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bigperm
Jul 10, 2001
some obscure reference

Naerasa posted:

I'd argue it reads even better as

Hawklad stomped his foot and pointed to the door. "Get the gently caress out."

but they all work and at a certain point it's just splitting hairs

It depends on momentum too, is this the last thing said in this scene or is there a response? I think both are good but have their own places.

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A human heart
Oct 10, 2012

Djeser posted:

Writing is first and foremost a communication of ideas from the author to the reader, and one of the most persistent problems amateur writers have is prose getting in the way of their ideas. This applies across all genres and styles. Effectively conveying ideas is difficult. A lot of the advice people give (especially in this thread, or in places like Thunderdome) is meant to develop the writer's ability to effectively convey their ideas. There's nothing inherently wrong with a stylistic choice, but a super common mistake amateur writers make is focusing on their stylistic choices to the detriment of conveying their ideas.

This is something I did for a while when I started out writing. I was so concerned with these weird flourishes I could do (intercut paragraphs with no punctuation! write like a fake textbook! do it all in a transcript style!) that I was spending more time on the style of my writing as opposed to the content of it. Now, style is important. But it's not more important than content, and that also applies across genres. Something plain and meaningful is better than a flashy nothing. I'm not pulling this out of nowhere or reading it off my Code of Hammurwritebi, by the way. This comes from having spent like eighteen weeks judging amateur fiction written by goons.

Prose style is an important part of writing, but it's something you discover as you build your skills, it's not the first thing to ever work on. It'd be like trying to learn a drawing style first, before you have a solid grasp on form or texture or anatomy.

I can sympathize a lot with showbiz_liz cause there's a lot of weird ways writing gets taught between high school classes that focus just on essays, electives meant to broaden your vocabulary, and college programs run by professors with grudges so old the grudges themselves have tenure.

I don't really agree with the notion that prose can get in the way of ideas, it's usually the reverse that happens. Content derives from form. If the form is bad, then I don't care about the content. Whereas fairly banal content or ideas can be great if the prose is good.

SurreptitiousMuffin posted:

A Human Heart, has anybody ever told you that you're needlessly abrasive? You asked a question, people answered it, then you insulted the people who answered it. You don't get to act like the !!!ONLY MATURE ADULT!!! if you refuse to court anybody who politely disagrees with you.

I've been reasonably polite in this thread, and haven't insulted anyone.

Sitting Here
Dec 31, 2007

A human heart posted:

I don't really agree with the notion that prose can get in the way of ideas, it's usually the reverse that happens. Content derives from form. If the form is bad, then I don't care about the content. Whereas fairly banal content or ideas can be great if the prose is good.


Genuine question: how much fiction have you critiqued? Because I can tell you from personal experience that amateur authors and even authors with some low-tier publications under their belt can abso-loving-lutely muddy up a workable idea with a misguided attempt at non-traditional prose (or any other writing gimmick, and yes, a technique can become a gimmick in the wrong hands). And those are the people posting in this thread.

You sound like you've probably read a lot of polished, stylized literary fiction. Which is great! But this thread isn't populated by a bunch of celebrated literary figures. Not everyone is aspiring to be the Frank Zappa of writing.

Maybe you could help us understand where you're coming from by showing some of your own work? And explaining why you made the stylistic choices you did? I'm assuming you have documents full of the type of writing you're describing, since you seem very enthusiastic about discussing it in this thread for fiction writers.

Chernabog
Apr 16, 2007



neongrey posted:

For the love of god, use contractions at every possible instance. People run their words together, it stands out if you don't.

I should of agreed with this but I know better.

Phil Moscowitz
Feb 19, 2007

If blood be the price of admiralty,
Lord God, we ha' paid in full!

Chernabog posted:

I should of agreed with this but I know better.

"Should'f"

:eng101:

crabrock
Aug 2, 2002

I

AM

MAGNIFICENT






SHOULD HAVE U MORAN'S

flerp
Feb 25, 2014

crabrock posted:

SHOULD HAVE U MORAN'S

no u

The Sean
Apr 17, 2005

Am I handsome now?


Naerasa posted:

I'd argue it reads even better as

Hawklad stomped his foot and pointed to the door. "Get the gently caress out."

but they all work and at a certain point it's just splitting hairs

Yeah, I'm a lovely writer, but in reading the original post I thought that this version was more effective (given that there is no other context anyway). Similar to the thing about "he said" "she said" being invisible phrases I feel like that structure already sets up that Hawklad is the one saying gtfo since it's adjacent to the action piece.

Cpt. Mahatma Gandhi
Mar 26, 2005

crabrock posted:

SHOULD HAVE U MORAN'S

I believe it is spelled "you" but I am not sure, this was not covered in my writing classes and I do not know for a fact that it is "you", probably should have figured it out on my own but I did not

crabrock
Aug 2, 2002

I

AM

MAGNIFICENT






Cpt. Mahatma Gandhi posted:

I believe it is spelled "you" but I am not sure, this was not covered in my writing classes and I do not know for a fact that it is "you", probably should have figured it out on my own but I did not

ok sure if you accept the white man's codifying of everything and stomping out any variation, i spell it the way William Shakespeare did. :colbert:

anime was right
Jun 27, 2008

death is certain
keep yr cool
this thread is way worse than the old one. fight me if i'm wrong.

flerp
Feb 25, 2014

anime was right posted:

this thread is way worse than the old one. fight me if i'm wrong.

ur way worse

sebmojo
Oct 23, 2010


Legit Cyberpunk









I'm enjoying all the fiction, and the advice.

Chairchucker
Nov 14, 2006

to ride eternal, shiny and chrome

THUNDERDOME LOSER 2022




Here's some fiction: sebmojo is a good writer

flerp
Feb 25, 2014

Chairchucker posted:

Here's some fiction: sebmojo is a good writer

:eyepop:

HIJK
Nov 25, 2012
in the room where you sleep

Chairchucker posted:

Here's some fiction: sebmojo is a good writer

:vince:

Djeser
Mar 22, 2013


it's crow time again

Chairchucker posted:

Here's some fiction: sebmojo is a good writer

present tense is a flashy, distracting fad in fiction
:goonsay:

neongrey
Feb 28, 2007

Plaguing your posts with incidental music.
it's just a tense, the manner in which your verbs are conjugated* is not a big deal

Djeser
Mar 22, 2013


it's crow time again

you will to have ought been being regretted having said that

anime was right
Jun 27, 2008

death is certain
keep yr cool
why wont agents respond to my inquires about my high quality boruto (the sequel to naruto, if you're more of a Bleach fan) fanfics

flerp
Feb 25, 2014
u write bad, prob

flerp
Feb 25, 2014
maybe try writing good?????

neongrey
Feb 28, 2007

Plaguing your posts with incidental music.

Djeser posted:

you will to have ought been being regretted having said that

gdi i knew someone would do this and i hastily edited that asterisk in there for a reason

anime was right
Jun 27, 2008

death is certain
keep yr cool
for real someone post some actual fiction advice that isnt just an insular td circle jerk, i have tried asking actual questions already.

HIJK
Nov 25, 2012
in the room where you sleep
Here's some advice that may not be bad:

If you're stuck in your draft, stop trying to write the story and plan out what happens next. You'll solve the problem a lot faster and you'll avoid frustration trying to work through bad prose.

Sitting Here
Dec 31, 2007

anime was right posted:

for real someone post some actual fiction advice that isnt just an insular td circle jerk, i have tried asking actual questions already.

Hmmm....


anime was right posted:

why wont agents respond to my inquires about my high quality boruto (the sequel to naruto, if you're more of a Bleach fan) fanfics


anime was right posted:

this thread is way worse than the old one. fight me if i'm wrong.


anime was right posted:

you're not my real dad


anime was right posted:

i do henceforth declare that this is precisely how the common man articulates

:crossarms: Your story doesn't add up, that's my critique

Though TBF...

anime was right posted:

also anyone want to trade test reading? around 10k words, first threeish chapters of a book. around early next week. no hard deadline. i dont care what genre your book/story/whatever is.

you did ask if anyone wanted to test read your novel, which would be cool and good of them. I would, but I'm trying to get my novel to a test-readable place. I don't really have any fiction advice because I'm uuuuh struggling to write a character-driven story. I have an outline and have been sticking to it structure-wise, but when I actually sit down to write the interactions between characters, I tend to discover new motivations/subtext/subplots. So then I have to go back and adjust the outline, and by the time I'm done doing that, a bunch more ideas have popped into my head...

but by god I am trundling along. So yeah those are my words about fiction.

anime was right
Jun 27, 2008

death is certain
keep yr cool

anime was right posted:

so this is a dumb thought i had when struggling with how to write the middle of the story.

typical structures seem more focused on the pacing more than the reasoning which made it hard for me to think about like, what events should be transpiring in the middle, and then this thought came to mind

"the middle contextualizes the ending that your beginning set up" - and i think this did a better job in my head of knowing what to trim and what to grow, personally. i dunno.

whats a good resource on writing middles

anime was right posted:

that or they're in a monkey/typewriter sort of situation if they do manage

you could be the monkeys with the typewriters, but why risk it?

i asked these too dude but no one responds to the actual questions and instead the insular trash.

how about this, how do people feel about information density? is it cool to thrust people into buzzword city so long as it makes sense as you continue to read? do you think its better to introduce elements slowly at the cost of lengthening your pace?

anime was right fucked around with this message at 03:02 on Mar 17, 2017

Sitting Here
Dec 31, 2007

anime was right posted:

i asked these too dude but no one responds to the actual questions and instead the insular trash

woah dude sorry, I wasn't trying to pick a fight or anything. I thought you were joking because your last few posts on this page were blatantly non-serious. A bunch of us were putting serious effort into making posts about literary style vs "traditional" character-driven plots but that kind of tapered out.

I don't have any resources on writing middles because my strategy is to splart out the whole story and THEN figure out the arc. I think it's easier to deal with the middle if you don't approach it as "the middle" in the initial drafting process. But that's just me and I wouldn't necessarily advise anyone to do it the same way.

That leads me to a question I wonder about a lot: how esoteric is the actual writing process for you guys? When I try to articulate my methods sometimes, they end up sounding wrong, or they just plain don't work for other people. But I get decent feedback from readers and publications, so apparently something in there is working. Obviously, writing blogs and books have to speak in general terms because they have a wide audience. How much do you guys tend to skew the process to better suit the weird machinations of your brains?

Ironic Twist
Aug 3, 2008

I'm bokeh, you're bokeh

anime was right posted:

i asked these too dude but no one responds to the actual questions and instead the insular trash.

how about this, how do people feel about information density? is it cool to thrust people into buzzword city so long as it makes sense as you continue to read? do you think its better to introduce elements slowly at the cost of lengthening your pace?

This is one of those things that comes down to writing style and it's usually a mix of both. For me, I'd rather define the setpieces that are central to the story and let all the ancillary stuff be figured out with context clues.

Buzzword City was basically how I felt about Dune when I read it fwiw and it didn't end up mattering because Herbert was able to make it feel natural, so do what you feel like you can pull off

Sitting Here
Dec 31, 2007

anime was right posted:

how about this, how do people feel about information density? is it cool to thrust people into buzzword city so long as it makes sense as you continue to read? do you think its better to introduce elements slowly at the cost of lengthening your pace?

I like to do things in bursts. Set the scene with description, have some character interaction. Usually I dump info in when the characters are transitioning between situations.

Like, in my novel, there is a fair bit of world building. My protag also spends quite a bit of time moving between locations in her city, so I use those interim moments to have her observe/acknowledge whatever info I think is most relevant at that moment. The novel is fairly dialog-driven, but it's nice to break that up with cinematic description and world buildy details.

Uranium Phoenix
Jun 20, 2007

Boom.

Sitting Here posted:

That leads me to a question I wonder about a lot: how esoteric is the actual writing process for you guys? When I try to articulate my methods sometimes, they end up sounding wrong, or they just plain don't work for other people. But I get decent feedback from readers and publications, so apparently something in there is working. Obviously, writing blogs and books have to speak in general terms because they have a wide audience. How much do you guys tend to skew the process to better suit the weird machinations of your brains?

From what I've heard from professional authors, everyone does it differently. Some people full-outline then write exactly what they outline with no deviations, some people full-discovery write and just make everything up as they go along. Some proof as they read and do almost no revising, and some spew out awful crap and then prune off all the bad parts--but most people are somewhere on a spectrum of those extremes.

I'm trying it different ways with different stories, but usually I start with an interesting premise and a cool climax, and work from there. I think of cool scenes and moments I want to hit, and the rest of the story is connecting those pieces together in ways that gives them the emotional resonance I want and is an interesting journey. I've come to the conclusion that writing middles is basically impossible, and no one can do it. Mostly, my outlines are pretty bare bones, and I fill in secondary characters as needed. Often, I'll write the scenes that are really cemented in my mind before the rest of the story, which only sorta works since by the time I actually reach them they'll have changed significantly. Disclaimer, I haven't ever actually finished a novel, just short stories. From what I've heard, though, my process would be normal for some authors and heresy for others.

anime was right posted:

how about this, how do people feel about information density? is it cool to thrust people into buzzword city so long as it makes sense as you continue to read? do you think its better to introduce elements slowly at the cost of lengthening your pace?
My preference is to minimize it and let the reader figure out things by having characters treat things as normal or unusual. That's my preference as a reader too, but other people like the direct explanations and get mad at me because my poo poo is confusing. So I'm not great at it yet.

It also depends on the genre and how much crap you're trying to throw at them. If you are breaking genre expectations, you'll need to talk about it. If you're doing what's normal, don't waste time explaining it.

neongrey
Feb 28, 2007

Plaguing your posts with incidental music.

Sitting Here posted:

That leads me to a question I wonder about a lot: how esoteric is the actual writing process for you guys? When I try to articulate my methods sometimes, they end up sounding wrong, or they just plain don't work for other people. But I get decent feedback from readers and publications, so apparently something in there is working. Obviously, writing blogs and books have to speak in general terms because they have a wide audience. How much do you guys tend to skew the process to better suit the weird machinations of your brains?

I outline in the worst possible way, by which i mean, i don't actually write the outline down, i just keep track of it in my own loving head. i do not recommend anyone do this

they're pretty loose outlines obviously but they're more concrete than nothing; i know what's going to happen in a story, what order it's going to happen in, and specifically what's going to happen in the next few chapters.

Djeser
Mar 22, 2013


it's crow time again

anime was right posted:

how about this, how do people feel about information density? is it cool to thrust people into buzzword city so long as it makes sense as you continue to read? do you think its better to introduce elements slowly at the cost of lengthening your pace?

As long as the reader is never in the dark about something relevant to the plot, then it's fine. You can look at something like His Dark Materials or the Abhorsen trilogy, where they've got a lot of thick worldbuilding, but it's all presented at a rate at which by the time something becomes relevant to the plot, the reader understands it. I actually personally like the effect that a flood of information can give you (when done right) but that's because I'm generally a fan of hyperreality in fiction and media. See: the avatar someone gave me because I loving love the Speed Racer movie.

I think it probably varies too when you're talking about short stories versus longer works. I've seen a lot more in novels asides where they'll go and kind of flood you with information and then later on tease bits of it out that had more meaning, where in a shorter story most of what you're going to be accomplishing with a flood of information like that is creating a sense/image of something more than setting up future plot points.

Probably the easiest way to dump information in without slowing down pace too much is to put the reader in the viewpoint of someone who's competent and let the internal monologue lead an explanation of the practical aspects. I remember in The Gods Themselves there's a part that's like a huge exploration of a tri-gendered alien society and Asimov basically explains it through the perspective of the viewpoint characters going through their lives.

Dr. Kloctopussy
Apr 22, 2003

"It's time....to DIE!"

anime was right posted:

i asked these too dude but no one responds to the actual questions and instead the insular trash.

how about this, how do people feel about information density? is it cool to thrust people into buzzword city so long as it makes sense as you continue to read? do you think its better to introduce elements slowly at the cost of lengthening your pace?

I am working on big posts about dialogue and the writing process but I am also on vacation and only have my phone. :(

For unique vocabulary use, though, check out A Clockwork Orange. Burgess starts relatively slowly with his slang, so you get it through context clues. And it keeps building up as he uses more and more.

Edit to add:
Oh god drat, I forgot about this parallelism. Beginning of the first chapter and beginning of the last chapter. The first bit is still heavy on slang, but notice, for example, how he explains what a milk bar is, and how he uses the descriptions of their outfits to introduce the word for face, which is then used in the second example.

quote:

‘What’s it going to be then, eh?’
There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim, Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter bastard though dry. The Korova Milkbar was a milk-plus mesto, and you may, O my brothers, have forgotten what these mestos were like, things changing so skorry these days and everybody very quick to forget, newspapers not being read much neither. Well, what they sold there was milk plus something else. They had no licence for selling liquor, but there was no law yet against prodding some of the new veshches which they used to put into the old moloko, so you could peet it with vellocet or synthemesc or drencrom or one or two other veshches which would give you a nice quiet horrorshow fifteen minutes admiring Bog And All His Holy Angels And Saints in your left shoe with lights bursting all over your mozg. Or you could peet milk with knives in it, as we used to say, and this would sharpen you up and make you ready for a bit of dirty twenty-to-one, and that was what we were peeting this evening I’m starting off the story with.

...

The four of us were dressed in the heighth of fashion, which in those days was a pair of black very tight tights with the old jelly mould, as we called it, fitting on the crutch underneath the tights, this being to protect and also a sort of a design you could viddy clear enough in a certain light, so that I had one in the shape of a spider, Pete had a rooker (a hand, that is), Georgie had a very fancy one of a flower, and poor old Dim had a very hound-and-horny one of a clown’s litso (face, that is), Dim not ever having much of an idea of things and being, beyond all shadow of a doubting thomas, the dimmest of we four. Then we wore waisty jackets without lapels but with these very big built-up shoulders (‘ pletchoes’ we called them) which were a kind of a mockery of having real shoulders like that. Then, my brothers, we had these off-white cravats which looked like whipped-up kartoffel or spud with a sort of a design made on it with a fork. We wore our hair not too long and we had flip horrorshow boots for kicking.

Towards the end:

quote:

‘What’s it going to be then, eh?’
There was me, Your Humble Narrator, and my three droogs, that is Len, Rick, and Bully, Bully being called Bully because of his bolshly big neck and very gromky goloss which was just like some bolshy great bull bellowing auuuuuuuuh. We were sitting in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter bastard though dry. All round were chellovecks well away on milk plus vellocet and synthemesc and drencrom and other veshches which take you far far far away from this wicked and real world into the land to viddy Bog And All His Holy Angels And Saints in your left sabog with lights bursting and spurting all over your mozg. What we were peeting was the old moloko with knives in it, as we used to say, to sharpen you up and make you ready for a bit of dirty twenty-to-one, but I’ve told you all that before.

We were dressed in the heighth of fashion, which in those days was these very wide trousers and a very loose black shiny leather like jerkin over an open-necked shirt with a like scarf tucked in. At this time too it was the heighth of fashion to use the old britva on the gulliver, so that most of the gulliver was like bald and there was hair only on the sides. But it was always the same on the old nogas—real horrorshow bolshy big boots for kicking litsos in.

Dr. Kloctopussy fucked around with this message at 14:14 on Mar 17, 2017

anime was right
Jun 27, 2008

death is certain
keep yr cool
them some good posts, im gonna mull over those and think about that stuff. thanks yall.

Echo Cian
Jun 16, 2011

anime was right posted:

so this is a dumb thought i had when struggling with how to write the middle of the story.

typical structures seem more focused on the pacing more than the reasoning which made it hard for me to think about like, what events should be transpiring in the middle, and then this thought came to mind

"the middle contextualizes the ending that your beginning set up" - and i think this did a better job in my head of knowing what to trim and what to grow, personally. i dunno.

whats a good resource on writing middles

If someone linked this already I didn't see it when I skimmed to check, but Jim Butcher's got some decent advice on the subject.


And before someone jumps in to say that Jim Butcher is a hack, which happens every drat time: Don't even. Whatever you might think of an author, their writing advice is worth considering. If he's popular he must be doing something right.

showbiz_liz
Jun 2, 2008

Sitting Here posted:

That leads me to a question I wonder about a lot: how esoteric is the actual writing process for you guys? When I try to articulate my methods sometimes, they end up sounding wrong, or they just plain don't work for other people. But I get decent feedback from readers and publications, so apparently something in there is working. Obviously, writing blogs and books have to speak in general terms because they have a wide audience. How much do you guys tend to skew the process to better suit the weird machinations of your brains?

I start out just generally thinking about the story throughout the day and taking notes on my thoughts, which generally tend to pingpong around in my head (so sometimes structural/overall story stuff, sometimes specific character stuff or lines of dialogue, whole paragraphs of description, etc). The main place I do this is during my subway commute. Then once I have several thousand words of that, I arrange the structural stuff into an outline and the other stuff where it belongs underneath the major outline points. Then I look over it to see what's missing or what's weak or what makes no sense, and then I rinse and repeat the freeform note-taking until I feel like I have enough of a handle on the story to start actually writing out a draft.

I hadn't heard of anyone else doing things this way, and I kinda had it in my head that I was doing writing wrong, but I recently went to a talk by Ken Liu where he said that he'd written his giant fantasy epic bit by bit during his commute and then organized it using wiki software. I gotta look into that wiki idea, it sounds awesome.

Cpt. Mahatma Gandhi
Mar 26, 2005

showbiz_liz posted:

I start out just generally thinking about the story throughout the day and taking notes on my thoughts, which generally tend to pingpong around in my head (so sometimes structural/overall story stuff, sometimes specific character stuff or lines of dialogue, whole paragraphs of description, etc). The main place I do this is during my subway commute. Then once I have several thousand words of that, I arrange the structural stuff into an outline and the other stuff where it belongs underneath the major outline points. Then I look over it to see what's missing or what's weak or what makes no sense, and then I rinse and repeat the freeform note-taking until I feel like I have enough of a handle on the story to start actually writing out a draft.

I hadn't heard of anyone else doing things this way, and I kinda had it in my head that I was doing writing wrong, but I recently went to a talk by Ken Liu where he said that he'd written his giant fantasy epic bit by bit during his commute and then organized it using wiki software. I gotta look into that wiki idea, it sounds awesome.

IMO, there is no right or wrong way to write (aside from the obvious stuff like being a horrible speller or being grammatically incompetent). Every person is different with regards to how much prep they do, how they organize their information, how they go about writing individual drafts, etc. and really it's all about experimenting and finding what works best for you. Some authors (like Stephen King) do basically no prep beforehand and go full throttle on the Discovery method. Others will create in-depth character profiles, fine-tuned outlines, and essentially do months of work before ever putting that first sentence on paper. It's what they've found works for them, and thus it's how they creatively operate.

If your routine is working and you're having fun while doing it, then keep at it. If something's not working or you find the work tedious, try changing it up. But don't worry about "writing wrong" because ultimately there is no certified "right" way to write.

showbiz_liz
Jun 2, 2008

Cpt. Mahatma Gandhi posted:

If your routine is working and you're having fun while doing it, then keep at it. If something's not working or you find the work tedious, try changing it up. But don't worry about "writing wrong" because ultimately there is no certified "right" way to write.
These days I'm all about it! But when I first tried writing fiction, I kept sitting down in front of a blank computer page with no idea what I was going to write because that's what I thought you had to do, and when that didn't work, I thought that meant I just didn't have the temperament to be good at fiction writing...

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SurreptitiousMuffin
Mar 21, 2010
Yo A Human Heart, I just wanted to say that I appreciate the stuff you've been posting. I shouldn't have snapped before, and it's good to have people asking those sorta questions.

We get a lot of new people looking for basic advice so we tend to lean that way, but there's also a lot of talented folks and it's not a crime to ask us to be better.

SurreptitiousMuffin fucked around with this message at 03:13 on Mar 20, 2017

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