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Let’s not do this in the writing thread, cool?
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Aug 3, 2019 00:24
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Spoilers are silly but don't be a dick, there you go. There's plenty of books out there that talk about the chapter's events in the titles of the chapter. In fact, I'd argue that any book that titles its chapters is doing a bit of this, even if it's not as explicit as the olde tymey "Chapter Six, wherein Beverly makes a surprising discovery and challenges Stacy for the Bone Crown". Like seb said, the point of reading isn't usually the plot synopsis but the entire experience. On top of that, knowing something about what happens, but not everything, is often more engaging than not knowing anything. There was a series of writing advice tidbits I listened to a while back and one of the awkwardly-named bits was "leave gold coins for your readers to find" by which they meant always be offering some reason to keep going. If a chapter starts with a sheriff hanging out in a saloon being a generally fine fellow I might start to tune out. But if that chapter title is "Chapter Four, The Death of the Sheriff" now I've got something to pull me onward, because I know something's coming up. I know that he dies. But at the same time, I don't know how or why. I'm going to keep reading, because now I want to know if he gets into a duel with his prodigal son or if he gets vaporized by the laser eyes of the Egyptian mummy risen from the dead. When you're writing a story, a lot of the craft that goes into making it something people want to read is managing expectations and building interest. Revealing bits of the plot ahead of time can help stimulate that interest. It works in the way that your friend telling you who dies in James of Throne doesn't because it's intentional; it's part of the way the author is deliberately building your interest in reading the story.
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Aug 3, 2019 03:38
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To put it simply: a teaser, not a spoiler. That's it. Give enough information that it draws your reader into your chapter, but not enough that when they get to the moments they go "Yeah, I know. You already told me that." The chapter where the characters pull the mask off of the phantom to reveal it's Old Man Thompson? Title it "The Big Reveal" and not "It Was Old Man Thompson All Along."
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Aug 3, 2019 06:42
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feedmyleg posted:To put it simply: a teaser, not a spoiler. But the second one makes me laugh a lot more 
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Aug 3, 2019 14:35
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Then make the point of reading that chapter something other than learning that It Was Old Man Thompson All Along.
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Aug 3, 2019 15:31
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The real friends were the old man thompsons that we made along the way
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Aug 3, 2019 17:30
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Djeser posted:Then make the point of reading that chapter something other than learning that It Was Old Man Thompson All Along. It was Old Man Thompson - AND HE'S HOT!
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Aug 3, 2019 17:30
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Djeser posted:There was a series of writing advice tidbits I listened to a while back and one of the awkwardly-named bits was "leave gold coins for your readers to find" by which they meant always be offering some reason to keep going. If a chapter starts with a sheriff hanging out in a saloon being a generally fine fellow I might start to tune out. But if that chapter title is "Chapter Four, The Death of the Sheriff" now I've got something to pull me onward, because I know something's coming up. I know that he dies. But at the same time, I don't know how or why. I'm going to keep reading, because now I want to know if he gets into a duel with his prodigal son or if he gets vaporized by the laser eyes of the Egyptian mummy risen from the dead. I've been thinking about this kind of thing recently. There was a related discussion some pages back and someone posted a quote from (I think—I can't find it) Le Guin about plot not being a necessary element of an (engaging) story, which I think is transparently true. The more important nugget is "Why?" or "How?" I can only be sure what engages me as a reader and make some educated guesses about everyone else. Plot in writing is (experientially if not temporally) linear: every plot beat asks a free and obvious question about what happens next. And, for me, questions are at the heart of engagement. But they have to be questions that I care about answering. By the end of a story, I am (hopefully) invested enough to care if the bomb goes off; at the beginning, I don't care if the characters escape before they're made into reconstituted mash. So how do good authors maintain engagement before readers become invested? And I think the simple answer is that skilled authors set up and knock down questions constantly. While plot is one of the vehicles they use to do that, it's only the most obvious one. Interesting characters are littered with questions; wanting the answers is what makes them interesting. A great premise works because I want to know what you're going to do with it, not because basking in the radiance of a clever idea keeps me enraptured. Getting me to speculate about the relationship between two characters as they interact is going to keep me engaged much longer than just telling me that they're married and one of them is planning a divorce. Some questions are asked and answered over a paragraph or a few sentences, and some reach across an entire series, but if you aren't answering the smaller questions along the way I'm unlikely to trust you to answer the big ones later. The satisfaction of the answers has to be proportional to my investment in the question and how long I've been asking it. If you expect me to continue caring about a single question for your entire 10 book masterpiece, the revelation better be explosive.* If your entire story is riding on the Old Man Thompson reveal you've probably hosed up somewhere along the way, but if you're full steam ahead you can't afford to give the game up. If you've created a story with enough layers that your readers are engaged with questions beyond the surface level plot, then unmasking him in a chapter title may open some interesting doors. But then I could be totally full of poo poo  * Smart authors offer some nuggets along the way to keep expectations manageable, which has the additional benefit of fueling speculation and subtly changing the question over time.
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Aug 4, 2019 18:46
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With permission from Sebmojo I'm pimping my feedback thread in here. I wrote a book, hopefully a better, tighter, more purposeful book than my last attempt. I'm looking to get feedback on it, but since posting it it's been deadville. Previously people were happy to tell me what I wrote was a load of shite, so I hope no-one's hesitant in offering their thoughts. I'll copy and past the basic blurb into this thread, and the thread with a link to the book and the place for feedback is here. https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3894903 quote:It’s been three weeks since Natalie wandered in league with the city, conquering her own fears and thoughts, righting all the wrongs inflicted on her and the world. It’s two weeks since she began attending the psychiatric day hospital after her latest psychotic episode. ‘What Even Is Harmony' tracks Natalie’s life, starting with “in the home care” and daily trips to the hospital, progressing over the weeks, months and years recovering from a frightening bout of illness.
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Aug 6, 2019 13:18
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I skimmed it, and it's, not easy? But I don't think that's a bad thing, it doesn't feel like it's intended to be.
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Aug 6, 2019 13:22
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sebmojo posted:If spoilers really affected enjoyment, no-one would ever re read anything. What happens matters a bit, but how it happens is why you read. Spoiling things makes people enjoy it more. Do your duty, spoil everything.
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Aug 7, 2019 01:31
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Mrenda posted:With permission from Sebmojo I'm pimping my feedback thread in here. Hi! I don't do this normally, but I've heard that a good way to get better at writing is to give crits (if this isn't true, please blame Thunderdome.) So I decided to read the first three or so pages of your story and provide some feedback... I hope it does without saying that I might be completely wrong, and that you should take what you like and leave the rest. edit: snip. Siddhartha Glutamate fucked around with this message at 17:55 on Aug 7, 2019 |
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Aug 7, 2019 04:51
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Wallet posted:Some questions are asked and answered over a paragraph or a few sentences, and some reach across an entire series, but if you aren't answering the smaller questions along the way I'm unlikely to trust you to answer the big ones later. The satisfaction of the answers has to be proportional to my investment in the question and how long I've been asking it. If you expect me to continue caring about a single question for your entire 10 book masterpiece, the revelation better be explosive.* I think I might be able to add my own experience to this. Too much focus on a single big question/reveal/reversal/moment tends to spill over into the rest of the story with a sort of constricting or confining effect. I used to make this mistake over and over while writing first (or even second or third) drafts of novels. I'd often have a moment, halfway or three-quarters through the narrative, where I intended to answer a big question I'd been building up, usually some kind of reversal of character dynamic, meant to be cathartic or satisfying. In an outline this made perfect sense, it looked good as a plan, but once I got elbow-deep in writing actual characters and scenes they tended to naturally do parts of that emotional or dynamic shift in bits and pieces throughout the narrative, spoiling or undermining the effect of that planned dramatic reversal or reveal. Before I knew any better, I would reach in and stop characters from doing this, adjusting them away from stuff that made sense or would be interesting for the reader if it spoiled the perceived 'purity' of that plan. This led to plot-heavy stories rather than the sort of character-driven stuff I wanted to write, and frustrated me a lot until I figured out plot mattered far less than just letting characters follow what paths they will and drat my plans.
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Aug 7, 2019 10:06
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Hungry posted:I think I might be able to add my own experience to this. i.e. robbing story peter to pay dumb twist paul
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Aug 7, 2019 10:36
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Hungry posted:I think I might be able to add my own experience to this. I think you can too! I feel like it's easy to get caught in a trap of thinking about a story as an assemblage of plot points. Some authors can really pull off an incredible reveal, but it's hard to get right, and even the best reveal is going to carry your reader along for a relatively small portion of a novel. If all of your energy is going towards managing information so that you can surprise your reader on page 200, you can easily forget (or, as you note, sacrifice) pages 1-199. In The Sense of Style (which I broadly recommend though it has some rough spots), Stephen Pinker talks about the curse of knowledge being a barrier to clear writing because we're generally not very good at imagining what it would be like to not know what we know. That inability is, I think, part of what makes it difficult to actually put into practice what I'm talking about with questions; to really set up engaging questions that get answered in loops on different time-scales requires maintaining a fairly complex mental model throughout writing of what the reader knows, what they're likely to be curious about, what they can infer, and so on. That kind of information management for a big reveal is easier because you're likely to be keeping very tight control over the pieces (they're probably all on your outline, even) while the predicates for the kind of questions a reader might be engaged with regarding a particular character are likely to be a series of inferences that an engaged reader will build from small details across what might be hundreds of pages.
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Aug 7, 2019 14:24
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Siddhartha Glutamate posted:Hi! I don't do this normally, but I've heard that a good way to get better at writing is to give crits (if this isn't true, please blame Thunderdome.) So I decided to read the first three or so pages of your story and provide some feedback... I hope it does without saying that I might be completely wrong, and that you should take what you like and leave the rest. Thanks for marking that up, I appreciate the effort you've gone to, but could you take down that document? People have already told me about making private copies to read over, but I didn't think I'd need to say that sharing versions publicly, especially of the entire document, that I have no control over isn't something I'd like to happen. Edit: Gonna take most of this down as it's really only valuable for me working out how to interpret the feedback for what I need/want to do. But the sum of point is in the following sentence I've left. How do you make clear that the questions the reader has, the parts the reader wants more details on, are actually the whole purpose of the book, or at least a very strong point of it? Again, thanks for your comments. It's definitely making me think about how to straight-up state in the first chapter what the entire purpose of the book is, and how to make it clear to the reader that the questions asked are the themes of the story. Mrenda fucked around with this message at 15:59 on Aug 7, 2019 |
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Aug 7, 2019 15:16
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Mrenda posted:Thanks for marking that up, I appreciate the effort you've gone to, but could you take down that document? People have already told me about making private copies to read over, but I didn't think I'd need to say that sharing versions publicly, especially of the entire document, that I have no control over isn't something I'd like to happen. Sorry, I didn't even think about it. All down.
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Aug 7, 2019 20:05
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Eyyyy I sold a story to a 10c/word market and just signed the contract! I remember posting in the earlier iteration of this thread when I sold my very first story back in 2014. Thanks for sticking with me for many years of writing for fun and profit, Fiction
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Aug 21, 2019 10:04
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 congrats man!!! Good job!
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Aug 21, 2019 10:50
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Anomalous Blowout posted:Eyyyy I sold a story to a 10c/word market and just signed the contract! I remember posting in the earlier iteration of this thread when I sold my very first story back in 2014. Thanks for sticking with me for many years of writing for fun and profit, Fiction dang, nice job!
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Aug 21, 2019 15:20
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Congratulations!
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Aug 21, 2019 16:10
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That's awesome! Congrats! I've been lurking here a bit. I really need to get back to work on my novel/short story thing.
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Aug 21, 2019 19:30
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Congrats, Blowout! That's so rad.
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Aug 21, 2019 21:59
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I've been working on a story idea for years and years involving spaceships and still, somehow when I write down the goddamn words, I am completely blanking on what the inside looks like. My sketch is a blank room. I know it's the engine room or power generator, and I can't fill in the blank space. I've seen dozens of the things in TV and movies and videogames, and read about dozens more and I have this loving blank space staring at me reminding me that I've been working on this story for something like seven years and somehow I still have nothing. I am completely loving worthless. EDIT: gently caress it. I'll just put in a placeholder reminder to fix it, move on with the scene and see if I can think of something later. Stabbey_the_Clown fucked around with this message at 00:48 on Sep 4, 2019 |
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Sep 4, 2019 00:42
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Stabbey_the_Clown posted:I've been working on a story idea for years and years involving spaceships and still, somehow when I write down the goddamn words, I am completely blanking on what the inside looks like. My sketch is a blank room. I know it's the engine room or power generator, and I can't fill in the blank space. I've seen dozens of the things in TV and movies and videogames, and read about dozens more and I have this loving blank space staring at me reminding me that I've been working on this story for something like seven years and somehow I still have nothing.  Describe this for a more "realistic" engine room than any scifi depiction I've ever seen lol
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Sep 4, 2019 00:50
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Fashionable Jorts posted:
Cramped and grungy is a good direction, actually, since it was designed as a small short-range vessel used for asteroid/comet mining. The idea is that it should burrow into the asteroids somewhat like a worm, extracting useful ore into cargo bays and ejecting useless waste rocks behind it. So the overall shape would be long and thin, segmented into sections, each of which could be sealed off from the rest of the ship in case of an breach.
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Sep 4, 2019 01:28
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Stabbey_the_Clown posted:Cramped and grungy is a good direction, actually, since it was designed as a small short-range vessel used for asteroid/comet mining. The idea is that it should burrow into the asteroids somewhat like a worm, extracting useful ore into cargo bays and ejecting useless waste rocks behind it. So the overall shape would be long and thin, segmented into sections, each of which could be sealed off from the rest of the ship in case of an breach. Go read articles on worm biology and figure out how to mechanize it. The worms have already done the hard work for you; all you have to do is figure out how to emulate their actions with preexisting or imagined parts.
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Sep 4, 2019 02:01
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Have a little bit of writer's block with this story I'm working on. All I know so far is that it's going to be a fantastic work of genius that will instantly propel me to fame and financial success. Beyond that I'm stumped.
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Sep 10, 2019 14:14
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Uh okay? Do you need advice? Are you stuck on a plot or character or just staring at a blank page?
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Sep 10, 2019 14:22
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My advice? Focus on world-building and plan out a 9 book series before you write a single word.
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Sep 10, 2019 15:32
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BIG FLUFFY DOG posted:Have a little bit of writer's block with this story I'm working on. All I know so far is that it's going to be a fantastic work of genius that will instantly propel me to fame and financial success. Beyond that I'm stumped. Make sure to copyright your idea!
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Sep 10, 2019 15:49
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Doctor Zero posted:Uh okay? Do you need advice? Are you stuck on a plot or character or just staring at a blank page? I'm trying to write a masterpiece. I have a pretty good idea already of what I want the Times to say in their review. Now I just need to figure out some good bon mots and insightful thoughts on how the drive for inclusivity in literature and the Trump administration is affecting the state of literature for the NPR interview. Also if you have any ideas for the actual book that would be great. BIG FLUFFY DOG fucked around with this message at 17:03 on Sep 10, 2019 |
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Sep 10, 2019 16:56
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Great Gatsby is about to go into public domain. Just add some zombies to that and you should be good to go.
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Sep 10, 2019 17:32
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feedmyleg posted:Great Gatsby is about to go into public domain. Just add some zombies to that and you should be good to go. Just re-publish the Great Gatsby but with bigger font, and call yourself the editor.
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Sep 10, 2019 17:46
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feedmyleg posted:Great Gatsby is about to go into public domain. Just add some zombies to that and you should be good to go. Big Fluffy Dog, you should write the Greater Gatsby. I bet that's a whole idea.
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Sep 10, 2019 19:23
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Whalley posted:The Great Gatsby is fuckin' old hat. It's passe. It's been done. I'm already writing the Greatest Gatsby so you can gently caress right off.
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Sep 10, 2019 19:27
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Write The Great Cats... wait, that's bound to exist, let's see... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Catsby
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Sep 10, 2019 19:51
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Whalley posted:Big Fluffy Dog, you should write the Greater Gatsby. I bet that's a whole idea. no one better gently caress with my intellectual property on the Lesser Gatsby either
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Sep 10, 2019 19:53
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Go sci fi: the Laser Gatsby
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Sep 10, 2019 20:01
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Nah, YA is where it's at. Gotta go with Skate Gatsby.
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Sep 10, 2019 20:07
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