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Cuckoo posted:The big problem is that each one is from a separate "school", and they are all on iffy terms at best (they all think their method of teaching/culture is the best, and a couple have rivalries towards each other). So why would one representative of each school team up to stop the big bad? It seems like every reason for them to get together is cheesy. They all have to get together to represent their Griffon College Sports Team and poo poo get hosed up? Oh wait, I think that's a plot from Harry Potter.
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May 24, 2015 03:10
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Cuckoo posted:I've actually never read Harry Potter, my ripoff-inspirations were Dragonriders of Pern and Animorphs v Being afraid of ripping something off is one of those dumb writers fears that has little basis in reality since anything you come up with is everything you've ever seen or heard filtered through you anyway. Don't avoid books because you're afraid they might be too close to your ideas. Instead seek them out because you can learn a lot, even if it's how not to do your idea. I actually find reading books like that a relief because they turn out not to be like what I was planning at all. I think the closest I ever came to going, "Aw, dammit." due to an author saying nearly everything I wanted to was Octavia Butler, but that still didn't stop me from wanting to write my story. So yeah, consider what I said a recommendation to read Harry Potter. I can't remember which book had all the wizarding schools get together for their championship thing though.
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May 24, 2015 06:40
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magnificent7 posted:The BITCH though is finding that comfy medium between READ MORE and WRITE MORE. I have taken READ to heart so much that I kind of don't write no more. Just constantly reading, going, "yeah yeah remember how they did that when you start writing again. Later." I spent a year reading and not writing, and when I finally sat down to work I found I could write better than I ever had before. I suppose it helped that I upped the quality in my reading material.
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May 28, 2015 01:47
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jimcunningham posted:What's the best way to tackle short dialogues in with telepathy or the like? Currently I have it as Read (or re-read) Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man. It's all about telepathy, and he did some interesting stuff with formatting there.
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Jun 28, 2015 20:50
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General Battuta posted:Yeah, it's really hard. I've been through it, came out the other side, and I don't know if I learned anything about handling it beyond 'get better.' Think I need to trade in my 1D4. Bobby Deluxe posted:I feel like I'm getting on top of it more and more recently, like the last month or so especially. Got my routine down and am more able to concentrate. Heatwave has knocked me down a little this week but the important thing is I'm getting back up quicker and learning from my mistakes. You need something like this: http://www.engadget.com/2012/09/29/brian-eno-scope/ I use that one. It's pretty cool.
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Jul 3, 2015 01:56
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Agent355 posted:Without typing up a huge summary of why it's important to introduce the main character late let's just say I have a few options. 4. Cut everything before your protagonist shows up. Two reasons: Protagonist literally translates as "first actor," as Aristotle defined it in Poetics, and this expectation hasn't changed much since. I learned this the hard way, starting my first novel from the antagonist's POV because I thought it would be an interesting way to introduce the characters. Nope. All I did was create confusion about who the story was supposed to be about. Second, all that world-bullding you think is so important to establish context before the story begins is not as important as you think it is—because the story should only begin when the story begins. The thing is, you know yourself that the story doesn't really begin until your protagonist shows up, you've said so, and that the pacing is slow, and that this is a problem. You're just terrified to do what you need to because it's a huge decision that requires going through everything you established in those cut chapters and rewriting it into the actual story in a more natural way. At least that's my take on your general predicament based on past experience, knowing nothing about what you've actually written.
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Aug 7, 2015 02:43
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General Battuta posted:My book is out, reviews are kind, Publisher's Weekly gave it a Nice, I'm waiting to see it in my local nerd store (or get them to bring it in) so I can go, "Yo, I know that guy online and he's cool."
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Sep 16, 2015 05:40
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, please buy it so I can afford to own a cat 
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change my name posted:How do you guys deal with the overwhelming urge to keep adding whatever new dumb poo poo you think sounds cool to your longer works when you go back to edit? Depends on how far you are in edits and how developed your draft is the first time you puke it out of your brain. If you're like me and write more of a "draft 0," which is what I call the horrible mash of exposition, outline, bare-bones scenes, and white-room dialogue I need to get out of me before I even have a cohesive first draft, then it probably needs fleshing out. But if you're in a later editing stage and just adding flourishes because you're getting bored, start another file for that and leave it out of the draft--unless you look back and decide it actually enhances the story and know exactly where to fit it in.
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Sep 26, 2015 02:34
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As someone who's wrestled with my own demons and won, I can confirm. Just loving write is the only advice worth a drat. I set aside an hour in my calendar app to repeat every day. I could move that hour to any time, but I wasn't allowed to delete it. If I'd butted that hour against midnight, I'd have to drop everything and write. It's not like I had anything important to do that late at night, so I had no excuse not to. This removed the first mental hurdle: the question of whether or not I was going to write that day. The first month sucked. I'd sit in front of a blank screen completely unprepared. I'd type any old poo poo just to say I was writing. So I'd write about why I wasn't writing, how much it sucked, and what I could do to avoid this lovely situation in the future. I started outlining a day ahead to make sure I always had something planned. I didn't always follow it, but it removed the next mental hurdle: not knowing what to write. After getting through the first lovely month, the second one went a lot smoother. I knew I was going to write and what I was going to write. The next mental hurdle was worrying about whether my poo poo was any good or not. I got over that by powering through. I'd have bad days where I'd only dribble out 200 words or so and they were all crap. So instead of spending the rest of the hour beating my head against lovely prose or a plot dead end, I'd switch back to outlining. I'd work out how the story wasn't working and how I wanted it to go instead. The next day I'd have an awesome writing session that more than made up for the lovely one before. By powering through the lovely day, I'd prepped my subconscious to work out the story problem. I learned you need to write bad words to make the good ones come out. So even my worst days were worth something so long as I was writing. I had to up my game from there to pull 20k a month, and that was by not thinking about that goal but placing smaller ones before me. I broke that into 5k a week, and that felt more doable. It's less that 1000 words/day. It also doesn't take much more than my original hour/day. It averages out to more like an hour and a half. It also accounts for lovely writing days because it has just enough days for me to make them up.
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Oct 6, 2015 06:05
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It still seems too coy with details for a proper query synopsis. I've read advice from a few agents that say, "Please tell me the ending. I want to know if it's worth my time." So ending on the kind of teaser question you'd put on the back of the book probably won't do you any favors.
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Feb 29, 2016 04:25
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Screaming Idiot posted:That sounds like the sort of story that would just go on and on forever. It's actually called the Neverending Story because no one ever finishes part two.
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Feb 29, 2016 22:53
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sebmojo posted:Part 2 is actually legit horrifying. All I can remember (I was 10 or so, so it's been a while) is the kid turned out to be such an unpleasant little fuckhead when he got teleported into the world, I couldn't stomach reading about him any longer, put down the book, and never touched it again.
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Mar 2, 2016 06:24
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sebmojo posted:It's worth tracking it down and reading it, it has quite the dark but ultimately uplifting message. I might. It's probably more readable with an adult perspective anyway. At 10 years old, reading about a kid who stomps into that fantasy world and says, "You are all my toys. gently caress you, do as I say." made me think wtf, dude, I thought you were cool, especially since he was merely a cipher for the reader in part one. But a pathetic bullied nerd who turns into a bully the moment he's given a bit of power... sounds about right actually. I'm guessing horrible things must happen to the little punk. Stuporstar fucked around with this message at 19:30 on Mar 2, 2016 |
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Mar 2, 2016 19:27
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^^ You own, and I'm working back up to this, because "being a writer" is the goal, and means doing exactly what you've said.HIJK posted:You are definitely right and I do my best to put down whatever comes to me in that moment as soon as possible. I commiserate. I've spent the past month banging together a sloppy and stilted first chapter only to have to refocus and start again, even though I already wrote a full first draft of the novel and outlined it. It just wasn't working, but knuckle-dragging my way through a shitload of the wrong words was necessary. The only way to prime the subconscious to work for you is to feed it words. Even the wrong ones will do, because the wrong words are a problem to be solved that will itch in your mind until it finds a solution. Feed it the wrong words and then take a break: for an hour, a day, a week (not recommended, but I'm so guilty of this). But write the wrong words down before you do, because doing nothing before you stop will grind the whole process to a halt. I'll tell you what helped me was refocusing on why I wanted to tell this story, and since it's narrated in first person, why my main character wanted to tell this story. I had to imagine my character walking into a bar or whatever and figuring out how he'd introduce himself, because that's the opening scene. It has to grab the audience's attention and also make them give a gently caress, and the way I originally started the story was the wrong way to do that, in the worst possible way. I also have to keep that why in mind for every scene, not just the opening one. I stopped writing for almost a week to figure my poo poo out, but I didn't stop completely. I wrote down every line/idea that popped into my head. I re-outlined. I read four novels last week, just to keep absorbing better words than my slug-brained dross. And every false start kept the momentum going, even if I only wrote 10 words. Anything is significantly better than nothing. Also, don't spend too much energy on the wrong words. I have to fight the urge not to polish every scene as I write, because chucking out a scene you've edited three or more times is the stupid way to write a story and I've done that way too many times. I'm not yet good enough at structuring a novel to tell if I'm writing stupid crap that doesn't fit the story, so I now get it all out in a half-assed manner and then figure out which scenes stay and which have to go. At least, I'm trying to get better at doing this, because even outlining doesn't always tell me for certain whether or not what I'm going to write is a dumbfuck idea. I still spend too much energy writing crap before I figure my poo poo out. I'm hoping to get less bad at this with more consistent effort. Stuporstar fucked around with this message at 22:00 on Mar 21, 2016 |
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Mar 21, 2016 21:45
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HIJK posted:I have a brand new character that I'm holding like a tiny little doll and I keep thinking, "you're so cute, what am I going to do with you?" Stick him in an environment, wind his little key, and see where he goes.
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Apr 17, 2016 07:05
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Djeser posted:In broader terms, I think an ideal action scene is one where a character trait becomes an advantage--not a trump card, but something they can use instead of brute force. An action scene that's too easy might be one where the hero knows the weak spot, so all he has to do is shoot the monster there and then it dies. That's not fun. But if the monster can guard its weak spot, then he has to wait for an opening. Don't give your character an opening that any bozo could use to succeed, give them an opening that only they could use to succeed. I just realized this is why JoJo is so good, even though it's written so bad
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Sep 8, 2016 22:15
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crabrock posted:esp if it's a trait they didn't possess at the beginning of the work, but acquired over the course of the story. something like patience or whatever the gently caress. or a stand that punches cartoon sound effects into your face
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Sep 9, 2016 00:29
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Scrivener + Dropbox ftw
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Sep 18, 2016 01:46
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Has anyone here come across good examples of epistolary first person that borders on second person because the letter is addressing another character in the story? I've been trying out the style because I thought it would help focus the story, since it forces me to consider exactly what my protagonist wants to say to this other person and leave out the rest. However my first reader says it's "dense and hard to follow." If I can't make it work, I may have to drop the conceit and write in a straight first person, but then I might have to lose little asides like, "What the hell were you thinking when you X?." And dammit, I was having fun writing those. Besides Calvino, the only other example I've read is William Gibson's short story New Rose Hotel, and it was dense and hard to follow as well. Addressing the reader as "you" seems to be too distracting. Maybe I should take that as a sign. 
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Oct 19, 2016 04:43
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a friendly penguin posted:Currently reading Us Conductors by Sean Michaels. The premise is a fictional biography of Lev Termen, inventor of the theremin and Soviet spy, written as a letter to a woman he loved, Clara Rockmore. I did an edit to take out most of my second person references in my 2500 word experimental scene, whittling it down to a couple second person sentences near the beginning and end as a frame. My first reader said it made a huge difference in the readability, that saving the use of "you" for only a couple key moments made those moments stand out in a good way. So the problem seemed to be picking a scene where both characters were major actors and insisting on using "you" every time. Now that I think of it, most epistolary fiction gets around the problem by being presented as letters written to inform someone of events they weren't present in. My protagonist is writing these letters to people he's lost in an effort to conjure them back to life as he sits in jail. I don't have to lean so heavily on the second person for that, and given how hard it is to read, probably shouldn't. I'm glad I tried the experiment though. I learned quite a bit from it.
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Oct 19, 2016 18:27
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I find writing fuels the best thinking. If I'm stuck, I try to write my way out. If the stuff I write is bad, knowing it's bad itches my brain so much, it spurs me to try to think up something better. After a bad writing day, I may throw out everything I've written, but it leads me to rewrite it with a better idea, rather than sitting in front of a blank screen going durrr. But my best writing sessions also come from taking half an hour or more to run through the scene in my head the night before. That and struggling with a story problem before giving up and going to bed (letting it go after the struggle is key, otherwise you're liable to lie awake all night). It gets my subconscious working on the problem, and I usually end up figuring poo poo out by the time I wake up.
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Nov 25, 2016 23:04
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Harrow posted:In relation to the narration tense/person discussion earlier on this page: I decided to switch to 1st person when I realized all my favorite books were written that way. A weak 1st person is worse than a weak 3rd, which is why I stepped back from my instincts to write in 1st until I found a voice strong enough to tackle it (and also learned to write gooder). A good conversational tone is one way to pull it off, but there's other ways to make the POV sound natural. A good 1st person is focused on why the narrator is telling the story, and having a fictional audience in mind helps focus the story as well. I'm thinking specifically of things like prison confessionals like Lolita or Mother Night. Close third is great though, and tons of highly respected writers use it. I can't even imagine what kind of bug your profs had up their butt about it.
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Nov 29, 2016 21:19
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Harrow posted:It wasn't close third they had a problem with, but the idea of an omniscient (or limited-omniscient) third-person narrator with a personality of their own, even though they're not a character in the story. I guess they thought that, if you wrote the third-person narrator like an actual person telling the reader the story (while not being a character in the story) the reader would just end up confused and wonder who the narrator is. I never really agreed with that. I don't read A Series of Unfortunate Events and go, "Yes, but who is telling me this story? Who is this person? How do they know this?", y'know? But that's the question they always asked, so eventually I just dropped it and never looked back. Ah, ok. You didn't mention omnicient. As BB mentioned above, it's considered outdated by modernists, which is why they probably hated it. But then something like Infinite Jest comes out, doing exactly what you described—limited omniscient 3rd person, so close the character's psychology determines the writing style—and the same people all cry, "Genius!" So hating it as a concept, rather than just because they're not seeing it done well, is a case of your bog-standard hypocritical academic rear end-hattery, which tends to plague all art programs.
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Nov 29, 2016 23:14
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I've written the misfit-goes-crazy-in-utopia scenario. I love conflict that comes from people with good intentions doing the wrong thing. It's so much more realistic to me than coloring every antagonist different shades of evil.
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Jan 12, 2017 08:44
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