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I've been using Scrivener for about 5 years now, and while I like roughly 500 little things, I'd have a hard time pointing to a single "killer app" it has. Still, I think it's pretty rad and worth the 30-day trial, especially if you're obsessively tidy like me. Some examples: I use a lot of its tagging features, such as tagging a scene by character presence. I keep my scene and chapter summaries updated, so I can get an instant overview of the story's high-level flow in the corkboard view. I use the snapshots feature whenever I revise a scene, in case I want to review how it changed or perhaps port some plot points/verbiage into a later revision, or a different scene. If I'm working on a scene and I change something that I know will impact another scene I've already written, I pop over to that other scene, change its status to "Needs Revisions", and type a short explanation into the notes section, so I know what I need to update later, when I'm not caught up in the flow of drafting/revising. I've also used it in my day job to do the early drafting phases of product proposals, presentations, stuff like that - any long-form writing project, creative or otherwise.
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Feb 24, 2013 23:07
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Sitting Here posted:Question: How painstaking are you when developing the climate and geography of a non-earth world (thinking more fantasy here than literally other planets in this universe)? For example, I'm writing about people who live on an isthmus in an area that has a roughly Mediterranean climate, and since they're fishers and farmers I have to figure out what would live and grow in that area, and so on. And then what starts as a simple scene with a villager getting run down on a clam field by a guy on a horse turns into a bunch of research about whether there would even BE clam fields in an area like that, or whether they would need to dive for clams, or what. After a while it starts to feel like a pointless holdup. I suppose it depends on how much a large, consistent, realistic world will contribute to the story. Personally, for bigger projects, I like maps, and I take two different approaches; the top-down approach when I'm more interested in a realistic world with large-scale consistency; the bottom-up approach when poo poo needs to be weirder and less realistic, or I otherwise don't care about consistency. The top-down approach is way more  and science-heavy. Wikipedia will be your friend.< >I was working on a fantasy novel about a year ago. After writing a few scenes to get a feel for the characters and figuring out what I wanted to accomplish, I spent about a week writing "research", starting literally with plate tectonics and wind directions. The actual geography was about two evenings' work. I took a piece of paper, in the center I slapped down the one thing I knew about the world - there is a city here. Then I worked out how a few imaginary plates could interact, which filled in the overall geography around - mountain ranges here, volcanoes there, wide flood plains here, and so on. If you really want to get into it, make the northern coasts more jagged and add a lot of lakes at the northern latitudes, for glaciation. The rest is water. Wind directions are dependent on Hadley cells which are dependent on latitudes. How far north/south is your continent? I went for middle latitudes, like NA/Europe, and I expect most folks will. So, wind moves from southwest to northeast, generally. This lets you figure out where the wind is going to pick up water and where it'll be deposited - look up rain shadows. Elevation, latitude and wetness gives you a rough idea of biome, so you know where forests, plains and so on will be. From that, you can pick wet spots in the mountains and hills to source major rivers. I ignore the smaller ones; rivers are so goddamn common that you can make up a smaller one whenever you need it. Major rivers will shape where people initially settled: look for confluences of two rivers (Paris), places where two rivers run close to one another (Mesopotamia), and places where major rivers meet large lakes or seas (Thebes). Look at a map of Europe and North Africa: major old cities are always on the water, somehow. Bam, fictional geography. Now you can start writing fictional history, which I prefer to write and subsequently ignore, because nothing is worse than a fantasy author banging on about some historic general or battle that is Super Important and Very Detailed but has absolutely no loving bearing on the story. </ >Bottom-up is easier, but more time-consuming and less consistent. Write a bunch of scenes for a bunch of different characters located in different places, preferably at different social stations. Use these as reference material, maybe build a map out of 'em, although Terry Pratchett says you can't properly map an imagination, and I'm inclined to agree. The real question is, if you need a world that's very realistic and earthlike, then why not just use Earth? There's a ton of bizarre stuff in our backyards, and you get the benefit of real local history and mythology to draw upon, which is often weirder than anything made-up. Your clam-field example could be based off of a Japanese pearl-diving village, or it could be based off a maritime city like Boston or Halifax. What does the story require?
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Feb 26, 2013 10:32
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Stabbey_the_Clown posted:That's a good question. I'm working on a story set on not-earth, and I did think about if I could set it on earth. It would be set on a volcanic island nation in the middle of an ocean between two powerful and hostile countries, like say, Hawaii. Could I have used Hawaii? No, I would have had to write up far too much alternate history to get the Earth history to match up with what I need that it wouldn't be any kind of time-saver at all. In that specific case, perhaps you're not casting your net wide enough, although I can't say without actually knowing the details. Sicily is a volcanic island nation that has traditionally been torn between major contemporary powers: Greece/Rome, Rome/Carthage, the Byzantines/Umayyad Caliphate/Normans just to start. Granted, it's not in an ocean. There's also the Aleutian islands, which were traded between the US and Russia, although that brings around your noted problem with contemporary attitudes. If you just can't get history to match up with your message, then by all means write an alternate or entirely fictional history. I like using obscure pieces of real history to shape the made-up elements. You can find some weird poo poo out there, and it can give you some delicious flavoring details to sprinkle into your narrative, if you have the wordcount.
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Feb 26, 2013 18:54
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Sitting Here posted:This was a very helpful post overall, but to answer this question, I don't like the baggage that comes with writing fantasy on earth. The geography got more important as I wrote more about the culture my main character comes from, since geographical isolation contributes both to their culture and the main conflict. They live by the sea because I wanted people who worshipped a sea goddess/the tides/etc. If you have the time, I suggest checking out some nonfiction books on social evolution. Robert Wright's Nonzero and Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs & Steel (and Collapse, if you have even more time) were good food for thought when I was working on my world's fictional history, even if those books' real-world scientific cred is disputed.
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Feb 26, 2013 21:42
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I don't recall where I read it, but some writing advice book told me, paraphrased, "The job of your first sentence is to get the reader to read the second sentence. The job of the second sentence, get them to the end of the paragraph. The second paragraph's job takes them to the end of the chapter, the chapter to the act, and the act through the book." I'm a believer in the strong opening. If you're not opening with the inciting event, open with a inciting event for a subplot that dovetails with your main story. Draw the reader's attention with something. Your first sentence or two should give the reader something to bite into, some interesting detail of character, setting or plot that drags them into reading the rest of your drivel. The first paragraph should expand on it, provide more interesting details. Keep doing this until you kick off your big plot, which is basically just another interesting thing, albeit the one your story hinges on.
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Mar 19, 2013 20:32
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systran posted:When writing less than 1,500 word pieces, what are some different ways to go about structuring and then editing? I've tried a couple different things; some have worked to various degrees. The one that worked least well was getting the idea for a setup, writing from there until I ran out of wordcount, and then going back to edit and tighten things up. That ended in a plotless mush of confused themes and irrelevant actions. More recently, I've been doing a variant of the snowflake method. Once I've got a situation or character, I write a one-sentence summary that neatly encapsulates a struggle or conflict, generally hinting at the setting and conclusion. I'll revise this a few times until I effectively have a one-sentence summary of a story. This is often a starting point. For example, here's the initial one-sentence summary of my Thunderdome entry for last week: quote:An investigator wraps up a case against a government Chancellor poised to take over after the Dear Leader is assassinated, assisted by the third-in-command, who has secretly set the Chancellor up by drugging him. The investigator discovers this treachery too late. The plot ended up changing as I wrote it, of course, but this provided initial characters, setting, surrounding details, conflict and a twist ending. Next, I write a few short paragraphs of 2-3 sentences. The first paragraph describes the inciting incident, the middle paragraphs describe what the characters do as a result of the inciting incident, and the third paragraph describes the climax/twist/disaster which concludes the action. Here's my original three paragraphs, expanding on the above one-sentence summary: quote:The investigator witnesses the Chancellor playing games on his phone during the funeral. He begins an investigation of his own accord, then is approached by the Security Minister, who reveals the Chancellor has gone to his beach home during the period of official mourning. You'll note that this is substantially different than what was posted, and is a pretty limp plot. Worse, there's inconsistencies, unclear characters and odd details hanging off it. After writing this sort of plot summary, I go back over it and try to shave off as much extraneous stuff as possible. Is there something I mention only once? Then it's probably inconsequential to the plot and I should think about dropping it. Is there an interesting detail later in the story? Then I should mention it earlier to set it up. In the above summary: why is there a dog? Why is the home on the beach? I couldn't answer these questions, so I cut the details. (Much later on, in drafting, I realized I could use gardening as a metaphor, so the dog ended up resurrected as a rose garden.) I also look at how much narrative time needs to pass for something to "feel right" - "starting an investigation" takes a lot of time, an investigation is a whole plot arc to itself, so I cut that bit out in later drafts of the summary. Sometimes, to help out, I write little character bios. Generally, this is what the character's ultimate desire and proximate desires are, along with any interesting details that may inform their character. Once I've got a relatively tight summary, I write the thing, using my notes as a guide. For Coup, I realized halfway through the first draft that it would be far more interesting if the protagonist was actually the murderer, and his obvious Displays Of Loyalty were a ruse to frame someone else. I wrote it to that conclusion, then went back and revised the first half to match it. After the first draft, it's all about rereading and revising. Having a fresh head helps. For Thunderdome, I try to let it sit for a day in between revision sessions and go do other stuff without thinking about the story. Ideas will pop up, and I just jot them down when I can. The main things I look for when revising written drafts are inconsistencies, weird character voices, unresolved plot threads, and irrelevant details. Apply the Chekov's Gun principle: if you mention a detail somewhere, or reveal some aspect of character, it better come back to be relevant later, otherwise remove it immediately or revise it into something relevant. If you have a sentence of whose verbiage you're particularly proud, definitely remove it. Once I'm sick to death of the thing, or Sunday comes, it gets posted.
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Mar 22, 2013 11:25
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Reivax posted:There's a program that does that, Scriber, I think? Scrivener. I use it, and I use the corkboard feature extensively. I still think there's some value to having a real, tactile board, especially for bigger pieces, and I'm planning on getting one myself sooner or later. Plus some whiteboards. I love whiteboards.
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Apr 16, 2013 22:47
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Pladdicus posted:My current idea for it is a faux noir set up to a silly detective story about a paranormal detective who isn't terribly good at his job. The trouble I'm running into is I'm about 1000 words in and currently have the set up and case established but am wringing my hands over how I plan to wrap it up with another 2500. I'm fairly confident I can work something out about it but do you guys have any advice for writing under 3500 words? Especially for something with a loose detective story trapping. This week's Thunderdome prompt is very close to this, but with a 1200-word limit. Have you considered entering? It'd be good practice, and you'll find out what works and what doesn't at 1200 words. Some ideas just won't fit in very short word-counts. You can't do a lot of exposition or world-building; you have to focus on a core plot. If your story involves a lot of sub-plots that all revolve around a main plot, you're obviously going to need lots more words. Build a small, well-contained plot for a shorter story. In extreme cases (<1000 words), you may only be able to do the one scene where your character confronts his/her demons. Make it a good one. For very short stories, I look towards really classic, basic, relatable story-lines. You have enough time to present one, maybe two problems and have your characters struggle with them. What's your absolute core story? Is it about redemption? Love? Freedom? Dump all your subplots, or only use pieces them to reveal flavor and depth. Focus on your main character and the main problem. Caveat: I'm very much an outliner type when it comes to writing. I do a lot of planning before I start drafting, usually. This may or may not work for you. You haven't given us many details, but what changes about the detective in your story? Is he going to learn to accept his incompetence? Find a job he's better at? Or is there something inside him that's making him a bad detective, something he regrets and has to face? (Gonna say "he", "him" and "his" a lot here, but that's just shorthand, k? Transpose it if you need to.) Then, is your story a tragedy or a comedy, in the classical sense? Does he "win" and overcome his problems, or does he struggle and fail? Either way, you now know your ending. What sets your detective off on his journey of discovery? Classically, this is the receipt of a mysterious case, but it could be anything that relates to the change that needs to take place. In a very short story, you'll want to start with something relatively proximate to your ending. So, if your detective is struggling to forgive himself for a case he blew, then he should have something shoved in his face that forces him to deal with this demon. Make your character immediately start dealing with The Big Problem from word 1. Now sketch out a rough budget your remaining words - this is just a tool, not a strict rule. For your 3500 word story, let's budget 500 words for the opening scene and 500 words for the closing scene. That's 1000 words, so you need about 2000-2500 more. Budgeting for additional 500-word scenes gives you room for 4-5 plot developments. Boom, outline for a targeted 3000-3500 word story. Find things where your character struggles with the problem presented. Your hero has received the Intriguing Case. Does he accept the case? Reject it? This is your chance to show us some character nuances and some inner conflict. Maybe he cannot bear to consciously accept, the case reminds him too much of the case he blew (his demons). But, something about the Femme Fatale who brings it to him is intriguing (what is it?) and he finds himself outside her door at 3 AM, despite not really wanting to be there. And then he witnesses her getting murdered. There, you've got probably 1-2 plot developments down, come up with 2 more. How does your character react to each of these developments? Once you have your outline and word budgets down, go forth and draft your scenes. Don't worry about the word budgets at all while drafting. Just write your story, using your outline to keep your plot on track. You'll probably end up way over word-count, but if your plot sticks to your outline and you don't go off on wild tangents, you should be in shooting distance. Go back over your story with a clear head and look at each scene in detail. How does your dialogue and action contribute towards revealing your main character's inner struggle? Think hard about every sentence and description. You can cut a lot of description if you're focusing on the action. We don't need to know about every coathook and potted plant. If you show it to us, you're drawing our attention, which means it better either be immediately relevant, or, better yet, it should become relevant down the line (Chekhov's Gun principle). If you do go off on wild tangents, you'll see it - you'll find scenes and action that don't match well with your outline. Think hard about these; do they move your story closer to its resolution than what you planned, or do they accomplish the same thing but in a more interesting way? If so, fix your outline. Otherwise, cut/adapt the tangent.
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Apr 19, 2013 13:30
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Pladdicus posted:I'm not much of a planner when it comes to writing, usually I'll mull an idea out in my head for a few days then write furiously and adjust as necessary, out of curiosity what's your method of planning? I haven't got a set method down, because I don't think there's anything in writing that will always work 100% of the time. Generally, it's as I've described. Figure out a Big Problem, figure out a Resolution, and the split up my remaining word-count into "intended plot twists". This is based off of doing the Snowflake Method a few times in a very strict way, figuring out which parts work for me and which don't. Once I've got the big picture, I usually write down some character-establishing material. Sometimes this takes the form of scenes with the character that I never intend to use - these are just things like the character going about a daily routine, or an interesting past event. Other times it's a brief biographical summary. I've dabbled in doing interviews, where I pose questions and try to have the character answer them. For one of my projects, I have a bunch of essays written "by" the character presenting his political views on in-world events. The core of it all, though, is figuring out what the character wants, and realizing that this often differs between conscious and subconscious desires. There's a good article on this that I'm entirely failing to find at the moment. Once you know how it starts, how it ends and what the character is, I find it's just about rolling from situation to situation. If the character is here, and this happens, how does the character react? How does that make things worse? That's a scene right there, move to the next one. Just keep asking questions about your plot and your characters. I like to take notes about my answers and go over my planned scenes to make sure that the motivations and reactions remain consistent. quote:These questions are all incredibly helpful, I don't think you're really looking for me to answer them in the thread. Most of the questions I asked are the ones you should be asking yourself. If Character A does this, how does Character B react? What does Character B do in return, how does that impact character A? Repeat.
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Apr 19, 2013 18:56
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magnificent7 posted:At what point in your story can you throw up your hands and say, "gently caress it I don't CARE why that happened, who knows why crazy people do poo poo?" versus the need to provide a convincing reason for poo poo to happen? Pretty much loving never. As the writer, you should know why everything happens the way it does in your story. It's part of making every word in your story count, because if you know why stuff is happening, then you can use just enough extra words to convey that meaning alongside the action itself. This is especially important with characters. Using your example, if you have a serial killer who just kinda snaps one day, you're probably going to have a really goddamn boring story if it's centered around the serial killer himself. (If he's just a background plot device to get other things to happen, then you might be less strict.) Why? Because you have no character there; you have a puppet. In a story about a sociopath, you (the writer) need to know what makes the killer tick. Some dude just snapped, you say? "Jimbob the Slasher cut Perky McJuggs' plump little throat, because he was loving crazy." Boring, no one cares. There's no tension or character development, just gore. You need to know why your characters are doing things, and then you need to illustrate the "why" with the characters' thoughts, the little details of their actions, the things they say (or don't say), how they see and react to the world and events around them. The second important point here is that, even though you as a writer know absolutely everything, you should not be dumping every drop of that onto the page. This is where the mantra "show, don't tell" was born. If you're writing about a character with mental issues, like your serial killer, don't tell us "Jimbob the Slasher sank his knife deep into Perky McJuggs, because her blonde hair reminded him of mom and he felt ashamed when Little Jimbob got happy when Perky flounced by", show us Jimbob's issues with women, show us how Perky arouses him and his failure to deal with that. (Or do it afterwards, through your detective's eyes, if it's a detective story.) Edit: There was a great bit in a writing article I read once, which I cannot find now. Which of these is better? I don't have the actual lines, so these are poorly reproduced from memory. Article the First: "After a long wait, Harold stood up from his seat and went to greet Helen. He was nervous." Article the Second: "After a long wait, Harold wobbled to his feet and staggered towards Helen. He shoved his gnawed fist into his pocket, hiding clench-whitened knuckles." Erogenous Beef fucked around with this message at 00:24 on May 24, 2013 |
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May 24, 2013 00:18
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magnificent7 posted:Am I reading that right? Perfect prose is better than something interesting happening? Completely wrong. What he's saying is that a great idea is nothing if it cannot be communicated effectively. Good prose is just one part of communicating your great ideas effectively. The other parts are characterization, pacing and framing (setting/theme). The key point is that you cannot fall in love with a beautiful idea in your head, because chances are there's some flaws that you're not going to see. Everyone has beer goggles for their own ideas. Have the discipline to sober up a bit from your narcissistic love-drunk and carefully examine the idea's warts, scars and deformities before you decide to jump in bed with it. Either that, or get really good at literary plastic surgery. There are plenty of Dome pieces, and plenty of stories elsewhere, that get high marks but are by no means Serious Literature. They're fun ideas, well-expressed. What you're being told is (a) stop tootling your own horn about your ideas, you arrogant rear end, and (b) work on communicating your ideas effectively using all the tools mentioned above.
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May 28, 2013 18:20
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Learning to recognize that your lovely writing is lovely is the first step on the road to improvement. After writing a lot of poo poo, and rewriting and reworking that poo poo, you might end up with something that's merely a turd, and then a hairball, and eventually a marginally slimy lump of clay. Most of us are still in the poo poo/turd phase. However, never give up, never surrender!
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May 30, 2013 14:49
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I've got a minor grammar question raised by a book I was reading this morning on the train. Is "waked" an acceptable past-perfect form of "wake" now? As in, "He had waked." I've always assumed the proper form was "He had woken," and even that seems terribly stodgy compared to simple perfect.
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May 31, 2013 09:49
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magnificent7 posted:
I'm pretty sure it's not meant to be a character thing, given how many adverbs and purple phrases I had to slog through to find it. Actual phonecam shot from my Kindle:  Given that this is an actual, properly-published book from an actual publishing house and not some $0.99 selfpub thing, I had to ask.
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May 31, 2013 15:37
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PoshAlligator posted:Ebooks just replicate physical books, and don't offer anything new, so they can only really go along in tandem. I've almost entirely stopped buying physical books, for two reasons. First, I do a lot of commuting and traveling for work. An eBook means I can carry several dozen books around for less than the weight of one paperback. This is the primary value in an eBook reader, I find. When I ride public transit, at least half the readers use some kind of screen, whether eBook or tablet. Second, I'm an expat living in a non-English-speaking country. Ordering physical books takes a few extra days for them to arrive and often incurs customs/taxes on top of the current price. An eBook costs less to start with, plus I don't have to pay anything extra and can download it immediately. This is especially valuable if a business trip gets extended and I run out of reading material. In the Olden Times, I'd have to hunt down the city's English bookshops; now I just need an internet connection. It's a niche case, but you can see the value there. Physical books have two values. First, obviously, is the text itself. The second is the appearance - as noted above, "a shelf full of books" has an intellectual air and presents guests with a certain statement, and some books are simply pleasant-looking. I have a hardcopy of the Feynman Lectures and they're quite pretty.
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Aug 7, 2013 14:36
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Sitting Here posted:Where do you guys do most of your writing? Does anyone have a particularly cool or inspiring setup that helps them get into the right space? How about while living in close proximity with a lot of people? Has anyone engineered noise-canceling privacy pods for introverted creative types yet???? It varies; when I'm at home, I spread out on the couch or snuggle into my giant Reading Chair with a laptop and notepad and pen. If it's nice out, I'll drag a lovely folding chair and table onto the unswept, sooty balcony and write there. For a while, I skipped writing if I was traveling. Then on one particularly long trip, I couldn't stand it any longer and, after waking up at 4 AM with jet-lag, I just sat down and cracked out prose for two hours in my hotel room. Then I wrote some more on the train to the office I was visiting. After struggling through a terrible 10k word short story that way, I've found location less important - in the past half-year, I've composed TD entries in an airline seat, in a waiting room, on a train, in a taxi, on the veranda set on a Spanish hillside (great view, terrible productivity), hunched over a postcard-sized desk in a hotel room no larger than my suitcase, and sprawled on a beanbag in a quiet corner of an office. Many of these remote spots were quite productive, because I had no internet access and fewer distractions - more importantly, the daily worries you have while at home (did I take out the trash, is there laundry to be done, maybe I should call such and such friend I haven't seen in weeks) melt away because you cannot do anything about them. If you have a laptop, perhaps you could seek out somewhere public? A corner of a library, a park bench, the atrium of a business center, something like that.
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Aug 13, 2013 10:27
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Revol posted:Well, I know how to do the story, but I don't know how to do the story. I don't think I can just start writing the script right away. So I'm here, asking for help on how to do a proper story outline or proof. My story is still fluid and organic right now; I have the beginning, the ending, and much of the middle. I'm prepared for this to evolve further, but I do want to properly get things outlined. So, if you buy this book, it'll tell you all about the precise and proven way to-- Heh, gotcha. I'd recommend trying to do a few short pieces at first to hone your technique. It's far too easy to sit down and not work on your supposed Magnum Opus because you're unsure whether you're ready to write it. Well, guess what - everyone's first work is terrible, so get over yourself and just make something. There's no One True Way to plan a story; you'll have to work out your own process through the long, hard labor of actually trying stuff. In the end, remember that all the planning in the world is worthless if you haven't any product to show for it. When I got started writing my first novel (which is poo poo and I shoved it in a drawer after I finished it), I spent literally a half-year planning the plot, characters, locations, etc. All sorts of detailed character sheets and descriptions of cafes and poo poo. Almost all of it proved mostly worthless over the next two years of actual hard writing. Why? Because ideas evolve. Characters (good ones) begin to evolve as you actually write them. You realize that you've gotten the motivation wrong in Chapter 2, Scene 3, it doesn't logically lead into the thing you've got planned for Act 3, Scene 1, so you have to redo that bit. So, one way I'd recommend of outlining your story is not at all. Sit down and script out/draw out/write out all your scenes, in whatever order you're comfortable with. Hit a sticking point where you don't know how to get to the next Big Plot Event? Just skip up to that and come back to the sticky bit later, perhaps with fresher ideas or a better perspective of what needs to happen for the setup. Another way is any of the exhaustive-planning methods you can find on the internet. One example that I've had some moderate success with is the Snowflake method, which is a fancy way of saying you start with a one-sentence summary and break it down into smaller and smaller bits until you've got a brief summary for every scene. I do a slightly less granular form of planning for most stories. I'll sketch out the plot in broad strokes (theme, moral, major turning points), then break down the first act into major plot segments, and break a few of those down to scene-level summaries of about 2-3 sentences each. I tend to leave the later bits of the outline less granular, as at the early stages of the story, I'm usually still figuring out the characters. Here's a concrete example. Two weeks ago I did a comedy story for the Thunderdome about a PUA supervillain. Now, I already knew I'd have a supervillain chemist protagonist, I knew where it was set (Amsterdam), and I knew it was going to be a story about relationships (to make a pun on chemistry). But I was stuck breaking it down. While going for a walk along the seafront, I had a thought: "It's all about not being able to have a good relationship until we accept who we are". Great, so the central conflict would revolve around the protagonist being in a bad relationship and not recognizing the potential for a good one until he learns to get over his insecurities. At that point, I sat down with a real pen and real paper and wrote out a scene-level summary. It's for a 1200-word story, so it's not terribly long. At the same time, going for comedy, you can see notes that turned into jokes or humorous dialogue later on. If you can read my scratchings:   The story evolved a lot in editing. A whole pick-up scene got cut because it was creepy, and a fair amount of stuff got cut out for wordcount. The final result is painfully lacking in scene-setting and description, but I think it otherwise comes across reasonably well. So, in short, try stuff. Try not planning, and try planning everything to the nines.
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Oct 9, 2013 02:51
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CantDecideOnAName posted:I don't really want to get into writing comedy hardcore, because I know and understand that it's one of the hardest things to write. But let's throw this out there anyway: how do you write comedy? First off, "I don't want to X, because it's hard" is a bad attitude to have. If you like something and you want to try it, go for it. Don't shrink away just because it's not easy. You can start off by reading successful humor writers. I grew up on Dave Barry's books. You can probably find a few of his older paperbacks in the bargain bin by now. Comedy is hard because it's wildly variable. You're usually playing off of concepts and cultural tropes that people may not be familiar with. The "bro" stories we sometimes get in the dome are usually well-received here, because we're (mostly) young(-ish) and familiar with the cultural tropes associated with that subculture, so riffing off of it works. You can get away with humor based on internet culture here, because we're obviously all familiar with it. For other audiences, your reception will vary. Anyway. The absolute core of comedy is to set up an expectation, then violate the expectation in an unusual way, preferably one that forces the reader to re-examine their assumptions. One reason your piece last week fell down was that the joke was obvious: "we're out of virgins - well, except for internet nerds." That's a punchline that's become tired and predictable because it has been thrown around internet culture for so long. Because it's a familiar joke, the setup ("we're out of virgins") immediately makes me expect you to go for an internet-nerd joke. Since you then deliver exactly what I expected, it's a lame joke, and you've done nothing new with it. I noted a possible funnier take in my crit. "We're out of virgins", "oh, that's too bad. I never did get why the Dark Gods needed so much olive oil though." 'Virgins' and 'Dark Gods' sets up an expectation of human sacrifice, and the punchline violates it. Bam, job done. Further, it forces you to re-examine the word Virgin and see the pun. Bonus humor! Another classic way to construct a joke is to set up expectations by presenting two similar things, and finish the list with a non-sequitur. "Did you get everything we need for tonight?" "Well, I got the carrots and celery, but they were all out of virgins." You can improve it by reinforcing the assumption after the third item. "Vegas is so glamorous. The lights, the show, the passing-out-in-your-own-vomit-at-five-AM. What a place to see and be seen!" You can do this at a sentence level, at a paragraph level or longer. That's called layering gags, and it's really hard to do well, but very satisfying. Running gags are also good. Once you've found something absurd or funny, repeat it later on in (in)appropriate places as a punchline with a different setup. Once you get a few of these in, the reader starts looking for places where you might set up the running gag - an expectation, which you can then fulfill or violate as the story demands. Read some of Robert Rankin's stuff, he's great at this. For jokes in English, you can also mess with phonemes. For some reason, we culturally find "g" and hard "k" sounds funnier. Starting and ending a word with a plosive is usually amusing. Don't ask me why. This is actually where the name "Duke Guncock" came from - I was trying to shove as many G/K sounds into a name as possible, while stringing together words that were stereotypically "masculine".
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Oct 12, 2013 20:41
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Symptomless Coma posted:Okay, I want to be certain about what you've said cause it's potentially a big comment. When you say "too clever," do you mean that the format is getting in the way of the meaning? It's funny that you suggest rewriting it 'normally', because that's the way I originally started to write it, and it just seemed really domestic and flat. The way I eventually submitted it satisfied me because it felt the most immediate way of conveying a character, giving him the most airtime. I didn't care what the woman was like, and neither does he. Largely, I felt the monologue style obscured whatever meaning or development you were trying to portray. It worked okay as a character-study of a type-A guy with some subtle hypocrisy. If you were just going for that, I'd say "competent, but unsatisfying". We're shown a guy. He's a douche. Okay. And? There's no character development - hard in 600 words, I know, but other pieces done in a more-conventional style managed it. I'm not a huge fan of present-tense prose myself, but I suppose yes, no matter what, the monologue style is going to predispose me to not liking your piece unless there's some absolutely masterful writing in there.
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Oct 15, 2013 18:28
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Peel posted:Never pad out your story for the sake of it. Every word should do work. This doesn't mean your writing needs to be ultra-compact - adding tone and rhythm and atmosphere is work. But if you think you can tell the whole story in 10-25k, try that and see what it gives you, you might be surprised. If nothing else it will be good practice for longer pieces. Pretty much this. You'll basically need three times as many plot points and plot ideas to form a 75k-word story than you would a 25k-word story. Simple math. There's plenty of ways to do this - can you show other interesting parts of your main plot from other points of view? Can you add subplots that deepen interesting characters? Are there interesting consequences to be explored - is the climax to your first plot also the inciting incident for a second plot? It's a common formula for the first 20-30% of your story to be an inciting plot that, when resolved, leaves larger issues for the characters to confront and launches the main plot arc. When reading these days, I often find myself looking down at my e-reader's completion bar when I hit major plot points. Sure enough, around 20-25%, what appeared to be a subplot resolves itself and kicks off a larger plot. At 70-80%, there's a big turnaround or twist to set up the climax at 85-95%.
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Oct 30, 2013 11:51
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TheRamblingSoul posted:Any advice for beating the cliche reflex out of me when it comes to writing dialogue and characters? That's a problem I keep running into, before in a creative writing workshop and now with Thunderdome. For dialogue and exposition: Draft however you want, go do something else, then reread slowly with fresh eyes. Mark your cliches (GDocs comments are great for this) and then go back to revise them after you've finished a reread. If you can see it, you can fix it. One way I spot problems is to move my work into a different format (change fonts, change programs, print it out, etc.) for proofreading. If you're having trouble spotting cliches at all, then you pretty much have to take the cliched advice to read more books. Dialogue is especially tricky and I find myself rewriting dialogue more often than anything else. My first drafts are usually terrible exchanges where characters speak directly to one another, slap down exposition, etc. Don't sweat it, just fix it later. For characters: This I tend to plan out in advance. I'm a "planner" when it comes to writing; I scope out the broad concepts first then backfill the details. I tend to come up with a 1-2 sentence concept for a character, then start sketching down interesting details as I think about the character's intended role in the story, and what might've guided the character to have the personality/motivations that I need to tell the tale I've planned. Rereading those notes, you'll find the cliches and can cut them or twist them. A cliche that's been bent just beyond recognition makes for a familiar-but-still-interesting character.
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Nov 18, 2013 14:41
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TheRamblingSoul posted:I am also really, really interested in studying writing that really digs deep into the reader and creeps them out with psychologically/ethically/philosophically disturbing questions and prose. Also, good writing that realistically and engagingly depicts mental states and thoughts when confronted with brutality, violence, (meaningless) death, war, torture, madness, trauma, loss of innocence or idealism, loss, hopelessness and despair, etc is a huge plus. Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. Kafka's The Castle. Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Illytch. Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms and For Whom The Bell Tolls are both interesting depictions of men confronted with the realities of war, though somewhat distant from what you've requested. Martin Amis' Other People, certainly. None of these is short, none of these is easy, and all of these will illustrate different ways of conveying narrative while also (sometimes loosely) exploring the themes you've mentioned. Note that none of these is "genre", per se, but my opinion is that you should be reading broadly, in addition to reading deeply into your chosen genre(s). Synthesizing ideas drawn from outside your genre into your genre can often produce very interesting results.
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Nov 29, 2013 18:45
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TheRamblingSoul posted:Maybe it was because I was a junior in high school, but I actually read For Whom the Bell Tolls for my junior English term paper and remember finding it incredibly dry and boring. To high school-me, basically nothing happens for the majority of the book while the anti-fascist resistance hides out in the foothills of Spain (apart from some implicit "earth-moving" sex) until the very end when they blow up a bridge and people die with a cliffhanger ending. Possibly. Hemingway is something of an acquired taste, one which I happen to enjoy and plenty of other folks despise. The reason I listed two Hemingway novels is that his style of writing is far down into "spare realism" territory. The surface action only illustrates "what" happens, and the reader is left to work out implications and motivations. This is a tool for your toolbox. For modern writing, you can't go down that road very far before people find your stuff difficult to read, or "dry and boring." 21st-century readers are used to things like free indirect speech and narratorial intrusions on otherwise close-third/first-person POVs. They prefer their themes, actions and consequences to be more visible in the surface text.
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Nov 29, 2013 19:10
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| # ¿ May 17, 2024 17:46 |
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That article has a particularly lovely examples. That was just the first article I had on hand; the illustration for dialogue is better. Anyway, from what you quoted, both the "tell" example and the "show" example are bad, for different reasons. The "tell" example is bad because it reads like a plot summary and doesn't give us any of the pertinent details. If any of the points it mentions were relevant, we should be shown their relationship deteriorating. If they're not relevant, cut them. The "show" example is bad, too. You sensed the reason - it's too heavy on irrelevant details. Televisionitis is what I call it; it's like the writer's trying to transcribe a picture instead of highlighting what matters. Unless the story's centered on fashion design, most of that can be cut. "He asked curiously" is considered bad, because the act of asking usually implies curiosity. The exception to the "no adverbs" rule is when you cannot find a good, clear verb that presents the concept AND the meaning of the sentence would be seriously altered without the adverb. Speaking to you directly, you'd do well to stop searching for someone to tell you the "big rules" are bad and that you should ignore them. Work inside the basic rules as hard as you can. After some time, you'll learn why they're there, and start building an understanding of when to break them. Otherwise, you're trying to pilot a plane before you've learned to walk.
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Jan 29, 2014 00:30
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