeling burnt out these days. I'm still poo poo at Spelunky too.
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Sep 4, 2014 03:45
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I quit playing video games more than a year ago, and while i still procrastinate, my productivity has shot up a billion-fold. Quit video games. they're fun but they're addictive and at the end of the day they don't really matter that much. i still read about games coming out, but that takes a fraction of the time of actually playing them.
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Sep 4, 2014 03:51
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I don't think I could ever give up video games, at least not at this point in my life. Do what you have fun doing, but don't get stuck in a rut doing the same thing over and over. Having a job helps with not playing video games all the time, but I don't have a job right now, and it's easy to get burnt out if all you do is [play video games]/[browse SA]/[do dumb internet poo poo]. I ended up in that kind of rut, where I went on the internet until I couldn't stand refreshing another god drat site, then I played video games until I was frustrated, then back and forth. That's not good for me, and it's not good for my creativity, because I'm just running in circles in my room. I think part of getting into a healthy habit with things is getting used to stopping when you could still have some more. Just like you don't eat until you feel like you're going to throw up, don't play video games until you get frustrated or browse forums until you're bored out of your skull.
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Sep 4, 2014 04:33
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I finally put words to paper today. It wasn't much, just a few hundred, but at least I started the drat thing.
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Sep 4, 2014 07:15
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i'm still writing--for now--but once the occulus rift comes out with the correct spaceship game i am quitting writing to become a captain. i want to either be like gene from outlaw star or like mal from firefly; i haven't decided yet.
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Sep 4, 2014 14:24
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same but w/dinosaurs. ankylosaurus, gobisaurus, gargoylosaurus parkpinorum, it don't matter so long as i got my sweet 'rift
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Sep 4, 2014 15:09
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stuff like the rift is one step closer to virtual reality as we've speculated it might be in scifi novels and movies. Probably one day people will just live inside computer worlds they control with their brains and it will basically be like being a wizard. Sometimes I look at films and feel jealous. Especially now that computer animation is pretty top notch. It's still storytelling, but with music and visuals. I never want to make films, because it's hard and expensive. but if i could like, somehow combine Dragon speech to text software, the rift, and RPG maker, I would, is what i'm saying. IMO it could happen, if we don't all kill each other first. My totally important and helpful question to the FA thread is: what do you think storytelling will be like in the cyberfuture? are we all going to keep plugging away at keyboards? or something else?
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Sep 4, 2014 16:33
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Sitting Here posted:stuff like the rift is one step closer to virtual reality as we've speculated it might be in scifi novels and movies. Probably one day people will just live inside computer worlds they control with their brains and it will basically be like being a wizard. My dream is some sort of wearable everyday VR device (such as Google Glass I guess) where I will be able to have instant and easy access to some sort of Google Docs and all of my work. It will give me some sort of VR keyboard projection that will be super easy to type on, and will be super functional. I can instantly pull up any documents and work on them without the need for clutter, anywhere I choose. It's all I want.
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Sep 4, 2014 16:49
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Sitting Here posted:My totally important and helpful question to the FA thread is: what do you think storytelling will be like in the cyberfuture? are we all going to keep plugging away at keyboards? or something else? Thoughtmitters and sensory induction chairs. Why should you go to war when you can simply ride the consciousness of someone actually fighting? Nevermind watching the new episode of ER: the Next Generation, just pipe right into a real ER doctor as he loses a 7-year-old boy on the operating table. Authenticity.
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Sep 4, 2014 16:53
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Sitting Here posted:My totally important and helpful question to the FA thread is: what do you think storytelling will be like in the cyberfuture? are we all going to keep plugging away at keyboards? or something else? I think the future of storytelling is verbal. We'll see a rise in podcast fiction. We started writing things down so we'd have a record that lasts, but now we can all easily record our stories verbally. That's still the default setting for storytelling - everyone tells and listens to stories out loud. Also, games. Interactive stories.
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Sep 4, 2014 17:27
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As storytelling gets more and more interactive, storytellers may / may not realise that the things that we see as gripping and tension creating in films and books are just frustrating in an interactive medium. Fun fact: I was carting round a PHD proposal a few months ago all about problems of interactivity in storytelling, but while everyone said it was fascinating and they'd be really interested, nobody 'felt they had the expertise' to supervise. The nearest I got was a guy in Southampton writing about hypertexts and a guy in Wales writing about vijagames. Maybe they were just being polite, but it seems a shame that there's all these new media opening up and universities are barely acknowledging the presence of the kindle.
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Sep 4, 2014 17:28
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People will still read books. Think about it: Everything you all mentioned we can literally do now. Interactive books? Easy on a tablet. In fact, they already exist. People still enjoy reading text, and some people (myself included) still enjoy and prefer reading from paper. It won't change, at least not for a long time. It's just like video-conferencing. When it was invented in the 90s, it was hailed as a new revolution of human contact. You can now see the person you're talking to! Suddenly, visions of the future had video screens in everything. Calling your wife? She answers from the videophone in the refrigerator. Calling your boss? You see him on the video screen. It was predicted to completely replace text communication. Why write or speak to someone when you can SEE and HEAR them! That technology totally exists today and it's everywhere (skype, facetime, hangouts) but we don't use it nearly as much as they predicted.
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Sep 4, 2014 20:09
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The really super great thing about a story/book is that it only takes one person to create. Anyone who's been involved in production for a movie or video game, no matter how small, knows what an advantage that can be. Forgive my self-  , I have a couple stories out recently, I'm pretty fond of this one about a Kurdish genocide survivor meeting an alien, also there is one about drones. I feel rude, anyone have any cool short fiction they want to plug?
General Battuta fucked around with this message at 21:36 on Sep 4, 2014 |
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Sep 4, 2014 21:31
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Liam Emsa posted:That technology totally exists today and it's everywhere (skype, facetime, hangouts) but we don't use it nearly as much as they predicted. I heard it being called 'The Caveman Principle' by Michio Kaku (that dude who looks like Japanese Einstein): Michio Kaku posted:Whenever there is a conflict between modern technology and the desires of our primitive ancestors, these primitive desires win each time… Having the fresh animal in our hands was always preferable to tales of the one that got away. Similarly, we want hard copy whenever we deal with files. That’s why the paperless office never came to be… Likewise, our ancestors always liked face to face encounters….By watching people up close, we feel a common bond and can also read their subtle body language to find out what thoughts are racing through their heads…So there is a continual competition between High Tech and High Touch…we prefer to have both, but if given a choice we will choose High Touch like our caveman ancestors. Just thought it'd be interesting to know. Hell, it might spark someone's inspiration, and that's good enough for me!
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Sep 5, 2014 04:50
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I like the post on infinite jest that explains why video calls never took off.
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Sep 5, 2014 05:04
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CommissarMega posted:Similarly, we want hard copy whenever we deal with files. That’s why the paperless office never came to be… This is nonsense.
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Sep 5, 2014 13:29
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General Battuta posted:The really super great thing about a story/book is that it only takes one person to create. Anyone who's been involved in production for a movie or video game, no matter how small, knows what an advantage that can be. I read your Apex published story over the weekend. Didn't know it was you/a goon. It was enjoyable!
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Sep 5, 2014 13:32
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qntm posted:This is nonsense. Michio Kaku is very smart but he is also a crazy person.
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Sep 5, 2014 13:48
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as tom Friedman has postulated the world is indeed flat I am posting this from a phone in Pennsylvania and the signal is beaming to a satellite and shooting back down to internet nodes the world over even to an airport in New Zealand or to a taxi in South Africa, while I do indeed work in a paperless office the written word as a medium shall never die; indeed it will remain long after we are carbon-based fuel (which ironically is what will have destroyed us)
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Sep 5, 2014 17:27
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how long before we can abandon these inferior vessels and become digital conduits through which our sherlock slashfics pour
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Sep 5, 2014 17:41
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In the future the time-wasting grind of word-by-word writing will be largely automated. Soft literary 'theory' will be replaced by a rigorous neuroscience of language and aesthetic pleasure, which will be used to design computer programs that can take up the task. Without this artificial barrier to entry, writers will be free to focus on their most important resource: story ideas.
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Sep 5, 2014 17:44
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basically i'm holding out until I can be a career ideas guy
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Sep 5, 2014 19:00
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After the great crash brought about by Obama's socialist policies, America becomes the first anglophone country to join the third world. However, due to ubiquitous spelling and grammar checkers, even uneducated Americans can write at a functional level. The lucky make a steady income writing epic fantasies and steampunk zombie novels as 'self-published creators' in the Amazon wordsmitheries. The unlucky trawl the Internet for fans of those works, and spam them with offers to write up their speculations.
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Sep 5, 2014 19:43
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One day we will be able to beam our stories straight into people's heads with no need to meticulously craft and consider our style and word choices. The limitation will not be how well we can put interesting ideas across, but how long we can go without beaming the thought of genitals into someone else's head by mistake.
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Sep 6, 2014 00:41
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Sitting Here posted:basically i'm holding out until I can be a career ideas guy
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Sep 7, 2014 19:38
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systran posted:i'm still writing--for now--but once the occulus rift comes out with the correct spaceship game i am quitting writing to become a captain. i want to either be like gene from outlaw star or like mal from firefly; i haven't decided yet. Oh god... Visions of Ready Player One by Ernest Cline.
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Sep 8, 2014 00:34
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How do I force myself to add more detail?
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Sep 8, 2014 01:59
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Liam Emsa posted:How do I force myself to add more detail? Do it in editing. Once you've finished in a rough draft and you see a spot that seems sparse, add some more stuff in there. Focus on the imagery, on selecting the words that would best express your mental image of the scene.
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Sep 8, 2014 02:03
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Liam Emsa posted:How do I force myself to add more detail? What are you missing?
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Sep 8, 2014 15:14
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Tyrannosaurus posted:What are you missing? I don't know. I just feel like I don't spend enough time painting the scene. If I do, I feel like I'm forcing myself to do it, and then adding unnecessary fluff detail. I have a screenwriting background, so I often feel like I'm painting it like a movie scene, and I don't know if that's good enough or not. edit: Here's an example of something I'm working on. The character is having a dream (actually going to be a premonition) and wakes up on the floor of a hospital: ---------- Leonard stood in the alleyway lit only by the harsh white xenon of the streetlight. The rain wasn't going to stop anytime soon, and he felt it soaking through his shoes at this point. “Dr. Mann?” Blackness engulfed the alleyway, and then there was nothing but the brightest light. Leonard lifted his head up from the floor. “Dr. Mann, are you okay? How long have you been here?” Dr. Leonard Mann found himself lying face first on the floor of a hospital room. A nurse stood over him. A few drops of blood stained the floor near his wrist, just past the IV that had been yanked out. The nurse helped him back onto the bed. ---------- Liam Emsa fucked around with this message at 17:45 on Sep 8, 2014 |
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Sep 8, 2014 17:37
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Liam Emsa posted:I don't know. I just feel like I don't spend enough time painting the scene. If I do, I feel like I'm forcing myself to do it, and then adding unnecessary fluff detail. I have a screenwriting background, so I often feel like I'm painting it like a movie scene, and I don't know if that's good enough or not. i get in trouble often for not giving enough imagery/detail in my writing. when this happens and I feel like I need to add some, i actually think about what i'm trying to convey re: attitudes, motivations, etc. then i describe objects/scenery that reinforces this. Also using scenery to further characterization helps. so I don't think what it looks like first, I think about what I need to say, and then pick things that match. so if you need to describe a room, talk about the objects in it that tell us more about the character. don't just talk about the blue walls (unless blue is significant to the char). when describing a nature scene, do it in the context of how the chars are supposed to feel. are they scared? then talk about dark and evil the forest seems. are they happy? talk about how they want to climb all the trees or whatever. showing your char's reactions to the scenery helps establish it better than just listing off what it looks like. a few descriptions can go a long way, no need to have whole paragraphs describing everything. let the reader's imagination fill in some stuff.
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Sep 8, 2014 17:45
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crabrock posted:i get in trouble often for not giving enough imagery/detail in my writing. when this happens and I feel like I need to add some, i actually think about what i'm trying to convey re: attitudes, motivations, etc. then i describe objects/scenery that reinforces this. Also using scenery to further characterization helps. so I don't think what it looks like first, I think about what I need to say, and then pick things that match. I bolded what works for me. I usually "see" the scene in my head, but I know nobody wants to know, for example, just how many cobwebs there are in the corner of this super spooky room as yet another item on the checklist of environmental descriptions. So I'll make a character interact with the spiderwebs: they get caught in them (signifying unease, being trapped, lack of awareness of surroundings), or maybe they make a point of cleaning the spiderwebs out with a broom (signifying determination, cleanliness, lack of awareness at the bigger picture). The point being, no reader cares about the spiderwebs until they're important for the characters. Make your world important to your characters, and you'll make your imagery interesting and ~*~ layered ~*~. Sometimes this happens during a first draft. More often it happens when I'm rereading, and I'm replaying the scene in my head, and a scenery piece just "clicks" as being usefully interacted with.
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Sep 8, 2014 17:53
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Those two dudes make some great points that I was gonna make. Description should back up what you're trying to convey, whether it's a character's warmth or the meaningless absurdity of a rampaging alien artifact. Here's some techniques that help me when it's time to write some description:
Not everything has to be a novel turn of phrase, but it's a good thing to consider if you need to really drive home an image. Sometimes all it takes is a bit of an unexpected contrast; once I said a character tried to soothe his anxieties by "combing the garden to pristine, compulsive beauty"--that 'compulsive' is unexpected, since 'pristine' carries connotations of peacefulness, and that contrast helps create meaning. Unexpected contrast is a great little trick. On the other hand, if you want to spend some time on a description somewhere, it pays to be specific. For instance, my latest TD entry had a line that boiled down to "He had an aggressively friendly voice." Not terrible on its own, since there's a bit of contrast there already, but I wanted to go extreme evocative so I considered a few iterations. 'A voice so friendly he could have been trying to sell you something' was a possibility, but that was more cloying and obviously insincere than I wanted (plus, the character was already a pitch man, so it didn't make as much sense to say that a pitch man did something the way a pitch man would). I settled on something to the tune of "He had the voice of an uncle coming over for Thanksgiving dinner," which gets the overly friendly, obligated to be nice to him, trying-to-make-you-like-him sort of feeling I was going for. It's effective (in my mind at least) because it's specific, evocative, and a relatively novel phrase. crabrock posted:a few descriptions can go a long way, no need to have whole paragraphs describing everything. let the reader's imagination fill in some stuff. I wanted to end with this cause it's true. Looking at my voice example, I pulled a poetic description like that maybe two or three times in the whole story. When you get a good piece of description, you can drop it in and let it build a little world around itself.
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Sep 8, 2014 20:45
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Djeser posted:Those two dudes make some great points that I was gonna make. Description should back up what you're trying to convey, whether it's a character's warmth or the meaningless absurdity of a rampaging alien artifact. Good advice. Remember: you should nearly always be describing characters, not scenery. But when you describe how a character experiences the world, you are (or should be) describing character.
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Sep 8, 2014 21:55
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When is it appropriate to focus on describing nature or weather in a story? I've read advice saying that you should by-and-large avoid describing or writing about nature or weather since it is really cliche, but what about like with Grapes of Wrath where Steinbeck spends several pages (the first chapter?) describing the clouds passing over Oklahoma before getting to the Joad family?
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Sep 8, 2014 23:27
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