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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? I would say that with dialects it's best to be consistent and to be as phonetic as it's possible to be with English. That means making sure that once a given character says a certain word a certain way, you stick with it the rest of the story. I think you also need to make certain that only the most extreme cases get special dialects in their dialog. Some people love it and some hate it, so I say do it if you like it, if not ignore it. People who like it won't throw your book away if you don't have it, but they are already enjoying things. People who hate it won't throw your book away if they are enjoying it, but they dislike your dialect writing. It's one of those things people argue about a lot, but it isn't really important.
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Aug 17, 2012 06:56
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Regarding accents. Do what you want. If over half of your beta readers complain then change it.
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Aug 20, 2012 05:56
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sebmojo posted:If I was going to use a single word to describe it, it'd be 'leering'. I'd not think less of someone who loved it, because he's undeniably talented. Why is his talent undeniable? He used the word largely twice in three paragraphs. In one of those the sentence was, "He lay largely on the bed." If nothing else he's got a tin ear, which is a pretty big hurdle for me to get over when labeling a writer as "talented."
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Sep 15, 2012 23:55
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I would say go back and re-look at some of your favorite novels. You'll probably be surprised at how close to the start the inciting incident happens. Just grabbed a few books off of my shelf for quick and easy examples: The Gunslinger - Stephen King: Story opens in media-res with the protagonist already chasing the antagonist across a desert. Cat's Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut: It happens in on page 6 when narrator writes a letter one of Felix Hoenniker's (the fictional inventor of the atomic bomb in this story) children. This is Chapter 4, but Vonnegut's chapters are ridiculously short, some only a couple of paragraphs long. The Eye of the World - Robert Jordan: This one is a bit more complicated. One could argue that the inciting incident is in the first chapter when a mysterious figure follows the protagonist and his father as they travel from their farm into town for a festival. However, there are several chapters of more minor intrigue before the protagonist and his father return to their farm where they are attacked in chapter 5. However, in each chapter more and more mysterious and dangerous things happen that ramp up the feeling that this day is different from other days. Less than 24 hours pass in the timeline of the story before we have all hell breaking loose. American Gods - Neil Gaiman: The inciting incident happens during the first chapter, but it's 13 pages in when the Warden tells the protagonist that he's being released from prison early and why. Blackbirds - Chuck Wendig: The inciting incident happens in chapter 2, after a fairly short and intense first chapter where someone dies. I only have this on Kindle, so I can't count the page numbers. So, generally speaking genre writers at least seem to try to get as close to the start of the story as possible. Of course, it's possible (and probably likely in some of their cases) that this is done to meet the demands of editors. I will say that the ones that take longer to get around to it and (and honestly twelve pages isn't terribly long) are the same ones who tend to take a long time to get around to everything else. Vonnegut gets right down business, and I would say there isn't a wasted word in that whole book. It's the best written book of the group I sampled. Neil Gaiman takes his time a little more, but he pulls it off because his writing he his voice is pretty charming in this chapter, and he's telling these little prison anecdotes that are kind of funny, and kind of scary, and kind of cute. I think American Gods is an interesting case study because it's also very polarizing. Nerds tend to like it, but perhaps because it's so drawn out and at times self-servicing there is a somewhat vocal collection of people who think it's rubbish.
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Mar 19, 2013 16:54
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Great Horny Toads! posted:The first thing the reader has to know, in most cases, is what business-as-usual looks like. Set up the everyday world, then let the Kool-Aid Man bust in. But how long should it take to set up business as usual? I would be for most situations you could set it up pretty darned quickly. I'm not even entirely convinced that the "business as usual" step is necessary. In Cat's Cradle, there is no time wasted on "business as usual". You realize that the narrator is a writer working on a biography. Okay, that's all we really need to know about him for this story to work, and so that's all we get. Vonnegut moves on and gets to the interesting stuff. That book could have opened with a scene where he's finishing his previous biography and feeling like it didn't go so well. Now he's motivated to do something better. He's going to go out and... Well, you see where I'm going? All he would be doing is stepping back from the story to tell us a bunch of poo poo that isn't important or interesting. Instead he jumps right to the interesting part. A letter to the son of the inventor of the atomic bomb. And when he gets a letter back. Oh, wow. The guy is a dwarf and his father was insane. Please.... Tell me more.
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Mar 21, 2013 03:38
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magnificent7 posted:Tell me about writing an intentionally unlikable protagonist. Not uninteresting, just not the knight in armor chasing a cause. Kind of like the chick in this? I don't feel like that type of character is at all uncommon.
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Apr 4, 2013 15:52
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magnificent7 posted:I haven't found another book about writing that covered that side of it; the thrill of creating a story, the joy of being an artist, the self-loathing of sucking at it. I mean, you've been doing this for years. I don't know what's so different about someone criticizing a song versus criticizing your writing. And also, in either scenario I think you try to keep in mind that when people say "I didn't like that," they are almost always right, and when they say, "because..." they are almost always wrong.
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Feb 23, 2014 08:32
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