Fiction Writing: Advice and Discussion

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General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Scrivener owns for writing novels but I can't explain why right now because I have to keep writing my novel in Scrivener. This is an example of Chiasmus

# ¿ Jul 26, 2016 21:21

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# ¿ May 14, 2024 06:52

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Literary fiction is definitely a very specific genre (you can sort of see how it was constructed, and by who, and how it is now maintained by critics) but it's become the yardstick used to define other genres so it's sort of an invisible genre.

Also it's cool and good and does not deserve automatic disdain.

# ¿ Aug 27, 2016 21:23

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Heroin addict makes me way more interested, not less, and I think agents will react the same way. If you pull it off, mixing a real and urgent character flaw like addition with the fantastic is a great play. I didn't like Thomas Covenant but 'a leper passes into a fantasy world' is a thousand times more interesting than 'not a leper does the same thing.'

Remember that small critique groups can get hung up on an issue and blow it way up :sun:

# ¿ Sep 10, 2016 19:08

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Your query is pretty loving awesome as is. "A heroin junkie tries to trick her boyfriend into giving up his reality-warping stone so she can escape into her own dreams - but keeping the stone forces her to make choices that drive her even deeper into addiction.' That's great! The supernatural ability to warp reality is a perfect allegorical twin for drug addiction.

Protagonists don't have to be likable or sympathetic, just compelling. Walter White and Tony Soprano are loving awful people. So is Pablo Escobar!

# ¿ Sep 10, 2016 19:15

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

The stones are a good macguffin for this story because they say "What if you could make objective reality conform to the way you feel when you're high?"

They are the terror of permanent heroin. Everything really is achievable by shooting up. You really will be as happy forever as you feel when you're peaking. Why chase friendship, family, and a fulfilling existence when you can take the shortcut?

They're kind of like the antithesis of the funhole from The Cipher, which says, 'is it worth pursuing something genuinely new and mind-expanding as an escape from your hellish everyday existence, even if that new thing is inherently destructive and abusive?" e: or alternately 'is it better to be creatively and radically destroyed than to be suffocatingly mediocre?'

General Battuta fucked around with this message at 20:20 on Sep 10, 2016

# ¿ Sep 10, 2016 20:16

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

That sounds like something to clue up better in the query, then!

# ¿ Sep 10, 2016 20:32

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Why would you want to trad publish without an agent, though? It's good to know the markets, but going out there alone seems...unnecessary, at best, actively bad at worst.

# ¿ Sep 13, 2016 03:18

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

change my name posted:

I actually just started writing a Lovecraftian science fiction novel too (but more as in fiction about science) that began as the cheap schlocky romance novel I posted about earlier. It's still about a heartbroken widow moving to a small town to find solace, but she's a trained astronomer who starts noticing small, scientifically impossible phenomena that the normal residents had been overlooking.

Goonspeed to Carla and may she find much happiness with Cecilia

_{i'm sorry i couldn't resist}

# ¿ Sep 21, 2016 06:44

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

HIJK posted:

If you want to write fiction set in a culture you're unfamiliar with, what are reliable academic resources to get a feel for history and practices?

You absolutely have to find some primary sources written by people from that culture. It's the only way to get it even a bit right.

# ¿ Nov 7, 2016 21:52

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

There's nothing to bloat your wordcount like a protagonist who pauses after every loving line of dialogue to consider possible hidden meanings, clues about secret alliances, and ramifications for the grand global conspiracy

# ¿ Nov 7, 2016 21:54

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

I hate writing! :shepface:

# ¿ Dec 6, 2016 17:55

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

anime was right posted:

thanks, comrade.

do you have any resources for finding an agent? i'm guessing one was posted earlier in the thread somewhere, but if anyone else has info on that, i'd like to hear. i would prefer starting on the trad pub route before starting to think about selfpub.

Find books you like which were published recently and which compare closely to your book. Look up their agents, check their websites to see if they're taking new clients.

# ¿ Dec 6, 2016 19:58

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

anime was right posted:

so it was a hyperbolic statement, ok.

Nah, uh, I think it's a fact (though I couldn't cite) that it's easier to go from 'unpublished' to 'one book' than to go from 'one book' to 'any kind of meaningful success.

Publishing is full of crazy bullshit, people get hosed over by agents retiring or houses collapsing or people running away to other continents and taking their series rights along or depression or or or. A lot of stuff can go wrong.

e: also there are a lot of horror stories about getting an agent but ending up in submission hell/insane drama

# ¿ Dec 10, 2016 01:04

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

gently caress books

# ¿ Jan 6, 2017 06:29

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

It's actually been going really well lately, I've just about finished a draft, but my total word count on this project over the past couple years is approaching the obscene figure of one point five million

# ¿ Jan 6, 2017 19:35

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Ha, that just goes to show how weird writing can be - that was one of my oldest stories, it got ripped up in critique and took me forever to sell. You really can't predict what people will like! So you've just got to keep doing the work and submitting.

One of the editors who picked the story for Year's Best rejected it from his magazine earlier that year. It just hit him differently the second time he read it. You can't let rejections get to you, they're like the weather.

# ¿ Jan 6, 2017 19:52

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

anime was right posted:

keep slamming the wall with your face and hope the wall breaks first. got it.

Exactly but every time you do your face gets a little sharper and harder

# ¿ Jan 6, 2017 20:12

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

General Battuta posted:

Exactly but every time you do your face gets a little sharper and harder

Also, study the faces of those who have broken the wall before you, and seek to imitate their expressions.

# ¿ Jan 6, 2017 20:17

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# ¿ May 14, 2024 06:52

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Read The Dispossessed, it owns. It's about two planets that each seem utopian (or dystopian) to the inhabitants of the other ��one is a lush world of wealth and achievement, but with all the inequity, violence, and decadence of capitalism. The other is a barren pain in the rear end committed to true anarchy, where everybody does whatever they want and things sort of work: but you get all the petty power politics, interpersonal conflict, and mob behavior that you'd expect from people.

LeGuin generally likes the anarchists better (because she is anticapitalist) but I think the book does a good job of painting both as flawed and interesting.

# ¿ Jan 11, 2017 22:19

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