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squeegee posted:You might want to check out books of short stories, especially if you're a slow reader. Even if you write only long-form fiction, a good short story can teach you a lot about tight structure and economy of words. Raymond Carver, for instance, is a master of very, very tight and sparse short stories and while not everyone is going to want to write that way, they're enjoyable stories and are useful as a teaching tool. To add to that, you should try beginning with Carver's collection Cathedral, Barry Hannah's Airships, and Larry Brown's Big Bad Love if you want some character/dialogue heavy stories that are in the realm of Lit fic. Tiggum posted:Why King James specifically? That seems like a pretty odd restriction. Because of that specific interpretation's use in literature. It's quoted and alluded to in many classics, and the meaning of certain parts changes with other interpretations. While modernized versions may be more useful in a religious context, the KJV is more important in the study of literature. Erik Shawn-Bohner fucked around with this message at 16:38 on Jul 15, 2012 |
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Jul 15, 2012 16:20
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I'll grant you that a lot of advice is tossed around frequently, but many of those pieces of advice are given for very good reason. They are also frequently misinterpreted, and there's where the problem you see comes in. "Show, don't tell" doesn't mean to add dialogue. It also doesn't mean to sperg out and tell us everything about a character. In the example you cited, the (bad) dialogue is telling us rather than showing us. The difference is that a character is telling us rather than the author. As for the prose after, it's a close third. It's perfectly fine to inflect the subject's voice and thoughts. It's expected as much as in first person. The subject is "thinking out loud" a bit, and their relationship, the focus of that piece, is shown through the sparse dialogue and action. That passage is a condemnation of bad dialogue and storytelling more than the rule. When it comes down to it, "show, don't tell" means to not force the concept you're trying to convey on the reader. Instead, pretend the reader is peeking through the key-hole and watching these people acting naturally. People can naturally infer the attitudes of a person in a situation by looking at their reaction to it. There are times you should tell, but it's only when you want to pass over something that's semi-important for the situation but not the focus. The reason it's repeated so often is because new writers have great difficulty in identifying what is truly important and what is the focus of their scene. They think everything is important and don't realize that a lot of the poo poo shouldn't be shown or told because it's just fluff. Here's an example of tell v. show: Bob is angry about the mess his wife left in the kitchen. That's telling me that bob is angry about the mess. That's the author looking through the keyhole at his characters and relaying the information to me, the reader. Bob opened the door to the kitchen. Flour rose in a mushroom cloud of disturbed air. Broken eggs crunched under foot as Bob approached the island counter in the middle of the room. He dug his nails into the edge, chest heaving and knees shaking. Blood clawed at the veins in his eyes as he looked at the message painted in blood: Get out. Yes, there's more words there, but it allows the readers to look through the keyhole themselves. They can tell there's a mess in the kitchen, that Bob is angry, and they can infer from either previous or future text that it was his wife that did it. In that story, the kitchen being in that state is very important. It is the story. But what if the kitchen being dirty was only partially important? Bob entered the kitchen. Like the rest of the house, it was wrecked. He kicked aside eggshells as he traced the vandals' footprints out the back door. Along the left-hand side, the doorframe was broken and twisted. The busted wood by the doorhandle was in the shape of a wrenching crowbar. In that instance, the kitchen being dirty is a detail that shows the whole house is wrecked and the trail leads out the back, but he already had the shock of seeing the front room destroyed when he opened the door--that you would show in detail because it's his first impression. It's important. In this story, you can tell a little when it comes to that detail. The "show, don't tell" advice is also like the "always use active voice" advice. It's not a hard rule, but there's a 94.3% chance you'll Dunning-Kruger the poo poo out of yourself thinking a crap passive line is good unless you're very familiar with how it works and why you're doing it. You won't go wrong with good prose in active voice, so it's best to practice that as much as you can since the great majority of your prose should be in that to make it readable. The same applies to "SDT" because if you show everything, you will see parts that are important and parts that should be cut. It teaches focus and good habits in writing. Erik Shawn-Bohner fucked around with this message at 18:09 on Jul 15, 2012 |
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Jul 15, 2012 18:06
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Cardinal Ximenez posted:Does anyone have any experience with the Linux port? It looks interesting, but I'm not going to spend $40 without a significant chance of it working. Last I checked, the Linux port was in Beta. They don't offer amd64 architecture because it's more someones pet project to port it to Linux right now. The deb package didn't want to work for me, and I didn't feel like installing a bunch of 32 libs. I don't feel like I'm missing much, though. A real writer uses cat.
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Jul 16, 2012 21:39
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Wolfsforza posted:Does anyone know what the ideal novel word counts are for submission to agents and publishers? I know a novel is usually defined as at least 80K words, but not sure how much it damages your chances going under. Just make it good and let it be what it is. The agents and publishers can classify it later. You can sell a career on a couple exceptionally good short stories. Once you start worrying about word-count, you're loving things up. Only add or take away when it makes the story better.
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Jul 21, 2012 01:28
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Rewrites are most useful in the beginning because the approach is an overall one. Is this scene necessary? Is there any way to save it? It's where you make your first decisions regarding the final shape of the story. Think of it like building a house. Your first draft is the blueprint you sketched up while taking a dump, but in the second, you're beginning to lay down the foundation and place structural support for the work. If you gently caress off and start adjusting minor details with a magnifying glass, you could end up wasting a lot of your time. You may not use that lumber or not as much as you planned because the story needs something different, so you've wasted your time (aside from the learning experience) when it comes to actually completing a work. The reason that a rewrite is a good idea for the second draft is because you will be throwing out more effort later on if you find out that poo poo doesn't work. It may sound hard, but writing well is hard.
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Jul 25, 2012 06:37
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Jonked posted:Do you guys have some sort of IRC channel where you put each up to this poo poo? Sort of. It's more of a secret network of CC posters. CantDecideOnAName posted:I just thought I'd mention that when I say edit, I'm pulling out scenes that I've been told are troublesome, just copy-pasting them into a new doc for easy referral, and rewriting those scenes in particular. Is that the wrong way to rewrite? Really, there's not much we can tell you that we haven't already covered. All this "goonperson says X" stuff doesn't help, so if you post what you're working on (in the Fiction Farm if <500 words or in its own thread if >500 words) we can assist you better.
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Jul 26, 2012 05:35
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CantDecideOnAName posted:All 200+ pages of it? If you're going to be obtuse, don't bother. The kind people of CC offer critiquing services in exchange for you doing the same, and so long as everyone follows the established politeness protocols, the big wheel keeps turning. As stated before, if you have a section of prose that is less then 500 words, it goes in the Farm, else it gets its own thread. Threads for longer works typically consist of single chapters being posted to work on, or failing that, around 5000 words. The good part is that these lovely people can help you work that 200 pages down to about 100 pages, making it a much more manageable project for you.
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Jul 26, 2012 06:29
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Jonked posted:Didn't see this asked in the first or last three pages. I'm looking into selling some of my fiction to journals and magazines. What's the proper way to shop around when I'm trying to sell a piece? Is it like interviewing for a job, where you send it to everybody and they assume you're looking at more than one place? Or is it more like dating, where you wait to be rejected or accepted one at a time, and for god's sake don't mention who else you're looking at? Thought I'd drop some bombs and lay some raps while wearing a backwards hat with this cross-thread reply. How to Assist in Killing Mother Earth by Tricking a Magazine into Publishing Your Drivel So, some of you have big dreams of being the next Hunter S. Thompson or Ernest Hemingway. I sincerely hope that comes true for each and every one of you in the near future--at least their last 30 minutes. To accomplish your dream (and eventually mine), you need to begin the long and painful journey of acquiring pub creds [publishing credits]. Does self-publishing on Amazon or anywhere else count as a pub cred? No. It does not. More on that later. Let's take a look at a roadmap to success for a fiction writer that I'll go deeper into afterward: 1) Decide you like reading books and would like to try writing them. 2) Read a lot with discretion. Start from the top of the "best of the best" in literature and work your way down to lovely dime novels you'd find in the bargain bin. Too many people do the reverse and only read whatever they happened to like as kids. 3) Write short stories. Many people start out with novels because they want to skip right to the rich and famous novelist part. If you can't manage to write a decent short, how can you expect to write a whole novel that isn't poo poo? It's like assuming you can perform surgery before learning anatomy. I'll squash the poo poo argument about "needing more room for big ideas" right now: if you can't do a proper short, you're a poo poo writer. 4) Edit your short stories. Hemingway wasn't lying when he said, "The first draft of anything is poo poo." Painfully going line by line as you write is still likely to produce a lovely first draft, so you might as well bang it out and make it good in the editing. I don't care if you consider yourself a "perfectionist" snowflake. You're an annoying idiot and the worst type of person to try to work with. 5) Submit to reputable journals that people actually read. 6) Get rejected. 7) Cry about it while you write more stories and edit them. 8) Submit some more. 9) Get rejected more. ... 273) Cry, write, edit, submit, get rejected. 274) Someone takes pity on you and you actually publish something. There's plenty of people that want to fill your head with pretty ideals that you should write whatever you want and eventually you'll be discovered. Those people were probably your friends and family (who are likely to support you even if you suck) and your teachers, people paid to make sure you feel good about your chances at a writing career and keep whoever is paying for your education tossing out that tuition money, you tosser, you. The truth of the matter is that it's a skill. Writing is a job that anyone who is literate can learn to do. That skill requires practice. Monkey see, monkey do. You read what other contemporary (stress on the contemporary) writers are publishing, and you assimilate what they've done well into your own work. While it's romantic to think of yourself as the artsy reclusive writer, it's just wrong. Writing is inherently a super-social activity. It is literally communicating with other people. To write convincing characters, you have to be social and know how people actually act. To write interesting situations, you have to have led an interesting life to draw on. If you suck at being social, you'll suck at writing. So, sorry to those of you who are the quiet and shy type looking to break out into the world with your genius fantasy/sci-fi/whatever novel. If you're writing stuff nobody wants to read, it's like walking up to a group of people at a party having a conversation and launching into a screed about your favorite anime while staring at your toes. You can just gently caress off to your weird little hobbit hole and cry about how nobody understands your work. If publishers don't want to see your poo poo, it's because people probably don't want to see it. There's not a big market for masons who only make houses in the shape of dicks either. So, what do you do? First, let's look at self-publishing. It was more aptly named in the past as "Vanity Publishing". For the most part, it's an excuse. Unless you're writing something in line with the Marquis de Sade as his work was received at the time, there's usually a good reason publishers wouldn't want anything to do with you. Probably because what you've sent to them isn't within the realm of stuff they publish or your prose sucks. Most people don't have time to crawl through hundreds of thousands of people trying to spew out half-assed novels even if they only cost a dollar. Publishers act as the gate keepers for the general public, so you'll at least be reading something that isn't total poo poo even if it's not any good. Stephanie Meyer is a favored whipping-girl, but at least some professional editors took a crack at making it readable before it hit the shelves. Imagine if she self-published it. Having someone else publish it, electronic or print, tells your reader that it has met a minimum standard, however low that might be. It's necessary to building a career even if there is a remote chance you could be a one-hit wonder self publisher. If it's actually any good, someone will pick it up. If it's not good, you should be busy trying to make it good through editing until someone does. It's vanity publishing because you want to call yourself a published author and not because you've put in the effort to make sure it's a well presented and crafted story that other people want to read. So, how do we get published? I'm going to assume you're going to want to write and publish novels. First, you should start with short stories. Why? Because they're short, there's a market for it, and it teaches you a whole hell of a lot. A good short story can translate into cash in your pocket, a very valuable publishing cred, and a sense of satisfaction that you don't suck. Once you've built up some publishing creds, agents are willing to look at you because you've been vetted. People obviously want to print you, so they're taking less of a risk taking you on. Once you have a reputable agent and a stack of publishing creds, their job is much easier in convincing a publisher to give you a run on your novel. That's how the system works. To get those publishing creds, you have to do a lot of leg-work, which is why many people turn to vanity publishing for instant gratification. The good news is that once you get your first, the next is easier, and it only gets easier to acquire more as you go along. A good place to start looking is duotrope.com. It makes your life much easier in that you don't have to crawl through multiple editions of Writer's Market. That's where you should start looking for magazines to submit to. To increase your chances of success, do a little background check into each magazine. Subscribe to a few that look good and see what they publish. Also, don't make the mistake of only submitting to the biggest, baddest journals with the highest pay. Ego gets in the way for a lot of people, and they think they can only publish in the New Yorker, Glimmertrain, or Gud because they're special. The reality is that the pub creds from little magazines add up, and they're just like the major book publishers, and they want to see a nice scroll of credits before they take you seriously. Check out the little, newer mags. They publish good stuff as well because they have to build their reputation by publishing people with talent. A good new writer and a good new mag go hand in hand because they need each other, and when you go on to publish in one of the big boys, it makes them look good. Here's the situation: you wrote a story, and you've edited it a bunch. What do you do with it? Well, you send it out to multiple mags. Response times can range anywhere from a couple days to months, so you better have your hand in as many pots as possible. Referring to the question posed by Jonked regarding simultaneous submissions, I usually laugh that part off. While it's absolutely important to follow the guidelines of a magazine when submitting (or they'll not even read the first line before they trash it), that's one I ignore. There's two reasons. The first is that it's an incredibly good problem to have, and it's far more likely you will have a huge stack of rejections unless you're name-brand to them, so it'd be a non-issue. Second, who is going to know? If you have a choice between two magazines, you can choose to pick the one that says "no sim-subs" and email the others that you've placed it somewhere else, or you can choose the more prestigious/higher paying mag and let the no sim-sub cry about it. Chances are, they won't even remember you the next time you submit to them, and if they write your name in their little black book of hate, it's not like there aren't literally hundreds of other mags out there. You've got a story, you've picked out 7 places to submit to this week (if you're being lazy about it... seriously, you have to submit constantly to get anywhere), and you've tailored each copy of your story to fit the guidelines of those magazines (extremely important). Let's talk about cover letters. It should look something like this: Hello [Editor's name] Thank you for considering [title of story]. My work has previously been published in: [pub cred] [pub cred] [pub cred] Regards, [Your Name] And that's it. Unless they specify that you should add stuff, you shouldn't. They're interested in seeing where you've been published, and that's about it. Using the editor's name is a nice touch because it shows you at least visited the website and checked out the magazine before dropping a turd in their lap. Now, you'll continue to do this in perpetuity. You can enter contests if you like, using your pub creds as weight (no, life isn't fair), and placing in those will be a really good cred for you along with some cash, probably. The whole time you're submitting, you should be writing and editing your rear end off. Maybe work on your novel on the side, but it's going to be hell trying to get it published if no one knows who you are. It's best to rack up those credits for short stories so you can get more, learn more, and get ready to tackle a novel. Once you've got a bunch of creds, you submit a portion of a novel to an agent (with much the same cover letter except you'd also attach a one-page summary treatment of it). Then, they take over the work of pushing your novel onto publishers and possibly your short stories onto magazines, thus earning their percentage. That's how you tackle becoming a professional writer no matter if it's poetry, fiction, or freelance: you treat it like it's your job and put that many hours into it.
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Jul 26, 2012 09:13
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squeegee posted:Has anyone here had experience writing "historical" fiction that is still set within living memory? The project I'm working on right now is set before I was born, but still well within living memory (i.e. millions of people alive today lived through that time period.) I'm obsessively well-researched, but, well, sometimes I feel like a fraud for writing about something I could never have experienced. I get the sense that I can consume as many firsthand accounts, historical documents, nonfiction books, media and ephemera from the time as I possibly can but I'll still always lack something that those who were alive then would not. Any thoughts on this? First off, what's the event you're talking about? Also, what's your personal connection to it? Meaning what's a life experience of yours that applies to the event and/or how characters feel. Writing what you know doesn't mean to write just what happened in your life. It means to apply the events of your own life to the cast and scene, so it doesn't matter if you weren't alive to experience it.
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Jul 26, 2012 14:41
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Well, as simplistic as this answer may sound at face value, there's a little more to it: the feel comes down to the tone. When I think 50's and 60's, I think of the cultural upheaval, questionable scientific experiments, and war. That's just the surface, though. A piece that tries to be everything to everyone, meaning to encapsulate several points of view on the era, is going to read more like an encyclopedia entry than an entertaining story. There really is no "feel" to an era--just loose groupings of interpretations. I had a neighbor who was an adult in the 50's, and his take on the era was "it was cool to shoot me some gooks." I've also known people who were social and war protesters who had their own take. To some, the era was entirely different, and they remember the rise of stereo, The Ventures, and reading about all this change in the news. So, if you're wanting to try to replicate their feelings, you may be SOL. They can and have written about it. What's interesting, and the way you should approach it, is recreating how you feel about it. Rather than try to recapture how the beat generation saw themselves at that time, tell us what you think of them. Create your own "feel" without giving a single thought to what you think is an accurate representation. As I said before, they've already spoken for themselves on that, and trying to add to it will just come off as aping. Accomplishing that is really simple but sometimes difficult. If it's something you care about, you have to reach down, pull from the gut, and state what you think plainly. That's where I think you're feeling anxious about it if I'm reading what you said right. You seem to be afraid of getting it wrong. Really, there's no way to get it "right" unless you just tell the story through your own lens, don't hedge your bets, and take the lumps if anyone throws them at you.
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Jul 26, 2012 16:23
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Jonked posted:Nautatrol Rx, thanks a lot of that big piece of advice. It answers pretty much everything I was a bit confused or unsure about, and it feels good to know that at least I was on the right track. It applies to most everything. With freelance/corporate writing, things change as your cover letter needs to show some balls and be more robust, but in the fiction/poetry realm, it's mostly all the same. I can't speak with any personal authority on "genre fiction" (I hate the false dichotomy that term implies as related to "Literary fiction") since I've been told I have a "Literary" bent (at least according to the last rejection letter). But I'm repeating a lot of advice that I've seen in action with a horror writer, which is arguably a genre that needs more love than fantasy/sci-fi. He whips my rear end up and down the street with his accomplishments, but he's also got ten years on me. My philosophy is that good writing is good writing, and unless you have a "hook" as an author, they expect you to make something that is marketable to a wide audience and can hold up to snuff to reviews from NYT critics used to reading stuffy lit rags. I should probably clarify that there is nothing wrong with working on a novel in the mean time while you work on short stories. It's just that shorts teach you so much in a short span of time that they're not only an art unto themselves--they teach you how to write a proper story from beginning to end, how to write a good chapter that makes people want to read more, and lets you experiment until you find what you actually like writing. My primary sermon boils down to this: fight hard, fight dirty, and gently caress the publishers/police. If you got any talent, you're doing them the favor by agreeing to a publishing contract, and you're just going to get used if you come at it from the other way around.
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Jul 26, 2012 18:22
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I know you specified print to make something like the point I'm about to make, but I want to draw a clear and decisive line between electronic vs print publishing and vanity publishing. Electronic publishing is a good thing and a part of our future whether we like it or not. I personally like it. I also derived great joy in seeing a physical product in my hand that had my name on it, but that's just sentimentality rather than the purpose of writing, which is to make money because it's your trade and to say something you want to say while you're at it. E-publishing does not equal vanity publishing, and I don't think there's shame in having a work published only electronically even if it's frowned upon in academic circles. I disagree on the future of self publishing because I strongly believe publishers will adapt. Much like we don't gravitate towards every livejournal or tumblr posted, I don't believe the majority of readers will want to gravitate towards a wasteland of increasing self-indulgent writers. Centrality and pre-vetting is important because consumers want to get the "best bang for their buck". There's certainly enough support from adventurous people crawling through Amazon and the like to make a living, but that's at least not where I want to be. Publishers will adapt, I'd say, because it's a business and always has been. It's absolutely mercenary, which is what drives many people towards self-publishing to get the satisfaction they're denied. It definitely cuts out some good writers who don't like the nature of the business. But it also makes it so you don't have to pay sum upon sum working your way through the heartfelt naruto fanfics to find a decent read. Edit: and I type like a redneck talks, so there's that for what it's worth. Erik Shawn-Bohner fucked around with this message at 19:28 on Jul 26, 2012 |
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Jul 26, 2012 19:25
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It's variable. Some say, "I'll sit here and work for eight hours and stare at the screen even if I don't write a single word" while others go "I'll sit here however long it takes to write X amount of words even if it's trash." Those are the big two "styles". Of course, somewhere in the middle where you're neither writing trash or staring at a blank screen is ideal. I'll repeat the advice often tossed around advice that you should at least pick a regular time each day to sit down and write. You should have a minimum number of words, something like 2000 if you can do that, and at least sit there for two hours trying without distracting yourself on the internet if you don't make the word goal. That trains you to have a set-aside, regular, time to write, and it gives you an easy daily goal that you should have time to exceed if you budget your time well, but those two hours should be sacred work time that you don't break unless it's an actual emergency. It's a bit of sacrifice, but it creates a good habit and teaches your brain to turn on at a certain time and begin producing. Many writers choose the time after they've woken up and started their second pot of coffee so they're alert and full of energy--writing at night can work as well, but if you have the luxury, writing in the morning gives you fewer excuses of being tired and opens up more space for evening social activity. That said, at most I'll clock in at about 10k of something researched and polished well enough to be readable. During that time, I was up and about getting coffee, grabbing lunch, and sometimes pausing to dick about on the internet. If you're honestly working hard, there's no reason to begrudge yourself some time to mentally unwind, and it's usually helpful. Changing location throughout the day can also be helpful. I liked going to dive bars with wi-fi access and taking up residence in the corner. Just make sure you get back on track after a short amount of time and try to get back into the groove. For fidgeting, I suggest working out before you sit for a long writing session. Bicycling, running, or swimming are my preferences. They just make me appreciate the time sitting down, and I don't want to get up and do something else. It's also good for you.
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Jul 30, 2012 04:28
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Time Cowboy posted:Some magazines (I know Asimov's for a fact does this) will request info about non-fiction pubs if they relate to the subject of your story. Say you're a nurse or an archaeologist, they'll want to know that so long as your story relates to medicine or archaeology or something of that nature. Quite true. I'd go as far to say that it wouldn't hurt to include any notable publication whether it's related or not so long as it's not something like "I published a top ten article at Cracked.com!" If it's academic and at a place which is generally respected in that field, the worst case scenario is that they'll ignore it, but it's likely to have some subconscious effect. That's much of the game. You can submit relatively sub-par work and get accepted if they see those credits because it colors their perception. Don't try to do that though, of course. Always do your best for your (and our) own good.
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Jul 30, 2012 19:26
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SkySteak posted:Just curious but I was thinking about DnD and Fantasy in general and how it often handled gods, demi gods and spirits. One thing that came to mind was how would one potentially go about writing such creatures? I can easily see the idea of making them totally alien in point of view and how they operate. However what if you wanted to make them relatable? I'm wondering how people would approach that given you may have beings of great power that may be millions of years old. Study the Greek and Roman pantheons. Their gods were very human in that they act like a person would if given great, supernatural power. Even the relatively benevolent gods would suffer from jealousy, spite, and anger. They'd make mistakes and sometimes come out of the blue with the perfect answer. Like any character, they become flat if they don't sometimes encounter a situation that is somehow dangerous to them, and they have to sometimes fail. The concept of a god is that they are immortal and extremely, if not all-powerful. The pantheon is in place to keep everyone in check with one another, and that's where they derive their conflict, and their conflicts spill out into the mortal world. From the mortal perspective they are all-powerful, but in the larger sense, they are limited. One mistake is to make them diametrically opposed. e.g. the god of fire is hot-tempered and warlike while the god of water is cool and nurturing. It's been done to death, so it's not interesting. To make them keep one another in check, go for more subtle oppositions in their personalities where you could see how both could be right from a certain perspective, but their goals conflict, much like how humanity doesn't always agree on the right path for us to take.
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Aug 2, 2012 02:20
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FauxCyclops posted:What do you mean? I've said I'll take the short story from my other thread away for a week, put some real work into it and try again then. There's no reason to make threats, now. P.S. please stop smearing your stupid poo poo across multiple threads. Contain your whinging over your avatar and reaction to the story to one so I can stop having to check who the last poster is when I see a new addition has been made, if you will so kindly.
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Aug 3, 2012 04:19
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Many people approach the writing and editing process as if it's the climactic therapy scene from Good Will Hunting. In reality, it's more like the scene from Pulp Fiction after they release The Gimp.
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Aug 5, 2012 09:33
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Mike Works posted:I'm having a title-related issue of my own, which is odd since I'm usually very good with titles. Here are the potential titles for a short story I'm mulling over: My way of doing titles is to find a very small, unique detail and draw it out into a broader theme. It's the reverse of how some people like to do it. Meaning that I'll write the story without a title (or a working title like the ones you mentioned), and then I'll go through to pick out some very small yet important detail that I want to turn into a horse for the story, and my title will be derived from that. An example of this type of this type of titling can be seen in the show Breaking Bad. Obvious choices would have something to do with crime or meth, but it's more likely that they wrote out the story beforehand and liked the little twist of the phrase, "breaking bad", so that became an important theme (which they probably went back and expanded upon) as well as the title. I'd suggest just finishing and posting it, and maybe one of us can suggest something that will spark a good idea for you. Better to finish it first because you may find a nice spark there.
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Aug 6, 2012 07:11
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Mike Works posted:The problem is that I've already found that detail, that spark, that encapsulating image... and it's a drat zombie. It has to be a zombie. Well, is there anything special or unique about your zombies, or are they purposefully as stock as possible? That's the part that's hard for me to get unless I see the story, but I'll try tossing out a few rewordings of "zombie" that might make you think of something: Walking and Rotting The Second Breath Risen Thoughtless Body Southern Revival The Stride of Corpses Roaming Bodies The Body That Trudges Husks Just a few words there that you can maybe mix and match.
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Aug 6, 2012 07:35
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Mike Works posted:Thanks for these, they're definitely worth working with. Where does "Southern Revival" come from? The story happens to take place in the southern states, so there could be potential there. Play on words relating to "tent revivals" common among southern protestants. There's a religious overtone to that, though. It may or may not be an area you want to trudge into.
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Aug 6, 2012 20:02
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I'm posting this in a couple writing threads to bring attention to it. It's about the writing sub-forum of CC to protect work from being indexed in Google and thus getting you rejected from several magazines. Some of us have discussed this already, and I've posted a QCS thread at http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3500225 to bring it up, so please add your input whether you agree or disagree with what I've said.
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Aug 7, 2012 21:54
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Honey Badger posted:Yeah, I'll probably end up cutting it down to one (the other I liked but looking at it now it seems to be a little too much exposition and I figured out how to get the same idea across without it) and the flashback is only a paragraph. Regarding the time-shifts, the standard lately is to go *** with tabs in between, centered. Changing tense and person can work well or it can fail miserably. You have to change voice for it to make sense.
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Aug 8, 2012 08:16
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SkySteak posted:I would but potentially having a custom title for being judged the loser is a real turn off. I everyone in there has a good time though. Also the advice you gave a little while back has been extremely useful. I wouldn't try to actually start a career in writing if a custom title can break your ego. Then again, someone who couldn't handle that probably wouldn't make it at McDonalds either. You would only get the title for being the worst which is a subjective. If that is your concern, you have no business in the field. Edited for some clarity. Erik Shawn-Bohner fucked around with this message at 17:17 on Aug 8, 2012 |
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Aug 8, 2012 16:30
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pipes! posted:While I generally agree with your sentiments, the man said he didn't want to participate. Lay off your little strongarming double-team posting combo supreme before I give you an ikari/psychicattack-style punishment. I am typing on my phone because I live in the worst place possible for reliable connections. I must have come off harsh instead of funny due to my brevity. Sorry. It's supposed to be a fun thing. Please don't break out your wicked kung fu and end our lives.
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Aug 8, 2012 17:10
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SkySteak posted:Why are you being so aggressive for one thing I said? I didn't exactly smear anyone doing it, gently caress I even wished them luck. Please relax, stay calm, and carry on. It was sarcasm.
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Aug 8, 2012 17:26
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SkySteak posted:In all honesty do you hold that view though? I'm not trying to pick a fight or poo poo up the thread, I'm just curious. The 'net is back up in American Botswana, so I can respond using the big-boy keyboard. I do hold that view. If you want to get involved in any art, you need to get used to harsh criticism. Mine was joking, but it wasn't even touching on the potential harshness that an average critic will give you, let alone a crabby editor. You need that life skill to even work a minimum wage job, and I've worked them myself. Look at that currently popular Chick-Fil-A video where some rear end in a top hat rolls up out of nowhere just to be an rear end in a top hat to a random person. Be like the awesome lady in that video and blow it off. She can because that dude was more than likely not the first. The difference is, whether you're doing vanity publishing or standard, there are going to be people telling you that you should kill yourself and all other sorts of nasty things. You're walking into that situation willingly. That's just the nature of making something personal to you, your writing, public. Erik Shawn-Bohner fucked around with this message at 17:49 on Aug 8, 2012 |
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Aug 8, 2012 17:46
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The problem I see is that someone may -think- they're trying to be artsy with creepy bullshit, a la Primoman, but they don't pull it off. I honestly think that was just him covering his rear end after the fact, but for this purpose, we'll assume he was telling the truth. To put my own story on the line, my character in "When They Leave You" is not a person to be emulated by any means. He reaches a point where he's clearly projecting his personal problems onto all women. Yet, no one has gone "OMG that's creepy" in response. That could be from the effect of it being done well (I hope) or that people generally don't see me as a creepy dude and interpret it differently. Our communicating with each other regularly affects the criticism whether we want to admit it or not. I'm not disagreeing with you, to be clear, but I'd like to delve further into the topic of taboo subjects and see if we can identify some qualities of writing that set Lolita apart from Primoman. One thing to consider is the concept of quality. There's different elements of quality that come from the places of objectivity, subjectivity, and society. Taboo subjects are exciting and great material to write about. There's objectively bad writing, which breaks rules for no reason and makes a piece unreadable or immensely unenjoyable. Subjectively bad writing is something you don't like for personal reasons, justified or not, because it strikes you as horrible (for me, that's a story written all in second person that could just as easily be done in third or first). Something considered bad by society could be anything written in an antiquated form or that's too wordy since, from what I've seen, Hemingway style brevity and immediacy is what is popular with the majority of critics. The society angle can flip around by genre, though, so it's harder to pin down.
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Aug 8, 2012 20:14
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Stabbey_the_Clown posted:Argh, how the hell does one tell one's inner critic to shut the hell up and stop screaming "this poo poo sucks" when I'm trying to write? I cannot stop myself from trying to re-write the opening of my short story a billion times. It's driving me crazy. Stop sucking. Works pretty good for me.
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Aug 12, 2012 23:02
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Martello posted:That should work fine without even using dialogue tags at all. It's "--" unless it is in modern, computer controlled print like in a word processor. It's the difference between potato-rear end in a top hat and potato--rear end in a top hat.
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Aug 14, 2012 03:59
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SkySteak posted:No loving wonder you mentioned getting a shitton of rejection letters. You were spewing potato filled novels on the poor sods. The potato is a noble creature, and I would thank you to not be so ignorant. Edit: and also -1 point on the next TD contest you enter that I'm judging for the pun.
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Aug 14, 2012 04:03
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I want to say it really is awful to not use "--" for that. Convention is "--" because typewriters. The extra character won't kill you, and it makes it clear to everyone, educated and dumb, that you're doing an interrupt. If you have a specific (good) reason to break that convention, do it by all means. I challenge someone, anyone, to come up with a good reason not typing that second character, for clarity, is better than what everyone else finds perfectly fine "--". So there, buttheads. SkySteak posted:stay away from ellipsis Erik Shawn-Bohner fucked around with this message at 04:15 on Aug 14, 2012 |
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Aug 14, 2012 04:12
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My irrationally heated opinions on a lot of things, such as ellipses and the use of dashes v hyphens, is born from seeing it used far, far too much. In the case of ellipses, I see far too many writings that use it in an awful way, such as making every other character end their sentences with "...". Worst case scenarios actually do it mid-paragraph or as if it were a period. Dashes suffer the same fate. A comma is less obtrusive, so it's easier to have interspersed action (something I really like) in dialogue. A dash should be treated like a big ole "HERE'S A SURPRISE" sign. You don't want to make a habit of it. So, I'd say a comma is always best unless you have some sort of really unexpected, outside thing happening. A character picking up a cigarette vs getting a bullet through the head mid-sentence. The dashes should be as sparse as the BIG TWISTs are. Some people manage to do really weird things with grammar without it sucking horribly. Dialogue seems to be the most often place where that happens. My core thoughts are that you should experiment with stuff like that, but don't be surprised when people hate it due to it being confusing or just plain tiresome on the eyes. If you can make it so it's serving a purpose, such as speeding up the pace of a story faster than convention will allow or stressing some word in an absurd way because there's a hidden meaning, then it can be a great technique.
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Aug 14, 2012 23:29
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Time Cowboy posted:I loved A Clockwork Orange. Never attempt to do A Clockwork Orange, however, unless you are an absolute master of language. Which, if you're posting here, you aren't. Do you have to project your self-deprecation on everyone else so frequently? It's really annoying and serves no useful purpose. Also, you're wrong on the Clockwork Orange stuff. Even uneducated people can write accents well by accident, especially their own. It's a learned skill, and the only way to learn it is to attempt to do it. Deifying authors will only lead to crippling your ability to learn. Jonked posted:Yeah, I guess. I tend to outline my stories before I write them, and I can usually gauge the word count, give or take a couple thousand. It's not just that it's all about the money, but I can't help but feeling it's a little silly to write a story knowing that nobody is ever going to look at it. I mean, writing is about communicating with an audience, right? It is okay to look at it from a financial perspective as well. However, considering word counts and audience beforehand is doing it backwards. When you have a completed story, novel, or what-have-you and you want to publish it, there are people who make it their business to tell you who is going to buy it. They're critics, editors, and publishers. Unless you have some weight behind your name through previous sales, they are your true audience. They will, in turn, surely have a load of suggestions regarding changes you will need to make to sell it to an audience. That's when you'll really be tailoring your message to the final audience. The rest of his/her point comes down to picking word-count, an audience, and a genre has a different effect than you might imagine. It colors your perception before you even put ink to wood. When you're thinking Young Adult novel, you're thinking in narrow terms. Unless you are extremely familiar with what makes a marketable and enjoyable YA book (meaning one of the people who is actively selling them), it will be hard for you to directly target that audience and the gatekeepers to that audience. That's why it's good advice to take what you think is a good story and try to make it into something you like, to "let it be what it is" rather than write it into a box. With work, it should produce a far better product that someone, perhaps not young adults or perhaps so, would really enjoy. Erik Shawn-Bohner fucked around with this message at 23:35 on Aug 16, 2012 |
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Aug 16, 2012 23:19
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Time Cowboy posted:Realistic expectations are really annoying? More so than misplaced cockiness? OK. If one of your novels is on a high school reading list fifty years from now, Nautatrol Rx, I'll send you a fruit basket and a formal apology. As a matter of fact, that goes for everyone reading this thread. You hear that? A fruit basket is on the line here, people. A fruit basket. Get to work. If you're still upset about that story, it was just a bit of comedy and nothing to get angry about. It was a 10 minute job made to be one word less than the minimum that wasn't targeted at anyone. The way you've been phrasing those statements, like the one I pointed out, say literally that none of us are critically acclaimed authors because we've posted in this thread. On a logical level, that's absurd. Even the greatest authors ask questions of one another. What's annoying is the clear undertone of 1) (and you never will be great) and 2) "I clearly understand my not being the best while the rest of you are running around thinking your poo poo don't stink." That's a bad attitude to have about it. To honestly work hard and every day towards your goal, whether it's to be a best seller or write the world's most-pleasing-to-academia piece, that shows a good attitude that isn't limited to mediocrity. I really do think that with practice and scholarship, just about anyone can become a great writer. You read, study what other people have done, and practice. That's how you get better at most things. Whether people consider you great or a genius down the road is a fart in the wind, scented with the vague whims of that time's culture. Plenty of greats died penniless and mocked along with a bunch of lovely writers. What we all can control is how much work we put into reading, writing, absorbing, and trying to get better at those three tasks. I can't be bothered to fret over what I can't control or mentally limit myself to mediocrity. But I've chosen writing as my trade, and it's the way I've made my living for a bit now, and it's the way I hope to continue doing so. And I may yet be dead in a ditch and mocked for writing the world's worst novel come 50 years--but I won't ever stop working hard and stretching myself to avoid that. I'll hold you to the promise for the fruit basket though.
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Aug 17, 2012 02:10
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Jonked posted:Thanks for the advice, both of you. I do want to defend myself though. I didn't sit down and decide "Young adult fiction looks profitable, I'll try to write that." The premise, characters, and rough outline of the plot all came first before I noticed that it wouldn't be half bad as a YA story, and that novellas as a format don't seem to be very popular. The thing is, I don't want to keep writing for my own benefit anymore. Putting my work out there, having it be judged, and ultimately having a real audience read it is what really motivates me. It's what really spurred me to edit and improve my work, and put it out there publicly for the forums to critique. If there's no outlet for me to show my work, well... I have other ideas I could develop, and only so much time and energy. That's not a pure artistic reason to write, but wanting an audience is important to me at the moment. I get what you're talking about a little more now. Also, I sometimes slip into the plural "you" when talking on here, like the doc up there. It's good to want to get it out there because that's what writing is for. I fully encourage that, even for the worst of the fanfic writers (so long as they keep it to the dark recesses of the internet where civilized folk don't have to see it). My comments are more about the common mistake of underwriting or overwriting an idea without changing the idea. Some writers get deathly attached to one idea, one outline and treat it like an essay for class where they will either spew out filler or cut it down into semi-nonsense to fit requirements that the outline can't handle. I warn against that because often the idea/outline needs to change as the story progresses. So long as you're willing to mix that part of it up, you can fit it to a palatable format for the audience. To clarify what I mean regarding targeting an audience is that YA is a bad target in my opinion. It's too broad because even young adults have differences in preference, so the focus needs to be tighter. First and foremost, always try to make it interesting to you, of course, and not with the mindset of how cool it'd appear to others even if it doesn't resonate with you. That's obvious advice, of course, but I've fallen into that trap before. Have something more specific in mind that you are personally acquainted with. Many writers say they secretly write each book to a specific person they know, and that person is representative of that "audience". Tolkien, for example, wrote The Hobbit for his kids, and it seemed to have worked out for him very well. I don't hate genre fiction, but I think too many people go "I want to be a sci-fi writer, so I'm going to write stuff sci-fi fans like." Again, it's a problem of the broad audience. People have different tastes in specific genres. Some people hate Tolkien with a passion and are in love with something else. It also sets up preconceived notions about the story you're about to dream up even if you try to defy it. If you're not familiar with the genre of magical realism, I'd suggest looking into it. It's a lot like the realistic genres--sans lasers, shape ships, elves, or abysmal horrors--except that completely unrealistic things occur as if they were a normal thing. It's understated. Someone could walk up a wall and stand on the ceiling while having a very serious, and sometimes touching, conversation with a cockroach about their unfulfilled lovelife. You could classify that as fantasy. Or you could try to pin it as a thriller about a man going crazy. It doesn't quite fit into those genres though as it doesn't necessarily defy them so much as act as if it's something unrelated to them, which it is. I'm not saying to go out and write a magical realism genre story. What I'm getting at is that the further you can push those expectations from readers from your mind, the more freedom you're allowing yourself in the creative process to bring us something new. The readers have seen what they expect, which is why they expect it. Bring us something new and have fun doing it. If you want to write a story about a spaceship and you need a loving Keebler elf to show up to make a great story, make the Keebler elf show up. If you truly did it well, I'll even love that you made the fucker show up. That's more to the core of what I mean regarding "letting it be what it is". No matter if you think, right now, if it fits the expectations for your market, take risks and try to do it well, but if you gently caress up, you can always change it. If you pull it off though, there are always other markets that might eat it up, and you don't have to deny yourself or the readers your awesome Keebler elf.
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Aug 17, 2012 06:45
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oddspelling posted:I generally dislike it when authors write dialog (much less narration) in patois. When done well it can really add a lot to a story, but the majority of the time it just comes across as awkward and forced. People in books by-and-large don't speak the way people in real life do, and shoehorning an accent or dialect can push it even deeper into the uncanny valley. I've seen it done awfully a lot as well. It's difficult to do. A good place to start learning is to 1) read and emulate people who have done it well to try to get into their headspace 2) do some study into linguistics and how they mark up other languages within the English system. I'd say that if you want to make a narrator have an accent, use your own accent. You're already familiar with the intricacies of it, and you get to show off a little piece of you more authentically than aping someone else's accent. It takes a lot of study to become familiar with an accent you don't deal with daily because it's more than just the sounds of the words--it's the slang, pace, and phrasing that lends it authenticity. Then, you have to shove all of that into the dialogue so it reads as being realistic. One effective means of making it less grating on the reader is to have the markings and phonetic spellings sort-of heavy in the beginning while you're establishing the voice of the character or narrator and phase it out as you go forward, so even if they're reading normal text they automatically associate that accent to the character. That allows you to toss in a token "bit" of the accent here and there, but the reader is doing the work translating it in their heads from regular text.
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Aug 19, 2012 23:07
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screenwritersblues posted:I'm starting to get ready for NANOWRIMO this year a few months early, I have the idea and it seems to be working right now, so I'm going to run with it for now. How should I be plotting this out? Should basically plot out each chapter or just write a paragraph about what goes on in each chapter. I'm used plotting out scripts, which means that every new paragraph is a scene. My intuition, based on your chosen screen name, says you should just hit the keys and start writing, format later. Everything else says the same. So if it's working, stop trying to break it. Worry later after some words are down.
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Aug 29, 2012 02:10
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Nirvikalpa posted:I think joyless might have been the wrong word. I like reading, but I don't really like what I'm reading. I think with non-fiction it's better because at least I'm learning. But with novels, I enjoy the process of reading, but I end up revolted by the subject matter most of the time or I can't understand it. You don't want to view the medium you're trying to produce in? Just get the gently caress out. Of course you can't be a writer worth a good goddamn if you don't read.
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Sep 9, 2012 03:55
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SkySteak posted:Ah that makes it sound far more clear. At first the last page gave the impression that if you say something mistaken, you'd get metaphorically lacerated and given a custom image (outside of fun events like the Thunderdome) Yeah, pretty much. If you say something blazingly retarded, people are going to mock you and spend money to do it as well.
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Sep 9, 2012 06:09
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Nirvikalpa posted:I guess I would rather have that than fail out of school? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FYTc55nGEI
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Sep 9, 2012 07:21
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