|
General Battuta posted:Quite.  Djeser posted:Even different forms of the same verb change meaning when you're changing tense around. Shivered is past tense, shivering is progressive. "He stepped into the room and shivered" is not quite the same as "He stepped into the room, shivering." The first one is a single action, not an ongoing action. There's more complicated rules about habitual tenses and differences between dialects of English on how you refer to what. This is my approach too. And Steering the Craft remains one of the best writing books I’ve read. I developed too-strong cutting habits after reading The 10% Solution, to the point where my brain itches at words I’d typically cut but need to be there. It’s a particular problem with weaving another language into English, because a lot of words that are merely helpers, because we’ve grown used to their typical English context, are fully pulling their weight paired next to unfamiliar words. They’re a critical bit of context for people puzzling out what these words mean. So like, my brain itched at wanting to take “for” out of this sentence fulla my conlang bullshit: “After roaming Shenūnet Ra3 for several renpūt—dodecades, how many I don’t rixā…” But if I change it to, “After roaming Shenūnet Ra3 several renpūt…” it makes it harder to parse out what the gently caress is a “renpūt.” Though it’s directly connected to its definition (the ancient Egyptian word for year used for a whole Jovian year, which I may footnote), “for” is doing a lot more heavy lifting that usual, so I have to reign in my instincts. (3 is the letter ayin, and I decided to use Franco-Arabic to convey it—still not sure about using it in my transliteration, but at least 3s will be easy to strip out of the text if I decide against them.) Learning ancient Egyptian, with its handful of modal particles and such, has also made me more aware of which English adverbs are things like discourse markers. So not every “quite” is quite useless. Stuporstar fucked around with this message at 16:10 on Apr 9, 2022 |
#
?
Apr 9, 2022 16:01
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 21, 2024 19:47 |
|
|
That’s a great point, removing filler doesn’t even always make your prose shorter. “Seems like” is mostly dead to me, but conveying uncertainty in other ways often makes things more verbose. Still better, though, at least in my opinion! Along similar lines I’ve been sprucing up descriptions of people and places. The advice generally is to get more specific to make things more immersive (e.g. instead of “stone” say “granite”) but to be honest I’m mostly ignoring that - because my narrator is not someone who would know or care about that kind of thing. Instead I’m veering toward descriptions that compare one thing relative to another that would be familiar to the character - which again, are WAY more verbose, but feel more authentic to the “voice” I’m going for.
|
|
#
?
Apr 9, 2022 20:42
|
|
|
kaom posted:That’s a great point, removing filler doesn’t even always make your prose shorter. “Seems like” is mostly dead to me, but conveying uncertainty in other ways often makes things more verbose. Still better, though, at least in my opinion! For sure. If you’re writing in first person and going for a conversational tone, cutting adverbs and such indiscriminately will erase too many discourse markers that make the tone naturalistic. The point of course is to use them more efficiently than we actually do in everyday speech, because some of us sling, “y’know” and poo poo in drat near every sentence. That said, my protagonist is particularly fond of the Arabic “ya3ny” (I mean…), but every one of those is stategically considered to get the voice just right without doing it too much. Also, I just love finding out poo poo like the ancient Egyptian particle iwms 𓇋𓅱𓄟𓋴𓀁, translated as “surely” ended up considered hyperbolic enough to be a discourse marker for total bullshit, and ended up only used sarcastically. Stuporstar fucked around with this message at 07:53 on Apr 10, 2022 |
|
#
?
Apr 10, 2022 07:29
|
|
|
I’m doing a comic, but my problem is more of a writer problem than the art side of it. I’m having a huge issue where I can’t decide what I want the tone to be, and I feel like half committing to both is damaging the whole. I’m also releasing serially as I go (part of my story is that it’s a choose your own adventure type, live on the internet, where everyone votes what happens next,) and I was wondering if there were books on writing comedy, and balancing the tone of a story. The biggest problem I’m having is that I want to have fun bouncy characters, but also have them be incredibly broken, violent people. I love how Breaking Bad did a serious and amazing execution of Walter White as a person and a character while still having aspects that made you want to root for him even when you know he’s a disgusting human being. I’ve never thought technically about what it means to be “fun” or “funny.” it felt like a natural talent not a learned on. Then I started doing art and writing, and now I realize that there is very little natural talent, and most concepts you have to learn about them, fail, and learn more, to be good at them. Because I didn’t think these characters through in the beginning, and wanted people to vote on who got in, I now have this issue where I want there to be an obvious type bond between the characters that makes them incredibly reliant and willing to put up with each other, but having the bond happen over the course of a week feels like it’s too cheap. I tried my best to give them a common enemy that is stronger than them and hunting them. It’s also incredibly slow telling a story using about 200 - 300 words a day. It’s been a year and I still haven’t even finished introducing the full cast! Let alone learn their feelings and who they are. I need to quickly learn through like, podcasts, books, and articles about how to write something good. I also want to dissect my ideas and really explore them fully with someone (and even willing to pay for it if I knew what to call that,) I want my ideas challenged so that I get blow back when something is stupid, or I’m accidentally writing the Gringotts’s bank. I don’t know where to go for that. In the last 3 years, I’ve written two or three book length stories on the internet, and I still feel like I know nothing about writing. Even now I’ve tried to fully explain what my problem is or what I need, but I feel like I don’t have the technical knowledge to know how to start the conversation. I’m reading the OP now, but I’m just kind of lost in the intricacies of the plot where I don’t know where to go to get help or educate myself.
|
|
#
?
Apr 15, 2022 02:32
|
|
|
I don't really know if there's a way to give yourself a crash course in writing like that. Like most artistic fields, it takes time and experience to develop your skills. I'd been writing on my own for fun for about five or six years before I started pursuing it as more of a skill and less of a hobby, and then it took me another three or four years to get to a place where I felt like I was creating things that were usually pretty good. There were techniques I found more helpful to me than others, such as learning to critically read other people's writing, but again, that was over the course of years. Also, just generally, the ideas I had when I was starting out learning to write were not the ideas I was still interested in once I felt like I was, IDK, "ready" to write seriously. I cared a lot about those ideas and they motivated me early on, but as I developed my skills I kind of realized they weren't all that interesting or compelling in the first place. It's not so much that I "abandoned" them as it is that I just realized they weren't what I wanted to do. That's pretty natural when you're still developing your skills. You sound very passionate about your writing, and that's great. Getting motivation to write has been one of the hardest things for me these past couple of years. But I don't know if you're going to be able to find the combination of sensitivity reader/editor you're looking for. (Though who knows, goons hold multitudes.) While there's many ways to mess things up, there's just as many ways to do things right, and what's right to you is going to depend largely on, you know. You. Plus, with the nature of serialized writing, there's a lot you're not going to be able to change since you've already done it. The most popular soap operas aren't written like the most popular TV shows, because they're just different beasts altogether, and your structure sounds much more like a soap opera, or issues of a comic book, than it does like a TV show where they've got the arcs planned out ahead of time. Also, like...is this a webcomic? Because writing for comics is also fundamentally different from writing just straight prose, and that's also going to affect what kind of advice is most valuable. If you're looking for books that might help you think about storytelling, I think Urusula K. Le Guin's Steering the Craft and Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics are pretty good for prose and comic writing respectively. They're not really going to make you good, but they will give you tools to help you think about what you're trying to accomplish. The last bit of advice I can offer up is that if there's something you want to do with your story--you want to make them all friends, what's stopping you from doing that? If you think it's too quick to happen in a week, what's stopping you from jumping ahead a month, or a year? Even in a story that's been crowdsourced, you're still the author, you're in control of everything that happens, and there's no pound of flesh you have to pay to make your characters just do the thing you want them to. Why are they working together? Because this is your story, and it's a story about them working together. You're not going to accidentally do a Gringott's, because the thing that made Gringott's bad was not accidental racism but responding to someone saying "hey that's kind of hosed up" by deliberately doubling down on the racism. Fantasy auithors goof things up all the time. Most of the time they say "ah poo poo, my b" and then they try to do better. You don't accidentally become JK Rowling. It sounds like you're very concerned with doing things right, or at least not doing them wrong, and while that's very relatable and I wish you the best in your creative endeavors, right and wrong writing are fake ideas.
|
|
#
?
Apr 15, 2022 03:57
|
|
|
You’re absolutely correct, and I really appreciate you saying that because it’s a huge confidence boost to hear “You’re not loving this up, there are no secret theories or magic codices that you need.” It’s a web comic and yeah, I’ve read all of McCloud’s books, Steering the craft, and the framed ink books. I have a habit of trying to brute force knowledge over skill craft. As for the pay a pound of flesh I think that’s exactly what I’m doing, I’m trying to match the pace of a shonen or a comic book, when I have all the time in the world. I don’t need tight arcs that are solved in 15 pages or fewer. I didn’t really think about it, but I’m in control of time passing, and I don’t need to show every moment from start to finish to imagine them there. I haven’t honestly thought about the control of time in these stories. There were just parts that felt had natural points where it was time to move on when I was writing. I guess with comics, every point feels so slow that I’ve not really gotten into the weeds of what I can and cannot skip. After reading the OP, I’m looking for the equivalent of a book level editor for chapters of my comic. I think I also have such a hard time imagining people so critically unaware of themselves that they’d just instantly dismiss criticism or concerns about their writing. I think I am overly receptive to criticism and want to constantly get feedback from people because it feels like even to the last word, color, or shadow, I’m still trying to tweak it and make it perfect. I get worried, when creating serialized fiction, that the longer I spend getting in the weeds of talking and showing the bits of emotion I feel stories cut, that I’m enraging an imaginary beast named “Pacing,” that will make everyone lose interest. There’s just so much I don’t know that I worry there are these secrets and techniques and manuscripts that I don’t even know exist that could help me. It just feels like every time I finish writing a story, or a light novel, a comic, art, anything there’s this feeling of “If I knew then what I know now.” It’s very annoying, because it creates an imaginary version of my story that somehow always seems like it’s better than what I went with.
|
|
#
?
Apr 15, 2022 04:23
|
|
|
I think we need examples, otherwise most if the advice you get will be "read stuff that does what you want to then don't be afraid to copy it because what you produce will still be yours".
|
|
#
?
Apr 15, 2022 06:28
|
|
|
Which is good advice dgmw, but if there are specific problems it needs specific examples
|
|
#
?
Apr 15, 2022 06:28
|
|
|
I have much less experience than you, to be honest, but one thing I might have a useful comment on is:Boba Pearl posted:Because I didn’t think these characters through in the beginning, and wanted people to vote on who got in, I now have this issue where I want there to be an obvious type bond between the characters that makes them incredibly reliant and willing to put up with each other, but having the bond happen over the course of a week feels like it’s too cheap. I tried my best to give them a common enemy that is stronger than them and hunting them. It’s also incredibly slow telling a story using about 200 - 300 words a day. It’s been a year and I still haven’t even finished introducing the full cast! Let alone learn their feelings and who they are. I’m writing a novel where two characters meet and develop life-or-death trust in each other under dangerous circumstances. Their relationship spans ~30k words, probably, before the first big leap of faith is taken. In-universe, it’s three days. This isn’t leaping out at anyone in my writing group as a concern, because the narrative time is more important than the chronological time. It feels true enough to the characters and the story that it doesn’t come across as unrealistic. I’d trust your own judgement the most, but it’s something to keep in mind (and something I find hard to assess by myself). If you’re already a year into publishing 200-300 words a day, a lot of “time” has passed from the reader’s perspective no matter how much in-universe time is passing. Stuporstar posted:Also, I just love finding out poo poo like the ancient Egyptian particle iwms
|
|
#
?
Apr 15, 2022 06:59
|
|
|
sebmojo posted:Which is good advice dgmw, but if there are specific problems it needs specific examples My specific questions, in the few scenes you’ve seen Marie, is she likeable, does she have a clear personality and a “voice” that sounds different from the other characters? Is Taylor reading like an adult, even if she’s a little broken? Does it make sense for these people to be grouping together to achieve their goals? Is the romance believable? Is it even romance, or have I just skipped all that without establishing a relationship? Have I missed some power dynamic that is icky? Am I missing something from the political angle? I’m making some strong political statements, but with real life the way it is, I want to make sure I’m saying what I mean. I’m worried I’m establishing the “Wolf and her Cub who talk back,” isn’t moving too fast. I worry that I’m trying to force it out as fast as possible so that I can get the characters where I want them to be for the parts I want to write for. On top of that, I’m writing a new romantic relationship based on votes and I’m worried that too is moving too fast. I’m worried about the tone, because it’s played pretty straight with little to no humor, and that I’m mostly just expositing about the world then having a real plot. I’m worried my main character doesn’t come off as likeable because she’s violent and manipulative. Alright, I’m going to try to condense this down as much as possible, because I don’t think anyone wants to read literally 117 pages of web comics. Marie is Purple, Taylor is blue. I cut it to a fifth of it's size to try and just the bare minimum to catch you up. Capitalist have cut off the city of Sabaton from the one world government, and it’s going to poo poo because of it, and no-one knows why the Queen’s government isn’t getting involved for a reason that is unknown to the audience at this point (They have subsumed most of the city government and are sending back false reports.) I’m trying to condense down as much as possible, but being succinct was never my strong suit. It's all about choices, specifically the audiences. A big decision that's planned to come up is, does she abandon this city that was her home to follow her dream, or are the connections to the few people she liked enough to give up and try to fight to liberate the city. The setting is post apocalyptic 1940s urban fantasy. Humans are extinct, most of their tech is irradiated, and the society that rebuild afterwards has Radios and Model T cars figured out, but not so much guns or anything like. It’s clear that a lot of the aesthetics are stolen from different parts of human history, with the subtle implication that a lot of architects just stole plans from buildings that were already there and tried to rebuild them. Finally, Magic is basically computer programming, and pulls most of its aesthetics from 80s and 90s retroware, the currency used in the world is the same that’s used to produce labor, the Calorie. A sorcerer can cast spells without calories. So here’s a light speed recap that’s still probably going to be too long. If you feel like reading the whole thing for a better understanding, you can do so here: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3966449&userid=225602 I wrote the below summary, and it turned out to be way too much text. I probably should throw it in the fiction farm? First scene is Marie introducing herself, loving up a job, and making a deal with a shadowy creature to be “marked for adventure” which lets her bump into Taylor, which is the Cub in this “Mother and her cub” story.    We introduce this character who is an adult, but only like 18 - 20, young adult, timid type. This is me establishing how Marie’s background is, and I’m hoping to make the parallels apparent.   We establish the blue one turns into a fleshwarp, passes out and then I establish Marie’s motivations later, after Marie lies to the kid and says she passed out and Marie was the one to kill those two guys. They get armor, and Marie tries to have Taylor learn about her power, but neither of them knows what to do.    Taylor’s magic gives her anxiety, the audience decided not to treat that anxiety with magic drugs that Marie takes (Marie is shown a few times in references to drugs, but we have her actually smoke a white substance out of a crack pipe to make sure people are making the right connections.  Marie gets jumped by a cop who says her syndicate sold her out to kill her. Taylor has a panic attack when she gets choked, and Marie “kills” the cop, cop’s are immortal . They sell their soul to become lich for the state. We make the parallels more apparent between Marie and her father, and Taylor and her. After that scene is done, they get inside and kill 2 more guards. To make the horrors of capitalism much more apparent is the idea of these chem labs. With every fantasy race being different, I decided to make it so they had unique drugs that can be processed from the dead, including adventuring trope staples like gold and items in monsters. We introduce the salvage law.  Right after this scene, we introduce a character the group voted for. We introduce a real adventurer, who is shown as an almost inhuman figure capable of feats that are so out of whack with what the story has seen so far.:     Taylor fucks up healing the Cat girl and Cat girl turns into a panther, mostly used for jokes. Marie gets her arm chopped off by a meth cook who has degrees in magic casting. Taylor figures out scripting and her own magic enough to save her. who were voted for to join the party. Fate comes up a lot because it’s a story ultimately the choices that are made, and in a narrative where major decisions are undetermined until the audience decides what is a “point in fate” and what can truly be changed.  The guy in pink spandex has kidnapped the Cat girl and the Frog Uncle because it’s against pretty much every law for one adventurer to attack or interfere with the work of another, and that extends to family. Adventurers can broker a deal with Daemons to literally change Fate in such a way that everyone gets what they want as they understand it. The broker knows what is and isn’t possible on a multiverse / fixed point of time level, so helps negotiations to get where they need to be. Marie is pulled out of this brokerage by what almost immediately becomes her spider girlfriend. They cut a deal that undoes some stuff from the first page a little bit. It also creates a context for someone to fight Gin, and if they win, then Gin has to pay for Marie to become an adventurer, and if the person who fights them loses, then Frog gives up his right to not be attacked. Introducing Spider Girlfriend:    Taylor, wanting to prove herself, agrees to fight Ginn, goes fleshwarp and loses  All the group agrees to stick together, because after the script takes effect and the protection is broken, Ginn is going to kill them. I try to strengthen the Spider Girlfriend relationship thing, because I want to treat them as a couple immediately. I find the mix of the two characters fun. I put them all in a room, have them state their goals.        In real life, this takes a year to tell from April 2021 to April 2022 with the last post posted Sunday. To recap: My specific questions, in the few scenes you’ve seen Marie, is she likeable, does she have a clear personality and a “voice” that sounds different from the other characters? Is Taylor reading like an adult, even if she’s a little broken? Does it make sense for these people to be grouping together to achieve their goals? Is the romance believable? Is it even romance, or have I just skipped all that without establishing a relationship? Have I missed some power dynamic that is icky? Am I missing something from the political angle? I’m making some strong political statements, but with real life the way it is, I want to make sure I’m saying what I mean. I am worried that I’m not telling a story, that people are bored and don’t find it engaging, that I’m just expositing about the world and don’t have any drama or any real story.
|
|
#
?
Apr 15, 2022 08:49
|
|
|
Boba Pearl, a few things leapt out at me as I was reading your posts. Although you're asking for advice about writing, I don't think that's your actual problem.Boba Pearl posted:I’m doing a comic, but my problem is more of a writer problem than the art side of it. I’m having a huge issue where I can’t decide what I want the tone to be, and I feel like half committing to both is damaging the whole. Boba Pearl posted:I’m worried my main character doesn’t come off as likeable because she’s violent and manipulative. There's an issue with planning, as you say. There might also be other "backstage" issues - I've never written a CYOA, but maybe having the audience vote on who it would be about is giving away too much power over the narrative for little gain? But then there's this: quote:The biggest problem I’m having is that I want to have fun bouncy characters, but also have them be incredibly broken, violent people. This is a question about how you understand people. What is a "fun and bouncy but incredibly broken and violent person" like to you? There's your answer to the tone problem. You must be able to answer this before you write characters like this; otherwise you don't have a target to aim for. I only glanced at the beginning and end of the pages you posted, but it looks like Djeser's idea of a time skip might be worthwhile. You could use it as an excuse to take a break to give yourself time to think your ideas through. Something like this: Boba Pearl posted:I realize that there is very little natural talent, and most concepts you have to learn about them, fail, and learn more, to be good at them. isn't going to happen overnight, by definition. One thing you might want to try is making a better summary in order to work out what the important details you need to really focus on are. You could also join a writer's group. You have three big things helping you here. First, you have an objective measure of how interested people are in your comic: the number of votes and the amount of discussion. So you don't need to worry about whether people are bored, you can just count posts! If people like it without a lot of plot, that's fine. There's no need to second-guess yourself like that; have authority. Second, you're doing this free and anonymously; even if you give this up as a bad job, the readers won't be able to complain they were ripped off, and it won't hurt your reputation in the real world. It doesn't matter how badly you mess up; there are no consequences. The third is that the art and writing improved a lot when I went from the early pages to the last; and if that's not a reason to be cheerful, what is?
|
|
#
?
Apr 15, 2022 16:44
|
|
|
If I'm being honest, my eyes glazed over somewhere around the second set of images. But I'm not much of the fantasy webcomic type, so literally, what do I know? Speaking generally, I think you've got a lot of ideas but you're struggling to prioritize them in a way that makes sense to other people. I don't know if I have any good advice about fixing that within the context of a single serial work. Usually I'd just say start over and start smaller, but in this case that would mean abandoning work that an audience is invested in. If I got hired to be the showrunner for something like this, I think I'd try to put a capstone on the current metaplot, skip forward a bit, and re-establish things with some clearer stakes. It's not that you can't make weird, complex fantasy worlds, it's just that the weirder things get, the more concrete your narrative has to be to compensate for it. Likewise, a more dream-like story will need a more grounded setting. This isn't like a "rule" of writing, but it is a good rule of thumb for how much your audience is going to be able to follow what's going on. If I'm doing a heist story, people are going to recognize that it's a heist story. That structure can then guide them through the less-intuitive aspects of the setting. They might not know what trigonomancy is or why the wizard has glowing gems rotating around his head, but when he crushes one of the gems to dust and blows it across the floor, causing warding sigils to light up, they'll be like, ah, this is the 'getting past the lasers' bit. Maybe sigils work differently from lasers, but when the audience can see "this is a story about stealing something" they're able to contextualize what's going on. Of course, you can write complex fantasy worlds with weird and intricate plots. No one's going to force you to write things like a thriller if you don't want to. But it's good to understand that the weirder things get, the more an audience is going to need something to hang onto. It can be a familiar setting, or a familiar plot structure, or a set of rules that gets established early on and elaborated on consistently throughout the work. I'm sure you've got rules in your head for a bunch of this stuff, but I think the main thing holding you back is just focus. I hate using the word 'pitch' because I have an instinctive revulsion towards marketing, and while I usually go with 'gimmick' that's kind of self-effacing and 'what's the point' can be a little mean, so let's call it a 'guiding concept'. What's your guiding concept for this? Imagine you're recommending it to someone, how would you describe it in a way that makes it sound interesting? Also, as a small aside, I see you're using a lot of dialogue in the comic, and that sounded like something you were concerned about. It's not wrong to have a lot of dialogue, but it's not really a strength of comics either. The strengths of comic books as a medium are a combination of visual storytelling and the idea of panels as slices of time. Quippy superheroes work better in comic books, where someone can say a whole sentence as they punch someone, than in a movie where a punch lasts one second. Movies are better at conversations, though, especially ones with a lot of back and forth. Anyway, I don't think what you need is an editor, I think you just need to focus and simplify. World-building is fun, but if it's just world-building without a particular plot in mind, it's absolutely going to feel like spinning your wheels. We care about world-building as readers because it fleshes out a place we like to imagine, but it means we've got to give people a reason to bother imagining it in the first place. There has to be a story to tell, and you want to spend as much time telling the story as possible. That's why I've suggested skipping ahead. Do we need to be introduced to everyone separately, or could you just assume everyone's already pals and jump forward to where whatever story you're trying to tell is happening? (All questions in this post are rhetorical in nature, I'm not going to be able to do much with the answers anyway. They're more intended to be things to ask yourself as you're planning the structure of a story.)
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2022 08:36
|
|
|
This is all really good, from both of you. I now have a direction and everything you're both saying is not unfixable from any standpoint. It sounds like I've got a hammer head and I really need it to be a spear head. Knowing that I'm looking at it from the wrong angle helps me expand what I'm trying to think about. I recognize what you're saying about focus, and it's something I keep bumping into. People ask what my story is about, and every time I try and explain it, it's always been like a really wobbling explanation about all these cool ideas that I feel are intrinsic to what my story is. The more I think about it the more I struggle with the idea. I have been wrestling with it for a few weeks now, and I can never come up with a satisfying answer to myself. I don't really know what I want my story to be about. I have a string of loosely collected plot scenes that I want to hit that I think are cool, and then I try to fill in the blanks between. I don't think anyone can give me advice that will tell me what my story is about. If I don't know the story I'm trying to tell then I'll continue flailing. Getting some honest feedback and a gentle push in the right direction is huge for me, and I really appreciate the input you both (and anyone else,) gave/gives. I honestly don't know what my story is about. Boba Pearl fucked around with this message at 08:51 on Apr 16, 2022 |
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2022 08:45
|
|
|
Another thing to think on is that you can do exactly two things: give people what they expect, or what they do not expect. Your job is to know which is which.
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2022 08:49
|
|
|
Sounds like you might have fallen down the worldbuilding hole. It can happen pretty easily, I've got tons and tons of stories where I thought I had something, and then halfway through I realized it just wasn't adding up to much. Big projects can be alluring because there's so much space to stick cool moments, and you can end up investing a lot of time in something that doesn't work out. It's kind of a bummer, but every creator goes through stuff like that. It's not even an experience thing, I've been writing for at least a decade now and I still write clunkers sometimes. One thing you might try instead, if you're struggling to manage a whole big interconnected story like that: make shorter works. While you don't have as much space in a one-shot, you can focus in more on that cool moment you've got in your head and give it just enough context to stand on its own. It's a habit I got into thanks to Thunderdome, but it's treated me pretty well in general. I may not always have a couple chapters of good ideas, but a couple pages of good ideas, sure. I can always go back and build on ideas from older stories I've written if I think there's something more to mine, but working on smaller projects means you make more content and get to iterate on it faster. Personally, I found it really helped me with the 'what's the point' aspect of things, because when I'm working on a smaller scale, the point is always right in front of me and I have to start with the end in mind. And "the point" doesn't have to be a narrative point, I've had really productive writing sessions where it's mostly just a particular image stuck in my head, or even just a line of writing I wanted to give some context to. And now that I've got experience working on a small scale, it's almost like I get to relax more when working on larger projects. I'm used to providing that immediate impetus to keep reading, so I don't have to worry about the scene-to-scene stuff getting boring or losing the plot. I don't think it's necessary, like I wouldn't call anyone a bad author if they'd rather work on longer stuff, but you mentioning having a bunch of Cool Moments in your head you're trying to string together reminds me of my own process, so you might find it helpful the same way I did.
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2022 14:37
|
|
|
You really might be onto something there, because some of the funnest parts of my comics were 1-off animations, or the "break" cartoons I do where I don't color or shade or anything and just tell a story in my universe.       Maybe I should move in the direction of doing more stuff like this, or even use stuff like this to help spark an idea about where to go with my story.
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2022 16:49
|
|
|
How does anyone keep up the morale to keep submitting a piece to multiple different markets? At this point, I can occasionally work up the courage to get a piece finished, edited, and submitted to a market. But the waiting on tenterhooks means I feel crushed when I get that rejection letter back. Even if I've gone from getting letters signed by editorial assistants to ones from the EiC, I still feel like I'm wasting my time, even though I know that should be at least a little encouraging. I feel like rejection means I should go back to the drawing board with the piece, but trying to revise after every rejection feels like bottomless hole that I could fuss over forever without ever having anything to show for my effort, without ever even really knowing if I'm going in the right direction or not. Am I just broken? 
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2022 17:59
|
|
|
You just need to think of selling a short story as a process of attrition. It took me several years to sell my first short story, and in that interval everything I wrote was rejected by every market I submitted to. Don't endlessly revise. In fact, maybe don't revise at all after a rejection - just send it out to the next place on your spreadsheet. You're better off moving to a new story than you are trying to perfect a past one. Write a piece, draft until you get it to a place you're happy with, then submit it to the best market. When it gets rejected, submit it to the second best market. Continue until you're out of markets you think are worth submitting to then trunk the piece. You are launching a human wave attack on publication. Your job is not to punch through with one brilliant stroke, it's to run the marathon.
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2022 18:20
|
|
|
HaitianDivorce posted:I've gone from getting letters signed by editorial assistants to ones from the EiC Congrats on your progress. You shouldn't think of a "rejection" as the editor rejecting your story; think of it as them not buying it. There's a lot of reasons the editor might pass on a good story: they just bought something similar, they're out of money, they had a headache when they read it which prevented them from appreciating it, your protagonist's name is the name of their ex and subconsciously turned them against the story... Editors are fallible! Here's an extract from an interview with Gene Wolfe: https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/interviews/wolfe46interview.htm posted:I sent a story called "The Mountains are Mice" to Galaxy; as I mentioned, I was very naïve about marketing in those days, didn't know who was editing what; but it turned out that Galaxy was being edited by Fred Pohl. At any rate, I got back "The Mountains are Mice" with a simple rejection note, which was the way I got back everything in those days. I was working from one of those lists of SF markets published by The Writer, so when Galaxy rejected me the next magazine on the list was If. So I addressed another envelope, sent the story off to If, and I got an acceptance from Pohl (who was also editing If!) with a check. His letter said, "I'm glad you let me see this again. The re write has really improved it." My point is, of course, that there had been no re write.
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2022 04:08
|
|
|
Yeah, absolutely that. I've had manuscripts rejected by people who went on to say they must've been on crack because when they read it elsewhere they loved it. I've had stories torn down in crit circles that went on to make Years' Best anthologies. It's good to focus on what you can control (the story) but important to remember that not everything that happens to your story is a rational objective evaluation of its absolute quality. Also I know they're a hard working and underloved bunch but uh hot take here most slush readers have taste that's no more developed than your average random forumgoer and I wouldn't trust them to reliably know a good story
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2022 04:12
|
|
|
General Battuta posted:You just need to think of selling a short story as a process of attrition. It took me several years to sell my first short story, and in that interval everything I wrote was rejected by every market I submitted to. ... You are launching a human wave attack on publication. Your job is not to punch through with one brilliant stroke, it's to run the marathon. Rejection reminds me of when I started taking karate lessons and almost burst into tears the first time I got punched (not even hard) in the face, but eventually it just became part of the process of getting a black belt. Similarly, getting a rejection e-mail causes a physiological reaction that, I hopefully assume, starts to lessen the more you get used to it. Boy does it feel like a personal attack the first few times, though! Finally, as someone who has experienced being on the other side of the fence when it comes to judging art and deciding who gets accepted: It is absolutely true that a lot of great work gets turned down, for all the reasons Safety Biscuits mentioned and then some. Personally, I always advocated hardest for the weird niche longshots that maybe 2 people would like, which made me feel better about my own ugly word babies. It helps if I stop worrying about being universally liked by everyone, and instead view the submission process more as trying to find that one editor who will be into my stuff as it currently is. I'm also really slow at revision, so I'm all in favour of any strategy that minimizes going back to the drawing board. HaitianDivorce posted:Even if I've gone from getting letters signed by editorial assistants to ones from the EiC, I still feel like I'm wasting my time, even though I know that should be at least a little encouraging.
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2022 05:24
|
|
|
General Battuta posted:Don't endlessly revise. In fact, maybe don't revise at all after a rejection - just send it out to the next place on your spreadsheet. You're better off moving to a new story than you are trying to perfect a past one. Write a piece, draft until you get it to a place you're happy with, then submit it to the best market. When it gets rejected, submit it to the second best market. Continue until you're out of markets you think are worth submitting to then trunk the piece. I made a rule to never revise a story after I started submitting it. That might have killed a few stories' chances, I don't know, but it's definitely preserved my mental health. It makes submission into a routine process divested of (most) emotion. Another rule I would recommend for people starting out on short story submissions is to never submit to a market that you don't respect. A couple of times I got a story published in a low- or no-paying market alongside stories that, in my opinion, weren't very good. And that was even more depressing than the story not getting published at all.
|
|
#
?
Apr 18, 2022 06:33
|
|
|
I want to confirm if this is a general creative thing or if it's like, specifically a personal/me thing or perhaps a neurodivergent thing: I keep flip-flopping between ideas. I'll try and work on Idea A, make some solid progress, but then suddenly be distracted by new, flashy Idea B (or sometimes Idea B is an old idea I abandoned or dropped that my brain suddenly recalls and is like "Ooh we should go back to that"), and then when I work on B, suddenly New Idea C becomes appealing, and this goes on and on and on.
|
|
#
?
Apr 18, 2022 07:58
|
|
|
Junpei posted:I want to confirm if this is a general creative thing or if it's like, specifically a personal/me thing or perhaps a neurodivergent thing: sure, why not
|
|
#
?
Apr 18, 2022 08:01
|
|
|
Junpei posted:I want to confirm if this is a general creative thing or if it's like, specifically a personal/me thing or perhaps a neurodivergent thing: This is fairly common question among new writers and is a common issue among the writers I know. Some of them have to be super focused on one project. Others can juggle one or two projects. How you handle it is up to you. For new writers I recommend focusing on one project, preferably short story. It’s a lot easier to get better at writing if you have something on paper.
|
|
#
?
Apr 18, 2022 08:41
|
|
|
It's common enough of an experience that I'd be reluctant to try to pin it down on one specific cause. It's hard to maintain interest on large projects for many reasons. Probably up to the individual to figure out whether it's a focus/motivation thing or whether they're using switching between ideas as a way to avoid the pressure of finishing a work. I've seen people using focus as their excuse to avoid 'finishing' things, and that's not a good habit whatever the underlying cause is.
|
|
#
?
Apr 18, 2022 08:51
|
|
|
Junpei posted:I want to confirm if this is a general creative thing or if it's like, specifically a personal/me thing or perhaps a neurodivergent thing: It's a "hard stuff is hard to do" thing. Getting excited about new ideas is easy. Executing on your idea is hard; executing it to completion is harder and executing it to your satisfaction is hardest of all. Grit by Angela Duckworth summarizes the psychological basis behind it. It's not something I see recommended a lot in writing communities and it definitely should be, when you consider how many would-be writers never manage to finish a thing. Grit is the answer to getting through shiny new thing syndrome...and it's something you can develop and cultivate. Also bad goal setting doesn't help either. A lot of people start out attempting to write their one great masterpiece. But that's the worst time to attempt it, when you don't have the skills to turn your ideas into reality. Set appropriate writing goals for your skill level. Work on hitting those, then set bigger goals. Eventually, you'll get into the habit of finishing things and getting better at writing and one day you'll be able to write that masterpiece. Some people seem to be able to skip this process. They are geniuses, but chances are, you are not (the rest of us aren't either). But even so, when you study a lot of these geniuses, more often than not, they have put in the hours too. They just got started a lot earlier or spent less time and effort doing other things. Leng fucked around with this message at 10:18 on Apr 18, 2022 |
|
#
?
Apr 18, 2022 10:16
|
|
|
Man, that’s a lot of gut punches for me in one post
|
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2022 02:01
|
|
|
Leng posted:Set appropriate writing goals for your skill level. Work on hitting those, then set bigger goals. Eventually, you'll get into the habit of finishing things and getting better at writing and one day you'll be able to write that masterpiece. I think in some ways managing a small project is almost completely different from a large one. Up to a certain length you can sprint through producing a work and stay completely focused on it until it's done. There's a scale where that completely falls apart and it becomes about sustaining focus and progress even when that progress feels insignificant relative to scope. It also decompresses the process, depending on how you write. On something short outlining, drafting, and editing can meld together for me. When you have three or four hundred scenes to cover in your drafting pass or your first editing pass or whatever you're living in that mode for a lot longer.
|
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2022 14:03
|
|
|
Leng posted:It's a "hard stuff is hard to do" thing. Getting excited about new ideas is easy. Executing on your idea is hard; executing it to completion is harder and executing it to your satisfaction is hardest of all. This is a good post
|
|
#
?
Apr 20, 2022 02:26
|
|
|
Wallet posted:I think in some ways managing a small project is almost completely different from a large one. Up to a certain length you can sprint through producing a work and stay completely focused on it until it's done. There's a scale where that completely falls apart and it becomes about sustaining focus and progress even when that progress feels insignificant relative to scope. I should clarify that when I say set goals appropriate for writing level, I don't necessarily mean "write shorter things" even though that is generally a good idea for a new writer struggling to finish something. You can: - write single POV first, before trying multiple POVs - start with a smaller cast or even just 1-2 characters, to practice developing distinct characters and voices - write your version of the main trope/plot in your niche/genre to get it out of your system and to learn how that works before you start subverting tropes and plot archetypes - write in third person limited past tense before you try first person or omniscient or second person - have only an A plot and a B plot which will still get you to a Nanowrimo novel length, instead of 4+ plot threads at once - scale down the scope of your plot - write a standalone instead of a series - choose generic world or write in a pre existing world instead of doing your own original world building. Writing fanfic is still valid writing practice - use a standard structure (3 act, hero's journey, 5 act, whatever) rather than an experimental one - write a story that uses a single chronologically ordered timeline, before you start branching out into flash backs and parallel timelines and non chronological timeline - if you must experiment, do so one experiment at a time until you get better at the basics Also practice writing other things and storytelling in other forms, not just prose fiction. The core principles are all transferable. This applies even if your day job has nothing to do with writing ostensibly. Writing is communication. Emails, board reports, process documentation, conference calls, performance reviews, presentations - you can practice structure, plot, character, word choice, phrasing, etc in all of those things.
|
|
#
?
Apr 20, 2022 08:53
|
|
|
Leng posted:I should clarify that when I say set goals appropriate for writing level, I don't necessarily mean "write shorter things" even though that is generally a good idea for a new writer struggling to finish something. I don't disagree. There's a core set of skills you need to produce prose, but there are a variety of surrounding skills that tend to take the back seat when we're talking about mindful practice. If you're trying to move from writing short works to longer form ones, outlining five novels without the intention of going further with any of them is, I think, invaluable practice. Focusing narrowly on the prose would make that exercise years-long.
|
|
#
?
Apr 20, 2022 13:58
|
|
|
Wallet posted:I don't disagree. There's a core set of skills you need to produce prose, but there are a variety of surrounding skills that tend to take the back seat when we're talking about mindful practice. If you're trying to move from writing short works to longer form ones, outlining five novels without the intention of going further with any of them is, I think, invaluable practice. Focusing narrowly on the prose would make that exercise years-long. 100%. Although I do believe that at some point, you need to produce a finished work to truly measure progress, because outlines can look good conceptually but you don't really know if they work until you start producing. At least, that's been my experience when I critique things and when I look at my own work. It's very hard for me to critique someone's outline. Like I can sit there are go, yep, here's the inciting incident, here's the break into II and the break into III, here's the midpoint and the climax, etc and map it all perfectly to a story structure but I can't say for sure whether that structure works until I read some prose, since the prose is the vehicle that conveys the story to the reader. But maybe this could work for someone whose approach is right at the architect/outliner end of the spectrum? I know there are some people who swear by outlining methods where you break the outline down from the beginning, middle and end to progressively smaller chunks until you get to individual beat by beat bullet points at the scene level, and then your first draft involves converting the bullet points into prose form. I've tried doing that before and have not been successful in getting that to work. When I'm working at the outline level, I'm in a different headspace to how I would work at the line level. And I often make connections when working at the line level that I can't see when I'm working at the outline level. I won't say never though. Maybe for my next project I'll find more success with that method!
|
|
#
?
Apr 20, 2022 23:22
|
|
|
General Battuta posted:You are launching a human wave attack on publication. Your job is not to punch through with one brilliant stroke, it's to run the marathon. Safety Biscuits posted:Congrats on your progress. Automatic Jill posted:I definitely feel that. It's really hard to see rejections (or getting punched in the face) as actual steps along the journey, rather than signs of not progressing at all. But the vaaaaaast majority of submissions are not going to get the "higher tier" letters, so that's absolutely a sign to keep going. Thanks guys. It's really helpful to not feel alone in this, and I really appreciate everyone taking the time to share.
|
|
#
?
Apr 21, 2022 02:37
|
|
|
Some authors come back to certain themes or frameworks a lot and I've wondered if I have any. One thing I've noticed is my works having a culturally conservative element even though I never set out to do that. Like the most recent things I did were a satire of a/b/o with a het romance (for those who don't know, a/b/o is a conceit for having yaoi stories where guys get pregnant), a story about the value of masculinity, and a story about what it would be like if George R R Martin became a Christian. And don't say that's just Elden Ring, it's different
|
|
#
?
Apr 21, 2022 08:23
|
|
|
Does anyone have good recs for books or links that delineate the agent querying process as well as provide good examples? I've got some down time between beta reads and my next round of edits and I want to start familiarizing myself with this process so that I'm extremely prepared! Also, anyone interested in beta reading my 86k word, no-romance, new adult, second world fantasy novel? I can post the hook if anyone wants to know more or you can PM me. Always happy to crit anything in return of any length when I'm not flogging myself to meet my own writing goals and deadlines. So sorry for not jumping on other people's requests before.
|
|
#
?
Apr 22, 2022 02:18
|
|
|
a friendly penguin posted:
I'm up for this if you don't mind waiting until I'm done with my own revisions next month. I'll PM you.
|
|
#
?
Apr 22, 2022 02:27
|
|
|
Leng posted:I'm up for this if you don't mind waiting until I'm done with my own revisions next month. I'll PM you. Thank you! And I will gladly read your next iteration.
|
|
#
?
Apr 23, 2022 20:47
|
|
|
I've seen more than once this idea going around that if a buddy is going "God, my book/script idea is so stupid, nobody will buy it or be interested in it at all", bring up really stupid but inexplicably popular pieces of media (the big four I've seen are Twilight, Fifty Shades, Sharknado and that one book where sexy teenage Hannibal Lecter goes killing Nazis with a katana) that made money to reassure them and I'm starting to wonder if that's even that good of a reassurance. I sure wouldn't buy it if I thought what I was writing was kind of dumb.
|
|
#
?
Apr 23, 2022 21:44
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 21, 2024 19:47 |
|
|
There's a difference between dumb by accident and dumb by design. A lot of the nerd media pop culture criticism focuses on fiction as a representation of a physical world distinct from our own and bounded by similar laws. That's not a bad way to write, but it's only one way to write. In the book Invisible Cities, the frame narrative is Kublai Khan and Marco Polo in some kind of dreamy thoughtscape discussing cities that are themselves only quasi-real. In the book Radiance, alternating chapters are told either as documentary evidence or in the style of a novel in the genre that the movie about the protagonist's life is currently being pitched as. It starts out as hardboiled detective noir and then two chapters later it's gothic masquerades on Pluto. Also color film was never invented and you get between planets by riding in a giant bullet. Guidance like "don't be afraid to be dumb" is more about not shying away from The Thing You Like because you think it's not professional, or literary, or you're kind of embarrassed by how much you're into it. If you actively dislike the thing you're writing, you're not going to have fun with it. But if you're not writing something you want to write because you feel it's 'dumb' in the eyes of other people, you're just limiting yourself for no particular reason.
|
|
#
?
Apr 24, 2022 01:41
|
|