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Yeah baby name sites suck. To help peek behind the curtain, I remember a big one had one of the top Māori names being "Aata", which means "bear or stone" apparently. It doesn't mean that: Also we don't have bears in NZ so how the gently caress did that happen? I followed the thread and it turns out they: 1) took "Arthur" 2) translated it into English 3) translated it back into Māori And like, it's a loan word. It's an English name. Nobody bothered it say it out loud. ARTHUR means "bear or stone". That seems to be what they're largely doing, just chucking English names into Google Translate, which is inevitably gonna chuck out like 90% random words that aren't names.
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Jun 28, 2022 22:13
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Re learning to write, the most important thing to do is allow yourself to suck. A lot of new writers hit a wall because they want their first thing to be perfect, so they procrastinate and procrastinate and procrastinate, do anything but writing, and it's like ... repairing the tyres on your bike hundreds of times because you want to race in the Olympics. Let yourself suck, let yourself fall off the bike, then pick yourself back up and do it again, then do that until you can't remember the last time you fell off. Thunderdome, as mentioned, is excellent: it's low-stakes (but not no-stakes) incentive to smash out 1000 words/week where you get free feedback and a built-in community. It's how I got where I am, and I'm far from the best writer in there, nor the writer who has improved the most. Otherwise, just free yourself from expectations, from yourself from needing to be perfect, just write whatever's in your head and every time your brain gets annoyed at you, tell it "I'LL FIX IT LATER" and keep moving forward. You do not need to be original, you do not need to be deep, you do not need to be good; those things come later.
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Jun 28, 2022 22:30
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I use the rosters for the classes I teach for my name inspiration. Works well.
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Jun 28, 2022 22:50
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Well thanks for letting me know that names on baby sites are bogus, for the most part. Back to stealing names from anime and toku for me.
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Jun 28, 2022 22:58
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Soccer/football teams are another good source. Usually I check the names against Facebook to see if anyone's using them.
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Jun 28, 2022 23:01
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Junpei posted:Well thanks for letting me know that names on baby sites are bogus, for the most part. Back to stealing names from anime and toku for me. The cheat version (that does still work, you just gotta be more cautious) is to go on Wikipedia, pick somewhere, scroll down to Notable People. Bada boom, list of first names. SurreptitiousMuffin fucked around with this message at 23:17 on Jun 28, 2022 |
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Jun 28, 2022 23:13
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also this: https://www.ssa.gov/oact/babynames/, from which you can learn that ~550 babies each year are given the name 'Unique'.
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Jun 28, 2022 23:19
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General Battuta posted:I do think it’s kind of a saccharine truism but, at the same time, if I had a “retroactively erase” button for all my published work I would’ve hit it several times by now, usually due to things I felt after particularly personal reviews or reactions to my work. And the occasional bit of fan mail does help fight that impulse. It may be obnoxiously plain but it’s also true. At least for me. Well the Baru series is my favorite book series bar none so if you did this I would be rather cross for a brief second before catching back up to causality and forgetting what it was I had been indignant about.
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Jun 28, 2022 23:21
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sebmojo posted:also this: https://www.ssa.gov/oact/babynames/, from which you can learn that ~550 babies each year are given the name 'Unique'. "your username must be unique" "no not like that"
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Jun 28, 2022 23:42
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Alright, let me try something different, because I feel like I come from a very similar place to you:Data Graham posted:Like, I can draw, I can code, I can do physical stuff, I can write nonfiction, got books on shelves from comic books (that someone else wrote and I drew) to giant operating system manuals, but nothing I've actually successfully (or at least satisfyingly) written myself. Everything I've ever written and thought was a fresh idea I'd come up with on my own, I managed to retroactively identify later as something I'd seen in a Simpsons episode or some short story I'd read once in passing. (My last serious attempt was a comic about gay cowboys that I wrote and published about six months before Brokeback Mountain came out. A coup! you say. Well no, turns out I was just remembering and aping the original short story that I'd read as part of a class in college and thought nobody else would ever have seen. gently caress me) Data Graham posted:There are forms of creativity I've never been able to begin to grasp, like coming up with names or plots or character motivations. This is me. I can draw, I can code, I can write nonfiction. But the last prose fiction I wrote prior to 2020 would have been a creative writing assignment from early high school. I somehow got an A+ for it and remember being really proud of it at the time, but looking back at it now, I think it's the worst thing that's ever been written, because it is a cringe-inducing derivative piece of awfulness that mashed together a whole bunch of things I'd read and enjoyed (like horse stories, Narnia, something about cyclones and escaped murderous tigers, I don't know it was terrible). Anyway. I go into business and spend a decade writing emails, proposals, board presentations, pitch decks, technical memos, speeches, and textbooks. The ability to string words together isn't the problem for me. I can write a structurally coherent piece just fine. It was the lack of ideas that had me stuck. Like you, I was never one of those people who had a burning original story to write. I just wasn't. Every idea I could come up with, I thought was lame. But as everybody else here has said, you have to start somewhere. And when you find yourself stymied at the thought of coming up with even a character name (yes, that's me too, I suck at naming characters, places, everything), it's just overwhelming. So, here's what worked for me in terms of getting started: 1. Take a piece of fiction that you think has been poorly written. One where the wasted potential of the story makes you angry—and the angrier, the better. 2. Deconstruct its plot, characters, and setting until you can pinpoint the reasons why you believe it is badly written 3. Write down a list of things you would change about the plot, characters, and setting so that it will suck less. Note: the goal here is to beat the original, not necessarily to produce something that is objectively "good" 4. Now go rewrite that piece of fiction, according to the list of changes you have identified. 5. Get to the end. Reread it. Compare it to the original. Ask yourself if it's better. If the answer is no, go to 3. Else, go to 6. 6. Celebrate! Hey, look at you, you're a fiction writer. Is it original? Not really, it's a fix fic, but also kind of, because it's a better version of the original. And did you learn lots of things about how to plot and structure a work of fiction and to write characters? Yes! If you need some examples of how to do this:
I'm deliberately suggesting you start with a fix fic because it takes away the fear/excuse of "not being original". You don't have to pick something as big as an entire book if that concept is intimidating. You could start with a short story, or you could even pick a portion of a book—maybe a scene you didn't like, or maybe a subplot that you thought didn't resolve well, or maybe write an alternate ending or a scene that you felt was missing. Whatever. Choose something. Deconstruct it. Then reconstruct it. It's just like coding. You learn a lot by picking apart somebody else's work and then trying to do better. On that note, I really recommend the MICE Quotient as a plotting framework as a coder. Here's the Mary Robinette Kowal guest lecture on the topic (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blehVIDyuXk). When you watch the video, do the exercise she gives in the lecture. Do not let yourself fast forward through that bit and consume the information passively. As the old thread title said: Read more, write more, close thread. Repeat.
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Jun 29, 2022 01:08
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That's a pretty good angle (and I may just be saying that because it's flattering, lol). But it fits in well with the pattern. Like, I have friends who are super creative writers, and they'll show me a thing they've written, and I'll workshop it back and forth with them and it gets way better in the process. Ideas get developed, characters get reimagined, whole premises turn inside-out, a tossed-off whimsical farce turns into a piece of pulsating drama or vice versa. I can script-doctor like nobody's business, apparently. What I can't do is come up with the basic concept in the first place. Or if I do, it's an excruciating part of the process that I wish I could skip or pull out of a hat. Ah well, I guess that's what prompts are for!
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Jun 29, 2022 01:17
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Data Graham posted:What I can't do is come up with the basic concept in the first place. Or if I do, it's an excruciating part of the process that I wish I could skip or pull out of a hat. The other thing that really helped me get my head around idea generation was Brandon Sanderson's advice that usually a novel is multiple ideas combined together. The epic fantasy novel I just published is basically a mash up of "what if blockchain magic system but with emotions", "what if job interviews, but fantasy" and "immigrant story, but fantasy". Like, I'm not advocating getting bitten with worldbuilder's disease here, but if you're like me and you find that hypotheticals about the world are easier to think of and more interesting, then do those as thought experiments first. Work backwards from there to think about how the world would be different in such a scenario, how people might interact as a result or what kind of things people would do in that paradigm. And from there, it's easier to start spinning out original characters. At least, that's how it works for me. I plan/outline my setting and I discovery write my characters. So I started with the big "what-ifs" in my world, thought about what kinds of conflict would logically occur in that world, and then thought about who would be involved in that kind of conflict. Once I had that, I started writing. And when you're putting words down on the page, you have to actively make decisions about who the characters are, because they are doing things. Anyway, this approach works really well for me, because I can't sit there and fill out character sheets. That would drive me insane. Keeping focused on what the conflict is has helped me so much to just start writing, because I am used to problem solving. And I am used to having lots of disagreements with people about how problems should be solved, so there's always lots of directions for any scene to go. So when I'm writing a scene and I've got my characters in situation with a conflict and the rules of my setting established, it becomes a problem solving exercise. I focus on writing down the beats of how they solve the problem, and then the consequences of their solution. Things like names, locations, directions, sensory details, etc I don't stress over if I can't think of them in the moment. I put an "XXX" placeholder down, leave a comment to remind myself of what I wanted there, and move on. As a result my first drafts look like this: "XXX arrived at the XXX. It was XXX, the time when XXX were XXX, and XXX should have been here already. But once again, XXX was forced to wait, cooling his heels in the freezing hallway, seated upon a too-small chair that threatened to collapse every time he breathed." It's not very immersive but it's generally clear enough from context what the placeholders are supposed to be. But the important thing is that using the XXX placeholders means I don't stop every two words to go Google something and I stay focused. Once the draft is done, I do a worldbuilding pass to fill out all of those details.
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Jun 29, 2022 01:51
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That actually really helps me to fill in a few holes in my mental model, thanks. It's probably not a great sign, on a meta level, that I have to have it spelled out to me — I should be able to extrapolate those points (imagine a what-if, fill in the blanks) as being common to all kinds of stories, not just sci-fi/fantasy where you're imagining a twist to the world and gaming out how things would naturally develop under those new circumstances, Jordan-like. But everything, even the most humdrum of settings, as long as there's something I don't know about it and would have to guess and imagine the most plausible way the details would be fleshed out. What I'm trying to do on a higher level, really, is gain a better understanding of how the actual world works, and the way I would measure that is to imagine a hypothetical as simple as "a mundane thing that I don't know about", like a dude ranch or a mob boss or a guy who decides to become a meth cook, or just some lady who works at the IRS, and try to deduce how it would come to exist and how all the necessary components of it would evolve in reality. In the absence of a hundred lifetimes to do first-hand research, I ought to be able to at least gain a good enough understanding of the world's first principles that I can make a passing stab at how people in a given situation would arrange that situation into a plausible design. So really all this is kind of fitting neatly together into a kind of grand unified theory for me here; no matter what the genre or the premise is, all this is is a mental framework for being able to tell myself I understand the world well enough to imagine how it would develop given "people" + certain starting conditions. So maybe that's how I need to think about it. Keep setting up some initial conditions and see how well I can make sense of them.
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Jun 29, 2022 02:29
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Pththya-lyi posted:Instead of stressing yourself out about being "original," it may help you to think about how you can combine tropes or setting elements in a novel way (like Naomi Novik combining Horatio Hornblower and dragon riders in her Temeraire series), or pull something from one publishing category into another (like Eoin Colfer taking the supervillain protagonist out of superhero comics and into middle-grade fantasy). Maybe it's a more standard story, but with a kind of protagonist we don't see a lot of (a janitor, a grandma, a social worker). Especially when you’re starting out, I guarantee you’ll have bigger problems to worry about than whether your stories are “original”. Depending on your experience and skill level, you’ll need to learn a lot about pacing, and structure, and writing characters with clear goals that the audience can relate to; these are the things that will make someone read (or stop reading) your work, not whether it’s derivative of something else they’ve read. (Some people will read it purely because it’s similar to something they’ve loved before!) Also, yeah, joining Thunderdome is a great way to get words out without feeling precious about any one idea or concept.
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Jun 29, 2022 02:44
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Data Graham posted:That actually really helps me to fill in a few holes in my mental model, thanks. It's probably not a great sign, on a meta level, that I have to have it spelled out to me — I should be able to extrapolate those points (imagine a what-if, fill in the blanks) as being common to all kinds of stories, not just sci-fi/fantasy where you're imagining a twist to the world and gaming out how things would naturally develop under those new circumstances, Jordan-like. But everything, even the most humdrum of settings, as long as there's something I don't know about it and would have to guess and imagine the most plausible way the details would be fleshed out. post a story in thunderdome this week, it's a very straightforward prompt ('work'), just go to the thread and type 'in'. here's me thinking out loud, steal any or all of these or do your own: INCREDIBLY BORING START IDEA: a guy gets up and goes to work, then goes home Variations: a guy gets up but he can't! why not? is is restrained? will his bed not let him? metaphor for depression? a guy gets up and goes to work but work has vanished, what happened? is it a hole in the ground? does he get some news that he can't go in? is it on fire? a guy gets up and goes to work, then goes home but he can't - why not? can he not find the exit? is he being prevented by people or by the architecture? has the world changed? how? Other variations: is it a guy? what is the work? where does he go? these are all about the right size for a 1k word story - break it into threes, no new characters after the first third, no new ideas after the second third.
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Jun 29, 2022 03:00
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Recent (very good) tv show Severance's plot is quite literally "a man gets up, goes to work, and then goes home."
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Jun 29, 2022 03:57
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General Battuta posted:Recent (very good) tv show Severance's plot is quite literally "a man gets up, goes to work, and then goes home." exactly! such a good show, and it's just a few knobs twiddled on the central extremely dull concept. Creativity is not the hard part, just think of boring things then change them until they interest you.
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Jun 29, 2022 04:02
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sebmojo posted:also this: https://www.ssa.gov/oact/babynames/, from which you can learn that ~550 babies each year are given the name 'Unique'. https://familieretshuset.dk/navne/navne/godkendte-fornavne Here in Denmark, parents are required to pick the names of their children from a list of approved names*, so the government maintains extensive excel spreadsheets containing every approved name in alphabetical order. You can download them above. 20.993 boy names, 25.819 girl names, and 1.319 intersex. It is debatable whether this is a good law, but it makes for a convenient writing resource. * The dystopian YA novel basically writes itself.
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Jun 29, 2022 09:39
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*two steps from hell with massive bass* In a WORLD... ...where your name is EVERYTHING... 
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Jun 29, 2022 17:25
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SimonChris posted:https://familieretshuset.dk/navne/navne/godkendte-fornavne What a great premise for a hard fantasy setting where knowing someone's true name gives you power over them. Of course a totalitarian government would tightly regulate and track its citizens' names.
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Jun 29, 2022 18:13
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I get how and why agents pick things up, and I appreciate that some have sent me lovely replies, but my mind boggles a little bit when I get one praising the characters, worldbuilding, pacing, and how the plot widens from the initial premise... but can't offer representation because they don't think they're the right fit for it.
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Jun 30, 2022 00:28
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:I get how and why agents pick things up, and I appreciate that some have sent me lovely replies, but my mind boggles a little bit when I get one praising the characters, worldbuilding, pacing, and how the plot widens from the initial premise... but can't offer representation because they don't think they're the right fit for it. There's no point in them lying to you, they wouldn't praise it if there wasn't something there. SurreptitiousMuffin fucked around with this message at 01:10 on Jun 30, 2022 |
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Jun 30, 2022 01:02
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SurreptitiousMuffin posted:Dude that's really good. Personalised reply + that sort of response is proof the book will move if you find the right agent. "Not the right fit" tends to mean like, "the editors I have strong relationships with aren't buying this right now but it's still good". I got exactly one reply like that and it was after the book was already out and winning awards. It was 99% silence and form letters. Outside of the Bad Fit agent, in two years and just under 40 rejections, I got one other personalised response, which said it had promise but needed more work, which is agent for "not good enough". That's true! I think I've had three personalized responses and they've usually mentioned something about the marketability of it, and there was that one I mentioned last post which was like, hey, great idea but you're not executing it well enough. I let them know that I really appreciated the pacing comment because that's what I feel I'm the least confident on. While I may not query this trilogy anymore, it's given me a shortlist of agents to potentially contact in the future.
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Jun 30, 2022 03:33
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They're saying marketability is the issue?
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Jun 30, 2022 07:45
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SurreptitiousMuffin posted:They're saying marketability is the issue? Things like 'Looking at my current catalogue, I'm not sure I'd be the one to sell it.' I assume that means how easy it would be for them to market it and sell it on to a potential publisher, with some consideration being to how they publisher would find it easy to sell. Which given that it's basically The Expanse meets The Boys meets Evangelion, I can see why it might be a tricky needle to thread. Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 08:01 on Jun 30, 2022 |
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Jun 30, 2022 07:55
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Yeah so, if they're saying nice things + that, it sounds to me like "good manuscript that's out of step with current trends." The good thing about that though is that trends change all the fuckin time. We're currently in a sorta GoT/grimdark/more traditional fantasy backlash that leans pretty heavily on gentler feelings and internality, but the backlash to that has already started in earnest (see: Gretchen Felker-Martin/RSB etc) and poo poo is changing pretty rapidly. If the MS is solid (which it sounds like it is?) then really all it takes is one agent to read the room. EDIT: quote:Which given that it's basically The Expanse meets The Boys meets Evangelion, I can see why it might be a tricky needle to thread. With one caveat: that's three TV show comps, which is death. I know The Expanse is also a book series, but if there's a TV adaptation, it's a bad comp. I try to avoid linking my own writing too much but this is one of the best thing I've ever written and still holds true re comps. SurreptitiousMuffin fucked around with this message at 22:22 on Jun 30, 2022 |
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Jun 30, 2022 08:15
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I don’t like the idea of comps in general. I know it helps agents get the gist of your book, but I feel like your work should stand on its own merits instead of being likened to an existing work.
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Jul 8, 2022 20:07
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Comps are very good and important because they characterize your book to people who don't give a poo poo about your book. They don't need to be accurate but they do need to be grabby. e: I cannot overemphasize how important it is to be able to concisely pitch your book to people who don't really care and want to go order another cocktail
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Jul 8, 2022 20:14
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General Battuta posted:e: I cannot overemphasize how important it is to be able to concisely pitch your book to people who don't really care and want to go order another cocktail Also nobody's going to give you a low grade score if your comp for Gideon is only 20% appropriate instead of the 50/50 split that above blend implies. There's no governing body. People treat comps as far more dire things than they are. They're a fast way to say anything about your book so you can get to the nitty gritty own merits part of the discussion.
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Jul 8, 2022 21:11
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Wungus posted:"It's Gideon the Ninth meets The Traitor Baru Cormorant." i feel like whatever this book is it would do quite well
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Jul 9, 2022 05:37
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There's a legal phrase "a moron in a hurry" and I think it's a good way to think about audiences sometimes. Someone who's about sit down and read your manuscript should know what makes it unique; a moron in a hurry needs to know within five words why they should bother retaining this information.
Djeser fucked around with this message at 06:45 on Jul 9, 2022 |
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Jul 9, 2022 06:43
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Djeser posted:There's a legal phrase "a moron in a hurry" and I think it's a good way to think about audiences sometimes. Someone who's about sit down and read your manuscript should know what makes it unique; a moron in a hurry needs to know within five words why they should bother retaining this information. Also thunderdome judging, interestingly
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Jul 9, 2022 06:49
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sebmojo posted:Also thunderdome judging, interestingly Thunderdome 2023ee: Write stories for impatient morons
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Jul 9, 2022 06:52
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We used "Game of Thrones meets Guns Germs and Steel" even though both the book is critical of both of those titles because everyone has heard of them and putting them together is kind of unexpected.
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Jul 9, 2022 15:48
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I very nearly went with Gideon the Ninth meets Traitor Baru, actually. But, in the end, didn't think it was accurate enough -- but when agents asked for similar works, they were always at the top of the list. A lot of agents have noted and liked the Expanse/Boys/Evangelion comps but I feel the other two may have resulted in more uptake. Oh well!
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Jul 11, 2022 02:52
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I'm going with Shadow and Bone meets the Traitor Baru Cormorant, so great minds and all (or maybe this thread is just more likely to attract people writing genre fiction?)
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Jul 11, 2022 03:24
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Some combination of Inuyasha, ATLA and Deltora Quest is what I've got in mind for mine.
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Jul 11, 2022 03:40
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change my name posted:I'm going with Shadow and Bone meets the Traitor Baru Cormorant, so great minds and all (or maybe this thread is just more likely to attract people writing genre fiction?) yeah im almost certainly comping shadow and bone with something. not sure what tho.
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Jul 11, 2022 04:57
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I went with Borne x Baru, Gideon would've been excellent but it came out like two weeks after I'd finished querying. And like, Baru was sort of a weird one b/c I wrote maritime anticolonial queers but with a wildly different scope, Baru's this huge sprawling thing with Space Opera levels of worldbuilding detail while my guiding principle was one town, one night, one woman (obvs blew that scope a little, but the whole book still plays out over basically a single week). But also "antimperial/anticolonial fantasy set in a maritime empire trying to speedrun all the warcrimes, where a queer agent of the state actually fights against it" IS a match; asking for a perfect match is ridiculous (I believe we call that plagiarism), you don't want perfect, you don't need to think in terms of percentages, you want "close enough that they get the idea and it convinces them to read the first 50". Baru is epic while I'm writing pretty street-level noir but there's enough similarity there to help an agent get a grip on the MS. FWIW, when pitching to publishers I believe my agent went with Gideon the Ninth x Black Sun which is not what I'd have picked at all but you kinda get why it sold? That's got teeth, there's an immediate question of how well those things work together, is it gonna be a mess or salted caramel? Should at least read the opening and find out, oh wow this is good I'm gonna keep reading etc etc SurreptitiousMuffin fucked around with this message at 04:19 on Jul 12, 2022 |
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Jul 12, 2022 03:41
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Last book I queried, I went with, depending on the agent and the interests they've shown, some combo of Seven Blades in Black, Trigun, Upright Women Wanted, Final Fantasy 8, and Lone Wolf and Cub, "but queer." I got a reasonable amount of partial/full requests for a book queried in 2021, but that "reasonable amount" looks horrifically miserable to anyone who queried in 2020 or earlier. Several agents said my comps were great in their rejections, so I was probably doing something alright. I'm still working up the list of things to comp for the one I'm working on now. At Futurescapes, I got told my early-rear end comps ("If Sarah Beth Durst wrote Haikyuu") are perfect but with the caveat of "although they're going to be super obscure to most people so try and find something more popular." Luckily I'm a while out from needing to really think too hard about this, but I'm definitely gonna make sure I use recent books when I hit the query point.
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Jul 12, 2022 16:13
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