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Sid Vicious posted:I don't really have any education in creative writing, but I have always really enjoyed it. Would this be the thread to post a short story for advice on my writing style etc? I sometimes have problems staying in tense and perspective, and I would just like some criticism and advice on a short story I wrote recently. If this isn't the right thread would anyone be able to point me in the right direction? Thanks in advance You should definitely start doing weekly entries to the Thunderdome. You'll get really good/honest crit and fun prompts.
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Mar 19, 2013 02:26
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I went in as a complete beginner and got myself this avatar, coming in dead last on my first try. I also got very constructive feedback and the competitive aspect has kept me motivated to keep trying every single week. Not wanting to come in dead last again has made me write a rough draft the day the prompt comes out and then polish it as the week goes on. If you write something really bad, it will get torn to pieces, but they'll tell you why and you can fix it next time.
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Mar 19, 2013 12:58
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Quote from Kafka: "Everyone who retains the ability to recognize beauty will never get old".
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Mar 20, 2013 21:13
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When writing less than 1,500 word pieces, what are some different ways to go about structuring and then editing? For the Thunderdome prompts I basically look at the prompt as soon as it is posted and start thinking about how to structure what I write. Usually within 24 hours I have planned out generally what will happen and then I start writing. The rough draft rarely takes any time at all to have done. I then look at it two or so times a day and make at first large edits and as the week goes by I make smaller edits. For one prompt, even though I actually liked what I had, I tried to just rewrite it from the beginning to break out of any calcified parts I had and also to help me just cut out words that I didn't really need. One week I broke from this process and completely scrapped what I had three days in. I then got sick and had to write something at the last minute and it ended up being absolute poo poo, so I at least know my usual process is better than going from the gut. In general I am finding myself very reluctant to make drastic changes after I have gone through my usual process. I can't decide if this is good or bad and am curious how other people write and at what point do you consider something "finished". Would I maybe be better off to just leave it alone for two days and then go in for bigger edits rather than editing multiple times a day?
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Mar 22, 2013 03:49
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I'm not a good writer but it's troubling that you have no desire to do short fiction. Doing short fiction lets you try out different concepts and allows you to work something to completion in a short amount of time. You don't want to spend four months writing your sprawling epic and then finally show it to someone only to have them say "This is terrible." There was a thread on here (the translation adventures one) where this more or less happened. If you do short fiction you can spend a week or just a few days writing 1200 words, have someone tell you it is terrible and why, then you can write something else that addresses those problems. If you are learning to paint you go to a life drawing class and start out with two-minute gesture drawings using chalk or charcoal.
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Mar 28, 2013 13:20
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Martello posted:Holy poo poo, a week? How about 2 or 3 hours? I can write something in a few hours but it usually takes me at least a few days to polish it to completion. I also just started writing so hopefully I can get faster.
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Mar 28, 2013 16:44
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If you're bad at something that is the best reason to do it.
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Mar 28, 2013 17:09
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It's called past perfect http://www.englishpage.com/verbpage/pastperfect.html You're basically using it because you are already writing the story in the regular past tense, so you need to use past perfect to have something happening even further in the past.
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Apr 14, 2013 21:41
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On the topic of over describing, a quote talking abut when they let R. R. Martin write a script for the HBO show:quote:For “Game of Thrones,” Martin will do one script per season, he said it does create a strange conflict for the writer. Martin described several additional scenes he’d written that were cut (as he expected), including one of ravens calling the banners—the ravens were received at Dreadfort, Last Hearth, Bear Island, etc. and all the secondary lords responded. Martin called it a “magnificent sequence,"
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Apr 27, 2013 15:53
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I was just thinking of his actual writing when I read that: When he describes every banner present during a battle for two pages. It's a strong example of how over describing can slow your plot and make things difficult for the reader.
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Apr 27, 2013 22:50
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crabrock posted:fellow thunderdomers: what do you do when the story you're working on is just complete garbage and you realize the idea just doesn't work? Do you scrap it and start over with a new (rushed) idea or do you try to edit it and make it work? I had this problem a bit ago, and I'm having it again. I don't want to be a "no-show" but I also don't wan't to submit something that I think is lovely even as I'm writing it. I scrap it and start over. The last week that I won, I had spent three days writing something that was pretty bad, so I scrapped it and started over with a similar concept in a totally different plot and setting. See if you can keep the good aspects of your idea, but throw away everything that isn't working. Doing it from scratch will help you not feel bogged down and frustrated.
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May 11, 2013 20:33
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Also it's "three and twenty" not "twenty and three".
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May 18, 2013 21:54
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I like to put headphones on and not play any music so people have their guard way down.
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May 21, 2013 13:10
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Practice writing short stories and prose first. Your writing will be much worse than you think.
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May 21, 2013 20:18
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In the Thunderdome, which is a good place to start practicing--$50 for the winner this week, we have had people come in and post a short fantasy-like piece. Out of 20 or so entries, this person gets dead last place. They then say, "I have a 60,000 word novel already written like this..." I just feel really sad when that happens. Don't be that person. I think everyone who "will write a novel one day" likes to just think about doing it and assumes that the ideas will carry everything else; the writing will just kind of happen, right? Writing is a skill that is difficult to acquire. You don't want to develop that skill from the ground up as you are constructing your epic fantasy series. Get good at doing it, then do it. If you want to learn to do oil paintings and have never drawn before, you will start by taking a pencil and filling sheets of paper with nothing but circles, not by buying a 20x20 foot canvas and doing an oil painting straight away.
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May 21, 2013 21:33
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There's no way it should take you three months to come up with an idea. Put a deadline on yourself and force yourself to write something.
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May 27, 2013 19:49
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magnificent7 posted:Thanks but no. I think maybe I should have waited before jumping into the Thunderdome. I'm not there yet. Crabrock, whose first entry was a pedophile story that made almost no sense and who now, two months or so later, just won the $50 prize and is getting published. You can probably learn something from him and he's willing to help you.
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May 28, 2013 19:43
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magnificent7 posted:How do you decide when your story is finished? When do you decide to stop tweaking? For Thunderdome, the two times I have won (and note that when I didn't place very well, I didn't have time to do the following) I did this: On Tuesday night, as soon as the prompt was posted, I read it and started brainstorming. The next day I spent several hours thinking up ideas and letting them fight each other in my head for which was best to use. I tried to consider how well each idea met the prompt, how much conflict and character development would be possible within each idea, and how good of a hook I could put onto each idea (pretty important for flash fiction). I tend to think really hard about my opening line and how "late" I can start the narrative. For weeks where I have not done very well according to the judges, I had a gut feeling during this stage that I was selecting an idea that failed to do well for any or most of the above criteria. I wrote the first draft on the day after the prompt was posted. After I finished the first draft I closed the word processor and did something else. Several hours later I opened the draft back up and did heavy editing, noticing many mistakes and unclear writing. I then re-opened the draft every four or five hours until the submission deadline, making constant edits. I never really felt "done;" I just felt I had made the maximal use of the time before the submission deadline. For one of the weeks I had a draft which I had edited for two or three days before realizing that my criteria of, "how much conflict and character development would be possible" was lacking, so I trashed the whole thing and wrote a new story with the same basic idea but in a different setting and with a stronger conflict. The edits almost always are reducing the word count whenever possible. Taking hours between edits allows you to read the story with fresh eyes and see things that just stick out as bad. When people tell you to "read read read," they are trying to help you hone this skill of seeing things stick out. Even if you have perfected this skill, you still need to take your eyes off your writing to get a fresh perspective. Waiting until the last few days or trying to shove all my editing into a four-hour block does not work for me. I'm sure some people are good at writing in one go and not editing, or doing a lot of editing at the end, but I doubt that they wouldn't benefit from doing more editing and spacing that editing out over a longer period of time. After I got critiques for these pieces, I spent many more weeks trying to edit them further for publication. I don't really think you can be completely finished with anything in the space of a Thunderdome week. EDIT: I just saw your submission for this week. Huge improvement from previous weeks... grats dude. angel opportunity fucked around with this message at 10:52 on Jun 3, 2013 |
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Jun 3, 2013 10:36
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edit: I posted incorrect information. Ignore this.
angel opportunity fucked around with this message at 20:31 on Jun 19, 2013 |
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Jun 19, 2013 20:13
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I'm on #20 of that book as well, though I'm going too slow to the point where I probably need to re-read the first twenty again. I've been actively using a lot of those "tools" though, especially the first few.
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Jul 4, 2013 16:09
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Do the people doing this Sanderson lecture want to form a writing group rather than risk random people? I'd prefer to have a group with people I know from Thunderdome who have proven themselves as good at giving critique (everyone I know of who is participating falls into this category). I can't catch anyone in IRC so I'm asking here. I think it would be cool to try to do some feedback things over Skype, but the timezones and work schedules would likely make it impossible. Maybe just use google docs? Let me know if anyone is interested and we can try to organize it. http://www.writeaboutdragons.com/extra/2013-summer-class/
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Jul 6, 2013 19:17
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Okay as of now these are the people who have said they are interested: -systran -Crabrock -Crabrock's wife -Chexoid -Dr. Kloctopussy So basically we have not very many people. Kaishai said she is leaning toward "no," but it would be great if we could guilt her into it. I know Muffin is probably doing the Sanderson thing but I don't know if he wants in or not. I think a googledoc is good and then we can try to organize Skype once we get going. I will try to set up deadlines when I'm home from work later tonight. If you want in, sign up: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ai2bkoEcAn5ZdFExUTdXMmVsdWhKdVAxWDMxZlB3cVE#gid=0 angel opportunity fucked around with this message at 20:31 on Jul 8, 2013 |
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Jul 8, 2013 20:00
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Last post about the Sanderson thing in this thread: If you add yourself to the spreadsheet I will add you to the google group which has more information. If you're interested just add yourself to the spreadsheet and don't post anymore in this thread.
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Jul 9, 2013 03:17
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Stuporstar posted:Read this right loving now, http://writerunboxed.com/2013/07/19/avoiding-boring-character-biographies/ This is just what I needed, thanks a ton.
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Jul 22, 2013 14:04
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Just make a thread for it and see if people will join. I made a writing group (from this thread) and it seems pretty successful so far. We are doing novels over four months though, so we have more time to discuss stuff. If I were going to do NaNoWriMo, I would want to be in some kind of group for it so I didn't feel I was doing it in a void.
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Jul 22, 2013 15:52
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You are describing too much for sure. We don't have to know what everything looks like. We don't need an adverb for every verb and a list of adjectives for every noun. Especially when nothing really is happening. Here is a summary of what actually happens in the first two paragraphs: They were in a dark alley. It was partially illuminated, but still dark in the center. Jason spit onto the ground and looked down at the woman's body. Maya looked at Sarah. She (who? Maya or Sarah? Probably Maya) was aware of the gun in the back of Jason's shorts. She tensed her muscles for when the moment came. Sarah leaned on the fence and stared down the barrel of the gun. (So the gun is out now?) I have bolded how much "extra poo poo" you have in the first paragraph: quote:The alley between the two warehouses was a dead end. Half way down the alley, a towering fence of corroded metal blocked the way past to the parking lot at the other end. The warehouse walls lining the alley were made of thick corrugated steel, streaked red with rust from years of rain. The entrance was lit by the pale, intermittent orange glow of a flickering streetlight. The far end of the alley was lit by a brilliant stage of powerful spotlights strewn throughout the harbor beyond the fence. Neither could wash away the deep, oppressive darkness of the alley’s center except the faint radiance of the full moon far overhead, but only subtly. Now the second: quote:Within that darkness stood three silhouettes. Jason, with his back to the streetlight, leaning with his right arm on the rusted metal as he choked through painful, heaving exhalations. He doubled over to cough up a glob of phlegm on to the weed ridden (should be weed-ridden) concrete, then returned his focus to the woman’s lifeless silhouette. Maya stared coldly and anxiously at Sarah, her breathing slow, as if restrained. She was consciously aware of the gun tucked into the back of Jason’s shorts, and kept the necessary muscles tensed for when the moment came. Sarah leaned listlessly on the fence with a silent air of resignation. She was motionless as she stared down the barrel of the gun. From the summary I gave, you can see that very basic elements of WHAT IS HAPPENING are not clear. Who is "she," when did the gun go from Jason's back shorts to being out? Or is this another gun? Which of these people is the assassin? Who is the woman on the floor? Is it Maya, Sarah, or someone else? I didn't get to bolding the third paragraph, but you have a lot of "what will/would happen soon" rather than anything happening. I have read all three paragraphs and don't know what the relationship between these three (or is it four?) people is and what is going on or going to happen. It's okay to put in adjectives and even sometimes adverbs, but look at all the stuff I bolded and look at the first few sentences of the first paragraph that do nothing but describe in too many words. With all of these words, I still don't know what's happening. Description can be great, but you have to do it sparingly and you have to leave the plot in the foreground. The setting here is relatively important, but you could probably get away with mentioning a harbor, warehouses, and one rusted thing. The reader will imagine the rest, just describe one thing in some detail and let the plot move on. More people are going to post further feedback, but really look at all those bolded words and ask yourself which you could cut out. You also are having issues with passive voice that really slow down the pace and make things read awkward. After reading "two warehouses" and "corroded metal," I have a mental picture of where they are. I then have to read several more sentences describing what is already in my mental image. It is frustrating to read because I am already imagining this rusted metal and uneven lighting, but you then describe it for me while I am thinking to myself, "Okay, but what is HAPPENING here?" angel opportunity fucked around with this message at 15:44 on Jul 30, 2013 |
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Jul 30, 2013 15:32
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I would practice writing flash fiction for now and not even worrying about creating mood or atmosphere. You'll find it's hard enough to create a plot that works and execute it in 1000-1500 words. Once you can consistently write coherent plots you can start working on making them more interesting. Adding in atmosphere or mood is one way you could make them more interesting. Once you have the building blocks and base knowledge of laying out a coherent plot, you will be able to add in that "extra stuff" and know if its adding to the piece as a whole or detracting from it. A big thing you'll do is write out the rough draft, then go back and edit the poo poo out of it. During the edits you'll probably notice a sentence that is very descriptive or atmospheric, but it might slow down the tension of a scene or detract from the plot, so you'll just delete it.
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Jul 30, 2013 17:41
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ViggyNash posted:
What you are saying is probably true, but I also think the author wanted to emphasize his "These are tools, not rules" thesis.
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Aug 4, 2013 21:35
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ViggyNash posted:The alley was a dead end slit between two dilapidated warehouses. A towering fence halfway down left no way through to the empty lot beyond. The combined luminance of the dim moonlight, the deserted street light at the entrance, and the powerful array of spotlights littering the busy harbor far beyond the lot at the exit could not do more than silhouette the three figures gathered within the darkness. This is an improvement from before but it's still too wordy and NOTHING HAPPENS. I'm very tempted to do a line-by-line but I won't. Instead I will tell you what this feels like to me when I read it: I see the setting materialize in my mind. I have a pretty strong idea of what it physically looks like, but there is no "tone," I just know the layout of the buildings, alley, and all of the light sources. All these descriptive words and there is nothing to catch me off guard or change the tone from "default". Moonlight is always dim, warehouses are always dilapidated, harbors are always busy, arrays of spotlights are always powerful, streets at night are often deserted. If you're going to spend a full paragraph doing nothing but describing the scene, at least set the tone as well. Have a bunch of stuff happen, and put descriptions in between. At least have a "rotting warehouse," at least give the moon a "sickly glare". Over-describe one thing really quick and let the reader's imagination work out the rest: show someone stepping into a puddle that has rusted the chain-link fence. After I see the scene materialize, I see three statues forming silhouettes in the alley. Then I see Jason leaning, motionless, while Maya breaths hard, but doesn't move. I then am told several things about these shadow statues. I am told how these statues would feel if they were ever to do something. I am told about some kind of conflict that is not going to affect this scene. Now the Maya statue is farther away, frozen again but still breathing. She is frozen now in a "hold up her gun" pose. I am told more about the statues. Suddenly a younger girl statue is leaning on the fence, also not doing anything. The girl statue doesn't know what is going on (neither do I), and now I see the Maya statue pointing the gun at the young girl. I don't actually imagine Maya moving, I just retroactively amend my mental image of her stance to have always been pointing the gun this way. All of these descriptive lines slow down the action. You have no action at all, just descriptions of physical positions and telling. "Show, don't tell" is thrown around everywhere, but there's good reason for that. It's possible to go overboard and not tell anything, but you shouldn't worry about that now: Show as much as you can. You are already showing us what everything looks like, but now you need to show us what is happening. I imagined this scene to take place over the course of about five seconds. If you're going to spend several paragraphs on five seconds, those better be five seconds packed with conflict. There was conflict in this scene, but we were just told about it. We barely were even told about it though; we were told about each isolated character's attributes and how they were standing still. All we know about the conflict is that they both have guns and that Maya is pointing a gun at a kid. As a reader, why should we care about this scene? You should practice writing something with almost no description. If you write really good STUFF HAPPENING short fiction, people will still probably like it. You might hear, "I could use a bit more description/setting the scene, but I liked this." If you do nothing but describe the scene, there will be nothing to like. angel opportunity fucked around with this message at 14:38 on Aug 9, 2013 |
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Aug 9, 2013 14:25
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Sitting Here and sebmojo, you really should have joined our writing group which features fake deadlines  I think Thunderdome and flashfiction is very worthwhile especially when starting out. You really don't want to write a full novel in a vacuum and not know how bad you are. Ironing out your prose and craft with flashfiction and the non-hugchamber feedback of the Thunderdome gives you a good eye for what is awful writing and what is at least passable. The competitive nature really sets it apart from things like fanfiction sites where everyone just tells you how great you are. I have finally started a novel so I've not been posting in Thunderdome, but I still feel an urge and need to go back every so often to keep myself sharp at short fiction and to gauge any improvement I may have made in my prose.
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Aug 13, 2013 01:52
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I started writing this novel I am doing in google docs, and it has won me over so hard. Everything you do in synced/backed up INSTANTLY. You can share stuff with people and enable comments if you want feedback; I set it so "only people with link can view," but you can also choose to share with someone's google account specifically. The writing group I started for this novel had eight people actively doing it, and we use google groups and google docs for everything. We even have a "word count tracker" that crabrock made, which is a spreadsheet where we input our daily word counts. The second page of that even has a bad rear end line graph where we can see the changes and who is writing the most etc. When we do crits, we have crits posted onto the google group post as well as in-line crits posted via comments in the googledoc itself. It's all seamless and know emailing each other files or keeping track of multiple websites is required. I have all of my plot outlines, notes, character arc summaries, all in a google docs folder that is always available instantly on any computer I happen to be on. I am so sold on google docs that I ordered a chromebook that will be here tomorrow. I didn't have a laptop before and always bummed my wife's, so it made sense at $250 considering I only ever use laptops to write while not at home. The one thing I'm worried about is one day googledocs saying, "Oops! We lost everything, sorry!" I'm looking right now for a way to backup googledocs to USB drive and/or dropbox on a daily basis.
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Aug 20, 2013 23:21
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"Show, don't tell" is a guideline, and it usually is good to keep in mind, but not always appropriate. I just reread your story and the thing Jeza pointed out is still "tell," but it's largely an infodump or "too much exposition". The other kind of "tell" that people tend to not realize as much is stuff like, "His eyes were full of fear, despair, and longing." That is just telling the reader what emotions someone is feeling, and ostensibly the POV character somehow knows from this person's eyes that he is feeling all those things, so show us that instead of telling us. I didn't see a huge deal of this in yours other than: "in my state of shock and confusion." I would call this "showing and telling" because you very clearly established that the protagonist is in a state of shock and confusion, it's completely superfluous to tell us it as well. This line, "That’s when I realized the magnitude of my situation," is also kind of "telly" because you ideally should show us that the protagonist is making a terrible realization rather than telling us. You had some good imagery in your story, like the snake thing, but most of the descriptions were just so much a case of, "This is what I saw" and you often throw in a few telly details to the vanilla description: "He was augmented, that’s for sure. Looked to be pneumatic limbs, probably a reinforced rib cage for good measure. The usual fare for any hired criminal." You are better off saying that the protagonist hears pistons firing when the man reaches for something or walks instead of telling us he had pneumatic limbs. Since we don't know how the protagonist inferred this, we learn nothing about the protagonist and we don't get to make any connections on our own. Within the scope of your story, it would be harder to show the reinforced rib cage, but since that detail has NOTHING to do with the action in the story, you might as well give him something more unique (your chance to "crank the knobs") that you can show very well. It's possible to take "show, don't tell" too far and spend two paragraphs showing something that could be told in eight words, but when you have something like this you need to look hard at it and decide, "Does this contribute to my plot?" If it doesn't, you're usually better to cut it. The "Diamond-level, upper echelon" stuff you did conflicted with the "common criminal" thing, but even if it hadn't you are telling us this stuff and it has no real bearing on the story or plot, so you'd want to cut it. You could have described the guy's clothes as being very immaculate and crisp and shown the character's reaction to that, but just telling us falls pretty flat. The main issue with your story was that the plot wasn't engaging. The protagonist can't do anything, he's just an observer. We are shown this whole situation that we know to be real and have no reason to doubt, so when he wakes up in an alley we are not doubting whether the thing you just spent all those words on actually happened. The reveal that it did happen is not a surprise at all. If you were going to rework this, you would want the protagonist escaping by doing something proactive, and then you could still end with some horrible discovery (that we didn't see coming).
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Sep 7, 2013 06:28
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BreakAtmo posted:I was hoping to get the opinions of you guys on a particular aspect of writing (sorry if you've already discussed this at length, let me know if so). What do you think of the idea that the inciting incident MUST come as early as possible in a story and MUST be something that forces the protagonist into action, rather than the more broad definition of the incident that sets up the central dramatic question/plotline? I have only been writing for about a year: I spent several months exclusively doing flash fiction of 2,000 words or less, and about two months ago I started a novel that I'm at about 36k words on now. In flash fiction you almost always want to put the inciting incident as early as possible; preferably in the first sentence. I like to have the first sentence of a flash fiction piece give away as much of the story as possible. Here are two starting sentences I used on Thunderdome submissions that either won or got honorable mentions: quote:The recipe for immortality came to me in a dream. The following lines after this have the protagonist use the recipe and drink it; the inciting incident happens immediately and the first sentence gives a lot of the story away. quote:On the third night of the revolution, Aleĉjo Ishqa tried and executed the Pope. This first sentence gives most everything away other than his reflecting on these actions as an older man at the end of the story. The next sentences cut to Aleĉjo finding the Pope and confronting him immediately. You can start with something more subdued, but it should always do some amount of "heavy lifting," meaning it will let the reader know what kind of plot structure AND setting to expect, or setting AND tone; the more "productive" your first sentence the better. In my first example I tried to establish right away that it's speculative fiction, that the protagonist is probably going to make this recipe, and that she is going to become immortal. I think this sentence also establishes a certain tone. The second example establishes a lot about the setting (during a revolution) and tells you what is going to happen in the story (but not how or why). You see a lot of entries in the Thunderdome start off really boring and meandering. I'm going to quote some first sentences of entries that I judged last week: quote:Monty and Jean stood at the river bank, gazing at the stretch of latticed wood sitting hunched over the water with all the sleekness and grace of a Model T. This sentence really only establishes setting. It's not awful but it's not great since it only does one thing, even if it does that one thing fairly well. It lets you know, without hitting you in the face with it, that this story takes place in the early 20th century and probably in some rural United States setting. This is way better than putting bold text like: New Hampshire, 1918 at the top of the story, but the author used up his first sentence to give you the setting and to name the two characters (but not to tell you anything about them). quote:“Don’t look at me that way. There are plenty of other options. We could start going into Petrie or Samford.” I'm going to count this whole thing as a first sentence. Here we have a floating voice saying stuff. It is commanding someone, we don't know who, to do something vague and ambiguous. All this really does is lets us know that the plot is probably going to involve the floating voice being forced to go somewhere, and the place names are generic enough that they could probably be anywhere in the Anglosphere. Does this opening make you want to keep reading? Can you infer from either of these examples what the inciting incident might be? If the word count is under 1250 for both of these, can you really justify having these as first sentences? Do either of them hook you in, and of all the possible things you could open with, why did the authors choose these? With all of that said, I started writing this novel a few months ago, and I rushed the inciting incident. I had the first line give a lot away (which I think may still work), and then within a few pages poo poo hit the fan and all of my protagonists were plunged into a situation in which they had to act or they would be captured and tortured etc. Everyone in my writing group told me unanimously that everything happened way too fast and said things like, "I wish I could have seen a scene of the protagonists talking to each other, going shopping, or doing normal stuff before everything went crazy." People told me that they had no idea what "normal" was in my setting because I shot right into a chase scene and life or death situations. I ended up going back and adding in extra scenes that established more normalcy, developed characters arcs, and showed relationships between characters, which the writing group found much better and more satisfying. In longer fiction, I think having a very early inciting incident that sets up the dramatic question is great and probably desirable, but having it force the protagonist into action first thing is likely only going to work in certain stories.
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Sep 27, 2013 14:52
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I'm not directly responding to graphic novel guy with this post. This is for everyone. I've never read any of this author's stuff, but he sells well and gives good advice: http://jimbutcher.livejournal.com/1308.html I would check out his whole blog, but this is the piece of advice that most strongly resonated with me. I read it as the plot of my first novel fell apart and I was deciding if I should push on or give up on the novel: quote:The story skeleton (also called a story question) consists of a simple format: The advice to "JUST WRITE!" still applies and is the number one thing everyone should be doing. With that said, I spent two months "just writing" after laying down a world-building-heavy, haphazard plan with no antagonist (I shoved antagonists in eventually, but they were not planned out before I started writing), and if there is one planning thing I wish I had done before writing 35,000 words, it's the above quote. You are going to gently caress up and write total poo poo on your first attempt. You think you're special, everyone does, and that it doesn't apply to you. Surely you will be different than everyone else who has ever written a lovely first novel. You are not different and you're going to gently caress it up somehow. The "just write" advice is good because you have to gently caress up a lot before you can do something good. You can read an infinite number of blog/forum posts and "plan" forever, but until you put thousands of lovely words into your word processor, it's pointless. After you've failed at your first novel and hate yourself for it, go back and read some blog/forum posts and advice: it will benefit you after you have done something). Don't read too much or spend forever planning again, just start writing another lovely novel. Hopefully your second one won't be as terrible.
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Oct 9, 2013 15:03
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I use chrome and the mibbit web application. On mibbit you press "channels" and then enter the server as "irc.synirc.net". For the channel, enter "#kyrena". I am not going to even keep up appearances anymore; NO ONE uses #thunderdome because of the elephant in the room. A lot of people are usually in #kyrena chatting, so if you post on TD and want to talk about writing stuff, please feel free to join!
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Oct 11, 2013 19:40
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His entire livejournal is actually just a giant manual on how to pre-plan a novel. It took several readings of it for me to actually notice this; I'm currently following the process to plan my second novel attempt (my first novel suffered from poor plot planning). I have never read any of his writing, but I can look at writing advice and know when it's good. I think a large amount of his advice, especially the importance of conflict, is worth following. I am a new writer and I am willing to spend several months trying to follow his advice by planning a novel using his method and then writing it. If it works better than my previous attempt I will likely keep a lot of elements of his planning structure for my next attempt. I can see some of the issues Fumblemouse is mentioning: Writing "tags and traits" for all of my characters and then using them when those characters are mentioned feels somewhat ridiculous, but I'm willing to give it a shot and see how it works for my reading group. My first novel suffered from some characters blending together and not being distinguishable, so I have very little to lose.
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Oct 14, 2013 21:05
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My guide to not losing Thunderdome (and MAYBE winning?): 1) Do not enter unless you plan to start working on your story immediately after entering. There is no reason to sign up and not work on your entry. You have until Friday to sign up! If you do wait until Friday to sign up, you better plan to allocate an appropriate amount of time over the three days that you have to make up for the late sign up. Ideally you want to enter the same day the prompt comes up, and have a rough draft done that first day. You then check your story once every day and make revisions. You can't really proofread something you just wrote. If you proofread the next day, things will immediately jump out at you as bad. If you sign up early and polish every day, you maximize the number of things you can spot and fix. I would guess 85% of the people who enter are not going to follow this timeline or do more than one re-read. If you do, you gain a significant advantage and drastically minimize your chance of losing. Example from this week: 90's Kids. If this author had let the draft sit a day, then re-read it the next day, he/she would have realized it was unclear and confusing, and ideally would have had several days to fix it from there. 2) Make the story sound good in your head before you start writing. The beauty of flash fiction is that you can create every aspect of the story in your head (or on quick notes) before you write anything down. You will inevitably think of a lot of ideas that sound good at first, but then once you play the whole story out and flesh it out in your head, you will realize it falls apart. A lot of people seem to come up with the seedling of an idea, and then write the whole story out stream of consciousness. The story ends up going nowhere, not making sense, or being a "so what?" type story (look at 90's Kids or Svetlana from this week's TD entries). If these authors had conceptualized the whole thing in their heads, asking "What is the beginning, middle and end of this?" they would not have ended up with these stories. 3) The first line is incredibly important! Here are a collection of bad first lines from this week. Ask yourself is these first lines hook you and make you want to read on: quote:“Ok,” I asked, rubbing my temples while I waited for the ibuprofen to kick in, “Tell me once more exactly what happened in there.” This is so meandering. I don't know who took ibuprofen and I don't care. You are setting up this conceit of someone having told a story, and now what we are going to see is him being retold the story. I do not want to hear someone repeating themselves. I have no reason to want to keep reading from this. quote:“Morning, Steve.” This opening is trying to just arbitrarily start. The author has given no thought to the best point in the story to begin. He is just starting, somewhere, and has no idea that starting at an interesting time is important. quote:Diesel fumes roused Bailey to consciousness, he thought he was still on the helipad. This author is trying to make an interesting opening, it just doesn't work. People waking up as the story starts is generally ineffective, and "thinking he was still on the helipad" does not make me wonder, "Woah!!! Where is he then?!?!" because I have no vested interest in this yet. I really don't want to read after this sentence. quote:Another ordinary Friday night at the local bar. This is the worst opening, even worse than "Morning, Steve". Instead of being unaware of openings being important and just starting somewhere, you are going out of your way to explicitly tell us that nothing interesting is going to happen. I actually DID stop reading here and did not read the rest of the story. quote:It was a clear evening; you could see the sun. This is trying to "set the scene," but there could be a number of interesting things happening. Even if you are describing a giant storm, it's not interesting, so a clear evening where the sun is out is orders of magnitude less interesting. These openings all suck. I read these and want to stop reading right away. If you open like this, you are starting in a hole and have to fight your way back out, but since you only have 666 words, you end up spending the first 1/3 of your story recovering from your terrible opening. Here are the good openings from this week: quote:(interesting rap followed by...) “Thank you for your hip-hop,” said the girl behind the Huawei-Starbucks counter. “You may purchase anything up to a straight black.” This one makes me want to know how hip hop as a currency will work, I genuinely want to read the next line because I'm interested in the story. Rhino kind of let me down with the story itself, but I still love the opening and have an overall favorable impression of this submission. quote:A cable snapped - the stunt coordinator still doesn’t know exactly what went wrong - and the wire rigs whipped two tweenage Broadway stars across the set of Children on Leashes: The Musical. I THINK there is a tense shift in here, which sucks, but there is enough going on in this opening that I want to read on. Explaining the logistics of such a ridiculous musical (and that something went wrong with those logistics) works for me and makes me want to know more about this weird premise. To be fair, the prompt GAVE HIM/HER this premise, but he/she at least was smart enough to put that into the opening line! This author flubbed the middle and stuck the ending, so I came away with a favorable impression even though the middle of the story was kind of boring. quote:“What the gently caress?” said the embryo. This is a good opening because embryos can't speak. A talking embryo is inherently interesting, and even if the author completely fucks up every element after this sentence, at least his opening is good. Luckily the story itself is engaging, so we are left with an overall favorable impression. angel opportunity fucked around with this message at 21:54 on Oct 14, 2013 |
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Oct 14, 2013 21:23
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In the future, if I don't like someone's writing in Thunderdome or in the Farm, I will simply respond with "This wasn't my cup of tea," rather than addressing what didn't work for me. I'm glad I finally realize that people have varying tastes, and that we shouldn't try to evaluate things that we don't like. I was going to point out that having the protagonist dive head first into a railroad track, and then having a random observer say, "I wish I had your mutation!" did not work for me and felt like really bad and forced exposition through dialogue, but now I understand that it's just not to my taste and I would be wrong to make such comments. Instead I will just not respond, and you can assume non-responses and silence are actually negative critiques (which you should also ignore).
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Oct 31, 2013 21:53
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Dialogue. Dialogue. Dialogue. I'm hoping if we say it enough, Chillmatic will appear.
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Nov 12, 2013 22:26
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I have marked most of your cliches and some other stuff: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1F16WPuqJWJHBZKRn019N3TVOJXQ6tbSTNKY34U8vUNw/edit I am quoting this everywhere, but I will do it here again: quote:The whole point of a short story is to assassinate the reader. You don’t have the time or the space to go to war or do large maneuvers, you can’t do chapters of elaborate setup, there’s much less room for character development—a good writer can get more character development in, but that isn’t my particular strength. Anyway, everything in the short story has to drive toward a short sharp point, whatever it is you’re trying to leave the reader with at the end of the story. Your story is basically the opposite of this. You waste your time and space with pointless stuff, and you do KIND OF drive toward a "sharp point," at least. The thing is, your sharp point is visible from the very beginning. As soon as we see Nick being a douche, we know he's going to be eaten. Everything that happens after we realize that is just the stuff happening in a straight-forward and obvious manner. I only read about four entries from this week, but crabrock's did the quoted advice pretty well: The parents split up with each kid, saying it will be better that way. The wife cries, and we are not sure why. The dad comments on different animals in a way that shows he is feeling trapped. The kid comes off as awful and makes you feel as a reader, "I do not want kids." When the dad reveals the divorce thing, even though he comes off as insufferable, you still do kind of feel for him. You then also feel for this poor kid on a leash getting pills shoved down his throat. The "sharp point" is obscured until the end, but you start to see it more clearly as the story progresses. After we see the point at the end, we can think back, "Ah, that's why the wife was crying, and that's what those comments about 'it will be better this way' were for." angel opportunity fucked around with this message at 15:46 on Nov 18, 2013 |
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Nov 18, 2013 15:43
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