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I feel like often my writing is too literal. (Possibly because I do a lot of academic writing for college.) What's a good way for someone to break out of literal-minded writing? When I try to write more abstractly, I feel like I'm just covering my literal thoughts with an unconvincing abstract veneer. e: fixed mixed metaphor
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Apr 5, 2013 23:59
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Apologies for not being clear. I feel like while I'm okay with writing descriptive prose on a basic, gets-across-the-idea level, I'm not as good with working in more figurative and less literal terms. When I read other stories, I'll see creative phrases that I like, but with my own writing, it feels as if it lacks that eloquence, like I'm more cinematic in my writing style than literary. For instance, a line I read like "The Monster twitched its jeweller's hands down to fondle at the men, to twist them in half, to crush them like berries, to cram them into its teeth and its screaming throat," hits me as a nice piece of prose, but if it was something I'd written, it'd be more like "The T-rex reached forward, as if it wanted to grab them, to tear them apart between its fangs and claws," or something similarly plain.
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Apr 6, 2013 00:49
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You can have over the top fight scenes in books. You can't have over the top anime fight scenes in books, because books aren't anime. You know how people complain about how movies are different from the book version? You know how novelizations of movies are rarely ever as good as the movie? That's because both are trying to say something similar in completely different media. If someone does pull off a cross-media translation like that, it's because they were creative and skillful in representing the themes of the original in an entirely different medium. An over the top fight scene in a book is going to be entirely different from one in an anime. Plus, what does that even mean in that context? Like Pokemon battles?
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Feb 22, 2014 15:42
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e: nvm
Djeser fucked around with this message at 00:09 on Mar 3, 2014 |
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Mar 2, 2014 13:33
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What it boils down to is that when things happen in your story, they need to have a reason. Suddenly someone can fly, for instance. The reason might be because that's how the reality of your story works, and you're using it to establish mood. It might be because it illustrates the ephemeral nature of identity. Anything that's going on in your story should have a reason, in the world of the story, or out of it, or both.
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Mar 6, 2014 17:44
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If you have an interesting element of your world that you have to introduce somehow, introduce them through the eyes of a character. This means that if they're completely normal to see, the first few mentions might not stick. Unless they're particularly bored, people don't stand around and talk to themselves about the intricacies of how the world works. They're going to see a little bit of something, think about it a bit, and you'll be able to slowly create a picture of just what these things are. For someone that did that in-character way of introducing a quirk of their world, I'd suggest reading Northern Lights/The Golden Compass, which does a great job of slowly sussing out the idea of what a "daemon" is, and if I remember right, it drops the concept on the reader in the first paragraph and slowly feeds them more information as it's relevant to Lyra. This works particularly because Lyra herself is learning in more detail about daemons, so the reader can learn through her as she goes through daemon-puberty. The advantage of teaching the reader about the world through the character's interactions with the unfamiliar elements is that you're doing double work--you're conveying information about the world, while also providing characterization. (If done right, it can also keep you focused on only explaining concepts relevant to the story/characters, as there's no reason a character would be talking or thinking about something entirely irrelevant to her. Remember that worldbuilding is probably interesting to you, but your reader is only going to want to know about it insofar as it's relevant to the story you're telling. It's fine if you know more than you put in the story. That's probably the best way to do things. re: gender chat from earlier Something to keep in mind, particularly for works set in another time period, is that the cultural concepts of sexuality we have now don't extend into the past. In Roman times, sexuality was much more about dominance (you were a man if you were sticking your dick in someone) rather than gender. "I bet you went down on your girlfriend" would be a huge insult to a Roman, because in their minds, you'd be saying that they made themselves submissive to a woman. Point is, sexuality can change a lot just through the passage of time.
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Mar 13, 2014 09:30
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CommissarMega posted:Well, it's to distinguish them from regular engineers- while common, magitech's normally used on a macro scale; FTL travel/communications, power generation from the municipal scale upwards, large ships (think intergalactic merchant ships/navy) all use magitech, while the typical civilian goes to work on combustion-engine vehicles and the like. I did think of using 'artificer', but the word brings to mind a tinker sort of character to me, and 'arcanist' sounds too magic. The mental image I wanted to evoke was a dude in a jumpsuit whacking an engine with a magic wand. In real life, engineers distinguish themselves by classifying which type of engineering they do. There's mechanical engineers, structural engineers, architectural engineers, and chemical engineers, off the top of my head. Metaphyscial engineering, maybe? Magical engineering? Arcane engineering? I have to agree with the arcaneer = pirate, you've got an arrr sound and -eer at the end, that's pretty pirate.
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Mar 14, 2014 01:59
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If you find that your stories are too long, the best way to shorten things is to get rid of unnecessary detail. If you want to link a TD entry that had this particular problem, I could give you specific advice, but in general, unnecessary details are either: -Stylistic fluff, like flowery metaphors or complicated phrasing -Redundant detail, where you say someone is angry, then they say something angry, and then you see their internal monologue about how they're angry -Unimportant information, which fills out a scene but doesn't contribute to the story in a meaningful way When you look through your story with an eye to cut material, you want to look for anything that doesn't drive your story forward.
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Mar 16, 2014 02:54
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To save elfdude from having to search, I went and found it myself.Erogenous Beef posted:Sit-Down Time With Unca Beef: A Word about Plots Another thing to keep in mind is that certain stories just won't work well in a short amount of time. I had to write a 500 word story this week, and it meant that I had to choose an idea that would fit in that space. You can't squeeze a ballad into 500 words. An area that's often ripe for paring down is the opening. I like strong openings, and I think that opening with something that introduces the conflict in your story is one of the best ways to go about it. Not only is the conflict (hopefully) the most interesting part of your story, but if you start right off by thinking about what's going wrong, then you'll have good momentum and you won't get bogged down trying to lay out a whole scene in your introduction before you get to the good stuff.
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Mar 16, 2014 03:24
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Since I don't have a Thunderdome story or anything to be writing, I decided to give you, Elfdude, a fairly in-depth crit on how to reduce redundancy with one of your TD entries. (It's the Lego week entry.) https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Y3nYGJXpnGFlzhHnygf0lcKGeEAIvIqPmMAQT7RHqpU/edit?usp=sharing Edit: I copied your story into a new file and did a rough edit of my suggestions into your story. The original story was 743 words. With my revisions, I got it down to 565. That's about 25% of the story that I was able to cut back, just by tweaking your phrasing to use less words. Overall, that was the biggest problem in that story--you just used more words to say things that could be said with fewer words. The advantage of shorter, simpler phrases is that not only do they use fewer words, but they're clearer and more evocative than getting bogged down in a mess of grammar. To grab an example from the crit I gave you: elfdude posted:The activity of cleaning had always reminded him of his mother. When she was alive he was still too young to be of much use on the farm, and so his mother had given him chores instead. They were really the only memories he had of her before her untimely demise. The thought of her death brought a frown to his face. Now that he was a murderer he had hoped that the thought of death wouldn’t bug him so much. Contrary to his hopes, for some reason he felt like death bugged him more than usual. rewrite posted:Cleaning always reminded him of his mother. While she was alive, he was too young to work on the farm. His memories of her were of the chores around the house she gave him. But thinking of his mother made him think of her death, then the dead creditors, then his dead father. The advantage of the rewrite is that it's shorter and that it gets closer to showing how death is dominating his thoughts. Djeser fucked around with this message at 05:26 on Mar 16, 2014 |
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Mar 16, 2014 04:25
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Your writing is inherently way more interesting to you than it is to anyone else. If you think "this scene is boring", stop. Evaluate what you're writing. Why is a boring thing relevant to your plot? Why can't you skip over it? If you can't skip over it, how can you make it more interesting? Seb's got the right idea. If what you're doing isn't interesting, do something that you wouldn't expect. And if you absolutely have to do something expected, use unexpected words. Describe the sky as the color of a dead TV station. Have clocks chiming thirteen. If you're saying something everyone can expect in the way everyone expects to hear it, why are you writing it in the first place?
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Mar 28, 2014 02:29
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Our very own Thunderdome has a strong emphasis on telling a complete story. It can be tough to successfully create a story within the constraints they give you, but tough things are often worth it. That said, what's the opinion on writing non-stories? Not exactly what I'd consider poetry, but more like vignettes or style pieces. (For instance, being a historian, a while ago I wrote fictitious historical documents for a fantasy culture.) They can be part of a larger story, of course, but on their own, are they a useful practice for getting a hang of elements like style?
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Mar 28, 2014 07:39
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RE CommissarMega and writing the mundane: I know that you didn't mean anything by calling it mundane, you were just looking for a word for non-genre fiction. But in the sense of being unremarkable and average, that's not what a story should be--you should want your story to be interesting and compelling. Which means you have to work out good characters and conflicts. These are necessary in any decent piece of fiction, even genre stuff. "Mundane" fiction just makes you have to rely on your characters and conflicts more, since you can't spackle up the gaps with worldbuilding or technobabble. I've just recently been reading two pieces of fiction set in the modern world, what you might call "mundane". But one of them featured suburban English sports clubs creating a fascist micro-state based on the worship of a cable news anchor after taking shoppers hostage inside of a megamall. The other one had anarchical class warfare breaking out between the floors of an apartment building leading to racism and prejudice between the people who lived on the lower floors and the people who lived at the top. Being set in the real world and grounded in reality doesn't mean your writing has to be boring. That's the exact opposite of what it means, in fact. You should write about interesting things, and interesting things do happen in the real world. People get in danger and fall in love and do drugs and hit the town and go on vacations and conduct espionage and make art.
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Mar 29, 2014 04:22
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CommissarMega posted:Yeah, that's pretty much what I meant As a small follow-up, just wanted to make it clear that it's perfectly fine to write fantasy/scifi stuff, and if that's what you want to write, fantastic. But if you're having trouble with fundamentals, then writing non-speculative stuff can help, because it makes you focus on character and conflict. Taking the time to get the hang of that will make your fantasy/scifi writing even better.
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Mar 29, 2014 14:48
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I guess I do realize a little too much on 'spackle' as you said. I think I'll work on an everyday story on the weekend and Fiction Farm the thing, see where I need to improve. Thanks for the advice, everyone!
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You can, though if it's around 1000 words or less, you can take it to the Fiction Farm thread, here: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3527097 You can also start a thread for feedback if it's a longer work.
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Mar 29, 2014 22:18
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Even if you're not a good writer, you can give useful criticism, because not everyone who reads everything is a good writer themselves. You might not be able to comment on mechanics, but like people have said, pointing out places where you were bored, confused, or tripped up on the wording is helpful. If you want to give positive criticism (whaaaat), you can still help someone by being specific about parts you particularly liked. It's nice but slightly annoying to hear "it's good, you know, the whole general thing", because that leaves the writer unsure of what they did that's good. It can be "I really like how the relationship between the mom and her son felt" or "I liked the imagery when he was walking through the forest" or something. And that doesn't have to be the only thing you like, it's just good to hear what works in your writing along with what doesn't.
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Apr 8, 2014 22:49
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I tend to have themes thought up by the time I'm writing, but that's because I spend a lot of time in the planning stages and comparatively little time writing. (I have to work on spending more time with actual words and less with imagining what words I could use, incidentally.) It's true though that when I get a theme, it comes from what I'm writing about first. For instance I'll want to write a story about a catastrophic flood and as I'm planning it out I realize that I want the theme to be about letting go of the past, so I write with that in mind. I seriously need to get more used to editing, but I procrastinate and when I do edit, all I tend to change is sentence-level grammar and I don't work on overall structure or stuff like that.
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Apr 25, 2014 00:17
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Speaking of making your work look like a real book, fonts can go a long way toward helping that, even just on the computer screen. If you're using Google Docs to write, it hooks into Google Fonts, so you have a huge selection of open source fonts to choose from. If you don't quite know which one to go with, I'd suggest the open-source version of the classic Garamond. When I went through my stories and switched them from Arial to Garamond it was like going from looking at some bullshit a goon wrote to looking at something that could be, like, a book.
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Apr 26, 2014 14:57
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Make them self-aware and compassionate yet still grounded in their beliefs that they know what's best? Like you can make it clear that they do care about suffering, but that they think the solution lies within their existing system and not through greater equality. They might have a strong sense of charity, but still feel like charity is theirs to decide and give and that the lower classes aren't owed anything just by merit of existing. You can also make them relatable in other ways--show why they don't have time to care about the concerns of the lower classes, because they're busy talking politics with neighboring nobles to make sure their lands aren't invaded, maybe. Show that they're human and they care about people, even if they don't have the time or inclination to solve the systemic problems that face the lower classes.
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May 6, 2014 12:53
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Sithsaber posted:I also need some help with structuring dialog. What part of dialogue are you having trouble with? Putting together a conversation, putting together individual lines, the tags (he said, etc)?
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Jun 27, 2014 01:05
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Sithsaber posted:The tags and ways to potray verbal idiosyncrasies. (Stammers, distorted vocal pitches, heavy accents etc) When you're adding in verbal idiosyncrasies, be careful, because it's very easy to get to the point where it's almost difficult to understand. The best way to clearly convey different voices is through word choice and sentence structure. You can still throw in one or two more obvious verbal tics, but once the reader has a clear idea of the character's voice, you don't need to constantly remind them. The subtle differences in the way you write the dialogue will keep those accents in mind. As for the tags, remember that 'said' is invisible. If you feel like you're using it too much, you can let the sentences attribute themselves. If you're trying to show people interrupting each other, you should put the cut-off words right next to the next person's words, but on a separate paragraph. Or, at the very least, move from cutting off one person to whatever action cuts them off As so: quote:"I don't think we should kung fu lawyer our way to victory in the Stevenson case," Bruce Fightsman said. "We are men of--"
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Jun 27, 2014 01:42
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Sithsaber posted:1. How do you handle all the changes in dynamic that may occur if you switch a character's gender? 1. Rewrite all those parts that would be different 2. When you're bored of writing it, because if you're bored with something you yourself made, everyone else is going to be super mega x2 bored with it because they didn't make it.
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Jul 4, 2014 08:12
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Sounds rad.
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Jul 11, 2014 06:40
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Sithsaber posted:Should I care more about freytag's pyramid/dramatic arc or Campbell's monomyth/ story circle? People fall into the trap of assuming descriptive theories, like the monomyth or the Hero's Journey, are presecriptive theories. They aren't so much "here's how to write a good story" as "here's how a lot of good stories are organized". Don't worry about writing to someone else's structure.
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Jul 15, 2014 15:29
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Good writing isn't just ideas, it's the effort and time spent taking those ideas, refining them, working over your words, and so on. Everyone identifies with their work via the ideas--I can think back to 'bitcoin dystopia' or 'Top Gun griffins' but what makes or breaks the story isn't the quality of the idea, it's the work you put into it. We get protective of ideas sometimes, but the way you're feeling is like being afraid someone might steal your kid's name for their own. First, no one is going to do that, and second, if they do, who cares? It's not going to affect the quality of what you've written.
Djeser fucked around with this message at 03:43 on Aug 14, 2014 |
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Aug 14, 2014 00:10
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Zip posted:I registered the trademark of Top Gun griffins in 1988. I'm going to have to ask you to stop using my intellectual property. Fine, then I'll take Top Gun gryphons. 
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Aug 17, 2014 10:36
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KevinCow posted:That's my problem: I never get to the redraft phase. I can't finish a story. I get a thousand or so words in and find that I've run out of ideas. I've got opinions about creativity, so here they are: Everyone is creative. Or, at the very least, everyone has the capacity to be creative. It's not something where you have it or you don't, it's a skill, and like any skill, you can learn and improve if you practice. If it seems like some people are inherently creative, that's because they've had practice--they didn't start out like that. If you feel like you're not creative, the problem might be that you haven't practiced, or that you haven't learned yet how to use your creativity. Both of those are solved by diving right in and writing and revising and getting feedback. This week's Thunderdome is wrapping up tonight, so there's going to be a new prompt in the next few days, if you want to get in on it. Or, if you prefer, there's the Farm thread, where you can post short excerpts, up to around 1000 words (though not a hard limit) if you want feedback. And while sometimes you can hear feedback and thing 'telling me how I'm bad', feedback can be a massive boost to your confidence, because then you're not sitting and worrying all day long about whether you're good enough. You'll know what to work on, and even what you're doing well, too.
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Aug 17, 2014 17:15
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butt, faart. fart fart fart fart. fart noise. bigger fart noise sincerely, a butt, also fart
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Aug 25, 2014 05:04
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Music can be tough. My advice is to keep in mind what you're trying to convey about the music, whether you're trying to get across snippets of the lyrics or the style of the song or the emotional feeling of the song. When I was trying to describe a certain sort of music, I had the kind of music I was thinking of queued up in my music player and listened to it every so often while I was writing. It helped keep the way the music sounded fresh in my head. If you're going for a comparison between styles, you could even just describe the difference in the performers--a trio with a banjo, cello and fiddle brings to mind different music than a skinny guy with a scruffy beard and an acoustic guitar
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Aug 25, 2014 16:15
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I know that when I'm up and around and doing things, I feel like I've got more ideas brewing in me than days when I spend it all sitting around at home. I just blew through writing my TD entry for this week on a Wednesday, and I'm the kind of person who has trouble with deadlines. I think the thing is that, over the weekend, I went on a trip, got to see new things, and generally put myself out of my comfort zone. But what's really interesting is that my inspiration had nothing to do with the things I'd seen during the trip. It's more about introducing some kind of variety into your thought patterns, because if you sit around and play Dark Souls for eight hours a day (which I did for a few weeks) you aren't going to be thinking about things in any new ways. I had a major creative block for that time, and then when I broke my routine and did something entirely new, suddenly I've got new thought patterns and I could pick up on a new idea and write about that. Sometimes, you just can't get yourself out there and do new things, and like Schneider Heim said, that's where books can come in. Doesn't need to be fiction, I've read some great nonfiction books that get me thinking about new things and making new associations. All it takes is shoving some new ideas into your brain, and then they can start to mix around and change things up and before you know it, you're finding all new patterns of relations that you can work with.
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Sep 4, 2014 03:37
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I don't think I could ever give up video games, at least not at this point in my life. Do what you have fun doing, but don't get stuck in a rut doing the same thing over and over. Having a job helps with not playing video games all the time, but I don't have a job right now, and it's easy to get burnt out if all you do is [play video games]/[browse SA]/[do dumb internet poo poo]. I ended up in that kind of rut, where I went on the internet until I couldn't stand refreshing another god drat site, then I played video games until I was frustrated, then back and forth. That's not good for me, and it's not good for my creativity, because I'm just running in circles in my room. I think part of getting into a healthy habit with things is getting used to stopping when you could still have some more. Just like you don't eat until you feel like you're going to throw up, don't play video games until you get frustrated or browse forums until you're bored out of your skull.
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Sep 4, 2014 04:33
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Those two dudes make some great points that I was gonna make. Description should back up what you're trying to convey, whether it's a character's warmth or the meaningless absurdity of a rampaging alien artifact. Here's some techniques that help me when it's time to write some description:
Not everything has to be a novel turn of phrase, but it's a good thing to consider if you need to really drive home an image. Sometimes all it takes is a bit of an unexpected contrast; once I said a character tried to soothe his anxieties by "combing the garden to pristine, compulsive beauty"--that 'compulsive' is unexpected, since 'pristine' carries connotations of peacefulness, and that contrast helps create meaning. Unexpected contrast is a great little trick. On the other hand, if you want to spend some time on a description somewhere, it pays to be specific. For instance, my latest TD entry had a line that boiled down to "He had an aggressively friendly voice." Not terrible on its own, since there's a bit of contrast there already, but I wanted to go extreme evocative so I considered a few iterations. 'A voice so friendly he could have been trying to sell you something' was a possibility, but that was more cloying and obviously insincere than I wanted (plus, the character was already a pitch man, so it didn't make as much sense to say that a pitch man did something the way a pitch man would). I settled on something to the tune of "He had the voice of an uncle coming over for Thanksgiving dinner," which gets the overly friendly, obligated to be nice to him, trying-to-make-you-like-him sort of feeling I was going for. It's effective (in my mind at least) because it's specific, evocative, and a relatively novel phrase. crabrock posted:a few descriptions can go a long way, no need to have whole paragraphs describing everything. let the reader's imagination fill in some stuff. I wanted to end with this cause it's true. Looking at my voice example, I pulled a poetic description like that maybe two or three times in the whole story. When you get a good piece of description, you can drop it in and let it build a little world around itself.
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Sep 8, 2014 20:45
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Fictive motion is a fancy phrase for a specific device. (For those that don't want to Wikipedia it, it's when you give motion to something that doesn't move, such as 'the stairs run to the top of the building'.) It can be a way of 'showing', but it seems like mainly just a linguistic device like synecdoche (using a part of something to refer to the whole) as opposed to a style choice.
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Sep 11, 2014 23:02
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It's pretty tough to have to face up to and acknowledge what your weaknesses are. Knowing you're not great is one thing, but being told specifically where you're weak is hard to handle. I don't generally have a problem with reading crits of my own stuff (as long as I put in actual work) but I can totally see why it might make someone feel self-conscious and reluctant to read it.
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Sep 16, 2014 22:49
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Thunderdome can seem scary but for the most part when you get crits they're sincere. The harshness is part of the fun, but the people who get the harshest end of the multi-ended stick are the people who aren't taking it seriously. As serious as a writing workshop where we all pretend we're post apocalyptic gladiators can be, at least. The harshest response I ever got was when I hosed off and wrote some dumb dick joke and every judge said "this is a dumb dick joke you rear end in a top hat." The harshness doesn't come from a place of mean-spiritedness either. It's really meant to foster frankness because when you hedge your criticism in praise you're helping no one. It's important to know what you're doing right, certainly, but if the person doing the crit is afraid to speak their mind they're wasting the time of everyone involved. PoshAlligator posted:Take Thunderdome with a pinch of salt though guys. It's a fun way to make sure you get something original out. Even if it gets shat on it can help you identify key bits to work on, especially if you submit a few times and people recognise your style. I kept doing way too make sentence fragments a couple of months ago. Even if it's unnecessarily harsh you can probably take something for it. Was it you where I just started going FRAGMENT each time you had a sentence fragment? That was a fun crit.
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Sep 17, 2014 01:28
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October's coming up. Anyone know of sites with writing tips for horror stories? Or just the tips.
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Sep 25, 2014 04:39
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Australians speak in backward-masking due to the coriolis effect. Use this to your advantage in your future endeavors.
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Sep 28, 2014 15:17
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I started with terrible steampunk and immediately realized that steampunk is the worst.
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Oct 10, 2014 02:53
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I don't know if this is more fiction advice or just life advice, but I've been having some heavy motivation issues lately, and I'm just wondering what people use to focus and get their writing done. I think last time, you guys had suggested setting aside a certain amount of time each day, which I've thought about but never managed to put into practice. Do people have anything else they've found to motivate themselves (in general, or in specific for writing)? I feel like I should note it's not that I don't like writing, it's just that it ends up being a lot lower-effort to browse forums and play Dark Souls. I deleted Dark Souls from my hard drive today, at least.
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Oct 10, 2014 05:05
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 03:38 |
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I joined Thunderdome, became unemployed, and now I have enough time to write AND play video games.
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Nov 5, 2014 00:22
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