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kaom
Jan 20, 2007


This thread’s OP is amazing and I mostly wanted to post to say thank you for it! I read the last ~3 pages as well and there are some really thoughtful replies and resources in here.

Unfortunately I’m super green and not sure I have anything to contribute myself. After not writing anything in a literal decade I just finished drafting a 75k word fantasy novel. The challenge of writing something this long has been super fun, but it’s mostly trash right now since I haven’t edited much of it yet. Which brings me to my question below.

One thing I’m really struggling with as far as the nuts and bolts go is HOW do line breaks work in dialogue? I found this resource which has been helpful but doesn’t really address my direct problem. The book is written in first person, and part of the narrator’s arc is learning to speak up for herself. I want to create this contrast early on between what she’s thinking about a conversation and what she actually says in response. Does anyone know a good sample or resource outlining what this can/should look like? I’m not trying to do anything weird intentionally.

The kind of thing I’m trying to do:

quote:

“Maybe you’d like to bribe me?” He grinned. “Seems dangerous.”
Unbelievable. This was his job. “I don’t have much,” I murmured.

Or, on its own line:

quote:

“Maybe you’d like to bribe me?” He grinned. “Seems dangerous.”
Unbelievable. This was his job.
“I don’t have much,” I murmured.

I think the second option has more impact, but if the asides are very short it starts to look weird to have them all split out. I’ve been struggling with this for a while.

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kaom
Jan 20, 2007


HopperUK posted:

Honestly so long as every person's dialogue is on a new line, I think you should do whatever lends the most clarity. Clarity is the thing. The only way to know if whatever you're doing is distracting will probably be to ask other people to read it.

I think I probably need to tone it down a little. I want to do at least one full line-by-line edit pass of the whole thing before I ask anyone else to look at it, so I was hoping to clean up a lot of this then if it’s overdone. (Up to this point I’ve just done simple edits the next day to whatever I wrote the day before.)

I’m really new to writing. I assume a writing group is what I’m looking for to get some serious criticism on whether this is working as intended or not?

kaom
Jan 20, 2007


Thank you, this is really helpful!

Sounds like the winning strategy for the first big edit on my own might be inlining the internal thoughts and making sure that’s being applied judiciously (e.g. not reacting to every single thing). Then get some feedback from someone actually reading it in context to see if it’s confusing, too much, or not enough.

At least it becomes less frequent as the book goes on and the narrator starts to just verbalize her feelings instead. Really trying to get mileage out of this 1st person choice.

kaom
Jan 20, 2007


Since I’ve only contributed a question so far, thought I could post something related to the discussion on this page about how you distinguish character voices. Super amateur but maybe the way I went about this will spark something useful (or rip it to shreds, you know, I would love advice!). Here are five separate characters with dialogue samples. Mostly I took into account socioeconomic background, education level, and then “locking” some words/expressions to specific characters depending on their level of formality (or as a way to distinguish the location they grew up). Just for context again if it matters this is a fantasy setting although I tried to pick quotes that require zero context.

Altan: A priest from the city. He’s well-read, formal, and polite. He uses way too many words to express an idea and never uses filler words or the word “just” (I’ll rewrite his sentence to use “only” in place of that).

quote:

“It makes you uncomfortable to look at it, doesn’t it?” he asked, gazing at the painting pensively. “Nothing else in here holds my attention like this. That’s what makes it a masterpiece.”

“I’m glad you made it safely on your own,” Altan continued. “Did you spend some time exploring the city?”


Roman: The son of the richest guy in a small village. He’s an angry man with something to prove. Speaks formally, but doesn’t have a large vocabulary and is extremely curt. There’s some minor word choice here, like “speak” in place of “talk” to keep that formal feeling even in short form.

quote:

“Be quick,” he snapped. “Go now.”

“Don’t speak to me,” he spat, not making eye contact. “Just leave.”

Tuya: From the same small village as Roman. She knows how to read but isn’t highly educated. Uses a lot of filler words like “um” and “I guess so” and phrases a lot of replies as questions.

quote:

“Um,” I pondered. “Maybe?”

“He’s wearing a hood, at least?” I supplied.

Audun: Different cultural background than the others. He’s wealthy, famous, and kind of dumb. I made some words unique to him to show this: “yeah/nah,” “wow,” and “uh” is his filler word to keep it distinct from Tuya’s. Highly educated so he’ll use precise words like “sapient” as distinct to “sentient,” but he’s a very lazy speaker and uses as few words as possible. In the second example “right” as a question is only ever used by Tuya/Audun as the least formal speakers.

quote:

“Nah,” he said. “That sounds like work. Work and me don’t mix.”

He nudged me. “You’ll come with me, right? As a favour?”

Signe: Audun’s sister. Unlike him she’s competent and doesn’t suffer fools. Since most of the main characters are idiots every interaction with her is meant to leave them and the reader making this face: :stare: She has some carryover from Audun’s lazy vocabulary, such as using “bad” in place of a more descriptive word like “poor” in the second quote below, but she doesn’t have the filler words.

quote:

As we stepped past her Signe hissed under her breath, “Tired? You’d have more time for sleeping if you spent less of it loving.”

“You struck him,” she said, looking at my injured hand. “The head was a bad choice. Next time aim for his throat.”

Hopefully this is useful/interesting to someone and not just me cluttering up the thread with garbage. :) I’m still refining things but I spent a lot of time thinking about how to make the “voices” unique since I really wanted it to be clear right away that the backgrounds/outlooks are very different across these characters. Advice welcome, pick my approach apart or alternatively I’d love to hear what others do to tackle this!


Leng posted:

Come join us!

White Chocolate posted:

I chose first person for my novel also, let me pm you our discord link.

Thank you both, really appreciate it! I didn’t want to assume the invite was still open.

kaom
Jan 20, 2007


newts posted:

I really can’t think of a way to be less generic about the conspiracy without spoiling the main murder plot. I’ll work on it.

I’m not sure you need to mention the conspiracy at all TBH, as someone who read your book. The stakes at the beginning that hooked me are the upcoming negotiations for reconciliation that are providing a ticking clock and extra importance to the case. This is set up super early and spoils nothing if you want to use it instead.

kaom
Jan 20, 2007


I think newts is right about keeping it past tense. I didn’t find a name for this, stating facts when in past tense, but I do know that’s what you’re supposed to do when essay writing (e.g., “one plus one equals two”). However it definitely reads weird in the samples posted, and I think what’s happening is that the present tense reads like it’s the author’s POV rather than the character’s. If the narrative is told from one character’s POV, this takes the reader out of the story.

My suggestion is to find another way of expressing the difference in current action and facts, such as:


Story posted:

The earth labored in the clutch of mid-August humidity, where the air always dripped, shade offered no balm, and the thermometer read the same at noon as it did at midnight.
Here I added “always” to clarify this is typical weather. (I also think in this case that it’s not actually a fact the way something like the math example is a fact—like this statement wouldn’t be true for where I live, so that might be part of why it sounds weird to readers.)

I also think “where” might be fine here since the subject of the clause is the humidity, not August.

Story posted:

He clapped me on the back with his free hand and I returned the gesture. No one shook hands here.
In this example I shifted “we” to “no one” to make it clear that it’s applicable to everyone, not just the two characters in the moment.

It’s possible something along these lines would read clearer?

kaom
Jan 20, 2007


Nae posted:

Any feedback anybody can give would be much appreciated. Thanks!
For context, I am a very bad reader and easily confused. But this sounds to me like Senth wants to kill the chimera (“destroy them from within”) and Anari also wants to kill the chimera (“including the chimera who worship him—and that’s exactly why Anari is summoning him”). So the final paragraph stating that they have mutually exclusive goals has me scratching my head. I know I’m missing something in the middle paragraph, but I can’t piece it together.

There’s a minor thing that jumped out at me, too: “she’s got a special connection” sounds more informal than everything else. Might be intentional, but if not maybe “she has” would be better at conveying the tone. :)

(I’ve never submitted anything anywhere btw so take me with a grain of salt.)

The vibe I’m getting is:

- fantasy, can’t peg it to a specific category
- significant romance component
- a lovable rogue & an aloof enchantress
- revenge (but this feels secondary to the romance)

kaom fucked around with this message at 02:03 on Sep 18, 2021

kaom
Jan 20, 2007


Yes please this is the first time I’m going to try it and I need all the moral support I can get!

kaom
Jan 20, 2007


Junpei posted:

The first question I'm asking is mostly a matter of avoiding an Evil Triangle:

-Don't want the books to be too 'weeby' (Solution: Avoid honorifics like -kun, -san, -senpai, -sensei, etc. as well as stuff like "oni-chan" and the like)
-Don't want the books to be too 'historical' (ie. I'm pointedly avoiding using words that are over-associated with Japan: Swords are swords, not 'katanas', the Emperor is an Emperor, not a 'Shogun', Assassins are assassins, not 'ninja', etc.)
-Don't want the books to just be a regular YA fantasy but with characters having names like Haruka, Takumi, Saburo, etc. etc. (mostly to be solved with more subtle touches, like kitsune and oni and the like)

Do you have any tips on avoiding said Evil Triangle?
This project sounds really neat! But I feel like you might be overthinking this, to be honest. What makes something weeby to me is when a work gets stuff wrong (especially if it’s obviously pulling from a pop culture reference rather than history/myth), or fetishizes things as “better” than other parts of the world while glossing over issues that were/are a thing in Japan. The word choice doesn’t matter too much unless it’s going overboard - like I agree about not including honorifics, although even then some are reasonably well-known like sensei and seeing one or two in context to mark a serious difference in decorum wouldn’t bother me.

It might help you to think about what you want the draw to be for a reader - are you looking for readers interested in the Japanese angle of this? Because then minimizing it doesn’t really do you any favours IMO.

kaom
Jan 20, 2007


Honestly I wish I had some of the worldbuilder’s disease. When someone asks to see my outline it’s just a mishmash of random notes, where “include a skeleton” is equally ranked with “these two countries have a trade agreement” or “character A tries to kill character B.”

People who do deep dives on stuff like fantasy politics and economies, what’s your secret? How do you start researching a topic you’ve decided to include? I need to do some amount of this to make my world feel real but I don’t even know where to start.

kaom
Jan 20, 2007


Yeah I have the opposite problem. But in starting to write it out just now (there was a big war in the past 100-200 years, the divisions still need to be healed between multiple countries) I think I realized that I’m basically writing the establishment of the fantasy EU, so maybe the answer is just to research that. Beyond a rough timeframe and who fought who, I don’t even have solid reasons established for why the war happened—I kind of need something for characters to feel some kind of way about that’s deeper than “we hate country x for unspecified reasons” you know?

This backing is really just there to support the characters’ journeys of learning to see things from other perspectives. That’s the part that interests me. But the world needs to support that journey in a way readers can connect with, I can’t entirely handwave the reasons there’s conflict to begin with.

kaom
Jan 20, 2007


I usually have a related but opposite problem, of blocking for characters who are confident. They’re not going to be stuffing their hands in their pockets, or fidgeting, or playing with their hair, or chewing their nails etc. so unless I give them something specific to DO in the scene I’m always like… they make themselves confortable and then ?????

kaom
Jan 20, 2007


Thanks to everyone for the advice on blocking, I appreciate it :love: Going to have to convince myself that it’s actually okay to go many dialogue exchanges without any updates on what a character is doing. I know once I flip into editor mode I’ll delete it anyway, so if I can just convince myself not to write it in the first place that will save a lot of time.

I find it so much easier in short form fiction honestly, because every action or lack of action carries so much weight - once I’m writing something longer it starts being hard, because at a certain point you’re not revealing base character anymore you’re just repeating yourself. I need to keep in mind that the focus should really be on emotional change.

newts posted:

plans/moods/inspiration/ motivations might change as you write, especially if it’s written over a long span, and you can either go with it or course correct.

Yeah this has been my experience. There’s a lot of discovery in my writing process, so I’m frequently surprised by the direction things are taking, but I have options to respond to that. In one case where the romance element wasn’t working, I gave one character a radical personality shift until it did. In another case the romance wasn’t a plot critical element, so when I decided the characters didn’t have chemistry I just dropped the romance angle entirely (because I otherwise liked the way things were going).

I think this happens when your character’s traits/motivations don’t line up to your outline the way you expect them to. Which is obviously going to be the case when you run into this moment mid-stream:

ultrachrist posted:

“wait no, what if THIS happened instead?”

kaom
Jan 20, 2007


Wow my editing trick has always been to physically print out what I’m working on and break out the coloured pens. I have to try this Comic Sans trick to see if I can save myself some money and paper next time!

kaom
Jan 20, 2007


Leng posted:

I have not personally tried it yet, and despite my love of all things spreadsheets, it does strike me as somewhat overengineered (there's literally a tab for tracking character genealogy which imo is now into world building notes territory instead of just outlinine), but kaom has been struggling with her outlining and this is apparently helping so if you are too, then maybe try this out.

The genealogy tab did prompt me to think about lifespan. I made a note in my worldbuilding document. Then I deleted the tab.

I’m more interested in the mechanism by which I take my discovery notes (a garbled doc of bullet points, half in conflict with the other half) and turn them into a plot - that part is helpful! And for my current efforts to fix my outline, the intensity score stuff is helping me to figure out in what order events in Act II should transpire (a decision I’ve been stuck on for weeks).

kaom
Jan 20, 2007


^ This is fascinating, I had no idea how those languages work.


I guess I’ll also roll in with my tense problems. The TL;DR is that after positive feedback I’m slowly reworking my manuscript from past to present tense. It works better for my story and the YA market didn’t balk at Hunger Games being written this way, so it seems like a good call. (Or at least, less out there than I was initially worried about.)

Except I have no dang clue how to write in present tense. It’s uncommon enough that I don’t have the same ear for it as I do past tense.

Here my character is in the present, thinking about how they were thinking about the future in the past (RIP me):

quote:

My eyes land on the window. Can I? That was the deal. But I pictured wearing practical clothing when I left—fur-lined boots, layers of coats, my favourite hat…
My ear insists this should be “left” but I keep wondering if it should be “leave” instead?


Here I have a shift in tense as the character goes outside:

quote:

[…] My fingers sting, but they aren’t going numb.

Clouds are blowing around in a way that’s completely disorienting, making the moonlight and shadows dance over the mounds of snow.
That second paragraph opening “feels” right to me, it’s descriptive rather than active. But maybe it should be “Clouds blow around” instead?


Honestly it’s sad because I learned French as a second language and we spent an exhaustive amount of time learning about verb tense, but English as a first language wasn’t treated the same. :( I’m planning on professional edits so it isn’t critical path to correct this on my own, but it bugs me that I don’t know the answers.

kaom
Jan 20, 2007


This is so incredibly helpful, thank you. I didn’t realize I was so far away from even having the vocabulary needed to talk about this, there’s no way I was going to be able to look it up on my own.

kaom
Jan 20, 2007


I did not in any way expect this kind of effort but I’m really glad you shared this, Stuporstar! This is seriously cool.

kaom
Jan 20, 2007


Stuporstar posted:

More Grammar poo poo, for those who care
Seriously this stuff is amazing, I can’t say enough how much I appreciate these posts. I need to read these resources you’ve shared because I don’t know any of this. When we got into French sentence deconstruction in like… year 11 of studying it, my mind was blown at actually seeing how to pick something apart into more than just actor/subject/verb. But it wasn’t a 1:1 match to English, obviously, and we never went this in-depth.



I’ll throw another thing in here that grammar software and humans have offered me various opinions on (and this isn’t directed at you specifically Stuporstar, please do not feel obliged). Character is climbing up a big, melting chunk of ice when this happens:

quote:

Part of the ice sloughs off, taking my axe with it. I release my white knuckled grip on the handle as soon as I realize what’s happening. It misses me on the way down, but I was too slow to react—I’m moving backwards, momentum all wrong.
After a lot of back-and-forth I wound up changing that final clause to “my momentum all wrong” but I’m still not entirely sure that it was incorrect on the first go-round.

This one I spent a lot of time trying to research on my own, and I believe it’s an “adverbial clause,” but I had a hard time finding an example that lined up with what I’d written. So TBH, I’m still not sure about this one and whether I even found the right name for what I was trying to do.

kaom
Jan 20, 2007


The coaching adage I know is to meet people one step ahead of where they currently are, and I think my online crit group is very good about asking and directing each other toward what type of feedback would be helpful.

My novel’s draft isn’t ready for line level crits - I’ll address and learn from those if something jumps out, of course, but I’m still at the stage where I’m fixing structural/character/setting issues, so a lot of things are likely to change or be scrapped. Sometimes I’m stuck moving forward on my own and post a first draft like “this is terrible and not working, can someone take a look and tell me which parts are boring / confusing / lame and which parts you want to see more of” and the feedback helps me figure out what direction to move in. The group knows that’s the point of polish that I’m at, so no one is going through my prose with a fine-tooth comb looking for every filter word.

Keeping target readers in mind does matter for interpreting crit, I think. I’m writing YA right now and it’s pretty girly - my partner (an adult man) might have things fly over his head, like the protagonist’s oblique aside being glad she’s not on her period, but that’s totally fine. If a bunch of target readers are confused then my conveyance is the problem, but life experience has a huge impact on how you understand and relate to something. That line wasn’t written with him in mind, so no worries if he doesn’t get it.

Professionally, I see A LOT of imposter syndrome. It’s common for people who view each other as peers to forget that it’s valuable to focus on what’s been done well instead of only narrowing in on improvements, and enough of that can get anyone down. I think all the suggestions here might help - trying another group or another medium, communicating what crit you need in the moment alongside the work, and weighting the feedback against target market.


(Also I want to thank Stuporstar again and also Wallet for the amazing grammar posts - appreciate you both, I felt weird bumping the thread just to say “thanks” but I loved the input and am still taking it in. I finally learned what a gerund is! :3:)

kaom
Jan 20, 2007


Wungus posted:

A million Americans are gonna write poo poo that feels more American than I ever will, which is why today I included the terms "have a chunder," "she'll be right," "fair dink," and "you mob" in my writing today on this relatively serious secondary world fantasy novel and yoooo it feels nice to lean the hell into Australiana. That said, as was pointed out earlier, and in that piece, doing this will definitely, intentionally create a wall for certain people outside of ANZ. It's just a fight I wanna have, and if you don't wanna have that fight, it's easy enough to avoid.
I also think about this a lot as a Canadian writing fantasy. My manuscript is all in Canadian English and I debate whether words like “skookum” are too weird to include - but, really, why not? It’s a different world, not all fictional places have to be populated by Americans and Brits.

I asked in a local writers discord and opinions were split. Some get reviews saying there are typos in their work. Some say no one is bothered. Some say it’s only a problem if you have Canadian spelling in the title. Some only write true CanLit, about Canadian people and places, so the subject matter and the way it’s written align.

I think there’s something sad about limiting your expression to suit someone else’s expectations. I’m not writing to make money (although that would be nice), so the choice for me is really easy - definitely publishing in Canadian English, hobbyist’s choice. But it’s not as simple when you’re thinking about it from a market perspective. There’s no way to predict what people will feel is impenetrable vs what they’ll view as interesting and unique.

Leng posted:

"Sucked in" is so intuitive though...even if you've never heard it before you know exactly what it means.
I actually looked this up and I’m not sure if I would have 100% got it in context. “Sucked in” for me means having your attention drawn to something, possibly to the detriment of others. “Suckered” seems like it’s more equivalent to the meaning I found.


Tars Tarkas posted:

Hey everyone, I've been reading this thread on and off the past year or so for inspiration and am excited because I finally finished a draft!
This is amazing, congrats! :toot:

kaom
Jan 20, 2007


DropTheAnvil posted:

I think certain aspects of myself goes into my characters. More broad brush aspects rather then the specifics in your examples. I only find out after the piece is done though.

In a downside, my regionality and biases reflect in my writing/characters, something I've been trying to address.
Same for me. I find that I think “what would I do” or “what would a person I know do” basically never. But obviously my own experience does play a role in what kind of characters I’ll come up with and how I see their interactions playing out.

It’s more like I pick some key background elements (education, culture, etc.) and their beliefs and goals, then figure out what makes sense to me from there. Like if someone’s goal is “get a promotion” I have to decide what’s motivating that and might come up with a few possibilités. Maybe they’re broke and desperate. Maybe they’re insecure and want to impress people. Maybe they completely deserve the promotion, but keep being unfairly overlooked. Those things, and the type of story I end up telling, are all so interlinked that I’d find it hard to tease apart the thought process.

I’ve also given characters personality adjustments before when I realized something wasn’t working in the story. The kind of traits they inherit from me tend to be dumb things like “likes animals” - because I want to write about cool animal facts and no one can stop me, it’s going in!

kaom
Jan 20, 2007


I’ve been removing a lot of “seemed like” instances. I was trying to make the narrator look appropriately uncertain, but decided there are better ways of indicating that because it really cluttered up the prose!

Similar improvements being made:

- Removing adverbs by choosing more descriptive verbs in the first place.
- Removing as many “I thought” and “I realized” and “I saw” -style filter words as possible.

kaom
Jan 20, 2007


That’s a great point, removing filler doesn’t even always make your prose shorter. “Seems like” is mostly dead to me, but conveying uncertainty in other ways often makes things more verbose. Still better, though, at least in my opinion!

Along similar lines I’ve been sprucing up descriptions of people and places. The advice generally is to get more specific to make things more immersive (e.g. instead of “stone” say “granite”) but to be honest I’m mostly ignoring that - because my narrator is not someone who would know or care about that kind of thing. Instead I’m veering toward descriptions that compare one thing relative to another that would be familiar to the character - which again, are WAY more verbose, but feel more authentic to the “voice” I’m going for.

kaom
Jan 20, 2007


I have much less experience than you, to be honest, but one thing I might have a useful comment on is:

Boba Pearl posted:

Because I didn’t think these characters through in the beginning, and wanted people to vote on who got in, I now have this issue where I want there to be an obvious type bond between the characters that makes them incredibly reliant and willing to put up with each other, but having the bond happen over the course of a week feels like it’s too cheap. I tried my best to give them a common enemy that is stronger than them and hunting them. It’s also incredibly slow telling a story using about 200 - 300 words a day. It’s been a year and I still haven’t even finished introducing the full cast! Let alone learn their feelings and who they are.

I’m writing a novel where two characters meet and develop life-or-death trust in each other under dangerous circumstances. Their relationship spans ~30k words, probably, before the first big leap of faith is taken. In-universe, it’s three days.

This isn’t leaping out at anyone in my writing group as a concern, because the narrative time is more important than the chronological time. It feels true enough to the characters and the story that it doesn’t come across as unrealistic.

I’d trust your own judgement the most, but it’s something to keep in mind (and something I find hard to assess by myself). If you’re already a year into publishing 200-300 words a day, a lot of “time” has passed from the reader’s perspective no matter how much in-universe time is passing.


Stuporstar posted:

Also, I just love finding out poo poo like the ancient Egyptian particle iwms
𓇋𓅱𓄟𓋴𓀁, translated as “surely” ended up considered hyperbolic enough to be a discourse marker for total bullshit, and ended up only used sarcastically.
This is super neat!

kaom
Jan 20, 2007


Kinda hard to say on that one without making a lot of assumptions. My guess would be “idle” was the sticking point. Even in slice of life stories, the “idle chatter” is telling a story or imparting a feeling about the characters and the place and time. So it serves a purpose, it isn’t truly aimless.


Junpei posted:

"Somehow, Palpatine returned"

I’m laughing all over again :lol:


a friendly penguin posted:

Also, anyone interested in beta reading my 86k word, no-romance, new adult, second world fantasy novel? I can post the hook if anyone wants to know more or you can PM me. Always happy to crit anything in return of any length when I'm not flogging myself to meet my own writing goals and deadlines. So sorry for not jumping on other people's requests before.

Sent you a PM. :)

kaom
Jan 20, 2007


The more I think about it, the more I feel like maybe you want a different manuscript for the audio version of your book?

It was a distant consideration for me until Google’s autonarration stuff, because there was no way I could afford it for a debut self-pub novel, but now… I totally could. But I think it will suck! A lot of my dialogue isn’t tagged because it’s obvious who’s speaking. I’m not much of an audiobook person but I assume this is usually handled by the actor doing slightly different voices or something?

kaom
Jan 20, 2007


Every high school student should read Bullet in the Brain.

kaom
Jan 20, 2007


How do people feel about epithets generally? I slip into using them sometimes and find myself removing them later, unless the epithet reveals something interesting about the narrator’s opinions (e.g. “the little creep” vs “the older man”). I guess they feel a little stilted or old fashioned to me?


sephiRoth IRA posted:

When do you feel a story is done being edited? Is it a time thing or something else?

It depends on your goals and what feedback you’re hearing.

I’m hobby writing and I’m happy to spend money on my hobby. I’m fixing issues from alpha feedback and things that annoy me (flow, filter words, repetition), basically trying to bring the manuscript up to my current level of skill across the board. Then I’ll fix anything that confuses or annoys beta readers. Finally, I’m going to pay a professional to carry it over the line, which I’m hoping will teach me more skills that I can incorporate into my next piece.

I’m not trying to produce a masterpiece, so I’m not going to agonize about it from there. I know in another 100k words of practice I’ll have grown as a writer and look back to find all kinds of things that annoy me about my current project, but that’s life.

kaom
Jan 20, 2007


My current attempts to avoid this problem include:

- Look up the invented word on name etymology sites.
- Punch it into Google translate (detect language -> English) and see if I get anything. I do this for the component parts of compound words also.
- Just do a web search for it and see what comes back in the first page of results.


Anyone have recommendations over and above this? I’m not sure how effective Google’s translations would be at picking up slang terms, especially derogatory ones.

kaom
Jan 20, 2007


Elephant Parade posted:

base your terms on real-world root words instead of mashing syllables together like a caveman trying to invent fire

This is what I’m doing but I worry it makes it more likely I’ll hit on an unintentional foul, not less!

kaom
Jan 20, 2007


Creature naming is something I’ve seen another consideration for, too, which is the current popular understanding of the term.

If it’s a type of elf with characteristics that are already highly popularized, then calling it an elf is the most economical way to convey information to the reader. But if it’s an elf that doesn’t agree with the popular concept of an elf, then you might want to use a different name to avoid reader preconceptions (regardless of what you’re drawing on).

Even exclusively within western tradition it’s something you run into. Dracula didn’t include all of the ideas about vampires that were swirling around at the time, and it introduced new ones. And it was so defining of a work that you kind of can’t ignore it and just roll with a specific pre-Dracula folklore version of vampires without addressing the fact that readers will have preconceptions you need to counter.

kaom
Jan 20, 2007


I find critical feedback motivating, because when it’s done well it gives me something concrete to work on that I know will improve my writing going forward. It builds my confidence. But if that’s all I ever heard, or the improvements needed felt completely out of reach, it would probably be discouraging. Empty praise doesn’t help either - I need to feel like I earned the things I’m doing well.

I think at some point you just have to understand that you’re always going to get negative reactions to any creative endeavour. There isn’t a single piece out there with universally positive reception. With interpretation, it’s impossible to convey your intention the same for everyone. And not everyone will like what you’re going for to begin with! There’s a natural tendency to give outsized weight to negativity that you need to develop strategies to handle.


ultrachrist posted:

Something else worth mentioning: I've noticed a huge amount of writing chat in this thread and the internet at large is about genre fiction. With a shocking (to me, who doesn't read it) amount being about fan-fiction, which I can only assume is way more dependent on getting people to read and like as part of the appeal. In person stuff I frequent is mostly literary fiction with a dose of sci-fi and the distinction between the two is much smaller than it seems online.

Regarding marketability, your options seem to be to aim for a crowd pleaser or to niche down into something underserved. Fan fiction is an interesting case because you have a lot more data to work with. You can figure out what broad appeal looks like given focus and tight constraints, and you can very directly compare your work against what other people are doing and their reception. That’s a lot harder with original works - you can look at other things that have been successful and try to take lessons from that, but you can’t get as specific as “the fan favourite pairing is characters A/B.”

I don’t know that fan fiction is more focused on audience appeal, but rather that it’s possible to hit that target in a way that it just isn’t elsewhere.

kaom
Jan 20, 2007


Somehow my Pages on iPad approach works okay.

I think it’s purely psychological though. It makes me feel like “I can do this” when my manuscript already looks like a book, and Pages is great at giving you nice templates and easy access to formatting niceties like drop caps. But if it has any features that help you organize notes, they’re beyond me.

kaom
Jan 20, 2007


REMEMBER SPONGE MONKEYS posted:

Ok I may extremely dumb, where is the Thunderdome discord and do you need an invite? I don’t have plat and my searching skills are not proving up to the task at the moment.

Yep it takes an invite. This might be expired? Worth a shot, it’s the most recent I found posted: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?noseen=1&threadid=3989882&pagenumber=58&perpage=40&highlight=Discord#post527248159

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kaom
Jan 20, 2007


I think my parents still have the draft of the first book I tried to write when I was like 8. I wanted to write a Curious George story about him needing to land an airplane. Could not figure out how to write obstacles or surprises as a literal child so this attempt petered out quickly. We got into an airplane, then ??? The pilot got sick or something?

You will notice the actual books are mundane things like “rides a bike” or “flies a kite,” but obviously 8 year old me knew better. At least I knew the story needed stakes, something I’m honestly re-learning how to properly set up these days.

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