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anime was right posted:my words are 100% grade a bullshit that's some pretty good poo poo, man, good job
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Sep 25, 2016 01:22
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all words are poo poo but u the goal is to make ur reader think the words arent poo poo
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Sep 25, 2016 03:36
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The more he wrote, the more he shat, and the more he shat, the more he wrote.
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Sep 25, 2016 03:57
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Sep 25, 2016 11:10
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Naerasa posted:The more he wrote, the more he shat, and the more he shat, the more he wrote. I'm sure you thought you were referencing GRRM, but you were in fact posting prophecy.
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Sep 25, 2016 19:10
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Thranguy posted:Something I've gotten more than a few times in feedback when I try to write action is that everything ends up being too easy for my main characters. How can I fix that? Looking for tips on writing action sequences featuring active and competent characters that can make it feel like they have real, serious opposition and threat, ways to put something in between a character having a problem and them using their skills and abilities to solve it that doesn't feel like stalling for time, that kind of thing. From a reader/watcher of things I will say this. Killing is an easy out, killing only ends a threat it doesnt resolve a problem. That is why I think Michael Westen from Burn Notice is one of the best T.V. action heroes. The writers on that show did a really good job of solving conflicts in meaningful ways. What I'd say is up the stakes maybe? Change the win conditions for an encounter up every now and again. Make sure that overcoming an obstacle isn't all sunshine and rainbows for your protagonists. Even if there's not much challenge to the physical aspects of a fight male your characters feel like poo poo for mudstomping a bunch of neonates that never stood a chance. I guess it boils down to "Hurt Them" in one way or another. SkaAndScreenplays fucked around with this message at 01:07 on Sep 27, 2016 |
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Sep 26, 2016 07:36
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SCRIVENER has a NANOWRIMO free trial that'll run until 12/7/2016, instead of the 30-day trail. I've been using the 30-day trial on my windows laptop, and I was down to 2 days. I was checking their site for any deals or whatnot before buying a second copy, (already have it on my mac) and found this deal. It is GREAT if you're a planner, and want to have your ideas collected before 11/1/2016. If you're looking for a program that is completely suited for longer stories, Scrivener is great. I can't recommend it enough. Go get it. Use it for free til 12/7 (that's almost twice their normal free trial period). http://www.literatureandlatte.com/nanowrimo.php Somebody else start a Nano thread this year. I've started the past two threads, and didn't finish my drat manuscripts... so. You -- you there. GO start that thread. Recruit new blood into writing, get people excited about the joy of vomiting words at a rampant rate regardless of quality. Sure, you can debate the merits of quality vs. quantity later. magnificent7 fucked around with this message at 13:59 on Oct 10, 2016 |
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Oct 10, 2016 13:55
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I'll start one when I get home today. Should it be in this subforum?
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Oct 10, 2016 16:08
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HIJK posted:I'll start one when I get home today. Should it be in this subforum?
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Oct 10, 2016 16:53
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NaNo 2016 thread here: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3793864 I hope everyone votes in the poll!
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Oct 11, 2016 06:58
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ill do it ill write 50k words ill ahahaha sure i'm gonna tho
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Oct 11, 2016 07:14
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anime was right posted:ill do it ill write 50k words ill ahahaha do it do it
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Oct 11, 2016 07:16
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On the one hand, "you have no idea what you're talking about" is never an appropriate response to crit. On the other hand "your story about corruption in an organized religion seems pretty down on priests, you should include at least one nice priest, just like how one should include a woman so one's story doesn't appear sexist" is pretty up there as bad crit goes.
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Oct 17, 2016 22:21
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neongrey posted:On the one hand, "you have no idea what you're talking about" is never an appropriate response to crit. On the other hand "your story about corruption in an organized religion seems pretty down on priests, you should include at least one nice priest, just like how one should include a woman so one's story doesn't appear sexist" is pretty up there as bad crit goes. I disagree. Sometimes "you have no idea what you're talking about" is an a completely appropriate (and accurate) response to a crit. Now, I don't think anyone should just dismiss a critique out of hand because they don't like it. And if you're dismissing ALL negative critiques out of hand, then.... you have a real problem. But I think it's fine to look at feedback, think about it, and then absolutely reject it. You don't have to make changes based on everyone's feedback. In fact, I think one of the most important things about learning how to get criticism, is learning how to decide which of it is actually useful to you and letting the rest of it go without throwing a big tantrum about people not understanding your genius. Unless by "response" you meant actually saying to that person's face, because yeah, that's not nice. And you want to include at least one nice thing when you respond to critiques, so you don't seem pretty down on all critiquers. This is why there's only two things to say to say to someone who took the time to give you feedback: 1) Thank you. 2) Can you clarify/expand on what you meant when you said XYZ
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Oct 18, 2016 00:46
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Yeah, that's fair. I don't like arguing with crit in general, partly because I'm the sort of person who likes to talk aloud about how I'm going to address it and that by nature already sounds argumentative; I don't like to muddle it with real argument. But there's definitely an art to figuring out what crit's useful and how you can adapt crit into something that will help your story. And I don't think there's anything wrong with clarification; I know some people here don't like it but sometimes I have been genuinely unsure what people are talking about and still had access to them, so hey. I got that bomb, though, after I'd already agreed with the sentiment because it's a) valid and b) not entirely unintentional. And then they told me to literally add a token character so I didn't appear biased, lol. Mostly, I think it's a briefly amusing anecdote.
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Oct 18, 2016 01:18
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Ignoring criticism is different from arguing with it. I don't recommend the latter, ever.
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Oct 18, 2016 01:43
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neongrey posted:Yeah, that's fair. I don't like arguing with crit in general, partly because I'm the sort of person who likes to talk aloud about how I'm going to address it and that by nature already sounds argumentative; I don't like to muddle it with real argument. But there's definitely an art to figuring out what crit's useful and how you can adapt crit into something that will help your story. And I don't think there's anything wrong with clarification; I know some people here don't like it but sometimes I have been genuinely unsure what people are talking about and still had access to them, so hey. Without having read your book, it's possible what the crit person was trying (and failing) to say was that your book lacks either any redeeming characters or understandable antagonists. I'll be the first to agree with you that organized religion is hosed, but it's one thing to write an op-ed around it and another thing to structure a narrative around it. If you have a group of characters in fiction where they're all a piece of poo poo, it comes off as flat, even if it's true to reality. But again, I haven't read your book and that's all just speculation, so it's entirely likely that the person's critique was dumb and your story is fine the way it is. I only present the devil's advocate argument because I've gotten critiques in the past that I thought were bad, only to later realize they scratched the surface of an actual problem that the person critiquing didn't know how to articulate.
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Oct 18, 2016 04:30
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I'm finally getting around to laughing a lot about how that person apparently thought if you include a woman in your story it won't be sexist any more. 
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Oct 18, 2016 05:47
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Dr. Kloctopussy posted:Ignoring criticism is different from arguing with it. I don't recommend the latter, ever. Yeah, fair cop; I think we're on the same page, I probably could have phrased better. Mostly I just had my mind blown at this person literally telling me to go for cheap tokenism for... priests. I mean this person's story literally had its main character have a glowing birthmark that made them somehow mysterious and special so I don't expect much, but, yikes. Writing groups! But other people in it really helped me work out some severe problems I had with this story so I'm sticking with them, but... lol. Naerasa posted:Without having read your book, it's possible what the crit person was trying (and failing) to say was that your book lacks either any redeeming characters or understandable antagonists. I'll be the first to agree with you that organized religion is hosed, but it's one thing to write an op-ed around it and another thing to structure a narrative around it. If you have a group of characters in fiction where they're all a piece of poo poo, it comes off as flat, even if it's true to reality. Nah, it's a fair cop, and I don't dismiss people lightly. The story's got issues overall and it's got issues with having a lot of bad people in it in ways that I do need to fix, but I'm gonna say 'you should have a good priest so you don't look like you think all priests are bad' is not one of them. Dr. Kloctopussy posted:I'm finally getting around to laughing a lot about how that person apparently thought if you include a woman in your story it won't be sexist any more. I know, right. 
neongrey fucked around with this message at 05:57 on Oct 18, 2016 |
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Oct 18, 2016 05:55
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neongrey posted:
Wait, P. C. Cast is in your crit group?????
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Oct 18, 2016 06:11
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Holy lol do you mean to tell me this girl is ripping off even more than I thought?
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Oct 18, 2016 11:17
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Well glowing birthmark is basically 'super badass and cool' fantasy trait number one, even if there aren't too many concrete examples. It's just one of those traits that an inexperienced writer would think exudes badass, like a character brooding about darkness or being able to sense some 'evil' that only they can feel.
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Oct 18, 2016 17:21
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I think the best thing to do with lovely advice is to try to find something useful in it. "It would be cooler if your character was a vampire." Thank you, that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. But maybe this character would benefit from a sense of duality, or the frustration of some unsustainable need...
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Oct 19, 2016 00:36
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yeah the thing is all feedback, no matter how lovely, has an underlying reason behind it: "your character should be a vampire" can say anything from "this character wasn't cool or interesting enough for me" to "your main character doesn't fit the story you wrote" to "there is a market for me to drool over dreamy pale dudes who bite necks" to "when chapter 3 happened i wasn't invested but if you stuck to cheap genre tricks i probably woulda ate the whole thing up" i posted something similar before like a year or two ago or something, but in creative fields, all feedback says something, just possibly not the thing the person is actually saying.
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Oct 19, 2016 00:57
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Has anyone here come across good examples of epistolary first person that borders on second person because the letter is addressing another character in the story? I've been trying out the style because I thought it would help focus the story, since it forces me to consider exactly what my protagonist wants to say to this other person and leave out the rest. However my first reader says it's "dense and hard to follow." If I can't make it work, I may have to drop the conceit and write in a straight first person, but then I might have to lose little asides like, "What the hell were you thinking when you X?." And dammit, I was having fun writing those. Besides Calvino, the only other example I've read is William Gibson's short story New Rose Hotel, and it was dense and hard to follow as well. Addressing the reader as "you" seems to be too distracting. Maybe I should take that as a sign. 
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Oct 19, 2016 04:43
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Stuporstar posted:Has anyone here come across good examples of epistolary first person that borders on second person because the letter is addressing another character in the story? I've been trying out the style because I thought it would help focus the story, since it forces me to consider exactly what my protagonist wants to say to this other person and leave out the rest. However my first reader says it's "dense and hard to follow." I'm in the middle of (listening to the audiobook of) Acceptance by Jeff Vandermeer (Book 3 in The Southern Reach Trilogy) and the story is in two voices - one is that second/first person kind of thing, and the other half is third person odd. It is INDEED hard to maintain an interest in it... after awhile the entire drat thing becomes exposition and reflection with very little action, just a whole lot of "you could've done better but Bob never believed in you, so you just keep tagging along because you know one day, you'll overcome your BLAH BLAH BLAH JESUS DOES ANYTHING HAPPEN." It would probably work if those chapters were a WHOLE LOT shorter; so it'd be a great refreshing break from third-person narrative, a chance to get inside the head of the person, either reflecting on what's already happened or setting up what's coming, and then bounce back to third person, but these chapters go on and on, and I find myself losing interest in most of it. Which is unfortunate because this series has a lot of high praise. I loved the first book, gave up on the second one, and I'm pretty much forcing myself to finish this third one. That's right, I gave up on the middle book so I'm probably missing a ton of AH-HAH! moments but holy crap I couldn't give a rat's rear end after 45 minutes of "you know you shouldn't read the diary, but you go ahead, because Bob's story just doesn't make sense to you; you can't think of a single person who'd trek through the woods for three days; hell you barely made it out alive when you were well equipped to --" blah blah. It is the unending inner monologue of a person sitting in a bathtub about to slit their wrists as far as I know, having one of those inner arguments of how they should've said "OH YEAH? THE JERK STORE WAS OUT OF YOU."
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Oct 19, 2016 14:02
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Currently reading Us Conductors by Sean Michaels. The premise is a fictional biography of Lev Termen, inventor of the theremin and Soviet spy, written as a letter to a woman he loved, Clara Rockmore. It's actually light and easily understood. And only refers to the second person rarely as she is an actor in the narrative or as he wonders what she might be doing or thinking. 400 page novel that feels like it's 200. Definitely recommend to anyone but especially if that's what you're trying to achieve.
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Oct 19, 2016 14:25
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a friendly penguin posted:Currently reading Us Conductors by Sean Michaels. The premise is a fictional biography of Lev Termen, inventor of the theremin and Soviet spy, written as a letter to a woman he loved, Clara Rockmore. I did an edit to take out most of my second person references in my 2500 word experimental scene, whittling it down to a couple second person sentences near the beginning and end as a frame. My first reader said it made a huge difference in the readability, that saving the use of "you" for only a couple key moments made those moments stand out in a good way. So the problem seemed to be picking a scene where both characters were major actors and insisting on using "you" every time. Now that I think of it, most epistolary fiction gets around the problem by being presented as letters written to inform someone of events they weren't present in. My protagonist is writing these letters to people he's lost in an effort to conjure them back to life as he sits in jail. I don't have to lean so heavily on the second person for that, and given how hard it is to read, probably shouldn't. I'm glad I tried the experiment though. I learned quite a bit from it.
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Oct 19, 2016 18:27
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Hey fiction thread. I've been trawling through this thread off-and-on and am still a good 2 years behind, but I wanted to say, at the tail end of a lovely relationship I drunkenly stumbled upon this thread and somehow it convinced me to take writing, an old dream, seriously instead of writing myself off (lol). I've been doing Writing Excuses prompts, flash fiction, and trying to hit 1000 words a day. The occasional short story, trying to work myself up to being decent, and mulling book ideas once I feel I can tackle that. Somehow my love of writing and english has translated into finding my calling and now I'm poised to actually finish my degree and then either tackle a law school or medieval lit academia track later on. This is after six years of job-and-school drifting and being inspired and driven is foreign to me. So thanks thread. I did my first thunderdome today and had a family death a few hours after signing up, forgot about the dome for a bit. but I managed to poo poo out a bad story Sunday before the deadline and bad though it is I couldn't have done even that six months ago. I hope I can do you proud thread, tbh clicking on the TD thread and reading my crits terrifies me.
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Oct 25, 2016 10:49
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vintagepurple posted:Hey fiction thread. I've been trawling through this thread off-and-on and am still a good 2 years behind, but I wanted to say, at the tail end of a lovely relationship I drunkenly stumbled upon this thread and somehow it convinced me to take writing, an old dream, seriously instead of writing myself off (lol). I've been doing Writing Excuses prompts, flash fiction, and trying to hit 1000 words a day. The occasional short story, trying to work myself up to being decent, and mulling book ideas once I feel I can tackle that. Somehow my love of writing and english has translated into finding my calling and now I'm poised to actually finish my degree and then either tackle a law school or medieval lit academia track later on. This is after six years of job-and-school drifting and being inspired and driven is foreign to me. So thanks thread. crits that aren't praise are always terrifying, but always good, because you want to be better. we all do.
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Oct 25, 2016 12:55
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vintagepurple posted:Hey fiction thread. I've been trawling through this thread off-and-on and am still a good 2 years behind, but I wanted to say, at the tail end of a lovely relationship I drunkenly stumbled upon this thread and somehow it convinced me to take writing, an old dream, seriously instead of writing myself off (lol). I've been doing Writing Excuses prompts, flash fiction, and trying to hit 1000 words a day. The occasional short story, trying to work myself up to being decent, and mulling book ideas once I feel I can tackle that. Somehow my love of writing and english has translated into finding my calling and now I'm poised to actually finish my degree and then either tackle a law school or medieval lit academia track later on. This is after six years of job-and-school drifting and being inspired and driven is foreign to me. So thanks thread. You'll have better luck finding work in medieval lit than you will in law. Either way, good luck and congrats on finding out what you love.
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Oct 25, 2016 15:05
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vintagepurple posted:Hey fiction thread. I've been trawling through this thread off-and-on and am still a good 2 years behind, but I wanted to say, at the tail end of a lovely relationship I drunkenly stumbled upon this thread and somehow it convinced me to take writing, an old dream, seriously instead of writing myself off (lol). I've been doing Writing Excuses prompts, flash fiction, and trying to hit 1000 words a day. The occasional short story, trying to work myself up to being decent, and mulling book ideas once I feel I can tackle that. Somehow my love of writing and english has translated into finding my calling and now I'm poised to actually finish my degree and then either tackle a law school or medieval lit academia track later on. This is after six years of job-and-school drifting and being inspired and driven is foreign to me. So thanks thread. Heck yeah, glad this thread has helped, and welcome to writing fiction. Congrats especially on building a daily writing habit. Consistent effort and practice is one of the most important parts of writing. Writing can be scary, especially when you're showing it to other people, but it's also very rewarding. The tone of Thunderdome crits can be a little uh.... over the top? But they are very helpful. I've improved a lot from getting honest feedback on my stories, even though sometimes I have to take a minute to cry inside when I read them. Seriously though, they get easier to take every time. Hope you enjoy the 'dome and stick around 
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Oct 25, 2016 19:55
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Any good (preferably free) sources that give a common sense breakdown on how in the gently caress punctuatiom works? My good-ish TD entries have suffered from absolutely miserably deployed basix conventions and no amount of self proofreading as proven itself an adequate remedy. I'm revisiting prose from a medium that can often treat complete sentences of action verbose and looks at blocks of dialogue is a completely separate and almost singularly important part of the manuscript so I'm stuck thinking "How the gently caress do semicolons justify their existence as anything other than an inconvenience." Halp appreciated... Edit: I'm not a loving useless baby and understand clauses and sentence structure. Tense and voice are second nature. As of right now colons especially are a symbol that MAYBE follows a dialogue slug if the format calls for it. SkaAndScreenplays fucked around with this message at 16:22 on Oct 26, 2016 |
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Oct 26, 2016 16:13
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I was watching Primer last night, and in it they repeat that oft-debunked story about "you know how nasa spent 30 mil developing a pen that could write upside down, and russia used a pencil." Anyway it got me thinking. That story gets repeated because it's an interesting story. It doesn't matter that it's not true. A lot of urban legends are like this. They make people feel like "oh man, that's so true, now i understand the world on a new level!" and it sticks with them. The reason I bring this up is, I was doing a little bit of casual writing, and I thought of something that would be good, but it's not factually true. It fits the theme of the story really well, but it's just plain old wrong. Are there like, reasons not to just say "gently caress it" and pretend it's true anyway? it has to do with biology. This isn't science fiction or anything. Am I breaking some sort of writer code if I talk about things even though I know they're made up lies? can i hide behind "it's a character saying it, so it doesn't matter?"
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Oct 26, 2016 16:34
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I don't think "rules" matter when it comes to fiction. If you can make me want to read it, mission accomplished.
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Oct 26, 2016 16:39
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Maple Leaf posted:I don't think "rules" matter when it comes to fiction. If you can make me want to read it, mission accomplished. oh yeah, well what about that i before e thing. bet you didn't think of that did you edit: wait that's a law, not a rule. edit2: it's only a theory. edit3: none of those were actual edits.
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Oct 26, 2016 16:46
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crabrock posted:can i hide behind "it's a character saying it, so it doesn't matter?" That's your answer, yes. Unless one of your characters is Dr. Manhattan or something, none of them should be capable of knowing all objective truth, which means they can spout facts they believe with certaintly even though they're wrong. Everybody on earth's done it at one time or another, so it's not like it's an unrealistic line to give a character.
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Oct 26, 2016 16:48
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SkaAndScreenplays posted:Any good (preferably free) sources that give a common sense breakdown on how in the gently caress punctuatiom works? My good-ish TD entries have suffered from absolutely miserably deployed basix conventions and no amount of self proofreading as proven itself an adequate remedy. post from TD: Kaishai posted:The relevant instruction from this punctuation guide is Use a colon after an independent clause when it is followed by a list, a quotation, appositive, or other idea directly related to the independent clause. Regarding colons in dialogue slugs and such: If you want to sell a script, follow the Hollywood formatting to the letter. It's archaic formatting IMO, but that's the rule. Cookie cutter look, fresh ideas (hopefully). http://www.finaldraft.com/mm_media/mm_pdf/How_to_Format_a_Screenplay.pdf Lots of examples here, including some major blockbusters. Plenty of other scripts floating around to look at. http://www.simplyscripts.com/movie-scripts.html The screenwriting thread doesn't get a lot of action, but it exists: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3355785 As for semicolons, my explanation is that the clauses are independent but linked. Here's an example from an action sequence in the Taken screenplay that illustrates this: Taken Screeplay P.94 posted:The pipe pierces his back and protrudes through his chest; blood sprays in every direction."
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Oct 26, 2016 17:10
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Semicolons have another, rather neat purpose that isn't often mentioned. You know how you'll usually separate items in a list with a comma? "I went to Wal-Mart and bought bread, milk, cheese, and simulated emeralds," that kind of thing. Usually that works fine, but it gets messy when individual items in the list contain commas. If you tell me you invited Dan, a scientist, Margaret, a welder, and Vinny to a party, how am I supposed to know whether you invited three people or five? The answer is semicolons. "I invited Dan, a scientist; Margaret, a welder; and Vinny" makes the situation clear. You could rephrase the list to avoid the issue if you wanted to, of course, but the semicolon is a valid and useful option. This page covers semicolons fairly well.
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Oct 26, 2016 17:34
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crabrock posted:I was watching Primer last night, and in it they repeat that oft-debunked story about "you know how nasa spent 30 mil developing a pen that could write upside down, and russia used a pencil." Anyway it got me thinking. That story gets repeated because it's an interesting story. It doesn't matter that it's not true. A lot of urban legends are like this. They make people feel like "oh man, that's so true, now i understand the world on a new level!" and it sticks with them. You can use the pencil story as a little parable about ingenuity and not overthinking a problem, or decrying government bloat. The other key here is that this is something that people did (or did not do) rather than the way the people work biologically. I think you have to tread a little more carefully with biology-related statements. Using "humans only use 10% of their brain"  as a story conceit is relatively harmless. If you have a character talking about how homeopathic remedies cured their cancer, then I would definitely have someone challenge them in-story.People take scientific fictions (especially if not presented in an obvious sci-fi manner) as fact far too often, so ask yourself if you would be OK with this piece of bad science getting out into the wild uncontested. The Cut of Your Jib fucked around with this message at 18:40 on Oct 26, 2016 |
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Oct 26, 2016 18:38
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