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tense has beaten my rear end throughout childhood and into adulthood lol, it's hard poo poo for even native speakers. let us join hands in prayer for the humble editor
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Jan 27, 2024 21:59
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sebmojo posted:I disagree; if you're making mistakes, then you should work to fix them. I mean no-one is going to die if you don't, but getting tense right is pretty basic. Oh sure. I just don't know how to go about regaining information like actively knowing what a past participle is (instead of just doing it on instinct) that has been jettisoned to make room for the proper weapon combos in Vermintide 2. Could be worse, I guess. I learned a bit of German and their grammatical structure still hurts my brain. Their separable verbs are some of the funniest (terrible) things I've ever encountered. Whirling fucked around with this message at 22:55 on Jan 27, 2024 |
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Jan 27, 2024 22:29
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two things: what hand exercises are you guys doing these days to relieve pain? you ever just wanna take a grinder to your brain meats while going "shut up, god drat, I can only write so many words a day" but also absolutely relish the fact that the story is flowing well?
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Jan 28, 2024 18:00
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Ah, hopefully I'm okay posting this here, but I'm trying to find beta readers for a novel I've written. I've had a few murder mysteries published before, but this is my first go at writing outside of genre fiction. I'd love to get some feedback before I start shopping this to publishers and agents and try and get this published too. Here's a blurb I've written up for it to hopefully give some idea about it. If you're interested then please email harrisonthewriter@gmail.com quote:When a meteorite crashes into the forest just outside Sudbury in the Wold, a peculiar array of characters: journalists, hippies and scientists, all start flocking to the sleepy village. And with them they bring the prospect of friendship, romance, and rivalry, turning Maggie’s quiet life upside down.
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Jan 30, 2024 10:16
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My brain is like that meme where I tell it to shut up I'm trying to sleep, and it's like, how about a lore dump! One of my supporting characters is youngish, similar in age to the MC, but he's at the Wizard Academy as an employee, not a student. He's a silversmith, and crafts filigree for magic wands and items to improve their abilities. Sometimes he can't get enough materials from the school, so he moonlights as a notorious burglar that steals from the rich. And one of the easiest things to steal is their silverware. Small, easy to melt down, and not always noticed right away when it goes missing. He wears a silver mask shaped like a crescent moon over his eyes and nose, with the points going upwards on the sides. The rest of his getup is black leather, a black quilted cloak, and a belt of many items. I have an scene where he gets accosted by a werewolf bodyguard. He says he doesn't like werewolves, and headbutts him in the face with his mask to cause some serious damage. Ok, why? I came up with the silver-bug idea first, then the mask, and the werewolf part last. I connected the dots a bit, and came up with this: His parents were weaponsmiths that specialized in honing weapons with silver for hunters to kill werewolves. One night, the werewolves struck back, murdered his parents, and crippled his fingers so that he wouldn't be able to craft weapons ever again. A jeweler from the Academy took him in, and crafted special knuckle splints for him so he could learn his trade. (Like the kind for EDS) Ok, so he has the means and motivation for revenge, why the crescent mask? I determined that a werewolve's strength varies on the phases of the moon. A werewolf seeing a crescent shape would be reminded of how that phase is when they're at their weakest. The mask is both a taunt and a threat that it'll be "the last moon you ever see." He's going to have silver weapons and stuff, he just can't make them himself due to his hands. Thoughts? Waffle! fucked around with this message at 03:31 on Jan 31, 2024 |
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Jan 31, 2024 03:26
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Sounds cool go for it
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Jan 31, 2024 03:32
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Waffle! posted:My brain is like that meme where I tell it to shut up I'm trying to sleep, and it's like, how about a lore dump! He’s an employee of a school but he has to steal to get materials to use for his job?
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Jan 31, 2024 03:34
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Well, he's stealing extra silver for his weapons and stuff. I'll rework that.
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Jan 31, 2024 03:40
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Does the silver for magical purposes need to be pure? If so, does he have the means to refine silver? Because silverware is going to be sterling, which is 7.5% copper (pure silver is too soft to hold up well as silverware). Also, one thing to consider is silver plate. Not sure of the time period/time period analogue, but in households of the nouveau riche/bourgeois wannabes, you're probably going to find silver plate - it looks the same as sterling but is a fraction of the price, due to not actually being very silver (like not enough to be worth stealing and melting down and refining). It is also much lighter weight. I'm sure the character, who's an experienced smith, would instantly be able to tell upon picking a piece of it up. This is probably totally superfluous to the story/lore, but I think it'd be funny if he goes to all the trouble to break into a house to steal the silver and it's all silver plate and he's like "ugh loving posers". source: I live in a Victorian designed and built for bourgeois posers and own a fuckton of silver plate so that I can have fancy dinner parties and pretend to be old money rich But yeah, agreed that it'd be kinda weird for his employer to not supply enough material for him to do his job, forcing him to resort to burglary, so it makes sense that he'd have a side gig making things that are outside the purview/jurisdiction of the school. re: handling bilingual characters/multiple languages being spoken in a scene: Thanks everyone! Lots of good stuff to think about. I will certainly be trying a few methods and thinking about little things like contractions and grammatical structure when it comes to more subtle indications of different languages being spoken. Come to think of it, one thing I've already kinda done (but probably need to reinforce harder in subsequent revisions) is that protag's mother, who speaks the "main" language as her second language, has her dialogue shift vibes depending on which language she's supposed to be speaking - when she's speaking her native language, her dialogue will be very natural and have contractions and whatnot, but when she's speaking the "main" language (her second language), her dialogue becomes more stilted and formal and the contractions go away. I don't actually indicate which language she's speaking in a given scene, but chances are that when she's alone with protag and/or protag's sister, they might be speaking her native language. But I never point it out because so far which language they're speaking in private has zero bearing on the story. I guess it's just a super subtle litter easter egg/detail that's not necessary but I just felt like including. Fluffy Bunnies posted:two things: what hand exercises are you guys doing these days to relieve pain? Wrist curls with a ~5lb dumbbell. Also rock climbing. Not sure about it directly relieving pain, but having stronger, better conditioned wrists/hands/forearms has definitely helped with preventing/reducing soreness I'd get from doing computery stuff/writing by hand. quote:you ever just wanna take a grinder to your brain meats while going "shut up, god drat, I can only write so many words a day" but also absolutely relish the fact that the story is flowing well? Yes. I've kinda been in this state for over a year now and it's still happening. Kind of insane, especially considering how ADD I am. I've never before experienced the combination of sustained obsession in a project for so long and said project working out really, really well. Like, it just keeps effortlessly figuring itself out. My previous major attempt at a fantasy was, in retrospect, a disaster because even though I was passionate about it, it was just a giant plotless flop in which nothing but a bunch of angst and navel-gazing happened because I was unable to resolve a ton of critical story and worldbuilding issues. So it just kinda withered away. Even if I wanted to try to go back to it and attempt to work out the issues, I don't think I could because I wrote it while in suuuuch a different headspace. Maybe in the future I'll strip it for parts and try something new with the aspects that did work in it (a couple of the characters and one or two key concepts).
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Jan 31, 2024 05:01
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Fluffy Bunnies posted:two things: what hand exercises are you guys doing these days to relieve pain? I'll second that strengthening exercises are a great thing in the long run! But you do want to be careful depending on what kind of pain issue you have. I get tendonitis in my wrists if I overwork them, and for a while I tried using carpal tunnel braces (didn't know tendonitis existed at the time and assumed it was carpal) and stretches they actually just made it worse at least in my case. Only thing to do with tendonitis flare ups is to rest, ice, and take some ibuprofen. I try to do nerve glide exercises and strength exercises somewhat regularly when they're not flaring up though and it's helped reduce the flare ups a lot.
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Jan 31, 2024 05:42
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Queen Victorian posted:Does the silver for magical purposes need to be pure? If so, does he have the means to refine silver? Because silverware is going to be sterling, which is 7.5% copper (pure silver is too soft to hold up well as silverware). Also, one thing to consider is silver plate. Not sure of the time period/time period analogue, but in households of the nouveau riche/bourgeois wannabes, you're probably going to find silver plate - it looks the same as sterling but is a fraction of the price, due to not actually being very silver (like not enough to be worth stealing and melting down and refining). It is also much lighter weight. I'm sure the character, who's an experienced smith, would instantly be able to tell upon picking a piece of it up. This is probably totally superfluous to the story/lore, but I think it'd be funny if he goes to all the trouble to break into a house to steal the silver and it's all silver plate and he's like "ugh loving posers". Thank you for the insight. I think amounts of pure silver would be controlled and recorded by the Academy, so he has to improvise with what he can find elsewhere. That could lead him to getting into business with shady characters, like The Mandolorian working for Beskar steel. I saw a video of coin collectors at a convention, and the major players would use a magnet to test for fakes before they bought anything. I think he'll have to use a Fence to melt down his stolen goods, refine, and craft for him, so that no impurities show up in his work forge. *drops a magnet onto a "silver" ingot and it sticks* "What is this? I asked for silver and you brought me steel." *badguys unsheath their swords* "Yeah, we brought steel all right..."
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Jan 31, 2024 07:33
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Waffle! posted:Thank you for the insight. I think amounts of pure silver would be controlled and recorded by the Academy, so he has to improvise with what he can find elsewhere. That could lead him to getting into business with shady characters, like The Mandolorian working for Beskar steel. I saw a video of coin collectors at a convention, and the major players would use a magnet to test for fakes before they bought anything. I think he'll have to use a Fence to melt down his stolen goods, refine, and craft for him, so that no impurities show up in his work forge. I think a simpler (and probably much safer) option for him would be to have an arrangement at a smithy run by a shady dude in a seedy part of town in which he rents the use of their smelting equipment and pays extra for them to not ask questions. He'd have an alias and disguise, of course. I dunno, the idea of him paying someone to smelt and craft for him while he does the burglary seems backwards - precious metal smelting and magical silver smithing seem like waaaay more expensive services than burglary - I'd sooner expect him to pay a burglar and have an alternate smelting/crafting setup (at a shady smithy or in his basement or something - not sure what sort of facilities/equipment he needs to make the magical weapons after he purifies the silver) to do the highly skilled expensive work himself and not have outsourcing it eat into his profit margin. So to me, it makes sense that if you want him to do his own burglary (of course you do because that's pretty fun), then he'd be handling all steps of the process himself - the fewer other people involved, the greater his personal profit and the lower the chance of one his contacts loving up/loving him over/ratting him out/loving him up/killing him. So yeah, I think that working with a single blacksmith who turns a blind eye would be a better and more logical route than dealing with multiple layers of criminals and also using school equipment to make illicit poo poo - much lower risk all around.
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Jan 31, 2024 16:40
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Good points all around. Simpler is better. He could have an arrangement with a "lesser" species, like some kobolds hiding in town. They work together to steal silver from all over the city, and he shows them how to craft with it using their forge, win/win. I was trying to work in a little gang angle from an earlier idea, so that fits. He can be annoyed with some that can't tell the difference between silver and plate. I can rework the tampered silver idea as well, like him discovering a plot to defraud the Academy. That would affect both his real job and the quality of his work. He'd be working outside the law, but still helping the Academy. "Hey, you're not our usual guy..." "No. I'm not." Problem is now I'm having a Boba Fett/Darth Maul scenario, where a side character is potentially cooler than the main one. My main character is cool, but I haven't put as much thought into her story beats as this one, lol.
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Jan 31, 2024 19:43
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Waffle! posted:Problem is now I'm having a Boba Fett/Darth Maul scenario, where a side character is potentially cooler than the main one. My main character is cool, but I haven't put as much thought into her story beats as this one, lol. That is absolutely a big problem. You've probably heard the phrase, "If you're not writing about the most important time in your character's life, then why aren't you writing about that instead?" I'd say that the same thing applies to side characters. "If your side characters are more developed and interesting than the main character, why aren't they the main character?"
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Jan 31, 2024 23:15
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The Expanse managed to get along just fine with the protagonist being the least interesting character surrounded on all sides by way more interesting and charismatic characters. And I’ve seen alotta other examples Scene stealers are fuckin great actually, in the right doses Sometimes the protagonist isn’t the most interesting person, but ends up being the center around which everyone else orbits, and that’s ok. What the central character has to be in that case is the pov who pays the most attention to what’s going on around them. Like the pov character in The Great Gatsby is so boring I’ve totally forgotten his name, because the focal character was Gatsby himself, and the narrator was just the only person really seeing him, and that’s why he was chosen to narrate the story. Sometimes it just works out better that way And then sometimes not, but that has to be worked out for each individual story
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Feb 1, 2024 02:22
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Watson is less interesting than Holmes. Lockwood's less interesting than Heathcliff and Cathy. Ishmael is less interesting than Ahab.
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Feb 1, 2024 03:41
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Junpei posted:Watson is less interesting than Holmes. Lockwood's less interesting than Heathcliff and Cathy. Ishmael is less interesting than Ahab. In all those cases (as well as Gatsby), the interest lies in the focus character rather than the pov character. The pov character is the witness of events, not necessarily their generator. The other case, and this is something you see a lot in ensemble casts, is the pov character is the center of a group whose purpose is to keep the whole group grounded, so often ends up being some milqtoast everyman compared to the rest. They kinda serve the witness role as well, since they’re usually closest to an audience stand-in. It’s great when these characters are interesting themselves, but they often fall short just because the ungrounded side-characters can get up to the most insane poo poo in comparison And then you have the “Boba Fett problem,” which isn’t really a problem at all. Having a scene-stealer, as I said, can be awesome when done well. Like, if you look at TV and movies (and this does work in novels as well, it’s just easier to illustrate with actors), when you have a great character actor or large ham like Brian Blessed walk on and briefly steal the show—everybody loves that poo poo. In a book, like say The Adventures of Amina Al-Serafi, has a kickass middle-aged momma pirate protagonist who is just done with poo poo. And she is awesome. But she’s also surrounded by a cool ensemble cast, some of which are total scene-stealers (including one who could definitely be played by Brian Blessed). These characters, who’ve also been around and led equally interesting lives, don’t detract from the story but add more layers and richness to it. No, you don’t know their full story, but not being the pov characters, their implied large pasts and experience add mystique! And this is why Boba Fett was latched onto so hard by fans. It’s not a problem at all, it’s a bonus feature One of the major things that drives my novels is my protagonist interacting with other interesting characters. My first person protagonist even tends to turn people into caricatures, describing everything they say and do in completely over the top ways, because this is in fact one of the things that makes my protagonist an interesting character—the fact that they’re a huge bullshitter who exaggerates everything because what makes an interesting story is more important than the truth. This means you occasionally get a walk-on part that could be played by Brian Blessed who totally outdoes my protagonist by being even more ott then they are. And it makes everything so much more fun. And my protagonist knows this, which is why they’re willing to shine the spotlight on others and give them the scene In fact, this was entirely how Damon Runyon wrote his pov character in all his gangster stories—his whole schtick is just being a guy who runs into interesting people and listening to their interesting stories, always insisting he’s too upstanding a citizen to actually be involved in their shady dealings and shenanigans. And it works Stuporstar fucked around with this message at 05:35 on Feb 1, 2024 |
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Feb 1, 2024 05:19
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Yeah. My main character is from the forest and doesn't know anything about city politics, or it's underbelly. One supporting character is secretly a part of the underground scene, while the other is the opposite trying to maintain the status quo. Main girl is in the middle learning about both. They all have their secrets, and don't know if they can trust each other about them yet.
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Feb 1, 2024 05:52
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BigFactory posted:He’s an employee of a school but he has to steal to get materials to use for his job? It's a magic school in the US, obviously.
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Feb 2, 2024 01:52
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I have a bit of a specific craft request. I've been reading through a collection of Beckett's short prose, and it's really struck me how much craft the guy puts into a single sentence. I'm wondering if there are any books or resources out there that adress craft at a sentence level. Less "How 2 Write Like Beckett" and more "how to treat sentences as a part of the craft of writing." Obligatory read more, write more etc.
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Feb 3, 2024 00:18
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ill go past read more write more and suggest you have yourself reread and revise some recent work maybe once a week for five weeks-ish. think about each sentence as a memory, how good are you articulating that memory to another who has none to begin with? and let that lead your revision. youll be surprised at the progression of quality in your own work by the end of the month n half sorry i dont know any resources
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Feb 3, 2024 01:34
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magic cactus posted:I have a bit of a specific craft request. I've been reading through a collection of Beckett's short prose, and it's really struck me how much craft the guy puts into a single sentence. I'm wondering if there are any books or resources out there that adress craft at a sentence level. Less "How 2 Write Like Beckett" and more "how to treat sentences as a part of the craft of writing." Obligatory read more, write more etc. Ursula K LeGuin’s Steering the Craft only has a few chapters on sentence level writing, but it’s probably the closest I’ve read to what you’re looking for. Some of the best writing advice I’ve ever read in that book
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Feb 3, 2024 03:05
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Stuporstar posted:Ursula K LeGuin’s Steering the Craft only has a few chapters on sentence level writing, but it’s probably the closest I’ve read to what you’re looking for. Some of the best writing advice I’ve ever read in that book I'll take a look, thanks for the suggestion!
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Feb 3, 2024 11:26
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magic cactus posted:I have a bit of a specific craft request. I've been reading through a collection of Beckett's short prose, and it's really struck me how much craft the guy puts into a single sentence. I'm wondering if there are any books or resources out there that adress craft at a sentence level. Less "How 2 Write Like Beckett" and more "how to treat sentences as a part of the craft of writing." Obligatory read more, write more etc. Mr. Battuta's long form post about sentences is an interesting place to start: https://www.sethdickinson.com/2015/02/26/lets-hurt-sentences/
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Feb 3, 2024 13:52
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magic cactus posted:I'm wondering if there are any books or resources out there that adress craft at a sentence level. Less "How 2 Write Like Beckett" and more "how to treat sentences as a part of the craft of writing." This is probably what you're looking for. https://www.amazon.com/Writing-Tools-Essential-Strategies-Writer/dp/0316014990 Each section is short and to-the-point. Here's the very first writing tool he teaches, to give you a sense of how much bang for the buck each provides. quote:Begin sentences with subjects and verbs. Clark never gets dogmatic about what a writer should or should not do. Instead he teaches the writer how to achieve specific results. "Do whatever you want, but know what you're doing, and then do it on purpose." was one of the earliest things my mentor taught me, and this short book is practically that lesson's platonic ideal.
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Feb 3, 2024 16:02
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Well poo poo! That looks great!
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Feb 3, 2024 17:03
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General Battuta posted:Well poo poo! That looks great!
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Feb 3, 2024 22:02
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magic cactus posted:I have a bit of a specific craft request. I've been reading through a collection of Beckett's short prose, and it's really struck me how much craft the guy puts into a single sentence. I'm wondering if there are any books or resources out there that adress craft at a sentence level. Less "How 2 Write Like Beckett" and more "how to treat sentences as a part of the craft of writing." Obligatory read more, write more etc. Some good suggestions already, and I'll add on Stanley Fish's How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One and June Casagrande's It Was the Best of Sentences, It Was the Worst of Sentences: A Writer's Guide to Crafting Killer Sentences. It might also be worth looking into rhetorical figures and tropes. Mark Forsyth's The Elements of Eloquence: Secrets of the Perfect Turn of Phrase is great introduction. BYU used to have an amazing Web 1.0 site on rhetoric which included a huge list of various ones, but they seem to have taken it down. You can still view it via the Wayback machine though: Silva Rhetoricae.
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Feb 3, 2024 23:42
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A Bunch of Really Good Posts posted:This is probably what you're looking for Thanks very much for all the recs, I will be checking these out post-haste!
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Feb 5, 2024 13:15
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Re: grammar craft etc: There is already a huge pile of great resources and advice, but I'll go ahead and add my meager contributions anyway. Two things that helped me a lot with grammar stuff and crafting prose at the sentence level are 1) having done a lot of sentence diagramming in middle and high school, and 2) technical writing, namely in the area of writing software SOPs and documentation. Sentence diagramming was already regarded as pretty archaic when I learned it in school (late 90's-early 00's) so I don't know if it's a thing anymore, but I personally found it extremely enlightening. Most of my classmates hated it but I loved it. There is established notation for all the grammatical aspects of a sentence (like subject, verb, object, dependent clauses, etc) and you would take a written sentence and draw it out as an exploded diagram of its structural building blocks. I've lost most of the technique and grammatical vocabulary since then, but it had a lasting impact in how I think about sentence structure, which has been good for my writing. And then doing technical writing was another huge boost. It is VERY different from creative writing in terms of style and goals, obviously. Writing SOPs for complicated processes in B2B/enterprise software forces you to think about how to convey this information in the most direct, succinct way possible so that the people using this software can do their goddamn jobs without harassing support. At a sentence level, it's very simplistic, really just subject/verb/object, prepositions, and maaaybe some adjectives. Individual word choice becomes crucial. There can arise deep considerations and debates around semantics. An extra challenge was that the software I was was writing stuff for was specialized and esoteric with lots of novel entities and processes in it, so I also had to maintain a higher level thread of purpose in these docs, like "what am I even doing and why am I following these steps". Overall, it was a lot of poo poo going into a 250-word set of instructions. I totally hated doing it, but it absolutely made me a better sentence writer. Not that I'd recommend going out and getting a job in technical writing, but maybe like, reading up on the art of technical writing and studying/analyzing written instructions and stuff you find in the wild. Waffle! posted:Problem is now I'm having a Boba Fett/Darth Maul scenario, where a side character is potentially cooler than the main one. My main character is cool, but I haven't put as much thought into her story beats as this one, lol. I have this issue as well (not gonna call it a problem because I don't view it as a problem, just an issue to contend with and otherwise be aware of), where I gave my protag a younger sister, initially as set dressing (if you're part of a medieval royal family you're bound to have siblings as backups in case you die too young), but she quickly spun herself up into a major scene-stealer. I keep giving her more page time because she's really compelling to write about (and funny). But at the same time, in this particular story, she's not main character material. She's almost TOO intense to be the dominant POV, and for her to be the main character, the overarching story would have to be about something else entirely, and given the world I've built up, it'd probably focus on overcoming a deeply entrenched patriarchy and sexism in a pre-Enlightenment society. That would probably be an awesome story, but not the one I want to write right now. Or I'd have to build a different society for her to exist in, where sexism and patriarchy aren't major obstacles, so I can tell the story I want to tell with her as the MC, but then I lose the historically inspired immersive medieval vibes I've been working so hard on researching and constructing. So she remains a principal supporting character with her own arc apart from the MC (one thing I did manage to pull off (I think) is that a ton of her story and character development happens while NOT in direct orbit of the MC). Which means that she can become as awesome as she wants and I'm not concerned about her stealing the show from the MC because for a time they are in separate storylines in totally separate locations. So they each have their own stories and contexts so I never have to temper her awesomeness. Also MC is super cool in his own right, but in a VERY different way. Not sure anymore where I was going with that, but I guess don't rein in cool side characters just because you think they're cooler than your MC. Give them an appropriate stage and outlet for their coolness and let them be as cool as they want. People like reading about cool characters and I don't think it matters which of a story's characters they find the coolest. Otherwise if you try to forcefully designate your MC as the coolest character, it could very well end up like that ReBoot episode in which Enzo wants to be the smartest person in Mainframe so he talks to the processor and the processor indeed makes him the smartest person in Mainframe... by underclocking everyone else, rendering them uselessly dumb.
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Feb 5, 2024 18:30
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another recommendation: https://www.amazon.com/Building-Great-Sentences-Write-Courses-ebook/dp/B00AEDDRF8
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Feb 5, 2024 19:18
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magic cactus posted:I have a bit of a specific craft request. I've been reading through a collection of Beckett's short prose, and it's really struck me how much craft the guy puts into a single sentence. I'm wondering if there are any books or resources out there that adress craft at a sentence level. Less "How 2 Write Like Beckett" and more "how to treat sentences as a part of the craft of writing." Obligatory read more, write more etc.
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Feb 5, 2024 21:52
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Queen Victorian posted:I have this issue as well (not gonna call it a problem because I don't view it as a problem, just an issue to contend with and otherwise be aware of), where I gave my protag a younger sister, initially as set dressing (if you're part of a medieval royal family you're bound to have siblings as backups in case you die too young), but she quickly spun herself up into a major scene-stealer. I keep giving her more page time because she's really compelling to write about (and funny). But at the same time, in this particular story, she's not main character material. She's almost TOO intense to be the dominant POV, and for her to be the main character, the overarching story would have to be about something else entirely, and given the world I've built up, it'd probably focus on overcoming a deeply entrenched patriarchy and sexism in a pre-Enlightenment society. That would probably be an awesome story, but not the one I want to write right now. Or I'd have to build a different society for her to exist in, where sexism and patriarchy aren't major obstacles, so I can tell the story I want to tell with her as the MC, but then I lose the historically inspired immersive medieval vibes I've been working so hard on researching and constructing. You're reminded me something I was going to say during prologue chat, so I guess I'll do it now. I have to wonder if prologues and interesting side characters can be turned into some short stories which you then offer as a bonus for signing up for your mailing list. That way you get some extra creative outlet, fans get a fuller world, and you get some kind of market win out of it! Although, are these sorts of things still considered best practices? Or have I just outed myself as being out of date?  EDIT: Oh, sentence diagraming -- it wasn't something I learned in school, but always struck me as interesting. Does anyone have any good resources on how to diagram? FouRPlaY fucked around with this message at 22:40 on Feb 5, 2024 |
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Feb 5, 2024 22:37
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Wungus posted:If you're not into poetry, try reading a bit of it and analyzing it. When it comes to deliberate sentence crafting and deliberate word choice, you can't really go past a good poem. I kind of prefer doing this to more strict texts on how to structure a sentence, because poems are often pretty deep in the wind about vibes, and I think if you're going to get deep into finding your own voice with how to structure a sentence, you can't go past seeing how poets do it. Or at least, I can't; I bounce off the more strict prescriptive text poo poo, but studying poems makes my brain sentences think more gooder. It's funny because the whole impetus for my previous post hinged on (finally) noticing the poetry of Beckett's prose. I think he might be the first writer where I've consciously tried to turn off the reflex of looking at a piece as a story, and instead just enjoy the writing at a sentence level. What does "Under the blind sky close with your own hands the eyes soon sockets, then quick into carrion not to mislead the crows," actually mean? No idea, but to me it feels strangely poetic. I'm not saying I want to write exactly like Beckett, but I do want to write something in this style from time to time to spice up my own work.
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Feb 5, 2024 22:45
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FouRPlaY posted:You're reminded me something I was going to say during prologue chat, so I guess I'll do it now. Add mention of Patreon and it's maybe no longer/less out of date.  But yeah, I have a lot of material that could be used for these sorts of purposes, like "deleted scenes" that are more just slice of life/character vignettes that don't serve any purpose other than to flesh out the world. My story takes place over a number of years (I really don't like when fantasy stories take place over an absurdly unrealistically condensed timeframe (looking at you, Inheritance Cycle)), so there are often time jumps of several months between chapters, leaving a lot of room for plot-inconsequential but potentially fun and interesting "side quests" and extra scenes I could write out and have as additional content. I mean, hell, I already have thousands of words and plenty of scenes I'm probably going to cut in future drafts, so all candidates for converting to subscription-only bonus content if/when I publish. I also have plenty of worldbuilding backstories and in-world histories taking on a life of their own. For example, there's a past king who's referenced a bunch because a lot of consequential foreign policy things happened during his reign, whose rise to power I based on that of Edward III of England. That would be a fun as hell spin-off novel to write: a grim coming-of-age story in which a newly crowned boy king has to navigate the realities of ruling a kingdom in turmoil and confront and overthrow his scheming regent uncle who's using him as a puppet but probably wants him dead in the long run. Like, this backstory has zero business being discussed at any length in the main story, hence designs on a spin-off novel. More than just a "deleted scene" extra, but yeah, a fun and awesome side effect of detailed world- and character-building is giving yourself a ton of additional content and off-shoot story ideas to write about. quote:EDIT: I do not know any good resources, otherwise I would have mentioned them. I no longer have ANY idea what the hell textbook we used or if it was worksheets and pamphlets or what, or how to identify a "good" resource. Only thing I remember about it was that it was great for getting me to really analyze and understand grammatical structures.
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Feb 6, 2024 01:23
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still cant believe some of you fools actually skip prologues. just wtf
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Feb 6, 2024 01:24
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cumpantry posted:still cant believe some of you fools actually skip prologues. just wtf some people skip episodes of TV, it's unfathomable to me too.
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Feb 6, 2024 01:25
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Some people listen to audiobooks at 2x while working and say they read them.
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Feb 6, 2024 02:48
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There's a series I follow on Reddit where the author posts a chapter every Sunday, and has the next two chapters for his patreon followers. I'm not on Patreon, but I appreciate being able to follow the series anyway. I really like Martha Wells' "Murderbot Diaries," but she did some short stories for the series that were online only and I'm waiting for a collection of everything together. Sarah J. Maas putting out 9 versions of "House of Flame and Shadow" with different bonus chapters depending on where you bought it from is some heinous crap. I would make each bonus chapter available to download for a few bucks apiece, or a supplemental collection to buy a month after release or something. Waffle! fucked around with this message at 03:36 on Feb 6, 2024 |
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Feb 6, 2024 03:32
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Tamsyn Miur makes the Locked Tomb short side stories available for free on Tor, and they're included in the main book's physical copies (Mysterious Study of Doctor Sex in Gideon, As Yet Unsent in Harrow, the Unwanted Guest in Nona).
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Feb 6, 2024 03:46
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