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Seldom Posts posted:This is a good idea. I'm just chiming in to say that this book absolutely blew my mind. I used to just pick at random off a fellow postgrad's shelves and he off mine(I'm US, he's UK so we had completely different 'lists'). I got Confessions he got Vonnegut's Bluebeard. I think I might have won that trade.
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Sep 10, 2012 14:47
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Runcible Cat posted:Footnotes! I'm kind of a footnotes nerd, and while Nabokov's Pale Fire is the literary apex of footnotes (and has some claim to being a Ruritanian fantasy... oh, read that too. It takes too long to explain. And Nabokov is an awesome writer). For footnoted goodness, try Lanark by Alasdair Gray. It's semi-autobiographical fiction set in a fantasy frame. One chapter, in particular, is glorious in the footnote respect. It goes so far as to reprint an entire short story by James Kelman (who is also awesome, but whose writing has been a bit blunted since his Booker win). I'm not a real fantasy/spec fic fan, so for me the middle secion of Lanark works the best.
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Sep 16, 2012 13:03
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I may spit something out soon, but I doubt it'll be within the confines of NaNo. Never could get to involved in the community there. I sometimes contribute to the Reference Desk, just because there's always some pre-teen going 'hi, I want my character to be bi-polar, but not bi-polar until her best friend wins prom queen and takes her boyfriend. But not, like, seriously bipolar. Not until she's shot five times in the head and lives through it, but her mom dies of amnesia.' Sorry, I really can't help myself when I see one of those. And there's a few since the forums just went through their wipe for this year.
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Oct 6, 2012 19:46
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I hate quotation marks. I find them unreasonably silly and unnatural-- most of the time. For a time I tried setting dialogue off with an m-dash, Dubliners style. Now they're just gone most of the time. I regretted putting them in my September contest entry. They just gunked things up. There is a danger of dropping their use to disguise poor / unclear writing. I knew someone who said that they left them out because they wanted the dialogue to be ambiguous sometimes. Nope. What I really hate, though, are the guillemets you get here in France. << How this looks good to anyone, I'll never know. >>
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Oct 15, 2012 21:53
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I will say that I find the single quote much easier on the eye. It still sets speech apart, but doesn't turn into a visual hurdle. I was beaten into British punctuation during my degree, and maybe it's just Stockholm Syndrome, but I kind of like it. I do not agree with McCarthy's lack of apostrophes. With regard to present tense-- is this now a thing? One that is done to purposely be 'literary'? I haven't really paid much attention to tense lately, aside from finding the present tense in The Night Circus really annoying.
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Oct 16, 2012 11:17
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Martello posted:Molly Bloom said it was a visual hurdle. I was addressing anyone who thinks Special Literary Writing Rules are a good idea. I don't really think special rules are a good idea. I'm going to weasel a little here and say that it's easier for me to work without them, is all. Things flow better. Then I can manipulate the text in whatever way I like. This usually means correcting my punctuation. I don't present much of my writing without quotes because it isn't strong enough yet to stand without. Single quotes are my default now. Again, I'll weasel- The 'visual hurdle' bit is more the Joycean defense of quotation-marklessness (and McCarthy, if I remember correctly). And, as I said, lack of apostrophes drives me nuts.
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Oct 16, 2012 21:08
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Since we're arguing about poo poo, can I ask about white people writing minority characters? I've been reading around on the subject and finding the answer to be a general 'don't do it (unless you have good beta readers from said ethnic group and even then probably not)'. I know the Thunderdome had a prompt to write as far away from your own experience as possible, but in a more realistic, more publishable way- is it feasible?
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Oct 18, 2012 11:13
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Runcible Cat posted:Hang on hang on hang on - so white people should never ever write non-white characters? WTF? Should male writers never write female characters (or vice versa) too? Are characters with a sexuality different from the writer's verboten too? Or does it only apply to straight writers in that case? That was my thought- it's better to write them and hopefully write them well but I'm a bit at sea at the moment having read what's out there. But there's a lot out there that has made me second guess myself. Currently, I'm working on a Native American character (it fits the area, I've had some contact with the area and the culture but not enough to be an expert). So I went exploring and started looking for NA opinions on white people writing Native characters after reading about 'RaceFail09'. On one hand, there's the fact that minority characters are vastly under-represented. On the other hand, what I've been finding suggests that creating a character that will meet with any approval is extremely difficult. I'm just writing her as a person. I mean, it's how I look at people. But then I find very serious people saying 'the text should say that this is a stereotypical statue of a wooden Indian to let readers know that we don't look like that.'
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Oct 18, 2012 12:45
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Seldom Posts posted:Tony Hillerman is a white guy who wrote a lot of books about Native Americans (Navajo nation in particular) and was very successful. AFAIK, he was critically accepted by the Navajo and the general populace. Maybe check out a few of his books. Just about the right area for me, so I do have few on order. Hillerman seems to be the exception to the rule. I also see J A Jance recommended, as she lived/worked on a rez. Molly Bloom fucked around with this message at 14:10 on Oct 18, 2012 |
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Oct 18, 2012 14:08
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Crisco Kid posted:tldr; writing more diverse voices makes writing diverse voices less hard. The invisible becomes visible and accessible. Awesome links, thanks for that.
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Oct 18, 2012 21:48
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Cheers for pointers- I've been trawling through what I've got and ordering a few more things. Re: Louise Erdich- there's a funny little slapfight between her and Leslie Marmon Silko because the latter claims the former isn't politically concerned enough about Native issues. I guess nobody wins. I'm still letting things brew a little bit until I've got a better handle on her character. The podcast was pretty loving funny, though.
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Oct 21, 2012 22:26
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Oxxidation posted:anything by Michael Chabon, but particularly The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay or The Yiddish Policemen's Union. Chabon has an absolutely stellar grasp of using imagery to set tone and scene combined with a straightforward style of prose that makes his work easy to absorb. Yiddish Policeman's Union is fabulous. Like K+C, I felt it ran on too long in the final act, but drat. That there is some writing. The best thing about Yiddish Policeman's Union is that it's an alt-history, so all the imagery has to work in an invented environment and use its boundaries. I would give my left secondary sexual characteristic to write like that on a good day.
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Nov 22, 2012 16:04
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Oxxidation posted:Taking an example from one of the dud contest entries a couple months ago, someone wrote that the walls of an inn were "cracked and broken like the skin of an old woman." That comparison just raises more questions than it answers - what old woman? why a woman? - and doesn't enhance the image at all. We know the wall is cracked and broken, which adds to an atmosphere of decay sufficiently by itself. This is exactly how I heard it described by Bernard McLaverty in a fiction course a few years back. His example went along the lines of: 'the night was as dark as a wolf's throat. Where the hell did the wolf come from?' The problem with presenting a formula for writing metaphors and similes is that once you've written something according to a formula it's pretty definitely a bad metaphor/simile-- It was as cold as some cold thing, as dark as some dark thing (a wolf's throat?), as cracked as a crackly thing (our old lady).
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Nov 22, 2012 19:48
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I was kind of contemplating writing about Chickencheese, but can I do it as a non-American? I mean I've never had a chickencheese before, but I've seen pictures. I've also spend a lot of time reading about them. Also,I don't really like the cheese you're supposed to use, so I was thinking about making it a European cheese. Like Raclette or Cancoillotte. Would that still work? I also don't like to cook very much, so how would I describe the process without actually cooking one?
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Nov 28, 2012 12:05
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Duotrope, friend to all who don't want the big market guide hanging around in their lives, is moving to subscription for full-features. It'll be interesting to see exactly what bits remain free to use. I've seen a few lit mags pulling/considering pulling their listings because of that. Thoughts? I know people here like it. To answer an earlier question, I'm not exactly sure how to write a maximalist piece of prose. It does not compute. I have read an awful loving lot of them, but can't actually write them. People like McCarthy can pull this poo poo off (mostly). If I try, it turns out overwrought, over written and over-egged. So despite not particularly liking him, I usually get something along the lines of 'oh, I see-- you must idolize Hemmingway'. I'm not big on adverbs, but that's just a personal preference. Am currently waiting on a big fat rejection or two. My one from the Atlantic's student writing competition is getting lonely because it's had a box to itself for something like a decade now.
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Dec 6, 2012 13:15
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Subway Ninja posted:I have a question regarding 3rd person viewpoints and how they're classified. Which of these is specifically omniscient? Limited? You can think of point of view as being like a camera and ask 'who sees?' and 'how much' First person- the narrator is 'I'. Second person- Remember 'Choose Your own Adventure' books? That's the biggest sample of second person writing you're going to find. Third person- the narrator is not a character. 'I' appears only in dialogue. He, she and it are the order of the day here. Now on to what you call 'mind reading'- that's omniscience. First person- by definition of a first person narrative, you're in the character's head. You know what they know, see what they see. You are thus limited by that characters awareness. The camera is, effectively, behind their eyes. Second person- this is a weird thing. I have never come up with a good way to describe this one. Takers? Third person- here we can split into clear categories. Third person, limited- there is an authorial voice that refers to all characters as he/she/it. There is no narrator 'I'. But we are limited in that there is no evidence of what you have called 'mind reading'. We see characters actions and hear their words, but we don't have the private access to their thoughts. The camera is on them, but not looking out from within them. Third person, omniscient- there is an authorial voice that refers to he/she/it, with no narrator 'I'. The camera is on the characters, but there is the equivalent of a voice over taking place, letting us know what it going on in their heads. A good (and rare these days) television example of this is 'Peep Show'. There is a grade between the two extremes. It's rare that we would be able to always 'hear' every thought in a character's head. Now to complicate things, there is something called 'free indirect speech'. You will sometimes find books written this way, sometimes a paragraph of it and sometimes you'll only see a few lines. Free indirect speech- the narration is in the 3rd person, but it takes on characteristics of a first person narrative. This is not to say that the narration suddenly begins to use the 'I'. Rather the tone, the choice of vocabulary and the ideas become those of the character being reported in the 3rd person. I'll use the example off Wikipedia for this: Wikipedia posted:
So, as you'll see, in the third instance the second sentence is reporting a character's thought, still using the third person--not,however, using 'thought'--but using something that approximates the character's voice. To address the issue of multiple POVs- it depends. Are we in the character's head, one at at time and looking out? Is there an I? Then it's 1st. Are we looking at the characters from the outside? Is there no I? 3rd.. Are we with the main characters, in their heads and there's 'we' all the time? Congrats, you've written The Virgin Suicides in great Greek chorus style and you don't need this explanation.
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Dec 7, 2012 11:04
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Thank you, Fiction thread. I have gotten off my rear end and started submitting for the first time in a decade. Well, it's either this thread or the fact that someone from high school's been published recently and I do nearly everything I do in life out of spite, hate and jealousy. So, how does everyone decide what journals they pitch their work to- especially if one doesn't write a genre?
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Dec 19, 2012 16:51
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God help me, but I used to go into the Reference Desk section of the NaNoWriMo forums to try to help people with personal experiences. You actually did get some good info there, every now and then. Some other writer's forums have an 'ask the experts' section. I know there was talk of starting an 'ask the arms expert' thread, but I fear a general 'ask the expert' thread wouldn't get seen by enough people without, say, a recruitment drive in A/T.
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Jan 6, 2013 12:50
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Gonna pour my heart out here- rejection is poo poo. Two on the same day is shittier. This week is a crapfest and it's only Thursday. I guess I should be glad they didn't leave me hanging forever. But that just means I didn't make it beyond. the interns/grad students/slave labour. Whinge over, submitting to new places. On a more cheerful note, how many times do you submit a story to new places before you resign yourself to the fact that it's not finding a home?
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Jan 10, 2013 14:06
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squeegee posted:There's really no reason to get depressed about rejections. Having your story rejected doesn't necessarily mean anything about its quality, it just means it wasn't right for that market at that time [...] Nice to have someone say this, even though I know it. My hate and envy-fueled submitting phase is petering out and I'm actually going to have to move into an ambition-fueled one.
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Jan 10, 2013 15:09
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Oxxidation posted:
Gaiman's preoccupation with a few ideas (world mythology, walls and doors) just bleeds through everything for me. To the point where I can go 'there's going to be a magic door there' and there is. He'd have to be a hell of a dialogue writer for me to see his characters as something other than figurative walls and doors, but I agree that's not his strength. What makes that interesting to me is his career as a journalist. Though I'm not that familiar with his work in that field, you'd have thought that interviewing people would give you more insight as to how people actually talk versus what works on the page.
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Jan 12, 2013 11:26
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With regards to point of view, what I use depends on how much I want to tip my hand. I almost never use third person omniscient, because I don't like putting all the cards out in one go. First person and third person limited are nice and comfy. Chillmatic I will never stop recommending Michael Chabon's 'Yiddish Policemen's Union'.
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Jan 22, 2013 19:46
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The Bananana posted:Posting in here too, because I'm new to CC, and didn't know who'd better field my question: Oooh, yeah, that's a bit of a mess. Even just taking out your second clause makes it more readable. 'Death drawing near, Sean’s hand finds, at last, a useful lever- the battery’s priming pump.' Nesting commas like this can be a bitch. The major problem is that the bit I've removed, 'crushed by thousands of pounds of pressure in an endless night' relates to nothing else in the sentence. What is being crushed? Not Death. I'm guessing it's Sean. Look at the tense there, too. Nothing else in that is past tense. 'Crushed', however, is.
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Jan 22, 2013 20:16
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Echo Cian posted:
Oh, you can do nested commas, you just have to be damned sure they work. Quick (and overly reductive) test? Try taking out the bit in between the commas. Is it still a sentence? If yes, you win. I'm only being such a bitch because I'm avoiding editing my own crap right now. Even though it needs done, like, yesterday.
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Jan 22, 2013 20:52
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Martello posted:Everybody read Elmore Leonard. Got a copy of his complete Westerns coming my way, in fact. Can't find poo poo here in Froggyland. I'm as interested as can be in that at the moment.
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Jan 22, 2013 22:53
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I'd be interested in hearing how people deal with action scenes. How do you make it readable? Do you block it all out? I'm having trouble with the physical space of my action and making that action easy to follow. I suspect it make have something to do with 'simultaneous' versus 'sequential'. I'm about ten minutes away from using green plastic soldiers.
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Jan 22, 2013 23:37
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The Bananana posted:Thanks again to everyone who contributed and gave me advice. I'll bite, even though you've been directed to the Fiction Farm. It's better. I'm not a fan of anything remotely purple, though, so my red pen is still at hand. Now, definitely don't take me as gospel. But if I were to write the line, I'd simplify the gently caress out of it. 'Death draws nearer. Ten thousand pounds of pressure wait to entomb him in endless night. Sean's hand finds, at last, a lever- the battery's priming pump.' It's better, to my ear and eye, with varied sentence length and structure. If I was really writing this, I would probable cut out the 'endless night' or maybe 'Death draws nearer'. Or both. But that's me, not you.
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Jan 22, 2013 23:59
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sebmojo posted:
I'll give this a try once I dig out a good film for it-we've been on an arty kick (except for Django, but that's definitely not what I want). I may post something up in the Farm myself, but it's with a friend at the moment. I tore the guts out of one of his things last week, so he'll be brutal.
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Jan 23, 2013 12:07
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SurreptitiousMuffin posted:I was talking about it in another thread but I thought it could be a good discussion here: how do you write inobtrusive in-chapter scene transitions? It must be something writers do but I've never really noticed it in action unless it's something ugly and obvious like I always thought it was just popping in an extra blank line. Maybe I'm wrong on this? I know that you're supposed to use *** or somesuch when formatting an MS, but that's just for the sake of clarity in a double-spaced document and not something that actually carries over into a finalized version. Edit- have just checked, it's # to indicate a blank line in an MS, but I think the blank line is still what you might want there. Molly Bloom fucked around with this message at 14:11 on Jan 27, 2013 |
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Jan 27, 2013 12:58
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Honey Badger posted:What are people's thoughts on epigraphs, particularly for short stories? I don't plan on using them all the time, of course, but sometimes I'll be reading something and come across a quote that just perfectly summarizes the "heart" of a story. I'm too nervous about the quality of my writing to do something like preface with a quote from someone else. I don't want the reader, even for a moment, thinking about how they'd rather be reading something by, say, Hemingway. I'm wary of even putting the 'hey, I could be reading X instead' thought in someone's head for a short story.
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Feb 5, 2013 15:07
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I can't decide what's more depressing- getting a rejection almost immediately or getting a rejection where you know you didn't even make the top 25 in a contest. I think I'm out of my jealousy/hate submitting phase. I'm getting to desperation.
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Mar 15, 2013 18:46
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With regards to the inciting incident- I usually think about it in terms of what's driving your story. Is it more action-driven or character-driven (or, because we have worldbuilders here, is it world-driven)? Personally, I'd say that if it's action-driven, then the inciting incident is the way to go. I'd have that incident and then introduce the people dealing with it. I'd stick mystery novels here (at least most of the ones I've read recently). With a character driven work, I still try to follow Vonnegut's advice and start as close to the end as possible. I don't know if that makes my work a tough sell, as it's not a pure, literary, slow ramble up to an event. I feel like that kind of approach lends itself too easily to falling into the trap of nothing happening for pages. I like LitFic a lot. But barring a few examples, I don't give a lot of time of day to stories that go nowhere in particular and are in no hurry to get there.
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Mar 19, 2013 14:25
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qntm posted:I'd just like to point out for the record that the piece of Vonnegut's advice that you're referring to is specifically for short stories. Yes, it is. Which is what I focus on. But I still think it's an acceptable thing to keep in mind for longer works, too.
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Mar 19, 2013 23:16
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Jonked posted:"I was confused about why Y happened" is pretty useful as well. Boring and confusing are going to be a pretty big chunk of what loses a reader. "This sentence seemed awkward" would just about cover the rest. Yup. I was going to post this myself. Personally, I'd like to know when someone has to reread something to figure out what happened. Just a simple 'hey, I had to read those lines a few times to tell who was where'. There used to be a guy in my writing group who would tell me that he didn't understand my submitted piece, but liked it. I wanted to throttle him. It's more helpful to talk about specifics- what, specifically, was hard to understand? What exactly did you like. That said, I miss those mofos. Molly Bloom fucked around with this message at 10:54 on Apr 9, 2014 |
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Apr 9, 2014 10:51
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blue squares posted:Yeah, I wasn't suggesting I wanted to try it myself, only that it could be an interesting way to structure a book. Essentially yes, a series of short stories about the same character(s), but chronological and with a major plot that is always going on, too. Of course, this isn't some revolutionary concept, but I do think it would be interesting/fun to write a novel with the TV show format firmly in mind as inspiration. Margaret Atwood's 'Moral Disorder' is a novella of sorts- or a short story collection where all the stories centre around one character.
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Apr 18, 2014 11:12
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Anomalous Blowout posted:
Oui! But they use 'placard', not 'armoire'. I'm still looking for a second success after getting a rejection after more than a year. At that point are they just cleaning out the in box with rejections all around? (I kid, I kid. Kinda.)
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May 21, 2014 16:48
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Captain Mog posted:Does having teenage characters in a novel automatically make it a "YA" novel? I'm currently in the process of writing a paranormal mystery novel that takes place in a small New England town where teenagers are mysteriously vanishing. It's third person omniscient and the focus is split between an FBI agent called in to investigate the disappearances and a group of teens who are after-school paranormal investigators. Think "Twin Peaks" meets "Buffy" with a Cthulu-style cult as the central antagonists. I am a member of a writing group and some of them told me that this makes it an exclusively adult novel by the mere presence of an adult MC alone, while others have insisted the presence of the teen characters and the focus on the teenagers makes it a YA novel. I guess what I'd be going for is a cross-age appeal thing but some have told me that I would need to focus at least 80% one way or risk isolating both audiences. Not sure about the genre conventions, but it doesn't have to be YA. Off the top of my head, both 'The Lovely Bones' and 'The Little Friend' have teen/tween mains. Of course, there are enough adults reading YA these days to almost make it a moot point. Unless you're invested in having extremely adult things happen (I'm thinking It and Anne Rice softcore porn-ish) I'd shoot for YA. Again, not my genre, so take a big bit of salt with that.
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Jul 28, 2014 16:55
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