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Stuporstar posted:Read. Read more. Read inside your favorite genre, and broaden your tastes outside your genre. Read character driven fiction. Read novels and short stories instead of devouring nothing but comics, games, and movies. You’ll develop a better eye for writing stories as you read them. By that same token, I'd suggest that any writer can learn from reading different forms. Screenplays: Have a recurring issue with "show, don't tell"? Read the screenplay of a film you admire. Screenplays generally run between 90-120 pages, so a good screenwriter has to choose their moments carefully. Especially helpful if the film is based on a book that you also dig. Compare and contrast. Figure out why that long, gorgeous internal monologue was condensed to three lines of voiceover while the protagonist stares glumly out the window. Do readers complain that your prose is too flowery? Screenplays are intended for an "audience" of people who don't give a poo poo about the bits you can't film. You get a couple lines to set the scene -- and that's assuming that your scene even requires a description. You then have to rely on action and dialogue. The various technicians who, if you're extremely lucky, will be translating your script to film? They need clear, concise descriptions, and then they need you to get the hell out of the way so they can do their jobs. Stage Plays These have many advantages in common with their screen descendents, but there's a bit more latitude with dialogue length, and a lot more constriction with the mise-en-scène -- you can't exactly load an otherwise-dull play with car chases and explosions. Mainly, though, if you're writing in English without ever having read a Shakespeare play -- it's like never having read any of the King James Bible. Sure, you can get by without it, but you're missing out on hundreds of years' worth of literary allusions. Poetry If, on the other hand, readers complain that your prose relies too heavily on cliche, poets have been beating their brains out for millennia to dodge that particular trap. A decent familiarity with the work of meticulous wordsmiths tends to expand one's expressive horizons. Another strength of the form is economy of language. Even epic poetry is vastly condensed in comparison to the prose equivalent of the same tale. In poetry, there's little room for words that can't pull their weight -- especially in free verse, where concessions don't need to be made for meter and rhyme scheme, and which has to be outstanding in order to be considered any good at all by the sort of audiences who get suspicious of poems that don't rhyme. Comics Up until the mid-'90s, your average comics scribe had 24 pages (at most; backing stories could range from seven pages down to one), each sectioned into nine panels, in which to tell their story. That's 216 bursts of information. Less, if there was a splash page. 216 frames is nothing in film. It's literally nine seconds. You can do a lot with 216 paragraphs of prose, but if you're bogging it down with a bunch of scene description, your reader probably won't like you. Comics writers can jam in as much detail as they want (Alan Moore's scripts are notoriously particular), or they can leave the lion's share of the storytelling to the artist (the "Marvel Method" pioneered by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and Steve Ditko, had Lee mostly responsible for dialogue and captions). Most scripts (and many trade paperback collections contain a page of script in the back of the volume) read lean, and expand only when the writer needs to get a very specific image or concept across to the artist. In prose, this would stop a story dead in its tracks, but with the intervention of the artist, the story should flow without the reader even being aware that an incongruously huge block of text lies behind Page 8, Panel 4.
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Jul 15, 2012 11:35
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Tiggum posted:Why King James specifically? That seems like a pretty odd restriction. The quality of language, and the influence it held for hundreds of years as the standard translation of what was often the only book a family owned. And if they didn't own a copy (or couldn't read) it would be what they heard every Sunday as they filled their community obligation to attend church. Wikipedia credits it with having introduced 257 idioms to the language -- more than the complete works of Shakespeare. It doesn't source this assertion, and I'm sure there's room to quibble about how commonly-used those 257 idioms might be, but there's really no denying where the phrasing of those idioms comes from. Quick compare and contrast (Exodus 20:3): "Thou shalt have no other gods before me." -- KJV "You are to have no other gods but me." -- Bible in Basic English (BBE) "No other gods, only me." -- The Message Bible "Never have any other god." -- GOD'S WORD translation For blunt clarity, I'd say the GOD'S WORD version wins. For adhesion to dogma, the prize probably goes to The Message (its phrasing seems to dismiss the existence of other gods, where the others have more of a "Jehovah: Ask for Him by name!" vibe, acknowledging competition in the marketplace). The BBE just replaces some of the archaic language in the KJV -- which was archaic when the KJV was put together, by the way, as the translators were aware that English evolved quickly, and decided that it would be better to phrase things conservatively, than to place their holy book in the fickle hands of contemporary jargon. That archaic approach lends an antiquely-poetic tone to the words. The reader hears that inflection, and its immediately apparent that these words are from Ye Olden Days. (Side note: There are literally people in America -- and probably elsewhere -- who are so convinced by this tone that they cleave to the KJV and denounce all other translations as heretical because "If [the KJV] was good enough for Jesus, it should be good enough for everyone". Yes, they actually believe God shared his message to mankind in English -- and not only in English, but in the exact form of it employed by the KJV.) EDIT: NeilPerry posted:I'm a very slow reader and I cannot help it. Is there a way I can maximize my reading efforts to becoming a better writer? I've got a two-birds/one-stone solution for you: English-language audiobooks. Can you access this site? http://www.audible.com (I've heard complaints from Europeans and Aussies that certain titles aren't available in their territory, so if some of the site is blocked in Belgium, let me know.) Also, podcasts. Aside from the purely informational ones -- some of which are outstanding -- there are also plenty of discussion-style podcasts, which you could use to get a feel for how English speakers from various regions speak extemporaneously. budgieinspector fucked around with this message at 22:06 on Jul 15, 2012 |
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Jul 15, 2012 19:38
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Stabbey_the_Clown posted:One book that for better or worse, has forever changed how I react to novels is How Not to Write a Novel (Amazon Link). I'm on the waiting list for this book at the library. Something I'm curious about : How many folks here regularly use their local libraries? I recall hearing something about David Cameron's government trying to close libraries across the UK, and we've got a bunch of international goons posting here, so I guess I'd like to know if you guys visit your local public or university libraries, how you'd rate them, whether they're in danger of being shut down by your respective governments, etc.
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Jul 16, 2012 05:50
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Baggy_Brad posted:I recently entered Lit Reactor's Horror Story comp Barely related, but is there a thread that tracks story competitions and such?
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Jul 23, 2012 21:13
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Martello posted:This brings up an interesting thing -- eye-dialect. Who loves it, who hates it, who has advice on when and how to use it? Love it when it's done to immerse the reader in another culture. Trainspotting is a great example of dialect done right. Alan Moore's Ballad of Halo Jones is a great example of too goddamn much. Also love depictions of dialects which most readers might never encounter. Even background-specific syntax lends a lot of flavor, I reckon. Where it gets ugly is when the author plainly believes that speakers of non-standard English are stupid and inferior. If you aren't infatuated (or at least fascinated) by a culture, you shouldn't type out your impression of the way its members speak. One thing that shut me down recently: I had a sequence where one character flips out and semi-inadvertently breaks another's nose. They then need to re-establish some level of trust, which required dialogue. Typing out the "dialect" of a speaker with a badly-damaged proboscis just stopped everything dead. I know it can be done; I just don't know how to make it flow. quote:Brian Azzarello's writing on 100 Bullets. Word. Great stuff.
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Aug 18, 2012 04:18
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I'll just leave this link to Proper Manuscript Format from Stuporstar's excellent Creative Resources thread right here.
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Jan 28, 2013 02:35
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I've seen worse writing advice than this: Will Ludwigsen’s Foul-Mouthed Writer’s Checklist
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Jan 31, 2013 23:44
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