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Yeah, more often than not, very simple changes and a command of language goes just as far as actual phoenetic dialect without running the risk of being annoying. For instance, Lonesome Dove uses very little apostrophes or phoenetic spellings -- just word placement, the right vocabulary, slightly incorrect grammar, and occasionally reminding the reader someone is speaking in a "soft drawl" or something like that and you never really lost the dialect the characters are speaking in. I don't have my books with me at the moment, but some random examples on goodreads: quote:“Nobody run off with her,” Roscoe said. "She just run off with herself, I guess.” quote:Monkey John looked at the dead boy. "By God, life is cheap up here on the goddamned Canadian River." quote:“I hate rude behavior in a man," he explained in his quiet, unassuming drawl. "I won't tolerate it." He politely tipped his hat, and rode away. Another good example of accents is Salman Rushdie. You can hear his Indian characters' accents in your head without really noticing or stumbling on the the dialogue. Then you have poo poo like Clockwork Orange where it just involves being incredibly skilled to make it work. I recently read Mason and Dixon and I'm not even sure what Dixon's accent is supposed to sound like but it was very beautiful to read.
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Aug 16, 2012 18:21
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Short sentences vs. long sentences -- I find myself torn on this, because it seems modern thinking is definitely shorter, direct sentences, and I think my own writing reflects that. But, I think I find flowery, verbose writers more enjoyable to read. For instance I am reading The Gospel According to Jesus Christ right now. Saramego loves to layer on comma after comma: quote:In this place known as Golgotha, many have met the same cruel fate and many others will follow them, but this naked man, nailed by hands and feet to a cross, the son of Joseph and Mary, named Jesus, is the only one whom posterity will remember and honor by inscribing his initials in capitals. and has no fear of adjectives, adverbs, or any regard for quotation marks or dialogue breaks: quote:Joseph, furious that this news should come to Mary not quietly and with measured words from his own lips but blurted tactlessly by hysterical neighbors, said in a solemn voice, It's true that God doesn't always choose to wield the powers exercised by Caesar but God has powers denied Caesar. It might be a lovely example in regards to that Twain quote since Saramego was writing in Porteguese, but it reads perfectly fine in English. And some of the other vices Twain mentions can also be done well. David Foster Wallace is excessively wordy and verbose, but I love his writing. You can say, yeah yeah but both those guys were masters of the craft, but so were Twain and Hemingway. Is it just easier to competently pull off shorter, direct sentences? Probably.
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Aug 20, 2012 19:07
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blonde is the feminine noun. quote:He had known of her type before. These are the pretty girls that languish around pretty towns waiting for a bit of adventure or a bit of cock. They are almost adults etc I'm not totally against tense shifts but this is awkward. Brett's other misogynist judgements are in the past tense, why change? Feels almost like the narrator is affirming them or something. If he wanted the brunette standing next to the blonde, why did he pursue the blonde? If I look at your first edit, I know this is becuase it occured after but that sentence doesn't fit right anymore. quote:The driver ground the gears down on the Renault and made a right off the main road and onto a pale and rocky dirt road. Brett spotted a plinth at the corner with an etched marble sign, but it was too overgrown to read. The little one lane driveway was hemmed in by low scruby evergreens and the Renault did not take it well. A few hundred yards down, they broke out of the low forest and into a brush clearing. There was no grass here, just brush and that sandy rocky dirt. Is this a story about dirt and brush! I think in between edits, you realize the story had to start later than it did, but I still don't think you're there. There's no hook. If you want to start with the car ride or the flashback, you have to hint heavily that poo poo goes down at this barn with too many adjectives and brushy sandy rocky dirt clearing. Also, Brett is a douche but I am extremely ambivalent about him. I guess what I am trying to say is this is boring.
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Sep 7, 2012 21:39
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Every interview I've read about a (good) writer of historical fiction has involved an enormous amount of research. Like way way more information than made it into the book. They usually come off as people who are interested in history or actual historians rather than "writer who had a cool idea about X time period". Anyway, seeing this is a short story and not a novel, you probably shouldn't spend forever researching. Prioritize what's important. Ballparking the cost of the gun and travel time is probably fine and also exact numbers would be very difficult to find. It's the other two that seem important. I'm assuming the story is about Federation Day or it figures in heavily, in which case, why not go to the library and find a couple books on Australian history and read their perspectives on it? As for the Wiradjuri, you always have to be careful writing about marginalized people and make the effort to get correct information. That said, gently caress, man, just googling a little bit seems like there is not much information out there and I don't even know how you'd verify it. There's some rare as hell book about them out there that you could try to find, but I don't really have an answer. I'm not Australian, are you? Are there like cultural centers you could visit or something?
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Oct 3, 2012 17:54
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Chillmatic posted:Can I gripe about something that's been bothering the crap out of me lately? awful dialogue and cliched characters in every loving book I try to pick up and read. I bought The Passage for my dad when it came out and bought part 2 (The Twelve) for him for Christmas. It's not something I'd ever pick up and read (more on that later), but he enjoyed it. I couldn't ever see "boring, poorly written, banal writing" ever being a complaint of his. Or even "bad writing" in general. If you hear him talk about a book he likes, like The Passage, he is talking about the plot -- I got it for him because I know he loves Stephen King and The Stand in particular and the book jacket makes that comparison. He is going to talk about zombies and the end of the world and whatever the gently caress, and if he did not like the book, it is going to be how that poo poo didn't work not that it wasn't written well, even if in reality those things are probably intertwined. What this comes down to is that some generic dialogue in a gigantic book about zombies and the post-apocalypse is only really going to bother people who care about good writing (the minority). The plot, the ghouls, the action, the pacing, the world building, the stakes, the buildup and conclusion, etc. For a good example of this, look at the reasons heavy genre readers praise or condemn a book. Those things are all tied into good/bad writing (at a craft level) too, but less visibly and sometimes lovely writing is just incredibly compelling to massive amounts of people due to some other factors. Try to explain Twilight's popularity. Something I find way harder to explain is how to be selective and find well-written books. Other than avoiding the front display table at Barnes and Noble anyway. Recording books that you hear of or are recommended to you by reliable sources helps. I have a large to-read list. Goodreads recommendation tool can be pretty useful if you have a fair amount of books entered. I am totally someone who tries to read a very wide variety of authors rather than consuming the whole oeuvre of a favorite quickly and that can help; it increases my "I like to read writers like X" pool. I almost never just take a book off of a shelf with no recommendation if it's not an author I am aware of. And if I do, I sit down at the bookstore and read the first 20 pages. I think it's sort of a snowballing process -- as you get better at trying to find well-written books, it becomes easier to do so. For me, anyway. EDIT: I'm trying to think of some awesome dialogue writers I like. Salman Rushdie for sure. ultrachrist fucked around with this message at 00:58 on Jan 12, 2013 |
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Jan 12, 2013 00:46
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I don't think it's a matter of "too much" or not, just if you handled it well. Like if you used cutting for shock value or to denigrate a person or something along those lines instead of treating the subject matter respectfully. This is going to be a deal breaker for some people, but you that is going to be out of your control and it's simply impossible to cater to everyone's trigger points.
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Jan 15, 2013 19:15
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Dr. Kloctopussy posted:Take lessons from the masters: pull out your favorite books and look for physical descriptions. Consider how they handled it and how well it worked. You might be surprised at how clumsily it's handled, even by experienced writers (looking in a mirror, oh lord). From Wolf Hall (awesome book btw), she'll often do characterization blurbs like the following: Hilary Mantel posted:The duke is now approaching sixty years old, but concedes nothing to the calendar. Flint-faced and keen-eyed, he is lean as a gnawed bone and as cold as an ax head; his joints seem knitted together of supple chain links, and indeed he rattles a little as he moves, for his clothes conceal relics:in tiny jeweled cases he has shavings of skin and snippets of hair, and set into medallions he wears splinters of martyrs' bones. "Marry!" he says, for an oath, and "By the Mass!," and sometimes takes out one of his medals or charms from wherever it is hung about his person, and kisses it in a fervor, calling on some saint or martyr to stop his current rage getting the better of him. "Saint Jude give me patience!" he will shout; probably he has mixed him up with Job, whom he heard about in a story when he was a little boy at the knee of his first priest. It is hard to imagine the duke as a little boy, or in any way younger or different from the self he presents now. He thinks the Bible a book unnecessary for laypeople, though he understands priests make some use of it. He thinks book-reading an affectation altogether, and wishes there was less of it at court. His niece is always reading, Anne Boleyn, which is perhaps why she is unmarried at the age of twenty-eight. He does not see why it's a gentleman's business to write letters; there are clerks for that. So the physical description of the Duke, which does not get down to minutia like eye and hair color totally sets up the personality-quirk half of the paragraph. In any case, you get a very full, visual picture of the Duke without requiring much physical detail. The next paragraph has him fixing an eye "red and fiery" at the protagonist of the novel, which again feeds off the physical look he had described right before.
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Apr 27, 2013 00:48
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Yeah, I thought the cutesy language was fine. It's absolutely fitting and believable that a person who is the submissive role wouldn't use explicit language.
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Jun 5, 2013 01:09
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Symptomless Coma posted:There's a lot in what Beef says. Much as I hate Charles Bukowski's manner sometimes, he has a point with this: http://zenpencils.com/comic/97-charles-bukowski-air-and-light-and-time-and-space/ I really hate the sentiment that desiring a writing space is excuse making (as per that comic). I work better alone in my home office space. This isn't just writing, it includes the creative parts of my actual job (product spec writing and some UI/Web design). I work faster and of higher quality by myself, in a quiet, familiar place with light music. Noise distracts me and I can't pace to consider a difficult problem without looking weird. I liken it to reading. You can read anywhere. I read on the bus every day, clinging to a strap while my thumb throbs because I am reading one-handed, while homeless people expound their gripes about the universe, and the bus lurches and screeches like some stygian beast. It's not as thorough, satisfying, or close of a read as laying in bed and (for me) the same goes for writing.
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Aug 13, 2013 19:46
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General_Disaster posted:I have a question for the assembled. I am going to disagree a bit with the posters who responded to this (w/r/t advice based on avoiding it completely) since I am reading a book that does this well -- The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton. There's 13 main characters (book is like 800 pages) who all know part of a plot and the perspective will shift between them mid-chapter; the narrator will also make commentary on occasion. The perspective shifts are subtle. They're not really announced, but there's usually like a setup to it. So, say Walter is the current persepective and the narrative needs to shift to Thomas. They'd have a conversation and then something like "Thomas considered what Walter said and recalled that time back in England when he...[backstory/now Thomas' perspective]". There's mid-chapter breaks that come from minor scene changes and the chapters end on major scene changes to other other characters/topics. It also has some kind of rigid astrological structure I don't understand. Anyway, it's all highly structured and works. As a result, the only weird parts are the occasional short paragraph where we get the thoughts or background of one of the non-13 cast. Even with the omniscient narrator, it's strange. ultrachrist fucked around with this message at 18:28 on Apr 22, 2014 |
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Apr 22, 2014 18:25
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