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Chexoid
Nov 5, 2009

Now that I have this dating robot I can take it easy.

Purple Prince posted:

A lot of great stuff

Thank God. I'm glad sticking the poem in there is a bad idea, since I'm a butcher with verse. The character is fairly academic, so I hope I'll be able to get away with getting a little flowery in describing it. Thanks again!


Martello posted:

This brings up an interesting thing -- eye-dialect. Who loves it, who hates it, who has advice on when and how to use it?

I've seen it used very well, a little in Cormac McCarthy's work, and a lot in Brian Azzarello's writing on 100 Bullets. But I've also seen it used badly, mostly in lovely amateur writing. I guess my idea would be to keep it legible above all.

I'm not crazy about it, to be honest. A lot of people go overboard. I was just reading Cloud Atlas, and the last "story" in it is absolutely crammed with this kind of chopped up dialect. (still loved it though)

The majority of the book is written in normal English, so running face first into a wall of "A fat joocesome slice, nay, none o your burn wafery off'rins" half way through was disorienting as hell. Really took me a while to adjust to reading it.

edit: wait no that's terrible advice. Better advice is to avoid using it too much when it's the narrator's voice, like in Cloud Atlas, and save it for dialogue. Too much of that stuff hurts your brain.

Chexoid fucked around with this message at 03:57 on Aug 16, 2012

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Time Cowboy
Nov 4, 2007

But Tarzan... The strangest thing has happened! I'm as bare... as the day I was born!
I loved A Clockwork Orange. Never attempt to do A Clockwork Orange, however, unless you are an absolute master of language. Which, if you're posting here, you aren't.

In dialogue, a little bit of accent goes a long way. A smidgeon too much distracts me and pushes me out of the story. Make it read smooth:

"Saw him runnin an I thought the cops'd catch him sure."

Not the greatest example (off the top of my head) but the general idea is not to make a mess with apostrophes and odd spellings all over the place.

Martello
Apr 29, 2012

by XyloJW
Some people have recently posted decent futureslang in Thunderdome Week II. You prolly wouldn't know because I ain't seen yer yeller rear end in Thunderdome yet. :clint:

Tiggum
Oct 24, 2007

Your life and your quest end here.


Time Cowboy posted:

In dialogue, a little bit of accent goes a long way. A smidgeon too much distracts me and pushes me out of the story. Make it read smooth:

Also, keep in mind that the person reading might not have the same accent as you. Sometimes when people try to write accents they seem to forget that people with different accents still spell things the same, so different letter combinations sound different to people from different places.

If you keep it minimal and just hint at the accent people can fill in the rest themselves, but if you go too far you just end up making it hard to understand and not even the right accent for people who don't read it the same way you do.

Purple Prince
Aug 20, 2011

I don't know guys, Trainspotting was fairly easy to read for me, even in the Renton chapters. Then again Welsh mostly writes in standard English and only replaces certain words in Scots with their phonetic equivalents. No hail of apostrophes. As far as I can tell he only replaces the words that are noticeably different other than in terms of inflection. In addition most of the words he replaces are commonly used; the reader becomes used to them quickly.

"Ah pull oot some crumpled notes fae mah poakits, and wi touching servility, flatten them oot oan the coffee table."

Purple Prince fucked around with this message at 07:44 on Aug 16, 2012

sebmojo
Oct 23, 2010


Legit Cyberpunk









Purple Prince posted:

I don't know guys, Trainspotting was fairly easy to read for me, even in the Renton chapters. Then again Welsh mostly writes in standard English and only replaces certain words in Scots with their phonetic equivalents. No hail of apostrophes. As far as I can tell he only replaces the words that are noticeably different other than in terms of inflection. In addition most of the words he replaces are commonly used; the reader becomes used to them quickly.

"Ah pull oot some crumpled notes fae mah poakits, and wi touching servility, flatten them oot oan the coffee table."

That's such a great sentence.

As with so much in writing, the answer to 'can I use weird accents?' is 'yes, if you are awesome'.

Purple Prince
Aug 20, 2011

To be honest I just flicked to a random Renton page and quoted a sentence with a lot of dialect. Which says a lot about how good Welsh's writing is. Everyone who wants to write something using a lot of accents should read Trainspotting in my opinion, because the accents are so well done that the book reads as smoothly as if it were standard English.

Also, Renton is not stupid. He's the most intelligent character in the book except, perhaps, for the unnamed narrator of "Bad Blood". Which makes a nice change from non-standard dialects being used to convey stupidity, which is elitist and potentially racist.

A Renton Moment:

"Society invents a spurious convoluted logic tae absorb and change people whae's behaviour's outside its mainstream... it's seen as a sign ay thir ain failure. The fact that ye jist simply choose tae reject whit they huv tae offer. Choose us. Choose life. Choose mortgage payments; choose washing machines; choose cars; choose sitting oan a couch watching mind-numbing and spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fuckin junk food intae yir mooth. Choose rotting away, pishing and shiteing yersel in a home, a total fuckin embarrassment tae the selfish, hosed-up brats ye've produced. Choose life."

Chillmatic
Jul 25, 2003

always seeking to survive and flourish

sebmojo posted:

As with so much in writing, the answer to 'can I use weird accents?' is 'yes, if you are awesome'.

This really can't be emphasized enough. The Rule Of Cool pretty much overrides every single other rule in writing. And hell, in life, too.

I would still suggest to only include as much dialect as is really needed to get your point across. This is where most people gently caress it up. They go way, WAY overboard and the text itself just gets garbled and lost, which isn't really the effect one wants.

Adding some signaling words in the dialogue itself, and adding description after an initial dialogue tag can go a very long way.

quote:

"Well, howdy there," the man said, tipping his hat and speaking in a slow drawl. "I do believe I've seen you 'round town before.



From now on, everything I write that that guy says will be heard by the reader in the intended voice, and I didn't have to go overboard with dialect to accomplish that. A little bit of description right upfront goes a long way to establish voice in a given character.

Use it wisely and it will bring them to life with only a minimum of wordfuckery required.

ultrachrist
Sep 27, 2008
Yeah, more often than not, very simple changes and a command of language goes just as far as actual phoenetic dialect without running the risk of being annoying.

For instance, Lonesome Dove uses very little apostrophes or phoenetic spellings -- just word placement, the right vocabulary, slightly incorrect grammar, and occasionally reminding the reader someone is speaking in a "soft drawl" or something like that and you never really lost the dialect the characters are speaking in.

I don't have my books with me at the moment, but some random examples on goodreads:

quote:

“Nobody run off with her,” Roscoe said. "She just run off with herself, I guess.”

quote:

Monkey John looked at the dead boy. "By God, life is cheap up here on the goddamned Canadian River."

quote:

“I hate rude behavior in a man," he explained in his quiet, unassuming drawl. "I won't tolerate it." He politely tipped his hat, and rode away.

Another good example of accents is Salman Rushdie. You can hear his Indian characters' accents in your head without really noticing or stumbling on the the dialogue.

Then you have poo poo like Clockwork Orange where it just involves being incredibly skilled to make it work. I recently read Mason and Dixon and I'm not even sure what Dixon's accent is supposed to sound like but it was very beautiful to read.

Jonked
Feb 15, 2005

ultrachrist posted:

Then you have poo poo like Clockwork Orange where it just involves being incredibly skilled to make it work. I recently read Mason and Dixon and I'm not even sure what Dixon's accent is supposed to sound like but it was very beautiful to read.
I just want to restate this - what Burgess did with language is absolutely amazing, and you (general unspecified 'you') won't be able to do what he did. Burgess uses a great deal of slang, but the way he uses it and the context he gives does a lot to provide meaning. Every time he uses slang, he's extremely careful to provide enough clues that you can pick up the general meaning. More importantly, the use of slang was for a very good reason - it reinforces the themes, it provides a barrier between the reader and the violence, it helps the reader imagine the world, ect ect. He didn't just throw it in for the heck of it.

And to top it all off, even he failed somewhat. I've given the book to a couple of friends for them to read. Some of them had no trouble with the slang, others liked the story but didn't like the slang, some absolutely refused to read the book because they couldn't understand it. A lot of editions come with a glossary now.

I've had similar reactions from friends who I gave Their Eyes Were Watching God. Hurston uses dialect very skillfully, but that doesn't change the fact that even well-crafted dialect is going to turn off a lot of people. It's not something you use lightly. If you're not absolutely sure that it adds more than it takes away, just saying somebody speaks with a drawl would be better.

Runcible Cat
May 28, 2007

Ignoring this post

Riddley Walker is another example - it's a loving amazing piece of work, and one of Hoban's stated objectives in writing it in Riddley's phonetic future slang was to slow the reader down to Riddley's speed of comprehension. (Riddley isn't stupid, but his world and background's very limited.)

But you basically have to be a poet to do it to that extent and make it work - the rhythm of the words has to carry the reader along, since comprehension sometimes takes a while, or comes on more than one level.

Jonked
Feb 15, 2005
Sorry to distract from slang chat, but I've got a question for any YA authors here. I've got an idea a story that would be pretty good for a middle school/high school audience, but it's more of a longer short story or novella length idea. I looked around on Doutrope, and didn't really see any magazines that accepted those sorts of stories - most of it seemed to be flash fiction or shorter stories, or novels. I also didn't see many major publishers on Doutrope when I searched, though. Is there just no real niche for novella length YA stories?

I guess I'm wondering if I should beef up the story and try to make it into a full-length novel. Just seems odd to me that there isn't a spot for something like this.

Dr. Kloctopussy
Apr 22, 2003

"It's time....to DIE!"

Jonked posted:


I guess I'm wondering if I should beef up the story and try to make it into a full-length novel. Just seems odd to me that there isn't a spot for something like this.

Middle grade and YA are two very different audiences. As far as word-count, middle grade books tend to be novella-length, YA tends to be longer.

Seriously, though, worry about writing a good story before you worry about selling it. (not that I haven't wistfully browsed duotrope myself.) It might be worthwhile to do a little more research about middle grade and YA fiction to see what themes they cover as you work out the details of the story.

Dr. Kloctopussy fucked around with this message at 22:52 on Aug 16, 2012

Jonked
Feb 15, 2005

Dr. Kloctopussy posted:

Middle grade and YA are two very different audiences. As far as word-count, middle grade books tend to be novella-length, YA tends to be longer.

Seriously, though, worry about writing a good story before you worry about selling it. (not that I haven't wistfully browsed duotrope myself.) It might be worthwhile to do a little more research about middle grade and YA fiction to see what themes they cover as you work out the details of the story.
Yeah, I guess. I tend to outline my stories before I write them, and I can usually gauge the word count, give or take a couple thousand. It's not just that it's all about the money, but I can't help but feeling it's a little silly to write a story knowing that nobody is ever going to look at it. I mean, writing is about communicating with an audience, right?

Thanks for the answer though!

Erik Shawn-Bohner
Mar 21, 2010

by XyloJW

Time Cowboy posted:

I loved A Clockwork Orange. Never attempt to do A Clockwork Orange, however, unless you are an absolute master of language. Which, if you're posting here, you aren't.

Do you have to project your self-deprecation on everyone else so frequently? It's really annoying and serves no useful purpose.

Also, you're wrong on the Clockwork Orange stuff. Even uneducated people can write accents well by accident, especially their own. It's a learned skill, and the only way to learn it is to attempt to do it. Deifying authors will only lead to crippling your ability to learn.

Jonked posted:

Yeah, I guess. I tend to outline my stories before I write them, and I can usually gauge the word count, give or take a couple thousand. It's not just that it's all about the money, but I can't help but feeling it's a little silly to write a story knowing that nobody is ever going to look at it. I mean, writing is about communicating with an audience, right?

Thanks for the answer though!

It is okay to look at it from a financial perspective as well. However, considering word counts and audience beforehand is doing it backwards. When you have a completed story, novel, or what-have-you and you want to publish it, there are people who make it their business to tell you who is going to buy it. They're critics, editors, and publishers. Unless you have some weight behind your name through previous sales, they are your true audience. They will, in turn, surely have a load of suggestions regarding changes you will need to make to sell it to an audience.

That's when you'll really be tailoring your message to the final audience.

The rest of his/her point comes down to picking word-count, an audience, and a genre has a different effect than you might imagine. It colors your perception before you even put ink to wood. When you're thinking Young Adult novel, you're thinking in narrow terms. Unless you are extremely familiar with what makes a marketable and enjoyable YA book (meaning one of the people who is actively selling them), it will be hard for you to directly target that audience and the gatekeepers to that audience.

That's why it's good advice to take what you think is a good story and try to make it into something you like, to "let it be what it is" rather than write it into a box. With work, it should produce a far better product that someone, perhaps not young adults or perhaps so, would really enjoy.

Erik Shawn-Bohner fucked around with this message at 23:35 on Aug 16, 2012

Time Cowboy
Nov 4, 2007

But Tarzan... The strangest thing has happened! I'm as bare... as the day I was born!

Nautatrol Rx posted:

Do you have to project your self-deprecation on everyone else so frequently? It's really annoying and serves no useful purpose.

Realistic expectations are really annoying? More so than misplaced cockiness? OK. If one of your novels is on a high school reading list fifty years from now, Nautatrol Rx, I'll send you a fruit basket and a formal apology. As a matter of fact, that goes for everyone reading this thread. You hear that? A fruit basket is on the line here, people. A fruit basket. Get to work.

I should get to work on some piss-taking "ironically bad" story for one of the writing competitions around here. That should serve some useful purpose, right? Come on now. If you're going to whine about my useless negativity, try not to be guilty of it yourself.

Also, this prescriptivist idea that anyone can become an enthralling master of words simply through practice is naive. That doesn't mean you shouldn't take risks or learn specific skills, many of which can be learned through prescribed tips, many more of which transcend mere mechanics and touch upon the nebulous and ever-evolving woo that is art and accepted taste. If you think you have whatever ill-defined quality you think it takes, good on you. Don't let realistic expectations bring you down.

Erik Shawn-Bohner
Mar 21, 2010

by XyloJW

Time Cowboy posted:

Realistic expectations are really annoying? More so than misplaced cockiness? OK. If one of your novels is on a high school reading list fifty years from now, Nautatrol Rx, I'll send you a fruit basket and a formal apology. As a matter of fact, that goes for everyone reading this thread. You hear that? A fruit basket is on the line here, people. A fruit basket. Get to work.

I should get to work on some piss-taking "ironically bad" story for one of the writing competitions around here. That should serve some useful purpose, right? Come on now. If you're going to whine about my useless negativity, try not to be guilty of it yourself.

Also, this prescriptivist idea that anyone can become an enthralling master of words simply through practice is naive. That doesn't mean you shouldn't take risks or learn specific skills, many of which can be learned through prescribed tips, many more of which transcend mere mechanics and touch upon the nebulous and ever-evolving woo that is art and accepted taste. If you think you have whatever ill-defined quality you think it takes, good on you. Don't let realistic expectations bring you down.

If you're still upset about that story, it was just a bit of comedy and nothing to get angry about. It was a 10 minute job made to be one word less than the minimum that wasn't targeted at anyone.

The way you've been phrasing those statements, like the one I pointed out, say literally that none of us are critically acclaimed authors because we've posted in this thread. On a logical level, that's absurd. Even the greatest authors ask questions of one another. What's annoying is the clear undertone of 1) (and you never will be great) and 2) "I clearly understand my not being the best while the rest of you are running around thinking your poo poo don't stink." That's a bad attitude to have about it. To honestly work hard and every day towards your goal, whether it's to be a best seller or write the world's most-pleasing-to-academia piece, that shows a good attitude that isn't limited to mediocrity.

I really do think that with practice and scholarship, just about anyone can become a great writer. You read, study what other people have done, and practice. That's how you get better at most things. Whether people consider you great or a genius down the road is a fart in the wind, scented with the vague whims of that time's culture. Plenty of greats died penniless and mocked along with a bunch of lovely writers.

What we all can control is how much work we put into reading, writing, absorbing, and trying to get better at those three tasks. I can't be bothered to fret over what I can't control or mentally limit myself to mediocrity. But I've chosen writing as my trade, and it's the way I've made my living for a bit now, and it's the way I hope to continue doing so. And I may yet be dead in a ditch and mocked for writing the world's worst novel come 50 years--but I won't ever stop working hard and stretching myself to avoid that.

I'll hold you to the promise for the fruit basket though.

aslan
Mar 27, 2012

Jonked posted:

Sorry to distract from slang chat, but I've got a question for any YA authors here. I've got an idea a story that would be pretty good for a middle school/high school audience, but it's more of a longer short story or novella length idea. I looked around on Doutrope, and didn't really see any magazines that accepted those sorts of stories - most of it seemed to be flash fiction or shorter stories, or novels. I also didn't see many major publishers on Doutrope when I searched, though. Is there just no real niche for novella length YA stories?

I guess I'm wondering if I should beef up the story and try to make it into a full-length novel. Just seems odd to me that there isn't a spot for something like this.

Novella-length shouldn't be a major hurdle for a middle-grade novel--the recommended word counts for most MG publishing lines basically stack up with average novella lengths. Once you get into YA, though, "too short" could be a bigger problem, and a true short story, even a long one, is going to be hard to publish in either MG or YA unless you're already an established author. I wouldn't worry too much about the length of it, though--if it's good enough, publishers will work with you on it, either by having you flesh out the premise or by manipulating the page layout, book size, etc. to make it seem longer than it is.

Dr. Kloctopussy
Apr 22, 2003

"It's time....to DIE!"

Nautatrol Rx posted:

The rest of his/her point comes down to picking word-count, an audience, and a genre has a different effect than you might imagine. It colors your perception before you even put ink to wood. When you're thinking Young Adult novel, you're thinking in narrow terms. Unless you are extremely familiar with what makes a marketable and enjoyable YA book (meaning one of the people who is actively selling them), it will be hard for you to directly target that audience and the gatekeepers to that audience.

That's why it's good advice to take what you think is a good story and try to make it into something you like, to "let it be what it is" rather than write it into a box. With work, it should produce a far better product that someone, perhaps not young adults or perhaps so, would really enjoy.

Quibbles/elaboration (because talking about writing is fun!)

I think it's fine to plan to write a story for a particular audience. I see it a lot like writing in a genre. The range of possible stories is still very broad. If you want to write for middle grade or YA, it's important to know what that means. I don't mean word counts or where to publish. I mean themes, what's important to kids those age, the conflicts they are interested in, their emotional maturity, etc.

The best way to write for a specific audience isn't to find some formula (where?) and cram your story into it (duh). It's to read good stuff that's already out there. Just like if you want to write sci-fi, you read sci-fi, if you want to write crime procedurals, read crime procedurals, etc. I don't mean exclusively, of course, read broadly and all that, but I do think you need to be familiar with a genre to write in it successfully.

If you have a good idea, write it. Make it as good as you can. You can almost certainly make it fit into word count requirements later, if it ever becomes necessary to do so.

Jonked
Feb 15, 2005
Thanks for the advice, both of you. I do want to defend myself though. I didn't sit down and decide "Young adult fiction looks profitable, I'll try to write that." The premise, characters, and rough outline of the plot all came first before I noticed that it wouldn't be half bad as a YA story, and that novellas as a format don't seem to be very popular. The thing is, I don't want to keep writing for my own benefit anymore. Putting my work out there, having it be judged, and ultimately having a real audience read it is what really motivates me. It's what really spurred me to edit and improve my work, and put it out there publicly for the forums to critique. If there's no outlet for me to show my work, well... I have other ideas I could develop, and only so much time and energy. That's not a pure artistic reason to write, but wanting an audience is important to me at the moment.

I get what you're saying, Nautatrol Rx, about letting a story be what it will be. But the format is a conscious decision. I feel that it's important to know going in what sort of space you have to work in, and I want to pick the format that achieves what I want. I want to write a good story, yes, but I also want to write a story that I can put out there and have an audience. If I write it as a novel instead of a novella, it's going to be a different story, and one will probably be better than the other. But I just don't have the time to write every story I want to write, even if I didn't have a job.

Bleh, I'm probably just digging myself deeper. I don't want you guys to think I'm a hack, is all.

Dr. Kloctopussy
Apr 22, 2003

"It's time....to DIE!"

Jonked posted:

Thanks for the advice, both of you. I do want to defend myself though. I didn't sit down and decide "Young adult fiction looks profitable, I'll try to write that."
....
Bleh, I'm probably just digging myself deeper. I don't want you guys to think I'm a hack, is all.

I never thought or intended to imply that you were trying to write YA like that! (Unlike my work buddy who came into my office today and told me she is sure we can write "the next Twilight." Yeah, 'cause 1000 other people aren't already trying to do that :rolleyes:)

Everything I said in my last post was more general advice, not directed specifically at you (I could have made that clearer, in retrospect). And so is this:

I don't think there's anything wrong with actually wanting to be published. I know that's my ultimate goal, too. And now there's the added bonus of a fruit basket if I ever write anything really great! Some stories ultimately get rejected because of market, but mostly the story or the writing itself is the reason. Especially for beginning writers. That's why the advice in here is constantly "Read! Read! Read! Write! Write! Write!"

For me, at least, writing is loving hard, and it's much easier to go off to la-la land where I'm raking in the dough from a seven movie deal. It pains me to acknowledge that writing is a skill that requires tons of time and dedication to learn, and that I haven't mastered it yet (this is because I am a whiney special snowflake). So I appreciate the repeated advice.

Uh, and with all that said, I'm going to finish my Thunderdome entry now....

Erik Shawn-Bohner
Mar 21, 2010

by XyloJW

Jonked posted:

Thanks for the advice, both of you. I do want to defend myself though. I didn't sit down and decide "Young adult fiction looks profitable, I'll try to write that." The premise, characters, and rough outline of the plot all came first before I noticed that it wouldn't be half bad as a YA story, and that novellas as a format don't seem to be very popular. The thing is, I don't want to keep writing for my own benefit anymore. Putting my work out there, having it be judged, and ultimately having a real audience read it is what really motivates me. It's what really spurred me to edit and improve my work, and put it out there publicly for the forums to critique. If there's no outlet for me to show my work, well... I have other ideas I could develop, and only so much time and energy. That's not a pure artistic reason to write, but wanting an audience is important to me at the moment.

I get what you're saying, Nautatrol Rx, about letting a story be what it will be. But the format is a conscious decision. I feel that it's important to know going in what sort of space you have to work in, and I want to pick the format that achieves what I want. I want to write a good story, yes, but I also want to write a story that I can put out there and have an audience. If I write it as a novel instead of a novella, it's going to be a different story, and one will probably be better than the other. But I just don't have the time to write every story I want to write, even if I didn't have a job.

I get what you're talking about a little more now. Also, I sometimes slip into the plural "you" when talking on here, like the doc up there.

It's good to want to get it out there because that's what writing is for. I fully encourage that, even for the worst of the fanfic writers (so long as they keep it to the dark recesses of the internet where civilized folk don't have to see it). My comments are more about the common mistake of underwriting or overwriting an idea without changing the idea. Some writers get deathly attached to one idea, one outline and treat it like an essay for class where they will either spew out filler or cut it down into semi-nonsense to fit requirements that the outline can't handle. I warn against that because often the idea/outline needs to change as the story progresses. So long as you're willing to mix that part of it up, you can fit it to a palatable format for the audience.

To clarify what I mean regarding targeting an audience is that YA is a bad target in my opinion. It's too broad because even young adults have differences in preference, so the focus needs to be tighter. First and foremost, always try to make it interesting to you, of course, and not with the mindset of how cool it'd appear to others even if it doesn't resonate with you. That's obvious advice, of course, but I've fallen into that trap before. Have something more specific in mind that you are personally acquainted with. Many writers say they secretly write each book to a specific person they know, and that person is representative of that "audience". Tolkien, for example, wrote The Hobbit for his kids, and it seemed to have worked out for him very well.

I don't hate genre fiction, but I think too many people go "I want to be a sci-fi writer, so I'm going to write stuff sci-fi fans like." Again, it's a problem of the broad audience. People have different tastes in specific genres. Some people hate Tolkien with a passion and are in love with something else. It also sets up preconceived notions about the story you're about to dream up even if you try to defy it.

If you're not familiar with the genre of magical realism, I'd suggest looking into it. It's a lot like the realistic genres--sans lasers, shape ships, elves, or abysmal horrors--except that completely unrealistic things occur as if they were a normal thing. It's understated. Someone could walk up a wall and stand on the ceiling while having a very serious, and sometimes touching, conversation with a cockroach about their unfulfilled lovelife. You could classify that as fantasy. Or you could try to pin it as a thriller about a man going crazy. It doesn't quite fit into those genres though as it doesn't necessarily defy them so much as act as if it's something unrelated to them, which it is.

I'm not saying to go out and write a magical realism genre story. What I'm getting at is that the further you can push those expectations from readers from your mind, the more freedom you're allowing yourself in the creative process to bring us something new. The readers have seen what they expect, which is why they expect it. Bring us something new and have fun doing it. If you want to write a story about a spaceship and you need a loving Keebler elf to show up to make a great story, make the Keebler elf show up. If you truly did it well, I'll even love that you made the fucker show up.

That's more to the core of what I mean regarding "letting it be what it is". No matter if you think, right now, if it fits the expectations for your market, take risks and try to do it well, but if you gently caress up, you can always change it. If you pull it off though, there are always other markets that might eat it up, and you don't have to deny yourself or the readers your awesome Keebler elf.

Mr. Belding
May 19, 2006
^
|
<- IS LAME-O PHOBE ->
|
V

Martello posted:

This brings up an interesting thing -- eye-dialect. Who loves it, who hates it, who has advice on when and how to use it?

I've seen it used very well, a little in Cormac McCarthy's work, and a lot in Brian Azzarello's writing on 100 Bullets. But I've also seen it used badly, mostly in lovely amateur writing. I guess my idea would be to keep it legible above all.

I would say that with dialects it's best to be consistent and to be as phonetic as it's possible to be with English.

That means making sure that once a given character says a certain word a certain way, you stick with it the rest of the story. I think you also need to make certain that only the most extreme cases get special dialects in their dialog.

Some people love it and some hate it, so I say do it if you like it, if not ignore it. People who like it won't throw your book away if you don't have it, but they are already enjoying things. People who hate it won't throw your book away if they are enjoying it, but they dislike your dialect writing.

It's one of those things people argue about a lot, but it isn't really important.

budgieinspector
Mar 24, 2006

According to my research,
these would appear to be
Budgerigars.

Martello posted:

This brings up an interesting thing -- eye-dialect. Who loves it, who hates it, who has advice on when and how to use it?

Love it when it's done to immerse the reader in another culture. Trainspotting is a great example of dialect done right. Alan Moore's Ballad of Halo Jones is a great example of too goddamn much.

Also love depictions of dialects which most readers might never encounter. Even background-specific syntax lends a lot of flavor, I reckon.

Where it gets ugly is when the author plainly believes that speakers of non-standard English are stupid and inferior. If you aren't infatuated (or at least fascinated) by a culture, you shouldn't type out your impression of the way its members speak.

One thing that shut me down recently: I had a sequence where one character flips out and semi-inadvertently breaks another's nose. They then need to re-establish some level of trust, which required dialogue. Typing out the "dialect" of a speaker with a badly-damaged proboscis just stopped everything dead. I know it can be done; I just don't know how to make it flow.

quote:

Brian Azzarello's writing on 100 Bullets.

Word. Great stuff.

oddspelling
May 31, 2009

Hope is the first step on the road to disappointment

Nautatrol Rx posted:

Do you have to project your self-deprecation on everyone else so frequently? It's really annoying and serves no useful purpose.

Also, you're wrong on the Clockwork Orange stuff. Even uneducated people can write accents well by accident, especially their own. It's a learned skill, and the only way to learn it is to attempt to do it. Deifying authors will only lead to crippling your ability to learn.

I generally dislike it when authors write dialog (much less narration) in patois. When done well it can really add a lot to a story, but the majority of the time it just comes across as awkward and forced. People in books by-and-large don't speak the way people in real life do, and shoehorning an accent or dialect can push it even deeper into the uncanny valley.

Erik Shawn-Bohner
Mar 21, 2010

by XyloJW

oddspelling posted:

I generally dislike it when authors write dialog (much less narration) in patois. When done well it can really add a lot to a story, but the majority of the time it just comes across as awkward and forced. People in books by-and-large don't speak the way people in real life do, and shoehorning an accent or dialect can push it even deeper into the uncanny valley.

I've seen it done awfully a lot as well. It's difficult to do. A good place to start learning is to 1) read and emulate people who have done it well to try to get into their headspace 2) do some study into linguistics and how they mark up other languages within the English system. I'd say that if you want to make a narrator have an accent, use your own accent. You're already familiar with the intricacies of it, and you get to show off a little piece of you more authentically than aping someone else's accent. It takes a lot of study to become familiar with an accent you don't deal with daily because it's more than just the sounds of the words--it's the slang, pace, and phrasing that lends it authenticity. Then, you have to shove all of that into the dialogue so it reads as being realistic.

One effective means of making it less grating on the reader is to have the markings and phonetic spellings sort-of heavy in the beginning while you're establishing the voice of the character or narrator and phase it out as you go forward, so even if they're reading normal text they automatically associate that accent to the character. That allows you to toss in a token "bit" of the accent here and there, but the reader is doing the work translating it in their heads from regular text.

SurreptitiousMuffin
Mar 21, 2010
Phonetic accents are terrible unless you know the variety really, really well and even then it's dodgy. Irvine Welsh is about the only exception I can think of and even that wears on me after a while. Unless it serves a very specific purpose to the story, keep it out.

quote:

You're already familiar with the intricacies of it, and you get to show off a little piece of you more authentically than aping someone else's accent.
I'll debate this; we're all the worst judge of our own accent. We've grown up with it to the point where it's just normal. I've got a pretty distinctive accent but I don't think I trust myself to write it phonetically.
aiff god a priddy distinctiff iksin bud I don thin I trast maisilf t wrait it phinuticully. See? Turrble.

In other questions, how does a paragraph in MS word translate to the printed page? I keep having trouble when I'm writing because my paragraphs look too short in word processing programs. I understand they're getting pushed wide and flat but it still doesn't feel right. What's a good word count for a paragraph, so I know I'm hitting a right-ish mark?


e: in fact, I'm going to try and prove this. Give me a short piece of text to write phonetically in my accent, then guess where I'm from. I promise I'll try to do it as well as possible.

SurreptitiousMuffin fucked around with this message at 03:58 on Aug 20, 2012

psychopomp
Jan 28, 2011
I don't think there's any kind of "right" length for a paragraph. Literally as short as you can make them and still get your point across, I guess. It's a good idea to mix it up, though, so that you're not springing monolithic blocks of prose on your readers.

Some long paragraphs, some short, you know?

Mr. Belding
May 19, 2006
^
|
<- IS LAME-O PHOBE ->
|
V
Regarding accents. Do what you want. If over half of your beta readers complain then change it.

Mr.48
May 1, 2007
So I've noticed that many people give writing advice along the lines of "keep your writing as brief as possible" in the sense of using the fewest possible words to describe whatever you're writing about.

Is this a widely-accepted idea?

I ask because I'm thinking about writing a novel, but I've been criticized for being too "wordy" in writing papers for publication (a hard to break habit from undergraduate days).

Stuporstar
May 5, 2008

Where do fists come from?

Mr.48 posted:

So I've noticed that many people give writing advice along the lines of "keep your writing as brief as possible" in the sense of using the fewest possible words to describe whatever you're writing about.

Is this a widely-accepted idea?

I ask because I'm thinking about writing a novel, but I've been criticized for being too "wordy" in writing papers for publication (a hard to break habit from undergraduate days).

Mark Twain set the standard for modern writing. Listen to the man:

quote:

I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English - it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; don't let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in. When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don't mean utterly, but kill most of them - then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are wide apart. An adjective habit, or a wordy, diffuse, flowery habit, once fastened upon a person, is as hard to get rid of as any other vice.

A lot of people, including myself, have had to break our undergrad habits of padding the wordcount. Breaking that habit is freeing, and so is learning to cut. Check out Ken Rand's 10% solution, linked in the Creative Resources thread. It's the most succinct book you can find on cutting the sluff off your prose.

The whole point in doing this is when you economize, you're forced to choose stronger, better words. You get your point across faster, and what you have to say makes a bigger impact, no matter what kind of writing you're doing.

Stuporstar fucked around with this message at 07:18 on Aug 20, 2012

Mr.48
May 1, 2007

Stuporstar posted:

Mark Twain set the standard for modern writing. Listen to the man:


A lot of people, including myself, have had to break our undergrad habits of padding the wordcount. Breaking that habit is freeing, and so is learning to cut. Check out Ken Rand's 10% solution, linked in the Creative Resources thread. It's the most succinct book you can find on cutting the sluff off your prose.

The whole point in doing this is when you economize, you're forced to choose stronger, better words. You get your point across faster, and what you have to say makes a bigger impact, no matter what kind of writing you're doing.

Thanks for the advice! I'm thinking of ordering The 10% Solution in paperback since I figure I'll be referencing it often and that might be awkward with an e-book. Good idea?

Edit: I should mention that its $14 in paperback, is this a good value?

Mr.48 fucked around with this message at 07:42 on Aug 20, 2012

sebmojo
Oct 23, 2010


Legit Cyberpunk









Mr.48 posted:

Thanks for the advice! I'm thinking of ordering The 10% Solution in paperback since I figure I'll be referencing it often and that might be awkward with an e-book. Good idea?

Edit: I should mention that its $14 in paperback, is this a good value?

Yes.

HiddenGecko
Apr 15, 2007

You think I'm really going
to read this shit?

psychopomp posted:

I don't think there's any kind of "right" length for a paragraph. Literally as short as you can make them and still get your point across, I guess. It's a good idea to mix it up, though, so that you're not springing monolithic blocks of prose on your readers.

Some long paragraphs, some short, you know?

It's not about length, it's about rhythm. You don't vary your paragraph length willy nilly, you're doing it for a very specific effect. A short perfunctory paragraph stands out like a tall tree. It's short because you want the details within to have greater significance than the longer paragraphs.

But longer paragraphs are just as important. They can slow your reader down. Force them to pick out stuff.

Are the sentences clipped because action is happening? Or long and complicated because the read has to know what your character is thinking right then and there.

Remember though that "five sentence" bullshit you learned in grade school is still bullshit.

\/\/\/ yeah I figured you did. It's just something to think about. It's weird but you gotta think about how your reader is going to breath when they read your story. What paragraphs they're going to skip(and how to make them not skip them) and how much of a workout your giving their eyes with that multipage paragraph.

HiddenGecko fucked around with this message at 17:39 on Aug 20, 2012

psychopomp
Jan 28, 2011
Well, yes. You should have a reason for everything you do. Pacing, word choice, structure. It should all be chosen with intent.

ultrachrist
Sep 27, 2008
Short sentences vs. long sentences --

I find myself torn on this, because it seems modern thinking is definitely shorter, direct sentences, and I think my own writing reflects that. But, I think I find flowery, verbose writers more enjoyable to read. For instance I am reading The Gospel According to Jesus Christ right now.

Saramego loves to layer on comma after comma:

quote:

In this place known as Golgotha, many have met the same cruel fate and many others will follow them, but this naked man, nailed by hands and feet to a cross, the son of Joseph and Mary, named Jesus, is the only one whom posterity will remember and honor by inscribing his initials in capitals.

and has no fear of adjectives, adverbs, or any regard for quotation marks or dialogue breaks:

quote:

Joseph, furious that this news should come to Mary not quietly and with measured words from his own lips but blurted tactlessly by hysterical neighbors, said in a solemn voice, It's true that God doesn't always choose to wield the powers exercised by Caesar but God has powers denied Caesar.

It might be a lovely example in regards to that Twain quote since Saramego was writing in Porteguese, but it reads perfectly fine in English. And some of the other vices Twain mentions can also be done well. David Foster Wallace is excessively wordy and verbose, but I love his writing.

You can say, yeah yeah but both those guys were masters of the craft, but so were Twain and Hemingway. Is it just easier to competently pull off shorter, direct sentences? Probably.

Stuporstar
May 5, 2008

Where do fists come from?

ultrachrist posted:

Short sentences vs. long sentences --

You can say, yeah yeah but both those guys were masters of the craft, but so were Twain and Hemingway. Is it just easier to competently pull off shorter, direct sentences? Probably.

If you can competently pull off shorter, direct sentences, you can decide if you want to add words back in, for rhythm, emphasis, or voice. You (the general "you," always) learn how to make careful word choices by learning how to be brutal when cutting them out. Some people have an ear for prose, can make the longest sentences roll off the tongue with ease. Most people have to develop that sense through careful training.

I have a friend who's prose style is pretty old fashioned. It's rambling in a comical way, a bit archaic at times, and works because he writes comical fantasy. He spent years developing an ear for prose, has great rhythm, yet still needed me to tell him to switch to active voice in a few parts where it was getting in the way of more active scenes. Changing up the voice highlighted those scenes and made the visuals pop. The point is he can do whatever's called for to turn a story into a symphony rather than droning on.

Phil Moscowitz
Feb 19, 2007

If blood be the price of admiralty,
Lord God, we ha' paid in full!

SurreptitiousMuffin posted:

Phonetic accents are terrible unless you know the variety really, really well and even then it's dodgy. Irvine Welsh is about the only exception I can think of and even that wears on me after a while. Unless it serves a very specific purpose to the story, keep it out.

I'll debate this; we're all the worst judge of our own accent. We've grown up with it to the point where it's just normal. I've got a pretty distinctive accent but I don't think I trust myself to write it phonetically.
aiff god a priddy distinctiff iksin bud I don thin I trast maisilf t wrait it phinuticully. See? Turrble.

In other questions, how does a paragraph in MS word translate to the printed page? I keep having trouble when I'm writing because my paragraphs look too short in word processing programs. I understand they're getting pushed wide and flat but it still doesn't feel right. What's a good word count for a paragraph, so I know I'm hitting a right-ish mark?


e: in fact, I'm going to try and prove this. Give me a short piece of text to write phonetically in my accent, then guess where I'm from. I promise I'll try to do it as well as possible.

I would say...seth effreckin?

sebmojo
Oct 23, 2010


Legit Cyberpunk









Phil Moscowitz posted:

I would say...seth effreckin?

Kiwi, IIRC.

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Phil Moscowitz
Feb 19, 2007

If blood be the price of admiralty,
Lord God, we ha' paid in full!

sebmojo posted:

Kiwi, IIRC.

I can't tell the difference between SA and Australian/Kiwi when written in dialect

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