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So how kosher is it to essentially gank the title of another work for one of your own pieces, assuming that a) the actual content is completely dissimilar and b) the title you're taking (stealing) isn't very well-known?
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Aug 6, 2012 02:53
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Canadian Surf Club posted:The question then is why? If it's a generic thing like "The Carnival" or something then it should be okay but if it's not it would have to have a pretty concrete connection to the work to excuse it. It does. I'm the type who can't get a serious grip on whatever he's writing until I have the title first, and this one lines up the dominant themes and imagery as well as I can hope for. The only catch is that some rear end in a top hat thought of it first and then I read it and remembered it and now I want it to be mine e: actually I just thought of another one that might have some pop to it without being plagiarized, so maybe this isn't such a big deal after all Oxxidation fucked around with this message at 03:02 on Aug 6, 2012 |
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Aug 6, 2012 03:00
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psychopomp posted:Generally speaking every title that isn't very specific and elaborate has already been used, so don't sweat it. Works for me. My view on titles was more or less articulated by Krzhizhanofsky (and no, I could not spell that from memory alone): quote:...if the title is right, the whole text will hang on it, like a coat on a peg. The title, for me, is the first word (or words) of a story; it must pull all the other words after it, right down to the last. Generally if I can't see a clear title for something right off the bat in the planning stages it's a bad sign, but oh well, can't let that stop me.
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Aug 6, 2012 03:48
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Nirvikalpa posted:Can you be a novelist without liking to read fiction? Not unless the only novels you're interested in writing are TVtropes-esque genre fiction that reads like an anime script put to prose. If you don't like to read, you'll never be able to write worth a drat. It goes against the entire nature of the concept.
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Sep 8, 2012 21:11
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SkySteak posted:What's the point of having an Advice and Discussion thread if you're just going to tar and feather anyone who is actually asking advice or have a flaw that you personally have a petty gripe with? Because as people have already said, asking how to write if you don't like to read is like asking how to paint if you don't like looking at art or asking how to play music if you don't like to listen to it. Anyone with sense is going to be incredulous as first, and then if the issue is pressed they're going to get pissed. It's not a request for advice, it's a request for validation of an idiotic choice.
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Sep 9, 2012 05:56
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Sitting Here posted:Yeah, NaNo might be the laxative I need to push out a bunch of lovely writing that I can kind of mold into a little poo poo statue. And then leave on a public toilet seat for others to find. Wait what metaphor am I making again. Oh hey finally something I can yell about at length. "Write what you know" is good advice. It does, however, turn into bad advice when taken too literally. I entered a grim phase in my writing classes where every other story was about working part-time in a church or a flower shop or going on a trip to Europe in which no-loving-poo poo three goddamn pages were spent dithering over train schedules. The sum total of your life experiences should inform your writing not in the particulars but in the overarching perspectives they engender, by which I mean to say that maybe those stories about church work would've been a lot better if they'd been more about the banal desperation of people seeking comfort in everyday architecture and less about vacuuming the pews every afternoon. It doesn't take a terribly exciting life to inform your work. Even if you're mired in ordinary present-day middle-class comfort then unless you've spent your whole life hiding under your bed there'll be some thing, or things, that gives you a way to reach out and grip some common emotion. If you want a personal example, my early writing was clumsy and way too ambitious because I didn't know how to make real the minor (well, "minor") details of character and relationships, and then a couple years into that process my family broke up. It took a fairly long time and it was moderately unpleasant and it gave my writing a real shot in the arm, because from there it latched onto and explored the concepts of alienation and how relationships are eaten away by the neuroses of those within them. It's not what you have but how you use it, and everyone has something to work with. As for research, sure, it's important. But one of my biggest joys in writing is to just see how much I can bullshit people on stuff and get away with it. Give details in broad and reasonably accurate strokes and fill in the blanks with strong, consistent characterization and you'd be amazed at the sort of stuff you can get a general audience to overlook. It's definitely better than going the Tom Clancy route and turning your work into a glorified tech manual.
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Sep 27, 2012 03:03
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Black Griffon posted:I'm getting hung up on whether I'm allowed to use "yelled" and such if it's really hard to show through the rest of the text whether the subject is yelling. It's getting so bad that my editor is kicking in when I'm writing and halting my process. Should I just type "yelled" or whatever and fix it later, or am I too obsessed with eliminating anything but "said"? In my view, "said" is the default, basic dialogue attribution and should obviously be the most common. Yelled/shouted/sighed and other innocuous verbs can be used in moderation, if you can't convey it properly through context or the dialogue itself. Any attributions past that first degree of separation ("ejaculated," etc, or using non-speaking verbs like "grinned") might be justifiable in special cases but should never be used habitually.
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Nov 11, 2012 04:20
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Bear Sleuth posted:Metaphores! They are the hardest thing. Seems like when I'm thinking in the car or engaged in conversation they come naturally. But when I'm writing trying to think of a good original comparison makes my brain seize up like a... cringing... hermit crab? Read your loving butt off. If your butt is not sitting alone in a corner by the end then your reading is insufficient. Metaphor and analogy are just a part of overall imagery development, which is something you can only achieve by exposing yourself to other peoples' work. I'd recommend starting with 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.
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Nov 22, 2012 15:54
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Bear Sleuth posted:Yeah okay. I read all the time though and still struggle. I'm looking for practical advice beyond "you'll learn by osmosis." Like most of the basic aspects of writing it's difficult to come up with a solid approach for improvement, because the fine details are so dependent on the person trying to write. I doubt you're getting hung up on the simplistic approach to analogies, i.e., "[this thing] was like [this other thing]," and you're instead just having trouble linking together two discrete images in an effective way. But what part of the link is giving you trouble? Is it the visual appearance of the images? Or the smell? The sound? Or the history, or the emotional connotation? The rule of thumb I try to go by is that metaphor should enhance image in two ways - sensationally, and tonally. That is to say, a successful metaphor would help one better understand an image as it applies to the senses, and it would also add to the atmosphere you're trying to set in the scene, whether it be levity, or apprehensiveness, or aggressiveness. It's helped me a lot not just because it keeps my metaphors from clashing with the rest of the prose, but also because it lets me know when a metaphor or comparison is unnecessary or downright redundant. 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. A lot of people seem to get hung up on analogies because they're treated like a basic and well-used form of imagery (it doesn't help that most Internet writing maliciously abuses them, and that gets picked up through osmosis), but they gain a lot more potency if applied with some deliberation. Oxxidation fucked around with this message at 20:06 on Nov 22, 2012 |
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Nov 22, 2012 17:02
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Fortuitous Bumble posted:Does this mean my characters or plot or something aren't well developed enough? It seems like people always talk about writing like the story just drives itself once they get started This is not the norm. Even Stephen King, who is a cheerful and shameless proponent of writing by the seat of your pants, had a huge stall in the middle of The Stand where he was completely at a loss as to what the gently caress to do next. A little consideration before each major hurdle is fine. Beneficial, even, because it's my experience that writing long fiction is a bit like Jenga - if you have enough tiny little mistakes in construction at the start, then the whole thing will topple over before you can finish.
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Dec 28, 2012 02:00
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Erik Shawn-Bohner posted:If you write fan fiction, please murder yourself immediately for the sake of the human race. Mm yes, incisive as always If you're only writing for giggles of your own, fanfiction is fine. If you want to pursue writing with any degree of seriousness, it's a distraction, and a bad one at that. Best-case scenario, you're developing your imagery and narrative skills using someone else's intellectual property, and why the hell would you do that when you can just make your own story and practice those elements of your craft alongside developing your own ideas? You won't get branded with a scarlet letter or anything for writing it, but there's very little point to doing so unless you're just wanting to get kicks on the internet and maybe let other people see your thoughts of fictional characters being naked with one another. 50 Shades of Gray has kind of stuck a pin in the safe assertion that all fanfic is a dead end (cuz it made megabucks), but personally I think that's not so much because of the fanfic aspect as the softcore-porn one.
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Dec 31, 2012 04:24
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quote:I look back at those stories -- they're still up on fanfiction.net -- and they're just straight-up unreadable to me. But it was a fun way to warm myself up, and I gotta tell you: just a couple of months ago, the site notified me of a couple of new reviews that went up, both commenting on how much they connected with what they read. That made me feel really good, and in the end, as a writer, that's really all I give a poo poo about : I want to share myself, but I want to entertain others doing it. Whether I do it through some crappy fanfic I wrote when I was young and stupid, or through the new, classy hotness I'm working on right now...well, either way, I win. It's cool that you feel like you're connecting with an audience and all, but getting that feeling from fanfiction.net commenters is a low, low standard. Most of those people forget how to swallow food if they turn their heads too fast, if you get my meaning.
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Jan 1, 2013 23:09
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Tiggum posted:I seem to have come across poorly. I'm not saying everyone should try to be the best, or that fanfiction can't be good. I just don't understand the desire to write it. I just don't see the appeal. I once again posit the theory that the main attraction is to externalize one's ruminations on the vision of fictional characters rockin each other's bodies ('til the break of dawn). Obviously there are exceptions, like the authors who have giddily written (and published!) Sherlock Holmes or Lovecraft fanfic, but I'm comfortable sticking with the above as a generalization.
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Jan 2, 2013 05:26
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ultrachrist posted:EDIT: I'm trying to think of some awesome dialogue writers I like. Salman Rushdie for sure. I've got the fairly standard trinity of Rushdie/Chabon/McCarthy - the first for fantastical, energetic dialogue, the second for snappy, often amusing dialogue, and the third for tense and terse dialogue. McCarthy can sometimes be hit-and-miss (The Road's conversations could get samey), but the exchange between Holme Cullen and the three strangers in Outer Dark was loving terrifying in a way that, at the time, is nearly impossible to describe. Denis Johnson also has a great sense of darkly comedic timing, especially in his short stories. Conversely, I've been reading American Gods and Gaiman's dialogue gets really tiresome, really fast. His characters' voices are laid on so thick they become artificial; maybe it's a comic-book thing? The book's prose is light as air, so it's good for a commute, but not much of it impresses me besides playing Find the Lady with mythological figures.
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Jan 12, 2013 01:56
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CB_Tube_Knight posted:Sorry, but this dialogue looks like 90% of what I see out there. Sure there are some exceptions but I think that we're seeing what is commonly done by authors and it sells and critics seem to like this stuff some of the time. Melodrama and the like is really what audiences want. Of course reality TV is popular, so that should tell you about popular opinion. See, this is where the quote button would come in handy. Assuming you're talking about that slab of dialogue quoted above, it's not even melodramatic; it's got all the emotion and sentiment of a coma patient. People stand around and mouth their feelings like they're nutcrackers getting their levers played with. You see that a lot in contemporary "realistic" fiction that strives to be profound despite not having anything interesting to say. Also if you're going to judge writing based on what quote-unquote "audiences" want, then the only fiction that should exist right now is zombie stories and billionaire erotica, in which case we should all stand in a circle with pistols in hand and headshot the person standing to our right.
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Jan 12, 2013 20:51
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More like you're single-handedly driving FYAD into CC, but whatever gets people writing is fine I guess CC was never a hugbox, I've looked over the past couple of years of forum threads to read the stories and if anything the general tone of responses was even more critical back then. I don't think Thunderdome is a net detriment to the forum or anything, but you're not really providing some Great Service for the overall nature of CC's criticism by participating in it.
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Jan 12, 2013 21:35
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CB_Tube_Knight posted:And not all genre fiction has explosions and daring escapes. The difference is that usually in genre fiction I feel like I am getting something going on, some kind of conflict other than the mundane. Sure there are examples out there that transcend that, but I would much rather take my chances with other things. I have my non-genre stuff I enjoyed, but it's much fewer and far between. I don't usually get that out of literary fiction and really I don't care as much about language and insight into the human condition as I do plot and compelling characters. In fact I would say language, as long as the person is actually writing well enough to be understood, is one of the things I am least concerned with and that language is probably why so many people think all writing is pretentious drivel. I'm a huge fan of brevity when it comes to language. You seem to be trying to make this into an either/or thing when it doesn't have to be. I've got Ramsay Campbell's The Doll Who Ate His Mother sharing shelf space with Chabon, McCarthy, and Dostoyevsky; my Stephen King books get shelves all to themselves. Good language is good language, regardless of "type." When it's bad in literary fiction, it results in lifeless, self-important blocks of talk or narration about nothing in particular. When it's bad in genre fiction, it manifests as endless zombie stories or fantasy/crime novels that read like something scraped off a Hollywood B-list studio's latrine. But their good qualities can inform each other as well; lit fic is less susceptible to the usual lineup of genre-fiction character cliches and can make for more interesting characters, while genre fiction tends to convey action and movement more often and the better examples can keep lit-fic prose from feeling too turgid. I don't know what argument you think you're making, but right now you come off as someone with super-trashy taste who's never bothered looking into alternatives and calls that ignorance a good thing.
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Jan 13, 2013 00:26
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CB_Tube_Knight posted:I didn't know brevity was a trashy taste and liking plot and characters over use of language was trashy taste. It's not an either or thing, but I can put up with a lot for a really compelling story. Brevity and plot/characters aren't limited to genre fiction (gently caress's sake, Hemingway is one of the most renowned authors of literature in history and his name is synonymous with brief, terse writing). This is where the ignorance bit comes from. You come off as someone who doesn't even know what books are outside of your own little bubble.
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Jan 13, 2013 00:47
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I'm personally plugging away at a larger project that should've been finished a year ago, but I keep my eye on TD to see if any of the prompts grab me. I'll be back eventually.
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Jan 13, 2013 00:55
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It's a favorite argument of a lot of literary critics that McCarthy's punctuation games are a gratuitous affectation basically meant to shout LOOK I AM A WRITER at his audience. I just sit down and watch literary criticism thrash about in the quicksand of its own irrelevance and wave The Border Trilogy in front of its face.
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Jan 24, 2013 04:21
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Epigraphs are cheap and gratuitous and I love them to loving pieces, who wants to fight me I think they're just a harmless indulgence, so long as they're brief.
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Feb 5, 2013 04:37
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magnificent7 posted:Jesus Christ man. Ease up. Be gentle with him, it's either this or he leans out his window and screams at the moon until the neighbors complain.
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May 30, 2013 20:38
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It's not like progressively lower ratings in Thunderdome necessarily indicate your quality's deteriorating, anyway. Judges always rotate and some prompts are nastier than others. Which is why I only participate when I'm interested in the prompt. Swaaaag
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May 31, 2013 03:18
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Chillmatic posted:He said, in his own words, that his writing was getting worse. That was not something I came up with, promise. This is a public forum; people post that they're having problems, I respond. Unneeded advice is easy to ignore. Well, maybe not so much in your case, since the sheer amount of noise you make needs a couple of full scrolls to get past no matter how irrelevant the opinion. Oxxidation fucked around with this message at 04:54 on May 31, 2013 |
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May 31, 2013 04:32
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One pertinent difference for me is that if I drop a book (I fumble things a lot), the worst that happens is a few pages get bent. If I drop a Kindle then that crack is the sound of a hundred dollars disappearing. It helps that most of my books lately have been free. I work two blocks from the NYPL and I move through those fuckin shelves like Pac-Man. Wakka-wakka.
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Aug 7, 2013 18:24
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PoshAlligator posted:Their point was that at their heart ebooks are just meant to give the physical experience digitally, as opposed to offering anything new due to format (though your points are valid, they arguably don't change the book itself). Untrue. It has allowed the market to welcome previously-unthought of quantities of lovely zombie novels and reams of billionaire erotica. (I hate zombies and billionaires in roughly equal measure.)
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Aug 7, 2013 21:32
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I was amused/impressed when Terry Pratchett reduced a three-against-one back-alley brawl to the phrase "a complicated moment."
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Feb 23, 2014 01:51
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I'm going to guess that it has something to do with 99% of video game plots being driven by the act of killing all the bad guys, which is anathema to any work in a medium where you, the audience, do not directly contribute to bad-guy killing.
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Feb 25, 2014 04:41
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Martello posted:I'm kinda getting sick of everyone bashing ASOFAI (sic) all the time around here. It's like it's the popular thing to do because the books are popular, and all of us cool-rear end goons are edgy, iconoclastic rebels, man. Martin has his strengths and weaknesses, but the man can spin a story. Most of us wish we could come up with the complexity of plot and character relationships that he can. If you don't like grimdark stuff or violence or main character death or whatever, that's fine. Read something else. Extra hint: preferably something finished.
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Feb 26, 2014 18:36
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Lethemonster posted:I have a very general question for anyone who does writing on a regular basis, whether you do it as an amateur or professionally. Most creative professions consist of a perpetual tug-of-war between your work ethic and your neuroses. This is a common thing.
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Mar 12, 2014 05:32
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Sithsaber posted:Someone report this. I always get probated when I tell off the whiners who follow me around. And nothing makes this "advice thread" unhappy like some pompous rear end-jack asking increasingly picayune questions in a transparent attempt to make other people an accessory to procrastination. Punctuation advice? Really? Really. It especially doesn't help that you've got no actual samples up so no one can be sure if you're just blowing smoke up their asses. Personally I have only read your essays on Bioshock and would give them a C- at best. Dull stuff, dull stuff.
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Jul 9, 2014 01:59
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DivisionPost posted:And also, when Chillmatic posts like he did above, you listen. He's twice the motherfucker we aspire to be. With two hundred times the words. But yeah, that appears to be a c/p'd EVE Online rant with Sithsaber's name dropped into it, which raises disquieting questions about EVE players.
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Jul 9, 2014 14:00
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magnificent7 posted:Jesus Christ this place is the worst place to feel good about wanting to write. You shouldn't feel good about wanting to do it, you should feel good doing it. The former is an impediment to the latter because it leads to endless blue-skying about ideas and punctuation without any actual material to show for it. vvv haha I really struck a nerve there huh Oxxidation fucked around with this message at 16:26 on Jul 9, 2014 |
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Jul 9, 2014 15:55
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Personally I just never ever discuss projects in-progress, ever. The editorial process is for finished pieces; if you have people muttering over your shoulder (ones who actually exist, I mean, voices in your head are fine and also compulsory) in regards to your every germinating idea then paralysis sets in fast. It can also set in fast the other way but hey, at least then you have no one to blame but yourself.
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Jul 10, 2014 19:42
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blue squares posted:Let's talk editing and revising. I've read the books--On Writing, Bird by Bird, Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, The Art of Fiction, but I feel like my editing is not strong. When I finish a story, I look back and I fix some minor stuff, but I've never rewrote whole chunks and changed the direction of a piece. Obviously, I'm not a super-genius who gets everything right on the first try. What do you do besides take time off from a story in order to really find out if it is saying what it needs to say? Beyond minor stuff, like making a character's behavior more consistent/clearer, but major thematic concerns and the entire arcs of stories? That's where other readers are crucial, I think. The overall structure of a story, particularly a big one, will usually make sense in your own head (and if it doesn't then you've got bigger problems boyo), but if other people fail to grasp certain aspects or find other ones pointless then it may be time to bust out the hatchet instead of the scalpel.
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Jul 11, 2014 03:18
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PoshAlligator posted:Fiction writing advice: how do I lead a fulfilling life? Step 1. Don't be a writer.
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Aug 20, 2014 02:28
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Bobby Deluxe posted:The caveat is that you need to be writing an absolute bare minimum of 2k words a day if you want to consider yourself a writer. Haha yeah ok dude, I think that only applies to the self-pub sweatshops where they need to churn out fifteen novels in an "I hosed a Billionaire" series before they can make enough cash to buy a medium pizza.
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Aug 21, 2014 13:43
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qntm posted:This is nonsense. Michio Kaku is very smart but he is also a crazy person.
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Sep 5, 2014 13:48
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PoshAlligator posted:Read more horror. I recommend Jeremy Robert Johnson. Found the guy just a week ago and he's incredible, I haven't seen a horror writer with this kind of imagination in ages.
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Sep 25, 2014 13:46
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HopperUK posted:Tumours don't tread. Let me tell you about an uncle I had.
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Apr 9, 2015 04:48
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