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As far as long rambling novels go, few beat The Count of Montecristo as the longest page-turner I ever tried to devour whole (took me a whole week). He spent more than a few paragraphs on character description, and most either revealed essential character, or was described from another character's perception to reveal their character (love that done well). This is why the detective novel (noir in particular) works, because every first person monologue about the people he meets is revealing his character while he makes judgements about people or tries to suss them out. It's critical your descriptions have a purpose rather than checking off a laundry list of features: weight, height, eye color, who the gently caress cares. You rather want to build a silhouette. Focus on a handful of key characteristics and let the reader fill in the blanks. As for general rambling, I appreciate a great bullshitter over a wheezing windbag. The difference is the bullshitter knows how to pace the story, which is just like comic timing and just as tricky. The windbag doesn't know when to shut the gently caress up and get on with it. If you find yourself wondering which one you're doing, stop and ask yourself what effect you're after. If you can't think of one, cut it. Stuporstar fucked around with this message at 04:00 on Apr 29, 2013 |
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Apr 29, 2013 03:52
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PoshAlligator posted:I love The Count of Monte Cristo. But I'm sort of torn about just how long the imprisonment section takes. On one hand it's the most boring slog of the book, and it's super early on, but on the other it really does convey the situation very well. You just made me realise I'd confused the spelling of the book with my favorite cigar. :facepalm: I have to agree. That one section was a slog up until he met the monk, because Dumas is far more interesting when he's writing character interactions. As for goon writing, you can check out the Thunderdome for flash fiction, and theres also the Goonreads thread which has its own website.
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May 8, 2013 21:33
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El Seano posted:So basically any advice you can give on realistically pacing dialogue would be very welcome, thanks guys. Read it out loud.
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May 15, 2013 21:34
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Tartarus Sauce posted:Real world conversations CAN be helpful ... Oh great, you've probably set Chillmatic off again. Chillmatic, chill the gently caress out. You don't need to repeat yourself a fourth time because people don't 100% agree with you. Chillmatic's point: When people talk in real life, they throw in a lot of ums and ers and pointless filler. Don't write like that. It's boring to read. Everyone else's point: It is still necessary to note how people talk in real life to pick up things like cadences and idioms. You are both correct, and you've all had a page to make your points. Now kindly stop repeating the same argument for the next page or so. Thank you.
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May 19, 2013 23:17
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Chillmatic posted:You just hush and get back to writing withering critiques of lovely fanfic plastered on a jpg! (you were twice as nice to that guy as I was gonna be) Nice rolling with the punches there. When someone tells you to chill out because you're being an overbearing prescriptive rear end and then someone else chimes in saying you're being an overbearing prescriptive rear end, then maybe you're being an overbearing prescriptive rear end. You have done this before. Stop getting upset and defensive when people only 80% agree with you.
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May 20, 2013 00:29
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The Saddest Rhino posted:Why are you taking this so personally. Just like you shouldn't treat your writings as your babies, you shouldn't treat advice you have given that way too. He does this. A lot. And people bothering to argue with he who must be right about everything, even if they're agreeing with him but not 100%, has caused more than one derail. Shut the gently caress up about it, everyone. I know it's been a page since this post, but this cannot go unaddressed: magnificent7 posted:Does every short story have to be about human nature?  Every story is about human nature. That is what makes it a story. If you're just putting ideas on the page and not making a human connection with them, then it is not a story, hence why people aren't interested in reading it.
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May 31, 2013 05:03
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Make her a dick.
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Jul 20, 2013 03:33
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I once had to give my character downs syndrome because he only had six points left for int after I used up all my good rolls on strength and constitution. Oh wait, that was a real DnD game. I don't write stories like that because that's stupid.
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Jul 20, 2013 04:54
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Purple Prince posted:Not sure a thread about fiction is going to be annoyed at you posting anecdotes. I quit smoking a couple months ago, and I found smoking a pipe so ingrained into my writing habit, I couldn't sit down to write without getting such intense cravings I couldn't write a damned thing. It's going to be hell for a while. There's no getting around it, but the cravings do go away. You need to distract yourself. Honestly, if you do nothing but play video games for a month while riding out the worst of it, no one is going to blame you. Give youself a month vacation from every stressor you can safely ignore. After that month, rebuild youself. Replace all your bad habits with good. Get back in the game. I'm slowly rebuilding my writing habit now that I've stopped thinking about smoking, and sitting down to write doesn't trigger cravings as much anymore. In the rare times it does, I stand up and take some quick exercise for a mild dopamine rush. If it's really bad I take a half hour walk, which also fills the idea well. I also use tea as a surrogate. Sleep deprivation causes a state similar to a mild alcoholic buzz. I often pull all-nighters when writing a first draft, because that's the best time for me to get into the flow without my internal editor butting in. I know that doesn't work for a lot of people's schedules, but even writing when you're groggy has proven to be more effective than when you think you're at your best during the day. There's been a few recent studies showing people are at their most creative when they're the least awake. For night people, that means slinging your rear end out of bed and hitting the keyboard for an hour before you even make coffee. For day people it means writing for an hour or so before bed. A non-liver killing alternative to Hemingway's advice: Write groggy; edit alert. This may not work for everyone, but if you're stuck, changing your habit might kick you into gear. If you're not getting anything done, what do you have to lose? Stuporstar fucked around with this message at 19:07 on Jul 21, 2013 |
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Jul 21, 2013 19:00
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Panda So Panda posted:I haven't yet gotten to a scene in my project that illustrates this specifically since I am still early in my character creation and writing stage -- no action scenes that would require my heroine to be both brainy and brawny (unless you meant any writing sample for this character at all) -- but I certainly will when I do. Read this right loving now, http://writerunboxed.com/2013/07/19/avoiding-boring-character-biographies/ and then write some scenes for your character. Don't even think about making a pansy little character sheet or plotting your story yet. If you're too timid to commit to your story because you're pissing around, then at least piss around in a constructive way. Get some goddamned words on the page, mister. Also, Soulcleaver, he's quitting smoking. The source if his writers block is quitting smoking. The solution is taking some time out to quit smoking. For gently caress's sake. Stuporstar fucked around with this message at 00:58 on Jul 22, 2013 |
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Jul 22, 2013 00:51
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Soulcleaver posted:I offered some maybe useful advice from a famous (if morally repugnant) writer? Not seeing the problem here. You offered generally helpful advice, yeah, but completely oblivious to context. There is more than one type of writer's block and learning to identify which kind prevents people from spinning their wheels. His is currently due to anxiety, most likely brought on by chemical withdrawal, so the way to unblock it is to take care of his mental health. Some writer's block requires you to put your bum in the seat, others require you to go for a jog. Actually, most writer's block requires you to do the latter before the former: back up, take a deep breath, and gain some perspective before trying to diagnose writing problems. The advice you offered comes if he's still blocked after he's straightened his head out. I'll give you that. I Just want to set him straight. And yes, I'm being pissy about it because I just dealt with quitting smoking myself and don't want to see this guy running down a blind alley.
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Jul 22, 2013 06:05
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Crisco Kid posted:Has anyone here taken a short story or novella and converted it into a longer work? You are allowed to indulge yourself as a writer sometimes, you know. Going off on wild tangents with characters you enjoyed writing may or may not be publishable, but even if it sits on your hard drive forever, the exercise isn't a complete waste of time. I dunno, it seems to me like saying, "I've been practicing the piano for ages for my upcoming Grieg concert. I just want to bust out some jazz once in a while because I enjoy it, but I can't possibly justify playing something that I'm not going to perform." To which I say, hell with that. Have some fun once in a while, dammit. Edit: And you may find you do have enough developed subplots and emerging resonant themes to turn your novella into a novel, but if you don't, you still had fun writing it, and pieces of it may help you understand your characters more so you can do a really tight revision. Stuporstar fucked around with this message at 06:21 on Aug 2, 2013 |
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Aug 2, 2013 06:11
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Yeah, I steer clear of anyone who recommends following archtypes as a way to build character. It's sure the fastest way for a lazy hack to build unoriginal characters for their cookie-cutter action novel. I knew I was onto something when I read similar bad advice and realized my main female character didn't fall anywhere within maiden/mother/whore etc. Jungian stereotypes and was instead treated like a real person with a job and stuff.
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Aug 2, 2013 20:46
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SirSigma posted:I also kind of don't like this whole approach the book takes on the archetypes by breaking them down by introversion and extroversion, their different kinds of archetypes, etc. It feels like almost like the over-categorizing that goes on with TVTropes. But to be fair, I guess this book helps you choose what a character does in a situation or another without it feeling unrealistic. See, this is how the blog post I read about archtypes struck me as well, as similar to Troperism in how it talked about using archtypes to build characters. I can't find the post, because it popped up on my blog aggregator weeks ago, but the dude was trying to cram James Bond into the "Businessman" archtype, and it read like someone trying to match their day up to their horroscope, so the example didn't help his argument at all. ViggyNash posted:It's still helpful keep archetypes in mind as you design a character, imo. One way I would use them is to create a very archetypal character, then twist or innovate that character in some interesting way; they would seem generic at first, but would develop into something far more interesting. It also might be interesting to put an archetypal character in a story in order to later use that character in a juxtaposition in order to make another far more interesting. I'd like to think writers grow out of using archtypes or tropes like crutches once they find they have a real character on their hands, one that grows organically as you fire them in the crucible of conflict and extrapolate your own life experiences to help them navigate through those conflicts. This is probably the point where writers starts finding their voice.
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Aug 3, 2013 07:58
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Tell ya'll what, I've added it to the creative resources OP.
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Aug 4, 2013 06:03
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Purple Prince posted:I confess: I'm biased. I don't like eBooks. They have no soul. People said the same thing about the printing press, that only a hand-lettered manuscript could have a "soul." Fetishize a mass-produced physical product all you like, but please stop yammering about it on this electronic message board thread when it's here to talk about the important bit of fiction, which is the words you type onto the computer which eventually make it into the book. Thank you.
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Aug 4, 2013 23:39
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Purple Prince posted:There's an interesting question here: How do you think the medium a book is presented in (i.e. eBook or physical book) affects the reading experience? The important thing is the words. If you need special packaging and little rituals to enjoy reading those words, don't pretend that makes you a better reader than other people, because most people have no problem sinking deep into a text without being precious about it. It's the same with writing. Some authors have rituals (which only end up getting in the way if disrupted), and others have no problem writing no matter where they are. Hey, guess what, having a tablet with keyboard means I can sit down and write anywhere, same with reading. Yes, you can do that with a notepad, but my tablet is a billion times more convenient, especially if I want to transfer those words to a computer once I get home. Also, I type faster than I can write longhand. If you prefer longhand go for it, but don't try to tell people the words they write don't have a "soul" if they don't like writing the old-fashioned way. That's just loving ridiculous, and the same goes for reading. The packaging does not have any affect whatsoever on the words inside unless the author has made conscious decisions in that packaging, and most don't even get a say. In most cases, the cover is a marketing tool created by marketers, so don't give me that bullshit about only physical books having a "soul." Tell you what, why don't you put together a book by hand. Make the paper yourself and bind it. Turn your words into a collage. Then I'll grant you that ONE OF A KIND book has a "soul" and needs to be experienced in person.
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Aug 8, 2013 00:50
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magnificent7 posted:I'm still smacking my head over that whole, "I can highlight a word and look it up IN THE BOOK RIGHT loving THEN AND THERE". Honestly, that's a game changer that should be the end of the conversation. The last physical book I bought was a copy of David Byrne's How Music Works. A couple weeks after I bought it, I read a review that mentioned the ebook version had links to music examples and supplementary reading. In this particular case, it would have enhanced the reading experience. I would have liked to know what a violin sounds like without vibrato. I would have liked to have a sample of Thomas Edison's early recordings. I would have like to hear some African polyrythms. I had to look all this stuff up on my tablet later. Though the hardback version is a nice product, I felt a bit ripped off because you can't do that with a paper copy. Edit: when it comes to non-fiction, I would have also liked to not have to lug around four or more ten-pound textbooks every day in University. Stuporstar fucked around with this message at 04:47 on Aug 8, 2013 |
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Aug 8, 2013 04:43
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Blade_of_tyshalle posted:Here's a question which I have been wrestling with for a while, but it's so basic and stupid that I do not want to ask it of the NYT best-selling author I know because I fear he will think I'm Moon Moon. This is not as stupid a question as you may think. The truth is, most people generally go by what feels right, so there's no simple answer. What I can give you is a bit about how chapters evolved. Leaving aside epic poetry (because I'm not too well read on it), the chapter can be thought of as relating to the act structure in plays. You have an act, which starts and stops at major pivotal points in the narrative. Each act is broken into scenes. Coming out of serial literature, like Dickens and Dumas, you have these acts broken into chapters, usually a slightly larger unit than the scene. Each chapter, as you read them now, was originally one instalment in the series. Because each instalment had to keep the reader both satisfied for the day, yet eager to read the next instalment, it had a natural arc as well as a lead, or cliffhanger. Each chapter has minor pivotal points in the narrative, which can take place over one scene or many. You have to go by feel. Think of it like reading a child a bedtime story over the course of many nights. At some point you have to stop and say, "Go to bed," but you have to answer enough of the child's questions to leave them satisfied or they will keep bugging you and refuse to go to sleep. This is the natural end of a chapter. Once you find it, you can push past it just a bit to create enough unresolved conflict to keep the child riveted. When writing popular fiction, you don't want the child to get comfy and go to sleep. You want to keep them up all night reading. If you're still on your first draft, you're over-thinking it. If you're too hung up on it, divide your story into scenes instead. Save making decisions on chapter breaks for the revision.
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Aug 8, 2013 05:45
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ViggyNash posted:If chapters are acts in a play, then the copy of Dan Brown's Inferno I have sitting next to me has 104 acts. Acts are not chapters. Acts are broken (further) into chapters. Didn't think I needed an adverb there to make that clear. You want at most five acts, but you can break that into as many chapters as you like, or even none at all. All a chapter does is break the narrative into more digestible chunks, whereas the act is an essential unit it in classic plot structure. Stuporstar fucked around with this message at 21:31 on Aug 8, 2013 |
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Aug 8, 2013 20:16
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ViggyNash posted:Just a jest, I didn't mean that literally. Poe's law. You never can tell. The Fiction Farm thread is where you want to post segments of your stuff for critique, not here.
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Aug 9, 2013 00:22
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Funk In Shoe posted:Nobody here will probably remember me, but I figured I'd swing by anyway and give a shout out about the virtues of perseverance, when it comes to actually writing substantial amounts of fiction. I remember you, and thanks for posting this. It's exactly what I needed to hear today. I've been posting a lot less myself because I've been too busy applying nose to grindstone without coming up for air. Revising my novel has been the hardest thing I've done in my life so far, especially because at times it does feel unrewarding. There are days when I look at all the suck I've written and despair. There is no point in me looking for feedback with a novel half revised/half unraveled. I've been on my own with this a long time. I know where it has to go, but right now it feels like trying to file a chunk of copper into a perfect sphere.* Even as my novel takes on a shape I'm more pleased with, I still imagine no one else will give a drat. I don't let that stop me. I have to finish it for myself. *During my old jewellery teacher's apprenticeship in Germany, his master gave him a chunk of copper as big as his hand and told him to file it into a perfect cube. Every time he thought he'd gotten close, he'd hand it to his master, who would scrutinize it with callipers and tell him it wasn't good enough. After almost a year, he finally handed over the copper cube, less than a centimetre square. His master looked it over and said, "Yes, good. This will do." He then handed him another chunk of copper, as big as his fist, and said, "Now make me a perfect sphere." It took him two years of nothing but filing before his master would let him touch a real piece of jewellery. The moral of the story is: until you are willing to put that much effort into something, for that little reward, you have not found your true passion. I didn't have that much passion for jewellery, illustration, or graphic design, but found it in writing, so a writer I am. Stuporstar fucked around with this message at 00:31 on Aug 12, 2013 |
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Aug 11, 2013 23:49
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SurreptitiousMuffin posted:I saw Neil Gaiman give a presentation a few years back, and somebody asked him "how do you become a writer?" I hope everyone got that this is what I'm saying. When I use the term "true passion" I mean whatever keeps you writing on the days you don't want to.
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Aug 12, 2013 07:12
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Yep, there comes a time when you graduate from the Dome, and at that point it's better to move on.Crisco Kid posted:The only requirement of a hobby is that you enjoy it. Period. If you want other people to enjoy it, and you would like to better yourself, then be honest about your goals and prepare to work hard. If you don't want to, fine, but for gently caress's sake, don't avoid something because you've made yourself completely insane with the idea of it. This is also true. I didn't quit drawing just because I decided I didn't want to make a living at it. Not wanting it hard enough doesn't mean you can't do it at all. I have other hobbies too, like making game mods, even though I've never aspired to become a game developer because that would suck the fun out if it for me. You are allowed to do something just for fun.
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Aug 12, 2013 07:55
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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???? Goddamn, I wish. I want it to be like one of those 60s egg chairs, and I'd be all like, "Do not disturb the sanctity of the writing pod," and then swivel the chair so whoever is trying to bug me gets a face full of 60s motherfucking egg chair, so there.
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Aug 13, 2013 09:29
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You can sync Scrivener up to a Dropbox folder, and use any Dropbox compatible writing app on the mobile side. It's a bit clunky, but at least you can work on the most important part, the actual draft, on the go. I so can't wait until they finally release Scrivener for the iPad.
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Aug 20, 2013 23:20
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Chernabog posted:Ok, got ya. There's better ways to show this as well. Some of the best authors use film-like techniques to make the audience feel a character coming out of a lifetime of frailness. It can be something like a man unwilling to let go of his cane after recovering from a car crash. It's conveyed through body language, symbolism, and most importantly character motivations. That's the stuff driving the characters forward into the story, not backward into the backstory.
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Sep 7, 2013 17:16
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Symptomless Coma posted:I don't think that's his implication at all. Especially since any writer worth asking reads more than most readers, and loves it. A writer is more likely to try to tell you how to fix it though. It's not that a writer's crit is worse, but you do have to sift through an extra layer of, "If I were you..." Seb gave me a good crit a few weeks ago, and I found his offered solution completely wrong for me, but his gut reaction about the bad pacing and lack of character motivation present on the page was absolutely right. Often readers can't even give you that much though, just, "This is where I stopped reading." That alone isn't always helpful. Most of my first readers stopped somewhere in the middle, but Sebmojo was the first to point out how the problems started right from the beginning and stretched out from there. The middle was just the point where their eyes could drag no more.
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Oct 22, 2013 08:11
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Good advice from a goon on worldbuilding: http://www.sethdickinson.com/2013/08/30/we-need-worldbuilding/#more-54 Seriously, read it.
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Nov 3, 2013 02:31
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General Battuta posted:Caveat that I banged that out over lunch in response to a Twitter discussion, so don't expect a hermetically sealed monolith of logic. But I'm glad it was useful! Still, you managed to peg exactly why I cringe when people slam worldbuilding as nothing but loving the dog (which it often is, but as you say, but ...). I have about 10k words worth of notes on biological/anthropological details about aliens so I can make their action/reactions different from the human norm, and I try not to wedge my drat notes into the novel (I rely on beta readers telling me, "Throw me a frikken bone here." before adding exposition). I also have a few thousand words dedicated, not to how future technologies might work, but how people use their crap on a daily basis and how they take it for granted, who has the tech, who doesn't, and why, and how it alters how they communicate. I always figured since writers have trouble with that today (such as conveniently forgetting that cell phones exist when they might easily solve the plot problem) wasting a few words to work that poo poo out in advance was worth the effort. So yeah, what you said clicked with me, and mentioning how well Ursula Leguin does it was really interesting. Edit: Harlan Ellison also has an interesting essay about Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes called The Whore With a Heart of Iron Pyrite: or Where Does a Writer Go to Find Maggie? that talks about how he builds the background details in his head about every character he writes. Imagining what kind of apartment Maggie lived in, even though you never get that detail anywhere in his story, was one of the details he needed to imagine what kind of person she is. Stuporstar fucked around with this message at 03:00 on Nov 3, 2013 |
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Nov 3, 2013 02:48
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General Battuta posted:The problem in writing racist sexist medieval Europe settings is that people usually botch the way the racism and sexism worked. Women had a fair bit of power in medieval society, and there were a lot of non-white people with roles in these societies beyond 'outsider' or 'slave'. Of course, both women and POC were constrained by the institutionalized misogyny and xenophobia of the system they lived in, and you can tell really compelling stories about those flaws. Just don't write a rape-happy world of whores and housewives while crying that women were never rulers and never soldiers and never powerful and call it a realistic depiction of medieval misogyny: you've elided both the actual roles that women played in medieval society and the ways they tried to resist or just live within the power structure. Oh yeah, that's one of my pet peeves, is people delving no further than the Victorian idea of what Medieval life was like, which was actually based on the Renaissance and half made up for moralizing purposes, and the writer transposing their own juvenile ideas onto it--ending in a fantasy world where politics are based entirely on Borgia backstabbing and every woman gets raped.
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Nov 22, 2013 22:37
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General Battuta posted:Happy not to disappoint. I just finished reading The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay where one of the main characters is gay in the loving 1940s, and what happened to him was heartbreaking. It's totally possible. It's just a matter of projecting your sympathies from the right angle. I know I've worried about the same thing in the past, and it took me way too long to figure out it all comes down to POV. I know you probably don't need this advice, General Battuta, but I've noticed some of the most unintentionally offensive writing comes from dudes who have a male proxy character fixating on their far more interesting female character, because they're too loving scared to write from a woman's POV. I've told several of these people to scrap the male character (with zero personality except horny for the interesting chick) and write from the girl/woman's POV instead, and they always wuss out and walk away from the challenge little boys. It's loving frustrating when they've managed to come up with honestly amazing female characters, but refuse to get inside their heads.
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Nov 23, 2013 09:36
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I've been working on a project about a really dark, homophobic world, so I can only hope it's possible to write about horrible poo poo without being horrible.
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PoshAlligator posted:Oh man, I've been planning on doing this. There is no asexual attraction between the characters, though. I was going for a more Watson/Sherlock thing, where the female knows things that the male and therefore the reader don't, for like, intrigue or something. I dunno. Looking back at what I'd posted last night, I'd say the unintentionally offensive part is a personality-free male character who serves as a proxy for the author to drool over the interesting female character (which I have seen way too many times), and comes across as the young, insecure dude version of Twilight. I'd say you're safe on that count with a Watson/Sherlock thing. When it comes to POV, just remember to go with the person who has the most at stake. You have to have a reason to put the reader in the Watson's head, more reason than just hiding things from the reader. Your Watson has to have enough tension and conflict to carry the story—otherwise, scrap the Watson. Writing from your female character's POV is a good idea even if it ends up not fitting and you pull it out afterwards. In earlier drafts of my first complete novel, I forced the focal character's POV in because I thought she balanced the other two male POVs. It wasn't until I nearly finished the second draft that I realized how uncomfortably she was wedged in there (and it took more than one person telling me I'd smushed three separate stories together and they didn't mesh well). In every one of her chapters, the tension dropped to zero and I had to manufacture conflict. Because she was the one character who had her poo poo together, I had to literally have poo poo smash through the ceiling to shake her up. I decided to pull her POV entirely, but having written it, she's coming across as more real in every scene I write from outside her POV, and staying outside her head keeps her dominant and intimidating. The effort was not wasted. I'd say it was even necessary. I'm the kind of writer who needs to test drive every major character by writing scenes for them. Whether or not I use those scenes doesn't matter. The exercise is useful.
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Nov 23, 2013 21:37
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The only acceptable narrative reason I can think of for doing a thing like that is if you're telling the story in first person and having someone ask them to tell their side of the story as a framing device. In that case, doing what's grammatically correct is more than likely going to get in the way of telling the story, so just chuck the quotation marks and find a more subtle way to lead into a character talking for an entire chapter or whatever. If you're instead doing it because you just want to barf out exposition in huge meaty chunks, please don't. People don't tend to spill their life stories in such length and so coherently unless they're eager to see their name in print and someone's sitting in front of them taking notes. Edit: Update based on new info. My advice is don't. Write the father's backstory and then cut it. Then try to find ways to imply the backstory without using exposition at all, and you'll have a stronger story for it (whoever's running TD this week, please make this a flash rule for McSlaughter). PoshAlligator posted:Funnily enough, as a dude, I try to write from a female perspective wherever possible. I think because I am not female, I have to stretch a little more when thinking about female characters, and I think that pays off in the end and stops me using dumb shortcuts by making male characters that are just quite similar to me but a bit different. I find the same thing. The more similar a character is to me, the duller they tend to be, so I try to stretch my experience out as far away from myself as possible. Stuporstar fucked around with this message at 04:00 on Nov 24, 2013 |
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Nov 24, 2013 03:51
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McSlaughter posted:Haha, well poo poo, that really sort of tears my story to shreds. I guess I'd better come up with something new. Don't you wimp out on me. Exposition is for the weak. A real warrior wordslinger tells a story through subtext, lies, and long lingering pauses full of discomfort. And symbolism. Stuporstar fucked around with this message at 04:14 on Nov 24, 2013 |
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Nov 24, 2013 04:12
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McSlaughter posted:See, but I really wouldn't say that the father's story is exposition at all. But I guess it's all subjective and I'm not very experienced to begin with so my arguing is futile. YES! This is what the Thunderdome is about. Good luck, soldier.
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Nov 24, 2013 04:21
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Oh for gently caress's sake. Thunderdome used to be about pushing people out of their comfort zones and encouraging them to try something they may have never thought of before. The whole point of flash rules was to add an extra constraint if we felt you needed one for that extra push. Sure, you can submit whatever the gently caress you want and if it sucks it sucks. McSlaughter can even reject the Oblique Strategy I just handed him, but it would be a damned shame if he didn't even try. Is TD not about challenging you guys at all anymore? Is creative discomfort not a thing you're willing to engage with? You all just want to cruise along doing whatever? Fine. Do whatever.
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Nov 24, 2013 23:42
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McSlaughter posted:I just typed up my second draft and I promise you it was not a wall of exposition. I pushed myself and I'd really like to think this rewrite came out really well. Now to do some editing to make sure it actually worked. Know that my rant wasn't directed at you but at all those people whining on your behalf. By your posts, I get the feeling you stepped up to the challenge, and I look forward to reading your entry. Whether you win or not, you're a winner for pushing yourself. Stuporstar fucked around with this message at 01:01 on Nov 25, 2013 |
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Nov 25, 2013 00:58
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Symptomless Coma posted:Here's a thought: if TD makes anyone not write a thing they were going to write, it's definitely performing the opposite of its function. Except that's not what happened.   Here's a thought: let's not project our own insecurities on another poster because his initial gut reaction was, "drat, that sounds hard," but decided to try the suggestion anyway and it turned out the story he wanted to write turned out even better for him and he felt satisfied for having done something he initially thought difficult, which is what really happened. VV Then you do that. Good for you. Stuporstar fucked around with this message at 22:38 on Nov 25, 2013 |
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Nov 25, 2013 22:24
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ravenkult posted:Sounds like you're luring me into a loving trap. I wouldn't worry. Apparently TD only uses nerf bats these days.
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Nov 25, 2013 22:49
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