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The first time I ever entered TD my story was poo poo and I received several harsh critiques, so in turn I took those critiques and applied them to my next story and got an HM. I guess what I'm saying is critiques are two fold and depend both on the person giving you one and how you respond to it. If you respond with a big "gently caress you" then the only person you're hurting is yourself.
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Sep 17, 2014 15:19
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Obliterati posted:I know this topic's kinda been done before but I am genuinely interested in it. As someone who hasn't done much hard critique, can people outline the sort of things I should be looking for/saying? I've done a few TD crits but I wasn't sure if they were much use to the writers concerned. I'm a fan of Mike Works' post on the topic: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3495955&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=2#post405652093
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Sep 17, 2014 16:12
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Obliterati posted:I know this topic's kinda been done before but I am genuinely interested in it. As someone who hasn't done much hard critique, can people outline the sort of things I should be looking for/saying? I've done a few TD crits but I wasn't sure if they were much use to the writers concerned. The post linked above me is pretty thorough and good so you should read that. If you want a short answer, the one unique thing you can bring to a critique even if you've never done one before is your own perspective. Just saying, I kinda got lost here or I couldn't visualize this fight scene or their dialog didn't match the characters/setting or anything like that can be very useful. Basically use your own first impressions and tastes as a kind barometer. Pretend to be a prospective reader picking up a new author for the first time. A good way to put it would be, say you were in a bookstore(alas) and you came across their story in a book and started reading it. Determine at what point you would set the book back down. It's the author's goal to hook you then snag you for the duration of the story. So if they fail at that then tell them when that happens with as much clarity as you can muster. If the first sentence doesn't make you want more, that's a problem and so on. Sometimes it's a case of not being the right reader for the work but ideally you get multiple critiques so that you can see what all sorts of folks are saying. If most everyone says X sucks then X probably does suck, if it's just one person then it may or may not suck. So be honest, and don't worry about being biased, everyone is and it's fine. It's why the more critiques you get the better. And Zip, I've seen a few online workshops for writing and each one handles critique differently. Some like critters pretty much enforce a politeness rule and you can still give good critiques in that kind of environment. Critiques don't even have to be worded harshly, though many of the TD ones are pretty well balanced and even have people saying nice things from time to time. Hard or soft coating, it's the substance that makes a good critique. You say you've lurked in TD, so why not give it a try just this once? If it's a horrible experience you don't have to do it again, but if you get something good out of it then that would be sweet, yeah? Use it as motivation to write a story if nothing else. I'm no great writer by any stretch but I'll give you a crit, a diplomatically worded one even, if you do. JuniperCake fucked around with this message at 21:53 on Sep 17, 2014 |
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Sep 17, 2014 21:51
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I've got a story idea that I can't quite make sense out of but I'm compelled to write. I want to write a story with zombies that isn't a horror story or about violent zombie attacks. The zombies would be an allegory about societal neglect of the impoverished and the stinginess of the Haves in society. I realize there have to be points that zombies attack people to really sell the importance of the threat of zombies taking over, but I don't really want a survival story. I realize this doesn't quite make sense; I do have other plot points mapped out but I don't know how to make the zombies important but not overstated. "Good writers borrow, great writers steal," and all that, so would someone be able to point me in the right direction for books to read (or even shoot me ideas), please? The closest I've read is World War Z. I love the book to death but it's more about the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse, though it does have great social commentary. vvvvvv Thank you! vvvvvv The Sean fucked around with this message at 04:41 on Sep 18, 2014 |
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Sep 17, 2014 22:23
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The Sean posted:I've got a story idea that I can't quite make sense out of but I'm compelled to write. I want to write a story with zombies that isn't a horror story or about violent zombie attacks. The zombies would be an allegory about societal neglect of the impoverished and the stinginess of the Haves in society. I realize there have to be points that zombies attack people to really sell the importance of the threat of zombies taking over, but I don't really want a survival story. I realize this doesn't quite make sense; I do have other plot points mapped out but I don't know how to make the zombies important but not overstated. salman rushdie oh, and this might be useful
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Sep 17, 2014 22:34
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Obliterati posted:I know this topic's kinda been done before but I am genuinely interested in it. As someone who hasn't done much hard critique, can people outline the sort of things I should be looking for/saying? I've done a few TD crits but I wasn't sure if they were much use to the writers concerned. I don't do a lot critiquing because I'm huge butthole who poopoos on everything (I also prefer lurking), but as someone who occasionally seeks out critiques, generally what I want to know is: 1. Do the words clearly explain what's happening in the story? Do you know where the story takes place? Do you understand what the characters are doing? Do the events make sense? Does the whole thing look like a schizophrenic took LSD and vomited words on the paper? 2. Is it interesting? Do the words you're reading make you curious and want to read more? Is the story moving so fast you can't keep up, or is it bogged down with so many excess words (like descriptions) that you skipped over things or lost interest? 3. Does the text flow smoothly between sentences? Are there parts you tripped over and had to reread, or parts where you just plain couldn't decipher what was being said? -1. Unless they ask for it, you really shouldn't try to direct their story for them. You might not enjoy the subject, but that's ultimately a personal issue.
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Sep 17, 2014 23:38
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I appreciate technical feedback, but I really love knowing what readers think is going on at certain points, what bits stood out for them, whether they noticed certain elements, etc.
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Sep 17, 2014 23:49
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shs posted:I'm huge butthole who poopoos on everything come to thunderdome
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Sep 18, 2014 01:03
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Obliterati posted:I know this topic's kinda been done before but I am genuinely interested in it. As someone who hasn't done much hard critique, can people outline the sort of things I should be looking for/saying? I've done a few TD crits but I wasn't sure if they were much use to the writers concerned. If all else fails, you can always ask the writer whose piece you're critiquing, too. Ask if they'd like a particular aspect of the story in focus: plot, pacing, characters, clarity of word choice, accessibility, suitability for intended audience, theme, etc. A lot of us have a pretty decent idea of what we need to work on as writers, so I'm sure if you're new to crit you can find out what people would like you to look for.  Sometimes it just sucks and you can say you had a problem with everything. But usually some bits are more problematic than others.
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Sep 18, 2014 01:30
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I think we're a little too zealous about pulling people into the 'dome sometimes: if Zip doesn't want to do it, let him rock out and do his own thing. The point about criticism not needing to hurt though, is total bullshit. If you want evidence that a soft touch gets you nowhere, check out the Writers Block subforum on TVTropes: negativity is banned, and everything there is terrible. A big part of the reason the site got turned into such a cesspit was because of their moratorium on criticism, to protect the members' feelings. "YOU'RE poo poo MOTHERFUCKER GO DIE IN A FIRE," is part of TD's kayfabe and is intentionally way over the top, but blocking out criticisms because they don't pat you on the back enough is a sure-fire way to wallow in mediocrity for the rest of your life. TD is a bit crazy for a lot of people and I totally get that, but there's a middle ground between TD and 'no negativity' that you've got to find if you want to improve.
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Sep 18, 2014 05:39
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i don't care if they're in thunderdome, but they posted saying "all criticism is useless, gently caress it."
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Sep 18, 2014 05:47
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SurreptitiousMuffin posted:I think we're a little too zealous about pulling people into the 'dome sometimes: if Zip doesn't want to do it, let him rock out and do his own thing. The point about criticism not needing to hurt though, is total bullshit. If you want evidence that a soft touch gets you nowhere, check out the Writers Block subforum on TVTropes: negativity is banned, and everything there is terrible. A big part of the reason the site got turned into such a cesspit was because of their moratorium on criticism, to protect the members' feelings. I don't think using TVTropes as an example is fair. That is the place where all that is good in fiction goes to die. I'd say critters.org is a decent example of a workshop that has a must be polite rule. All it does is make people say "This is just my opinion but-" but they will still tear your piece apart smiling all the while. Unless your definition of not needing to hurt means only back pats and vague encouragement then yeah, that's absolutely useless. If a person really wants to make a writer feel good, help them polish their piece so they can submit it to a magazine and get paid. Getting money for doing something you enjoy feels pretty good. Can't pay the electric bill with praise.
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Sep 18, 2014 07:17
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You know, reading this thread (besides giving me a fear of this Thunderdome people keep going on about) has reminded me that I've not gotten a proper critique of my work at all yet. I've been thinking about this for a bit and was wondering what advice I should heed when taking criticism for my writing. Is 'Don't be a massive manbaby about it' still sage advice?
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Sep 18, 2014 15:55
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Don't get defensive and don't try to explain to the person what you were going for
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Sep 18, 2014 15:58
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systran posted:Don't get defensive and don't try to explain to the person what you were going for Agreed. Often when I workshop in real life as a group we use a rule where the person being critiqued isn't allowed to speak until at the end.
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Sep 18, 2014 16:04
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Yeah it's hard to resist the urge to explain, but in the end in 90% of cases, if you need to explain what you were going for, you didn't convey it well enough in the first place. (the other 10% of the time, it's just that one guy who never gets anything not getting it, every group's got one, and you probably don't care what he thinks anyway because gently caress that guy)
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Sep 18, 2014 16:11
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neongrey posted:Yeah it's hard to resist the urge to explain, but in the end in 90% of cases, if you need to explain what you were going for, you didn't convey it well enough in the first place. (the other 10% of the time, it's just that one guy who never gets anything not getting it, every group's got one, and you probably don't care what he thinks anyway because gently caress that guy) It's always that guy that insists on explaining in great detail any of the problems you have with his story, too.
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Sep 18, 2014 16:25
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But we're all dead anyway according to Barthes, so what does any of it matter 
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Sep 18, 2014 16:39
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i like it when somebody else explains part of my story to somebody else that didn't get it. that makes me feel warm inside. the biggest thing nono for getting a crit on your work is being a jerk to the reviewer. they took their time to give you free feedback. even if you don't like what they say, respect that they are giving you their opinion (that you asked for) and say thank you, and move on. then cry into your pillow because they just didn't understand your grand vision.
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Sep 18, 2014 18:18
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I switched over from OpenOffice to Word 07, and Word has this annoying habit of adding an extra space between paragraphs. It makes it so when I copy-paste it onto Google Documents, it all comes out crammed together and I have to enter in spaces line-by-line. Is there any way to disable that in Word, or to compensate in Google Docs?
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Sep 18, 2014 18:41
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Sep 18, 2014 18:47
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EDIT: Feverpost removed.
LaughMyselfTo fucked around with this message at 16:02 on Sep 19, 2014 |
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Sep 19, 2014 06:41
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LaughMyselfTo posted:confusing mess
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Sep 19, 2014 06:48
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LaughMyselfTo posted:
Dude, no one is going to be able to give you answers because in art (writing, visual art, and pretty much every other drat medium) how you do something is more important than what your thing is about. A lot of the classics and really great writing has some measure of a political bent and there is also a lot of political infused writing that is trash. It's the execution, it's the stuff between the lines that matters. And we won't be able to tell you if you executed your vision well unless you give us something to actually critique. It's just not possible. So write or draw or whatever something then post it without preamble (if you have to explain the thing before you let us see it, then you've prob already failed) and get some feedback. Also if you are afraid of cultivating the wrong kind of audience or whatever, don't worry about it. Even if you were to be some sort of break away success, you can always write or art under a psuedonym if you are going for a new audience. Cart before the horse and all that, worry about actually finishing your work. Also you care way too much about what people on an internet forum think of you. Don't make apologies for yourself, we're all jerks here just be yourself. You got passion that's good, but now you have to break down the barriers you have for A) Working on your actual art (Not planning not world building, Make the drat thing) and B) throwing it in front of people for them to see. Nothing else matters besides those two things. Don't get caught in the planning-hemming-n-hawing stage forever, it happens to too many people and it never leads to a good place. That, I promise you. JuniperCake fucked around with this message at 07:25 on Sep 19, 2014 |
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Sep 19, 2014 07:23
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Schneider Heim posted:I got a question: Has any one of you tried working on multiple stories in one sitting? If yes, how did you go about it? Was it productive? I have been doing this lately, because my mind seems to jump around like crazy. So far they have mostly been within a shared-world-but-different-series kind of thing. It's only outlining though. I've realized that I will think of a bunch of scenes from different ideas I have, and they won't necessarily be in chronological order or from the same story, but by trying to confine myself to same story and chronological order or anything linear, I'm wasting the work i've already done in my head on these scenes. My psych suggested that I try writing on post-it notes and sticking them to the wall as a way of arranging everything. I haven't done exactly that, because when I think of a scene, it tends to be more detailed than can fit on a single post-it note--BUT I usually don't realize that when I start writing. So, writing an idea on a post-it note is a lot less intimidating than SITTING DOWN TO WRITE. So I start writing my idea for a scene down on a post-it, and when I run out of post-it, I stick that up on the wall, and then start another post-it note. Usually I end up with quite a few, and they look really cool and rewarding stuck up on the wall. Way more productive looking than a page in a notebook that just gets flipped to another blank page :P When the wall gets too cluttered, I pull them off and stick them on loose-leaf paper in a binder, divided by story. Later I can rearrange the pages in the binder, or add notes to the side (with more post-its if I'm still unwilling to commit to writing on a page, which has happened.....) Mostly right now it's a raw collection method. I've been in a pretty big writing slump lately, and this is the only way I have continued to write ANYTHING. I haven't converted any of my notes into an actually written scene, much less an actual completed story, so this isn't some kind of writing gospel. But it has kept me writing SOMETHING, and allowed me to work with the jumpy way my mind works. I think I've said this before, but in my option, figuring out a writing process that works for you is one of the biggest parts of learning to write. So experiment a lot.
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Sep 19, 2014 07:54
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LaughMyselfTo posted:a post I have no idea what this is but this is a writing thread so whatever you're asking the answer is CUT HARD.
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Sep 19, 2014 08:34
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LaughMyselfTo posted:
Few things to start off: CC as a whole is not necessarily geared towards novels. Thunderdome and Fiction Farm are both short story (drat near flash fiction) oriented, and I've seen everything from 6 word stories to novellas to full-blown space operas get feedback on here, so don't feel like you can't share anything. There are also threads for just about every medium you could think of, and if your project doesn't fall under any of them, you can post it anyway. You are a little vague on the project and medium so it's kind of hard to actually give you a useful answer, but I guess I can say this: "political" works are at their most effective when the politics are an organic part of the story. If you are just using whatever medium you are using to shout a message from the rooftops, it's probably going to be poo poo. That said, unless the political view is extremely unpopular and / or whatever you produce becomes widely known, I wouldn't worry about it making a stain on your future projects or anything. Hell, if you are really concerned about it, just put this project out under a pen name. That said, there are plenty of fine "political" works out there, regardless of genre. Off the top of my head: Starship Troopers, The Sheep Look Up, Master and Margarita, The Jungle, drat near everything Dickens wrote, etc. Coetzee writes very "political" novels and he's won a Nobel for literature. The reason everyone hates Ayn Rand (aside from objectivism being repulsive) is that her books end up being a bunch of cardboard cut-outs arguing talking points back and forth, interspersed with the kind of rambling tracts that a crazy person on the street corner would hand out. Grizzled Patriarch fucked around with this message at 15:42 on Sep 19, 2014 |
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Sep 19, 2014 15:39
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the gently caress is a tritagonist
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Sep 19, 2014 15:45
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I am the deuteragonist, but I will die and come back as a ghost with different character attributes, technically qualifying me as the tritagonist; but some literary critics will argue that my ghost form is actually the deuteragonist as it is more critical to the plot and undergoes more interesting character development with its complex arc.
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Sep 19, 2014 15:45
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Thanks! That was very illuminating.
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Sep 19, 2014 15:49
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Removed the post because, looking back, I'm sick enough I might as well be highposting. Also it was a bad post. Sorry for making GBS threads up the thread, hope to see y'all in the Thunderdome when I'm up to it, which should be soon.
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Sep 19, 2014 16:08
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Schneider Heim posted:I got a question: Has any one of you tried working on multiple stories in one sitting? If yes, how did you go about it? Was it productive? Like Dr. K, I also tend to jump around between stories. For me, they're usually in the same setting and about the same characters. For example, I'm working on a novel with chapters that jump back and forth between a dude and his girlfriend. As I'm working through the novel, I'll come up with ideas about how they met, or something that happened to one or the other of them in the past, and because I have a Digital Lifestyle I create a new Google Doc for that idea instead of Dr. K's post-its. Then I bang out a short story about that idea. I don't usually finish them, I just write enough to work out the idea and figure out how it affects the "now" of the novel. Because despite what Boost Mobile tells you, it ain't about where you're at, it's where you're from. To answer your last question, yes, it's productive. For me anyway. Though sometimes I'll go too far on a tangent and I have to pull back to the novel. The way I'm keeping on task right now is a weekly writing goal of 2200 words per week. The idea is that I'll reach a good round novel-length word count of 50k by New Year's. I'm at 27k right now, so about two weeks behind, but it's worked much better than having no goal in particular. As twinkle cave told me at our writer's group a few months ago, "you're almost thirty, it's time to actually finish a novel and shop it around." So that's how I came up with the goal. I highly recommend it, and make sure you share the doc with a friend who will keep you accountable and yell at you when you fall behind. e: also at some point one of those idea-stories might become a for-real short story that I could get published somewhere. Never throw any of that poo poo away.
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Sep 19, 2014 16:12
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Ugh, I wish someone had quoted it before he edited it.
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Sep 20, 2014 01:13
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The gist: tritagonist
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Sep 20, 2014 01:59
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Since we're on the subject of criticisms, nothing annoys me more than seeing a DM or loser get a half blurb (it's not even a crit) on their story and that's all. They lost for a reason, so obviously there should be a ton of poo poo to improve. They're not going to be able to get better if all they got from a crit is ">:|". I feel when you lose and the judges obviously don't give enough of a poo poo to give you a real crit, it rubs salt in the wound.
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Sep 20, 2014 02:52
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Tbh I agree completely. We should make that a new dome rule. Loser or DM gets a full crit. Not necessarily line-by-line, but at least what worked and what didn't.
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Sep 20, 2014 02:54
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Mercedes posted:Since we're on the subject of criticisms, nothing annoys me more than seeing a DM or loser get a half blurb (it's not even a crit) on their story and that's all. They lost for a reason, so obviously there should be a ton of poo poo to improve. They're not going to be able to get better if all they got from a crit is ">:|". I feel when you lose and the judges obviously don't give enough of a poo poo to give you a real crit, it rubs salt in the wound. That's what happened to me, if I recall. I got a lot of "decent, but obviously you ran up against the word count." And that's it. The only time I entered. Now my writing time is constricted enough that I have to focus on my novel, so it'll be a while before I'm back
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Sep 20, 2014 02:55
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blue squares posted:That's what happened to me, if I recall. I got a lot of "decent, but obviously you ran up against the word count." And that's it. The only time I entered. Now my writing time is constricted enough that I have to focus on my novel, so it'll be a while before I'm back It's happened to me an numerous occasions as well and it's the worst feeling. A mix of anger, disappointment and helplessness. More anger than anything else really.
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Sep 20, 2014 03:05
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I got Mercedes reading it out on Soundcloud (but I don't think you were a judge). e: (I also got good crits)
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Sep 20, 2014 03:08
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If I judge I always try to give good crits.
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Sep 20, 2014 03:09
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