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Chillmatic posted:This thread's getting a bit anemic. I don't know about beginning a novel with the inciting incident but it should definitely begin with an inciting incident of some kind, even if it's small.
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Mar 18, 2013 17:42
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Molly Bloom posted:With a character driven work, I still try to follow Vonnegut's advice and start as close to the end as possible. I'd just like to point out for the record that the piece of Vonnegut's advice that you're referring to is specifically for short stories.
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Mar 19, 2013 22:34
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I hate it so much that in language, if enough stupid people are wrong and loud about it for long enough, they eventually become right.
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Jun 1, 2013 21:10
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Symptomless Coma posted:Language change is great when it adds to our expressive power - when we have more terms to say exactly what we mean, and know we're going to be understood. Language change is bad when inaccuracies reduce our expressive power, or invert (pervert) it. Yes, this sums up my position pretty well. I'm in favour of everything which makes unambiguous communication easier.
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Jun 2, 2013 13:07
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I've got a villain character and he's getting up to give a dinner speech to his people. The speech needs to prove that he's done some bad things. But he's not a moustache-twirling cackling guy. He can't straight up say, "I did this terrible thing, and it hurt people, and I like that, ahahaha! Because I am a bad person." That's dumb. I'm finding it hard to phrase this question, but what kind of things should he say? What phrases? He and his people found something incredibly valuable to the world at large, and have essentially stolen it for themselves, denying the rest of the world. This is obviously incredibly selfish but I'm having difficulty putting myself in the shoes of someone who'd do that and then declare it a huge success and just not care. The core phrase I've got at the moment is "We're protecting the world from itself", which I think is pretty strong. I mean, what does a Mafia boss say at a big meeting? In reality?
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Sep 1, 2013 21:16
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Jeza posted:Why would they care? For whose sake are they justifying their actions? DivisionPost posted:It sounds like you've just got a motivation problem. sebmojo posted:Have him give an honest and heartfelt explanation about why he is the good guy. All of this is good, thanks. I obviously need to further into this character's "why" than I did.
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Sep 1, 2013 22:30
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One thing I am sure of is that nobody can write a sentence for somebody else. You can tell somebody what the problem is to any number of decimal places, but nobody can ever rewrite a story on someone else's behalf, because the words will simply not be correct for the original writer. At the end of the day, the original writer has to repair his or her own thing. Which is to say that the "what" can come from critics, but the "how" always must come from the writer.
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Oct 26, 2013 00:24
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I find the present tense is great for writing fights and action.
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Oct 30, 2013 12:34
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Martello posted:I have this idea that if you can't "just sit down and write" then you may not be a writer. I suggest that not being able to just sit down and write is a problem more commonly had by writers than by any other group of people.
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Feb 7, 2014 11:37
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Hocus Pocus posted:I think approaching a story from the mindset of what is the conflict, instead of what is the plot, will help me break of of my fairly conventional brainstorming. I've been reading a collection of Isaac Asimov stories and trying to think about what the conflict is in each one. In Day of the Hunters is the conflict simply the professor trying to convince the technicians he saw what wiped out the dinosaurs? Is it also an internal conflict of reluctance to tell them? Stories like Does a Bee Care? are clearer, but then in something like Silly Asses, a story where the Galactic keeper of records strikes Earth from a list of planets to join a federation because we haven't entered outer space, and test atomic weapons on our own service, is less clear. Its more like the creative presentation of an idea -- maybe I am thinking too strictly about what a short story is? I think some of Asimov's short stories just don't have a conventional conflict. They function much more like jokes, where all you're really given is a setup/hook which is compelling enough to get you to read to the end and find the resolution/punchline. Of course, many of them literally are just jokes.
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Apr 28, 2014 18:40
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Dr. Kloctopussy posted:Read a bunch of books with car chase scenes in them and take notes, then write your own. NO PLAGARIZING. So what you're actually saying is you've never read a car chase in a book, or written one?
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Jul 3, 2014 20:29
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Benny the Snake posted:Any tips on how to write a good car chase scene? Here is an actual car chase which for various reasons I wrote in probably about 90 minutes altogether, with no editing or backtracking. I wrote it mainly to see if it was possible to write a car chase. You will see a bunch of stuff which should obviously be fixed (for one thing, do not just write out sound effects) but my point is that it is actually possible.
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Jul 3, 2014 20:43
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Snow Crash also has one chapter end with the protagonist running out of a town with a bunch of angry people pursuing him, collects his motorbike, and the final line is "...and the rest of it is just a chase scene." Which is quite a neat way of doing it.
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Jul 4, 2014 07:36
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Grizzled Patriarch posted:If you aren't happy with the end product you could always go back and change the tense up once the story itself is hammered out. Gosh. You can do this, but I wouldn't wish the task on anybody. I find switching the tense of even a single page of text is very tiring and aggravating, and usually I blink and miss a few things anyway, requiring some very alert proof-reading. To the extent that, every now and then, I entertain the possibility of writing a computer program to perform tense switches for me.
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Jul 18, 2014 15:00
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You can come up with six ideas that good any hour of the week. Also, if your friends and acquaintances are writing semi-seriously themselves, so can they.
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Aug 13, 2014 23:42
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crabrock posted:OH I SEE DON'T GIVE ME ANY CREDIT FOR THAT AWESOME PROMPT You're just the ideas, man.
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Aug 20, 2014 20:48
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2k words per day is perpetual NaNoWriMo mode!
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Aug 21, 2014 14:11
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CommissarMega posted:Similarly, we want hard copy whenever we deal with files. That’s why the paperless office never came to be… This is nonsense.
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Sep 5, 2014 13:29
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FouRPlaY posted:
What does this actually entail, in text? An actor can fine-tune their facial expressions, body language and intonation to express all kinds of insanely subtle things. In text, it would be the simplest thing in the world to just explain directly that this is what the character is doing/feeling, and I do that sometimes, but it often feels laborious and expository.
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Dec 3, 2014 19:09
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SurreptitiousMuffin posted:Having a huge backstory is good, but not everything needs to go into the story. It's like an iceberg: only a small portion of the story actually hits the page. The rest goes on between the lines, and if you have all this extra information pre-written it will come across in the story without having to be directly stated. I'm not sure Lord of the Rings is the best example to cite here since it does, in fact, start with a full five chapters of tedious, expository world-building infodump/backstory.
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Jan 24, 2015 16:40
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Benny the Snake posted:Hey guys. Is there anybody here who's really passionate about geology and/or chemistry who could help me out? Normally I wouldn't ask, but I really, really think what I have has legs and I need to make sure the science checks out so I'd like a creative-minded science goon to help me out. Thanks! For specialist questions like that I'd be more inclined to hunt for a chemistry/geology thread than this one.
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Mar 16, 2015 00:08
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LOU BEGAS MUSTACHE posted:man this isnt ev
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Mar 16, 2015 21:32
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ravenkult posted:I hate it when a protagonist is a writer of any kind. Except maybe a journalist. How about if they're a writer... with writers' block?
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Feb 29, 2016 20:05
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