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Tell me about writing an intentionally unlikable protagonist. Not uninteresting, just not the knight in armor chasing a cause. In my story, poo poo happens, and she has to change or die, or both. How much time do I get before that poo poo has to happen? I want to establish: - late 30s female, kind of attractive but not OMG HAWT - cusses, lazy. - no ambition beyond getting out of work to get to the bar - drugs and booze yes please. - a bar fly that ain't exactly a prude Basically - imagine the two main characters of "John Dies At The End" - but they're but 37 year old women instead - but still talk and act like that. Is that too far a stretch? edited edits: More information. I wrote the story. Hell yeah I wrote it, and I'd have gotten away with it too. However, now I'm doing revisions, and sharing the first few chapters, and some people - just some - are asking me who's my intended audience with this book? If I'm going to write about a brash bar-hopping sailor talking floozy, I should skew the characters to twenty-somethings because darn it women in their 30s just don't act like this. Obviously, I disagree -- BUT I'm wondering how big of a gently caress should I give about that when the story isn't so much about the 30-something woman who cusses as it is about the aliens taking over our planet by burrowing into our skulls. But if I can't get readers to give a poo poo, they'll never get to the aliens. But dammit, the thought of me, a 48 yr old male, writing about a 21 yr old female makes me cringe. A lot. magnificent7 fucked around with this message at 07:32 on Apr 4, 2013 |
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Apr 4, 2013 07:26
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Mr. Belding posted:Kind of like the chick in this? I don't feel like that type of character is at all uncommon. And the foreshadowing is there, the aliens are there. The people who've got problems with the character have said flat out, "but I'm still roped in because of the creepy aliens and that fact that you start the book by saying she's already dead." Thanks for the input y'all. I don't feel so far off on this after all. magnificent7 fucked around with this message at 18:15 on Apr 4, 2013 |
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Apr 4, 2013 18:12
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Martello posted:or Thunderdome (
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Apr 6, 2013 02:50
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I think I'm becoming obsessed with stupid things. Maybe I've been reading too many writing books at once, hell if I know. I'm killing myself over PACING. How much space do i commit to each of these parts: - Dialog - Action - Backstory I don't want to go overboard with exposition, and dialog helps set up poo poo, especially when mixed with action, but too much action and you're just sort of doing exposition-in-the-moment, aren't you? Example: This sentence is which? Backstory, Dialog, Action, or Exposition? Frank said, "Yesterday Chuck smacked a ho in the face and then threw her out of his limo." I've got a gently caress TON of that happening in my story. It's written in a hosed up first-person kind of thing, talking about a second person's reaction to the events that are unfolding. Think like I Claudius, where this guy tells the story of all these other people doing all sorts of hosed up poo poo to each other.
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Apr 17, 2013 17:54
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Very much so. Thanks!
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Apr 17, 2013 21:35
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Pladdicus posted:Yes! Rewrites are gold. I've killed characters out of my book, I've turned good guys bad and bad guys interesting. I've hacked out dumb plots and reworked three scenes into one.
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Apr 24, 2013 03:03
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Mr.Drf posted:I do this sometimes. I get a novel idea, get like halfway through, figure out it isn't working, and then try to either shelve it, OR boil it down to it's most basic idea and turn it into a short story. I've been collecting books on writing, thought I'd share my latest good find: THE NIGHTTIME NOVELIST (site, http://www.nighttimenovelist.com/) Does it share anything different than other books I've read? No. Does it give me short chapters with lots of diagrams and examples from stories? Yes! The problem for me in writing is that, while reading a book on writing, (including Stephen King's "On Writing") I tend to get distracted with ways I can apply my newfound knowledge, instantly. So I'll read a chapter, or less, light bulbs will explode in my head and I'll go start scribbling ideas on my book. THIS book sort of assumes that's what you're going to be doing, and it assumes you've already got your story either written or started, so it kind of does a chapter then says "now go do this thing to your story." Also - and this is critical to me - books on writing tend to have a lot of writing in them.  Diagrams help me a lot in getting the big picture. Charts. And references to books or movies I know inside-out so I can understand what they're talking about. (honest, internal/external conflict and motivation - it's a no-brainer but I kept confusing them because I'm the slow).What I'm saying is, I'm an idiot and don't know much about writing. Swear to God, on Saturday, I was holding THIS book in one hand, and "The Idiot's Guide To Writing Fiction" in the other hand. I'm glad I picked this one. It's less embarrassing, for one. PLUS - here's some great articles I found this week that address common mistakes: What NOT to Do When Beginning Your Novel: Advice from Literary Agents http://writerunboxed.com/2013/04/22/april/#more-20630 And a FANTASTIC article about over-used themes: Stories We've Seen Too Often http://www.strangehorizons.com/guidelines/fiction-common.shtml magnificent7 fucked around with this message at 16:28 on Apr 25, 2013 |
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Apr 25, 2013 16:21
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Overwined posted:It's nothing new that blabby writers often enjoy great popularity. They never last in anyone's mind, though. Same thing happens in Music. Prince - his albums were amazing until he declared, "gently caress you label, I can do it all on my own!". While he enjoys complete unrestricted creative freedom, his albums have become more and more self-indulgent volumes of half-completed ideas. And I keep buying them, hating him for it. SO - just remember kids - learn the rules, follow the rules, become wildly successful, then forget the rules.
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Apr 28, 2013 17:21
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On a completely unrelated note, I am finding an amazing source for opening lines of stories: Facebook posts.quote:Thought it was going to be a boring grocery trip...until I came around the corner and the hot firemen were in the cheese area. quote:She ain't moved in over an hour...thinking she used to be a mermaid...staring at The Gulf like she misses her calling!
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Apr 28, 2013 17:31
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sebmojo posted:Just do it. Here, I'll make it easy: You malfunctioning cattle prod. This ain't thunderdome! But sure. Fine. My book will have to wait. My other short story will have to wait. A secret that should never be told: Your Mom. I would prefer a prompt more related to the topic at hand, though. Like, "commit 90% of the word count to describing the phone being used in a conversation"
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Apr 29, 2013 04:26
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Overwined posted:That is actually an excellent idea. You'd be forced to somehow put narrative action in a expository setting, which is probably how it should be. Or the inverse at least.
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Apr 29, 2013 18:51
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Oh. This was for rill? I didn't do it! I have failed.
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May 3, 2013 04:31
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It wasn't in the THUNDERDOME. Your petty attempts at luring me into a battle out here on the streets are futile. That, and blahblah excuses excuses. You single kids living in your basements and dorms, you've got all the time in the world! I got nothing! NOTHING.
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May 3, 2013 12:17
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sebmojo posted:Holy hell, you're the worst. OK, victory goes to CantDecideOnAName by default. But writing? I came at it thinking, "oh this is the easiest! No paint, no guitar strings, no computer programs even! It's just ideas, thrown onto a page! It's telling stories! I do that all the time!" So far, the poo poo I've done - all three or four different approaches have gone this way, each time: - Brilliant loving idea! - Flash of lightning writing it all down capturing it as a series of steps (guy finds a watch, guy wears watch, hooker blows him, steals watch, he kills hooker, etc etc) - I write the story. - I read the story I wrote and I KNOW I can make it better. - I rape my idea into a dead pile of hobo feces. Is it my lack of vocabulary? Or my insistence that I can write something completely original so I avoid tropes? Maybe it's my lack of comprehension of acts, character arcs, oh, gently caress I don't know! It all started out easy as gently caress. Tell a story. A story is, "there's this guy, poo poo happens to him, and wow hunh?" but somehow my writing, (prose?) sterilizes the poo poo. I lose track of the bigger idea as I scrub each sentence, fixing tenses, redundancy, removing adverbs. Augh it's pissing me off now. OH BUT I'LL WRITE YOUR drat NOT-TOLD-SECRET tale. I will.
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May 9, 2013 18:18
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Thanks for all your fantastic input. To quickly respond: I've had SK's "On Writing" since it came out a decade ago. Read it twice, (ten years ago when I didn't even try to write) and I'm reading it again. Along with "Self Editing for Fiction Writers" and another book I spoke about earlier. I think the easiest way to equate all this is that I can read about writing all I want, but until I start squeezing out the loafs, it'll always be poo poo. So yes. I'll start writing every day. I hate it. I don't have time for it. But I'll do it. Just as soon as I finish recording my gold record. And these nachos.
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May 9, 2013 21:37
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systran posted: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.
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May 11, 2013 21:14
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systran posted: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. As much as I hate being the dead last, (only after being nearly dead last twice) it's made me stop and think really hard about my amazing 55,000 word story. And these idiots are all exactly right. Don't start with your baby. Start with a tiny part of your baby. I can't bear the thought of starting over with the big huge story. But to be fair - there's something really exciting about saying gently caress-all and jumping in for 50,000 words. You get a real feel for doing something with your ideas. Just be prepared to discover your ideas (the world, the history of your place, the characters) are going to end up pissing you off because maybe you forgot to put a story in there somewhere. edit: and maybe you suck at conveying your point. and grammar.
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May 22, 2013 00:03
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Regarding the Thunderdome, here's what you'll go through. 1a: submit something amazing. 1b: find out there are massive mistakes you should have known better than to commit. 2a: Submit something that manages to sort of address those first problems 2b: Not unlike your car, addressing some problems reveals bigger, worse problems. 2c: Congratulate yourself that at least you're STILL not the worst writer on there. 3a: Submit something that kind of maybe addresses the problems from 1b, and maybe touches on 2b, but like poking at a tiny bump on your arm, you're only discovering it's not a bug bite it's cancer. 3b: Congratulations, you are the number one worst writer this time around. And this is the critical part here. 3c: Give up. gently caress them, they're all literary scholar types comparing your intentionally trashy writing to yeats or poe or lovecraft. 3d: Collect all their comments, and one by one, prove to yourself they completely missed the point and just don't get it. 3e: Get really drunk and pissy for a day because you've opened your soul and had people point out that your soul sucks. 3f: wake up with a hangover and think that this must be exactly what college is like, if you ever bothered to go to college. 3g: Remember that every person who encouraged you to join the Thunderdome pointed out it's harsh but it'll make you better. 4a: Keep writing, just like every person in this thread (and the TD thread) says to do. So there you go.
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May 22, 2013 14:53
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At what point in your story can you throw up your hands and say, "gently caress it I don't CARE why that happened, who knows why crazy people do poo poo?" versus the need to provide a convincing reason for poo poo to happen? In horror/zombie stories, you have a monster that craves brains just because he does. You don't have to explain how the living brain cells awaken something deep inside the reanimated beast. In serial killer movies, you don't have to explain why somebody woke up and decided to start slashing people. I think my writing tends to err in the other direction, feeling the need to put a reason behind every drat thing so people won't question the logic. My stories grind to a halt while I try to provide the reason that a person went from unhappy to murderous. Can't I just say, "without thinking, this person loving snapped"? Don't get me wrong, a story that makes no sense isn't any good, but I think there's a grey area in there somewhere. A person snaps and goes batshit, bites and gnaws the throats of anyone nearby, do you need to explain why, if the rest of the story is more interesting? There is that level of suspension of disbelief - when do I get to just assume people will go along with it? edit: gently caress YEAH MY LOSERTAR! I AM PROUD.
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May 23, 2013 21:05
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Thanks y'all. Great info.
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May 24, 2013 01:28
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I'm sorry about that over-confident egotistical crap. It's a horrible habit of mine. When the crits come in and I don't understand them, I try not to make excuses, but to ask questions to find out how I hosed up so horribly. Like, does the bridge have to be something more than a bridge? Does every short story have to be about human nature? Can't it be a shallow mindless tale? Like an Aesop's Fable? Why did the three pigs insist on making three different kinds of houses? Didn't they all think the one made from sticks was a stupid idea? edit: sorry one last question; do you guys tend to consider the 'dome as having a Real Literature angle? So then the lovely fiction, zombies, serial killers, hard loving, crap like that it instantly disregarded by most folks on there? And this - crabrock posted:Ideas are much less important than saying things effectively. magnificent7 fucked around with this message at 17:30 on May 28, 2013 |
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May 28, 2013 17:16
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crabrock posted:Mag7, you should enter this weeks thunderdome, send me your story by Friday evening, and I'll give you a preliminary crit with what is working and what is not, privately. Then when you submit Sunday I'll have another judge take a look at it. one negative thing about the dome is it doesn't really encourage revisions. this will give you the chance to do that.
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May 28, 2013 18:46
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Motherfuck fuckermuck. Okay so I pulled my head out of my rear end and I'm in this week. It happens every week, I'm okay with that. I researched the details of the story, (vikings, died from an infection after a battle) and I've got a good mental image of how it went down. And I have ideas to explain how the drat story unfolds. But I start to write and it all goes to poo poo. So I deleted it, and started again. And then ignored anything and everything, (books, feedback, self doubt) and ended up just going in loving circles instead of building up to anything, showing anything, giving a poo poo about anything. If there's anything I've learned in my beat-downs here, it's that my grammar is rear end, my ideas are weak, and there's no reason to read or care about my story. With the exception of grammar, all those things happen before the story even begins, the idea, motivation, climax. This time, they're ALL ALREADY IN THE GODDAMN STORY, I just have to put words around it. How is it I am loving this up so bad? Just venting. And now I'm back to writing again.
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May 30, 2013 14:34
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crabrock posted:He said he's started several books on writing but never finished them, which i assume means he's read several times how to construct the elements of a story. And to the comment that you can't get worse, I'm living proof that in fact you can. My first submission was half-good, (5 out of 10 score?) my second was better than the one person I was competing against, my third was counted as one of the worst three, and my last two have been official losers. There's something to be said about starting out knowing nothing, then learning the rules only to be paralyzed by them. I like your analogy that writing is like loving. In the meantime hey hey I finished my first draft. Crabrock, do you want it NOW in case it's a crappy idea, or would you rather the final thing? I'd rather send you the final draft.
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May 30, 2013 17:28
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Chillmatic posted:stuff
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May 30, 2013 20:35
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Oxxidation posted:Be gentle with him, it's either this or he leans out his window and screams at the moon until the neighbors complain.
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May 30, 2013 21:05
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sebmojo posted:Are you going to send it to me too? And thanks. I appreciate it.
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May 31, 2013 00:30
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Thanks to everybody for your input. I'm working on it. I finished my thing, sent it off to two goons, I'm going to leave it alone and go back and rewrite my other stories using the crits I got.
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May 31, 2013 03:32
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Please christ. Anyone. Someone. Come in here and start asking stupider questions than mine. I've really enjoyed the lively chat but holy gently caress.
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May 31, 2013 05:06
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Chillmatic posted:I haven't meant for a second to imply that there is no point to getting that kind of feedback on one's work. Of course, while it was so often helpful, there can quickly become a hive mind where everyone either pats each other on the back, or else rips each other to shreds with absolutely no specifics or real suggestions given. I think that's where my own wariness/retardedness about the whole "just write more and let us destroy it" thing has come from. I appreciate your input - I do. Even when it's harsh, your points make sense and I weigh them along with any other advice. But everytime you write a long post, I can't help but hear it in this voice:  Erogenous Beef posted:Is "waked" an acceptable past-perfect form of "wake" now? As in, "He had waked." I've always assumed the proper form was "He had woken," and even that seems terribly stodgy compared to simple perfect. A quick google and I found this. None of the examples include "had" in them.  http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/notorious/wake.htm magnificent7 fucked around with this message at 15:08 on May 31, 2013 |
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May 31, 2013 15:01
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I prefer "I could give two shits."
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Jun 2, 2013 05:44
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How do you decide when your story is finished? When do you decide to stop tweaking?
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Jun 2, 2013 19:18
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Thanks for the great answers. Very helpful.
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Jun 3, 2013 13:31
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crabrock posted:Also he didn't brag about his idea or story at all!
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Jun 3, 2013 19:59
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Accretionist posted:After watching shitloads of The Wire, either it should be assumed/understood that's the case or no involved party knows what their doing and you're just drawing attention to that. The three of us were in a car, all high as poo poo, while the cop was running a check on the driver's license. The owner of the car said "when that cop searches this car, the joint in the glovebox can't be mine. I'm on probation." So I took the hit for my friend. Before he said it, I wouldn't have thought about it. I didn't spare him out of some nobility. He's the only one who had a car. If he went to jail, we wouldn't have a ride anymore. If I got busted with it, it would be a first offense and I'd go on probation. Probably. As it turned out, the arresting officer never showed up to court and the case was dropped. Go Modern Judicial System! magnificent7 fucked around with this message at 14:32 on Jun 13, 2013 |
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Jun 13, 2013 14:30
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Augh goddammit. A narrator tells about seeing a car accident involving a driver and a hobo. With a rednecky southern accent: quote:When a car screeched at the red light, I looked around in time to see an old bum launched through the air like a wet towel. Is that sentence understandable? I've jumped from "He" being the bum who got hit, to "He" being the guy who hit the bum, in the same sentence. But, it conveys what happened, right? From a technical, logistical and followable standpoint, should I re-word this? It's a story being told by a simpleton who ain't so much teh smarts, but I STILL need to be clear that two people are in this sentence, the driver and the bum who got hit.
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Jun 15, 2013 03:07
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Oh you guys are good. drat. I have so much to lern. Thanks. But... a country boy would never say "there was nothing to be done". It's hard writing in a vernacular... too much and it's overkill. Too little and it's unbelievable. I'm struggling on this one. In the previous sentence I say "the old bum launched through the air like a wet towel". Adding another description for the landing is just self-indulgent at that point. This is where cursewords really fit the bill. quote:He hit the ground like a motherfucker magnificent7 fucked around with this message at 04:00 on Jun 15, 2013 |
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Jun 15, 2013 03:53
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Chillmatic posted:Quick line edit: Thanks for this. The whole story revolves around his interaction with deaths, and that's where I'm torn; put him into the event, or remove him from it so the event itself has more impact. When I take the second more powerful approach, the shift in dialect is jarring - it pulls me out of the narration and puts attention on the writer, does that make sense? But I know I can push the description better. Thanks. And this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuDYHTSmxNk That's got all the blood splatter and the formless attributes I had in mind, but loses the part of him flinging like that in the air without any real form or structure until he connects with the ground again. That was what I was going for. This bum - he's got layers of coats and hair and beard, arms and legs flapping in the air. Is it that so few people would know what a wet towel is like? Yeah so maybe I'm a little bit too married to the phrase. Kill my children, I get it. magnificent7 fucked around with this message at 15:13 on Jun 15, 2013 |
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Jun 15, 2013 14:58
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hope that helps!
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Dr. Kloctopussy posted:Be careful with similes and metaphors. They are exciting rhetorical devices, and we can feel rather clever about them as writers, but you have to make extra sure that they do the job: communicating with the reader. Sometimes (often) straightforward description is the better option.
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Jun 15, 2013 18:53
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SurreptitiousMuffin posted:http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3527428&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=85#post416616672 What are the rules on a narrator giving that statement though? I like when a first-person narrative tells you a story (flashback? anecdote?) and uses bad grammar because that's who they are. If your character ain't so good on the wording, doesn't proper grammer pull the reader out of the experience? I don't mean non-stop horrible talking, I mean if blue-collar Joe bitches about his room mate, I tend to want to write: "ever since we lived here, John will go to the store every thursday picking up those scratch-off lotto tickets." instead of "ever since we've lived here, John has gone to the store every thursday to pick up scratch-off lotto tickets". Each one fits, right? Or am I doing that exact thing you loathe?
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Jun 18, 2013 17:59
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