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Pinball posted:Thanks! It's supposed to be epic fantasy, but I think trying to write an epic fantasy duology or trilogy right off the bat may be too ambitious. I may just revise it, set it aside, and write something smaller-scale to try and publish, since apparently publishing houses like you to have a real resume before they put money into a multi-book series. And I only have three viewpoint characters, so I'm not really sure if it's all that epic. I've been in that situation before. Five year to write? Okay, good, now it's finished. But wait! Now you need to spend another five years trimming and editing and fixing, because what you wrote is no good and it desperately needs a great deal of help before anyone will care about it! Ah, hold on a second here, I'm projecting my own experience. But yeah, going big feels really good when you finally finish it up. It takes a lot of work and it takes a long time to write. Since you're doing fantasy, that probably also means that you wrote out a ton of world-building and back story that didn't actually makes it into the story itself. I'm currently sitting on a 100k+ story, about 25k of which was trimmed away over about a year's time [though a lot of that was just cutting out extraneous words, of which there were far more than I ever would have thought], and trying to figure out what I want to do with it. And that's just the first part of what will probably be at least a trilogy, so I'm definitely having to put in some deep thought about whether I should actually try to do something with it or just stick to shorter, more concise works. And three viewpoint characters? I think mine had at least a dozen! Which is probably too many.
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Jan 30, 2013 17:32
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Maxwell Lord posted:The second bit is a puzzler. Maybe they're talking about it but somebody else is present and they don't want them to know too much? Maybe they're paranoid that someone will overhear? That would be my suggestion, too. Just having them talk vaguely among themselves, solely to keep the reader in the dark, will come across as artificial and only irritate the reader. You might have a viewpoint character present somehow, or they realize that a viewpoint character is overhearing them, and so they stay vague about what they've discovered in order to keep the viewpoint character in the dark. If you can't make the passage work that way, you might want to consider rewriting it somehow or even considering how important it is to the story [as in, maybe the discovery of something important that the reader doesn't know about can be gotten across in another way entirely]. You obviously have a better understanding of the story than I do, but you generally don't want something to be the focus of a passage but not actually tell the reader what that something is.
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Jan 31, 2013 03:16
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Martello posted:Don't substitute an additional real-world language for a fake language. Using English for whatever the "common tongue" ( I agree. If you just want to drop in a line from some other language to show the multiculturalism of your characters/world, then just make up some fakes. It won't be any less likely to get the point across and is less likely to confuse/annoy your readers. I even get a little antsy about using commonly used words that were recently derived from other languages in my own writing. Like "hors d'oeuvre." Just about any native English speaker knows what it means, but it just feels...wrong...to use it in some fantasy world with no connection to the real world.
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Jan 31, 2013 22:19
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) in your world happens to be is fine, because otherwise nobody could read your book. Duh. But substituting Spanish or whatever is just going to look absurd.
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Maxwell Lord posted:If you took out every borrowed word you'd have very little left. Use whatever has been in common usage (so long as it fits your style.) Oh yeah, definitely, it's just something that I've become conscious of lately. Generally, I'll just use it anyway, but if it's a phrase or combination of words, I'll try to figure out some kind of alternative instead.
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Jan 31, 2013 23:15
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I thought about using epigraphs once, but I probably wouldn't today. As with a lot of things in writing, some people can really pull it off well, but most people won't. So, I'd say that it's only something I would use if I was totally convinced that it wouldn't come across as some kind of cheap "celebrity endorsement" like Mike Works said. I guess it would really come down to what you're trying to accomplish. Do you genuinely feel that it will contribute to your story in a meaningful way, or are you trying to add some weight to your story by connecting it to famous quotes by better writers than yourself?
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Feb 5, 2013 04:20
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Maxwell Lord posted:I dunno, the chapter headings in Dune are kind of cool. Yeah, I liked those, too. The only other book I can think of off-hand that had epigraphs was Starship Troopers, which used them pretty well, I thought.
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Feb 6, 2013 02:54
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I try not to get too caught up in researching obtuse things that aren't even important in the slightest to the overall story, but sometimes I will get caught up looking for some specific bit of information. For example, I spent about five minutes looking up the name of the hat that naval captains wear. It actually has several different names, though generally it's called a peaked hat or combination hat. You can thank me later.
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Feb 26, 2013 18:16
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Phil Moscowitz posted:I think comma splicing is great, especially when writing in first person or a deep third person limited, since that's how people think. Gotta go to the car, get my gun. rear end in a top hat thinks he can do me like that? We'll see. I'll whip his teeth out his mouth, make him hurt. Then spread his brains across the wall. That's how I tend to write. Screw conjunctions, what have they have done for me? Nothing. 
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Feb 28, 2013 20:10
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For all you guys who self-publish a lot of short stories, what do you do about the cover? Do you just go with some standard and simple or do you whip out the checkbook and get something custom made up? And do your readers even care?
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Mar 6, 2013 20:45
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| # ¿ May 21, 2024 03:25 |
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Then I shall ask it there!
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Mar 6, 2013 21:08
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