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Cardinal Ximenez posted:What's with all the passive voice dissing? I know it is "common" advice, but at this point, you are a necromancer raising this long-discredited prescriptivist cliche from the grave. It irks me because it gets covered by fairly reliable sources about as often as the "eskimos have n words for snow" thing. It's advice for new writers. Like anything else about the craft and every other craft, it's not a blanket rule, only a general one. Of course passive voice is useful in descriptive phrases and other places where something is, well, passive. The problem is when you have awful things like "He was moving towards her, his grey eyes flashing. She was standing still and falling into his eyes." In that case the alternative, "As he moved towards her, his grey eyes flashed. She stood still and fell into his eyes." is clearly better (though still awful). The real problem is not active or passive voice but inappropriate voice. Using active voice throughout a descriptive passage would be just as bad as using passive through an action scene.
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Jul 16, 2012 17:11
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Martello posted:What you just said isn't actually active vs passive voice. You were talking about tense, there. I'm a terrible human and a worse grammarian.
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Jul 16, 2012 17:57
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How educated is the character? I don't know if it might seem overly academic, but hurling literary jargon at the reader in a way that makes it clear he really loves the text might do the trick. The average reader might not be very interested in reading through some guy's disjointed literary ramblings on the text, but really that all depends on your target audience. Worst case scenario, the average reader skips over that section and people with formal literary education rock through it. Alternately, you could try doing what the romantics did and describe his experience of the poem. Being 'genuinely affected' by a work is going to lead one to make some pretty flowery statements, but again this might not be appropriate based on the type of reader you're aiming for or the character's personality (I can't see a hardened PI describing poetry in flowery terms even if he describes a writhing cesspit of copulation and debauchery that way). Putting the actual poem into the text would be a dangerous thing to do. You run the risk of writing a poo poo poem and then having the reader go "wow this guy is a loser" when your guy likes it so much. If on the other hand your poem is genuinely great, you might have your readers overempathise with the character if he's not very sympathetic. In my opinion the safest way to go about it if you plan on putting in the actual poem is to write it around the character. It's obvious why and how the character loves the poem so much if it's been written for him. You can ignore this entire paragraph if it's a poem by someone else. EDIT: Personally I'd use a combination of the first two methods to describe the content and how it affected him. If it's overblown then the guy is a bit of a romantic; if it's realistic the guy just really appreciates his poetry. I'd avoid using the actual poem because that could all too easily distract from the main writing if you're not a decent poet. Purple Prince fucked around with this message at 11:50 on Aug 15, 2012 |
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Aug 15, 2012 11:47
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I don't know guys, Trainspotting was fairly easy to read for me, even in the Renton chapters. Then again Welsh mostly writes in standard English and only replaces certain words in Scots with their phonetic equivalents. No hail of apostrophes. As far as I can tell he only replaces the words that are noticeably different other than in terms of inflection. In addition most of the words he replaces are commonly used; the reader becomes used to them quickly. "Ah pull oot some crumpled notes fae mah poakits, and wi touching servility, flatten them oot oan the coffee table." Purple Prince fucked around with this message at 07:44 on Aug 16, 2012 |
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Aug 16, 2012 07:40
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To be honest I just flicked to a random Renton page and quoted a sentence with a lot of dialect. Which says a lot about how good Welsh's writing is. Everyone who wants to write something using a lot of accents should read Trainspotting in my opinion, because the accents are so well done that the book reads as smoothly as if it were standard English. Also, Renton is not stupid. He's the most intelligent character in the book except, perhaps, for the unnamed narrator of "Bad Blood". Which makes a nice change from non-standard dialects being used to convey stupidity, which is elitist and potentially racist. A Renton Moment: "Society invents a spurious convoluted logic tae absorb and change people whae's behaviour's outside its mainstream... it's seen as a sign ay thir ain failure. The fact that ye jist simply choose tae reject whit they huv tae offer. Choose us. Choose life. Choose mortgage payments; choose washing machines; choose cars; choose sitting oan a couch watching mind-numbing and spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fuckin junk food intae yir mooth. Choose rotting away, pishing and shiteing yersel in a home, a total fuckin embarrassment tae the selfish, hosed-up brats ye've produced. Choose life."
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Aug 16, 2012 11:59
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Dr. Kloctopussy posted:My thoughts kept coming back to this over the past few days, and I really disagree that The Stranger or The Old Man and the Sea would be good introductions to people who don't enjoy reading. This again. The Stranger is a very easy read, but it doesn't have much in the way of compelling action. In addition, the themes it deals with are philosophically complex, and it's impossible to appreciate why it's a good book without having foreknowledge of what Camus was trying to get across or being decent at interpreting literature. Neither of which apply to someone who doesn't enjoy reading. I'm not going to recommend Pratchett or Gaiman (although they're great) because they're not strictly literary authors, and it looked like you were trying to get them into so-called serious literature. Instead I'll recommend the books that started me off with literature: The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. They're both Gothic fantasy novels, and because they're Late Victorian they're fairly accessible to a modern reader and aren't bogged down with the reams of description that e.g. Jane Eyre is. If you want something more modern, why not Catch-22? It's both hilarious and poignant.
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Sep 21, 2012 18:08
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Stabbey_the_Clown posted:All this talk about fan fiction reminds me of how I got into writing... Lots of people do seem to get into writing through imitation, which isn't very surprising. After all, imitation of classical literature or adaptations of other people's works used to be one of the main ways writers would learn their craft. Lots of writers even made a distinguished career out of imitation, just by livening the same plot with more believable characters and more eloquent prose. For those of you getting hung up on original settings and characters, bear in mind that before about 1750, the concept of originality did not exist: 'originality' is tied to romanticism. Some theorists, such as Foucalt, even believe that the entire idea of an Author as originator of work is a product of capitalism. Look up "What is An Author?" by him if you're interested. That aside, I'm one of the few writers I know who didn't get started by consciously imitating other people's work. From the age of about eight I wrote little fantasy stories to entertain myself, in much the same way you see kids of that age drawing pictures of animals or their house. As a kid I read a lot of pulpy young adult fantasy and sci-fi, so that became my model. When I got a bit older, probably around the age of twelve, I started to pay attention to the craft of writing, rather than just writing to entertain myself. I posted a few things on forums and tried to understand the advice I was given. Sometimes I'm asked when I started writing. I say when I was twelve. When I was about fifteen I read a collection of Edgar Allan Poe. It was hard for me to get through at first, because I was used to contemporary writing styles, but when I managed to get through the baroque language I really enjoyed it. Here was someone who used the same tropes I was used to, but made them mean something! From there, I moved onto progressively more literary books, and my writing began to reflect that. I don't think about my writing, not in the way some writers do. Trying to get too logical about my writing is counterproductive for me: I can't write under such strict guidelines. Nor do I deliberately imitate other authors. Often what happens is I'll read a book, enjoy it, then do some writing, and realise I'm copying how that author writes. Sometimes I do take cues from other authors, but they tend to be more 'using myths can give your writing a universal quality' (Angela Carter!) than 'using the subjunctive tense to emphasise a particular character's lack of concreteness': macro, not micro. My advice to people who want to write would be to read. Read everything. But especially read 'literary' authors. Normally they're considered literary because they did something new or perfected an existing technique (Wuthering Heights and free indirect speech, Joyce and stream of consciousness), so the more literary books you read, the more you expand your 'toolbox' of techniques. And the larger your toolbox is, the more flexibility you have to tell the story you want to tell in the way you want to tell it. This post is getting long, rambling, and pretentious: it stops here.
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Jan 2, 2013 19:41
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What do you guys think a sane balance of narrative to dialog is? I ask because I'm writing a piece that's turning out to be very talk-heavy, but as it's a slow-boiling drama set in a rural village I'm not sure that's a bad thing. Obviously it's very much a case of 'if you can do it right then do it' but I'm curious to hear people's views on this. What's the effect of a lot of dialog, assuming the dialog serves a purpose and isn't empty babble? Does it progress or retard the plot? Should I consider writing a play or screenplay instead of a novel?
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Jul 3, 2013 01:24
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Sitting Here posted:I suppose if you posted a sample of your dialog, it'd be easier to tell you whether it's pulling its weight. Quick background to the setting and characters. Postwar England, sometime between 1957 and 1963. This is set at a dinner party hosted by Lewisham, which has been going badly ever since Wegner arrived. Lewisham is a successful businessman and a patriarchal figure in the village. George Richards is his subordinate and friend. Wegner is the village doctor, 'A thin, anaemic young man'. Something to note is that it's in first-person from the perspective of another character, who doesn't act here. --- At last Richards spoke up. “So, Doctor, I trust your practice is going well?” Wegner glanced around him, blinking, as if he’d just been woken from a daydream. He brushed an errant hair behind his ear and cleared his throat. “I- I’m sorry?” Richards repeated his question. “Oh, it’s - it’s going well enough. As one would expect.” “You haven’t gotten involved with-” Lewisham was on his feet: “George!” Richards balked. “It doesn’t suit the present company to ask such personal questions, George, you should know that.” Richards glared at Lewisham, then bowed his head. “You’re right.” He turned to Wegner. “I’m sorry. I forgot myself. I must have had too much to drink.” “Well, it is a drat fine wine, George, so I forgive you,” said Lewisham. Everyone laughed, except Wegner, who had somehow become even paler.
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Jul 3, 2013 09:55
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Chillmatic posted:Anyway, hope that helps. If you want more help you'll need to post a more focused exchange (perhaps between your POV character and one other person)? Thanks for this. I was aware that my dialogue was the weakest part of my writing (lack of practice), and having reams of poo poo dialogue seemed unhealthy. (Also, Eddy Izzard is one of my favourite comedians, so kudos for that!) The Orson Scott Card extract really does get to the heart of the problem: I'm using dialogue to progress the narrative when my prose should be doing that for me. I'm not writing a drat screenplay. The emptiness of the dialogue is due to my attempt to make the conversation progress the narrative by itself, with very little prose. This seemed rear end-backwards to me because Gabriel Garcia Marquez, one of my favourite authors, manages to use about one sentence of dialog per chapter and still have the plot work. Granted, Marquez writes in a synoptic style, but even, say, Pratchett, who really doesn't, is nowhere near as dialog-heavy as I'm being. Not to make excuses, but whenever I start to do the sort of exposition that Orson Scott Card is doing, I feel like I'm violating 'show, don't tell' in a fairly monumental way. My aim in writing dialog like this was to show only the surface of events, like a film or play, and have everything else lie in the subtext, only occasionally boiling over into the visible world. But I don't know if doing this is intrinsically bad writing or whether I'm just too poo poo to execute it properly. Opinions? Purple Prince fucked around with this message at 23:51 on Jul 3, 2013 |
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Jul 3, 2013 23:45
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3Romeo posted:Anecdotal, I know, but I'm honestly surprised at how much I've learned to like standing. Not sure a thread about fiction is going to be annoyed at you posting anecdotes. Content: How do y'all cope with writer's block? I get it pretty severely and it's more-or-less because of anxiety. Drinking and smoking help me write by relaxing me but I just quit smoking and don't want to become reliant on booze.
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Jul 21, 2013 18:10
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Stuporstar posted:This may not work for everyone, but if you're stuck, changing your habit might kick you into gear. If you're not getting anything done, what do you have to lose? Thanks for this. Just finished doing some just-woke-up writing and belted out 250 words in just over quarter of an hour. Much better than laboring for hours over one sentence, although the prose quality isn't as high. Story quality is better because there is a story. I guess that's what editing's for. Stuporstar posted:There is more than one type of writer's block and learning to identify which kind prevents people from spinning their wheels. His is currently due to anxiety, most likely brought on by chemical withdrawal, so the way to unblock it is to take care of his mental health. This is almost but not quite right. My anxiety is down to psychological problems, which I'm seeing a therapist about. Smoking was a coping mechanism which helped me for a while (got me through exam season) but eventually became so much a part of my routine that it didn't work any more. So I quit. Trying to replace my drinking and smoking habits with work and working out. Your advice and the advice from Writing Tools (quoting Brenda Ueland) were the most helpful I've had in forever. "Just write" doesn't help with anxiety. Writing Tools posted:All people who try to write... become anxious, timid, contracted, become perfectionists, so terribly afraid that they may put something down that is not as good as Shakespeare...
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Jul 22, 2013 09:32
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magnificent7 posted:I absolutely second or third Writing Tools, the book recommended by Chillomatic. He recommended it to me two or three times and I replied similarly to the way you replied, and then I read the book, and now suggest that book as well. Just want to back this up. Along with How Not To Write A Novel it's probably one of the best writing books available, and not nearly as authoritarian as The Elements of Style.
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Jul 31, 2013 17:33
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Basing realistic characters off archetypes is totally contrary to the spirit of Jung's psychology. One thing he was always very clear about is that no person is an archetype: archetypes are just images with a very strong (primal?) bundle of complexes tied to them. If you plan to write myths, or give some character or situation myth-like qualities, then you might find using archetypes useful. If not they're mostly of theoretical interest.
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Aug 3, 2013 00:04
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Also it's printed on good-quality paper with a nicely-textured front cover, and has a simple and classic design which makes it look classier than Audrey Hepburn in Armani. It is a perfect example of why physical books are Just Better.
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Aug 3, 2013 21:46
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ViggyNash posted:In the other tools he managed to thoroughly cover both why you might want to use it and why you might not, at least where it applies. I found it odd that he mentioned JK Rowling for no other reason than to whimsically criticize her style without any sort of explanation. The point of the tool is that adverbs should only be used where they modify the meaning of a sentence. It's about avoiding redundancy, not adverbs themselves. You could flood the reader with a deluge of adverbs but be readable, or expunge them all and murder your prose. No adverbs means less detail in your writing. Many adverbs means redundancy and purple prose. The former is a lesser sin than the latter. If you can use adverbs effectively (ha!) you don't need the rule. The tools exhort you to learn the rules so you can break them well. That's all. EDIT: As for JK Rowling: she's not a linguistic magician, but she doesn't need to be. It's better to use an adverb than be unclear, which is why they're such a seductive crutch. EDIT2: ViggyNash posted:I wouldn't go as far as making that conclusion, but I agree that the physical book itself was really well made. I confess: I'm biased. I don't like eBooks. They have no soul. Purple Prince fucked around with this message at 22:22 on Aug 4, 2013 |
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Aug 4, 2013 22:13
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There's an interesting question here: How do you think the medium a book is presented in (i.e. eBook or physical book) affects the reading experience? Personally I think that the physical book allows one to become more immersed in the language because the text occupies space. You can flick between pages of the book with relative ease, make notes in the margin, dog-ear particular pages, and so on, all of which are more complicated on an eBook. The book also has a symbolic function which is different to that of an eBook - a house full of bookshelves has a completely different feel to if all those books were in a Kindle. From a pragmatic point of view they are the same, but emotionally and symbolically the two are completely different. The eBook is convenient and allows one to get most texts quickly and easily, but this convenience speeds everything up and removes some of the relaxing properties of reading. A physical book is archaic, but this might be a good thing - in many ways books are the one refuge from the extreme pace of modern life - you have to take time over a book and focus on it to get the most out of it. Am I getting off-topic here? This discussion seems like one worth having in a thread about writing, because it's about how readers interpret what we write. In Search of Lost Time only seems to make sense as a book; as an eBook the convenience of the device would contrast with the ponderousness of the text.
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Aug 7, 2013 11:34
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Martello posted:Personally, I very much dislike present tense. I don't know if it's just a preference thing or what, but any time I'm reading a story and realize it's present tense I immediately groan. It just smacks of "artistic" writing where you change up conventions just for the sake of it. Admittedly, sometimes it can work, but I think more often it doesn't. It's kind of like not using quotes or whatever. Yes, Cormac McCarthy does it, but that doesn't mean you should. In fact, McCarthy shouldn't do it either. I didn't have the same experience when I read Pattern Recognition. Its being written in present tense made it a little difficult for me to adapt to, but that's nothing compared to Gibson's famously florid phrases. I often find that when a writer is doing something of interest with regard to style, it's more difficult to adjust to. Take Gabriel Garcia Marquez. When I started reading Love in the Time of Cholera (translated, but these features weren't a function of translation) I found it quite difficult and dry: Marquez always writes in the same pseudo-synoptic style. As I adapted more to Marquez's writing style I started noticing the interesting things he does, like segueing between different levels of synopsis to create particular effects. Saying he writes like a history book wouldn't be inaccurate but nor would it be a criticism: if Marquez wrote history books, he'd be up for a Pulitzer Prize on the basis of style alone. Compared to the unique literary devices and rhetoric each writer employs, something like present vs. past tense is practically insignificant. I think there's a very real risk of 'always use past, third-person' becoming an orthodoxy, which is a pity because I take the view that whatever style and voice is best for expressing a particular story is the one you should use.
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Nov 9, 2013 00:51
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