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I might as well post some of the advice I've given to other people on How to Start Writing (and keep doing it). It's well established that the notion of inspiration suddenly hitting the writer like a lightning bolt is overly romanticized. Listen to any published author, and they will tell you that writing a novel is work. It can be just as grueling as a job at Burger King. Waiting for that moment of inspiration or creativity to work on your novel is about as useful as waiting for your boss to pick you up at home. I have periods where I can't get a single word out in a month, and then I have periods where I can write five thousand words a day. One thing I've noticed when I have my good times is that I do certain things that you could call practices or exercises: 1. Grab everything that gives you an idea. When I'm in my prime, I write about everything I find interesting during the day. If I read an interesting news article, I'll write a little weird short inspired by the article. If I see something interesting on the street, I'll take inspiration from that. Back in '06 or so, someone posted a news article that was hilariously terribly written. I got a tiny idea, and I made into a short story that everyone in the thread loved. However, if you're doing this while working on a larger project, you need to watch out and... 2. Write short shorts. For me and many others, it's important to finish any projects you've started. Starting a hundred novels or short stories will eventually create an Infinite Backlog of Unfinished poo poo, and for people like me, that's a very bad thing. Those unfinished bits will stick to your brain like a tumor, and even if you purge them from any medium, it's detrimental to your progress. When you grab inspiration and write, take care to write things that you can finish in a short time. Don't worry about editing now, that's not the important thing. The important thing is to have self-contained and completed Thing that you can be happy about. It doesn't need to be good, original or anything, in fact... 3. Don't worry about [X]! Don't worry if it's poorly written, don't worry if it's too short or has a bad ending. Don't think about originality or variety. Write fan-fiction if you want. Write a tiny play or a fake news article or an SCP. Make a creepypasta or any other stupid meme. The priority of these exercises is to Just loving Write Something. When you're finished with a Thing, you move onto the last step. 4. Practice editing. This is what you do when you're drained and tired of writing. Take one of your pieces, grab your thesaurus and your copy of The 10% Solution, and get to work. Use every piece of advice you get here and every other place, and you'll slowly improve both your editing method and your vocabulary. The best possible outcome is that when you're finished, you have something good enough to post in the Daily Writing thread, or the outline of a great short or even a novel. Just make sure it doesn't get in the the way of your main project. When I do all of this, I notice that I enjoy writing even more. It feels good to finish something, and hopefully that will carry over to your main project when you get your rear end in gear.
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Jul 15, 2012 23:27
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Sounds like you need to learn about discovery writers versus outliners. The simplest explanation lies in the terms themselves; a discovery writer discovers his way through the story, only having an idea or a hook to go on. You've been a discovery writer so far, with the world-building parts of an outliner. An outliner world-builds, creates a plan of varying detail, often a one-page summary of the story, and goes from there. The most important thing to know is that both ways are okay. Some people get nothing out of outlines, and some need to have a proper plan or they'll dry up. Some people like to mix it up a bit, write some stories of the bat and some with careful planning. I think you would benefit from trying the outliner approach, just to see if it works better for you. Eventually, you'll settle in a good mood and figure out what you excel at. Remember too that it's not a binary thing. It's a sliding scale, and with some experimentation, you'll figure out just how much discovery you need and just how much you need to plan. I'm mostly a discovery writer. I have a vague idea about how my story might end, but I'll never write it down, and it often changes depending on where the story takes me. I've tried outlining a couple of times, and often I realize I've veered away from the outline and gone into completely different territory. That's alright by me though, but I will try to follow the recipe one of these days, just to see how it ends up. Black Griffon fucked around with this message at 22:40 on Jul 28, 2012 |
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Jul 28, 2012 22:37
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Well does he know the grenade can be disarmed? How much do airport security learn about this stuff? Is he alone here, or surrounded by people who know just as little about grenades as him? You had to ask the question if the grenade can be disarmed, so it might be that he's just as clueless. I say you should write ahead. It sounds like an interesting premise, and people usually expect that it's too late when you pull the pin. That's why you asked, after all. 
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Aug 2, 2012 00:01
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What they're all trying to say is that a contest like the one Martello mentions is genuinely good for a writer. Since we're already talking about martial arts, apparently, you can compare it to the way that any practice fight is better if it's rough. You'll still learn the art if you practice your patterns, but a rough contest will improve more than just your writing. You need thick skin and confidence if you truly want to succeed, and if you can endure a custom title and some feigned (and real) anger, you've got a good start. So we're just trying to tell you the upsides of joining and the downsides of staying out. And this is the kicker: You're going to get the exact same treatment when you post a thread for your story. People are not going to be nicer to you there. But remember to do a couple of drafts and a proper edit before you post it, and I can guarantee that you'll get good advice. Edit: Or, what Nautatrol said.
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Aug 8, 2012 17:47
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I want to set up a blog for my writing, to share with family and Facebook friends and so on. Is there a blog service that's especially good for this, and how should I treat any material that I want to send to a publisher?
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Sep 5, 2012 18:38
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FauxCyclops posted:I use blogger/blogspot, and Wordpress offers some good solutions as well. Tiggum posted:Blogger is really easy to use and if you already have a Google account you can just use that to log in, so you don't even have to remember an extra password or anything. Well look at that, I even have an ancient blog on blogger I didn't know about. In the meantime, however, some of my friends convinced me to start a tumblr, which has the option to stop indexing by search engines. Is tumblr a bad idea though? So far it's very simple and to the point. And I might as well resurrect the blogger blog; asking for advice and then just doing something is kind of bitchy. 
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Sep 6, 2012 10:04
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HiddenGecko posted:Important note. Anything you publish on your blog is considered published in he official sense. You send that short to a lit magazine and they find it online and it goes in the trash. They find out later you hornswaggled them and they'll tell the rest of their editing friends you're no good. So don't put anything on your blog you want to submit and get paid for. What about samples? If I post a chapter of something I'm working on, will that count? Since I don't really care about publishing a lot of my shorts, it's the serious pieces I'm worried about. But I don't plan to post anything more than a sample, even if it's a pretty short short. And if I clean it off my blog when I send it to a magazine and the blog is non-indexed, will it still be easy for them to find it? Tiggum posted:Maybe it's just me not knowing how to use it, but I find reading stuff on Tumblr really awkward. Old posts always seem to be inconvenient to access and every post seems to be followed by a bunch of notifications of people who reposted it for some reason. I dunno, maybe I just don't get how it's supposed to work. I find that this depends a lot on layout and style. I try to run a clean, accessible style without junk and with easy-to-access archives. A lot of tumblrs do exactly what you say, and it sucks. Black Griffon fucked around with this message at 16:17 on Sep 6, 2012 |
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Sep 6, 2012 16:11
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sebmojo posted:edit: Oh and Martello - what did you think of the redditor who got all Clancey over sending a Marine battalion back to Augustan Rome? Read pretty well to me, and my skimpy classical education didn't register any major clangers, but it seems your literary MOS. I think my favorite part of that is this guy. quote:Second, your knowledge of the Marines and military tactics is a 1/10 and just about everything in the entire story would have been different with more knowledge. Some examples, the mindset and stress: we're trained hard both mentally and physically. I assume you're getting the idea of our ability to handle stress from what seems logical assumption and the results of the Iraq war. Iraq is not to be considered a traditional war though, nor is Vietnam. The mindset was totally different in those wars than this scenario. First Vietnam had a lot of grunts (which means Ground Unit Untrained). Those are the draft guys who spent a fraction of the time in training and didn't become as mentally prepared for war as a normal Marine. Second Iraq is not a just war by any means. We are not defending the country we are only there to make rich people richer and to fix Bush's problems from going in the first place. Honestly most Marines would relish in a fight like this scenario and morale would actually go up greatly, that is until we figured out we couldn't go back home then the mental anguish and suicide rate would increase. Yeah, marines are so badass they're even trained for time-travel.
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Sep 11, 2012 13:17
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The times I start and stop the most stories is the times I'm least productive. I try to finish anything I write, no matter how lovely it turns out. If I'm thinking "This could be a novel!" and lose faith, I'll just turn it into a lovely short. Having unfinished stories on my plate really mess with my vibes, and it's better to have a hundred bad shorts than a dozen "So I'm working on my novel" novels.
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Sep 24, 2012 13:33
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Didn't one of you note earlier that the best course of action is to just submit to everyone and not give a poo poo if they get their panties in a twist? Not that I'm recommending it, I want to know for my own sake as well.
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Sep 26, 2012 15:57
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I'm gonna try to work the ~MY NOVEL~ that I'm most interested in getting done. It's pretty well outlined, but we'll see how it turns out.
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Sep 27, 2012 01:03
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I should mention that I'm not "saving up" for NaNo. If I didn't try to keep my output even throughout the year I would be doing something wrong.
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Sep 27, 2012 21:23
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quote:Here is happening-truth, I was once a soldier. There were many bodies, real bodies with real faces, but I was young then and afraid to look … This made me go "Holy crap, that's so right" in my head. I love it when that happens.
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Sep 29, 2012 22:35
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Erik Shawn-Bohner posted:It's all semantics. I'll give you the secret recipe to finding greatness in writing: As true as this is, I know far too many people who would write crappy fanfic until they died if they just followed that advice. Some times it doesn't hurt to elaborate.
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Sep 30, 2012 02:30
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While it sounds badass as hell, there ought to be some kind of leeway. Yesterday went from unexpected event to unexpected event, from breakfast to 3AM, and if that Joel McHale looking motherfucker would've finally given in to my roguish charm and smooth voice I would have had time for something like fifty words total. Getting banned because of something like that would suck balls. Edit: Heh.
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Sep 30, 2012 06:07
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I love this loving forum. All this is so good for my writing.
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Sep 30, 2012 08:02
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Read and write more first person. Post it in the daily writing thread or whatever. We can help you identify your problem, but then we need to read how you write.
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Oct 4, 2012 01:28
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bengraven posted:For me, the community is what makes NaNo awesome. Well get on over to the thread then! http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3509907 Also, I just noticed the October writing thread, so now I feel guilty and I'll get right on that.
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Oct 6, 2012 19:52
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I often feel more comfortable and confident when I write in present tense, is that a horrible thing? I've never even considered that it's some kind of pretentious and bad thing.
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Oct 16, 2012 19:19
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screenwritersblues posted:Is it wise to throw some information about the two that your story is set in to break up the story? I'm considering doing it so that my readers don't get bored with the story and have a better feel for the story. Would it be fluff or would it be a good idea? This can quite easily turn into "He was wearing black socks", if you could call it that. If you're worried about the readers getting bored, you have a problem that infodumps certainly won't solve.
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Oct 17, 2012 12:20
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I'm getting hung up on whether I'm allowed to use "yelled" and such if it's really hard to show through the rest of the text whether the subject is yelling. It's getting so bad that my editor is kicking in when I'm writing and halting my process. Should I just type "yelled" or whatever and fix it later, or am I too obsessed with eliminating anything but "said"?
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Nov 11, 2012 04:13
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Oxxidation posted:In my view, "said" is the default, basic dialogue attribution and should obviously be the most common. Yelled/shouted/sighed and other innocuous verbs can be used in moderation, if you can't convey it properly through context or the dialogue itself. Any attributions past that first degree of separation ("ejaculated," etc, or using non-speaking verbs like "grinned") might be justifiable in special cases but should never be used habitually. Crisco Kid posted:If it's bothering you too much, it might be worth just scrapping the attribution altogether in favor of character name + action beat: Stuporstar posted:Hehe, proscriptivism strikes again. I chuckle because for a while I was trying to eliminate every single instance of "was" in my manuscript, until I realized I was going through awkward contortions not to use it when it was sometimes the best word. Alright, good to hear. Writing is going much smoother now. I've been through the "was" loop myself, and I blame The 10% Solution, and then I forgive it because it's awesome.
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Nov 12, 2012 06:16
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Jinnigan posted:Do y'all have any advice for any honest to god new writers? I got it into my head to learn some basic fiction writing (I'm a fine nonfiction writer) but as soon as I actually sat down to try and write I froze up with anxiety and insecurity and ignorance. I don't even know where to start. Any suggestions? On Writing is fantastic, and The 10% Solution by Ken Rand is essential. While it won't help you to actually write a good story, using it will make anything you write more readable. When you plonk your horrid poo poo down in this forum, we'll be much more willing to help you if you've gone through Rand's process. Also; join Thunderdome.
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Apr 4, 2013 15:45
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The best advice is to read read read. I sometimes get criticized for being too abstract, but when I describe something, I like to use everything other than the actual description in order to evoke feelings instead of explaining things outright. If you're describing a scene you need to find the taste of it, the comparisons, the essence and the memories. When you look at a chair, it's not like the only thing you're thinking is "Chair"; you're accessing everything in your brain related to "chair" and sorting out the important bits. If you were looking at that chair with ten velociraptors on your tail, and that chair was bloodied and worn and had your tied up significant other in it, the important bits would be something completely different. So the idea is to dig deep inside your braincase and find everything that doesn't immediately come to mind when you look at a chair. Some people are completely and utterly inept at analogies, metaphors and similes, and, uh, hopefully you're not one of them. Yeah. Read read read (and Thunderdome).
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Apr 6, 2013 01:59
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