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I went on a trip to Alaska in August, got the germ of a story, and started writing a novel on September 1st. (Actually, I started outlining the novel Sep. 1st along with a scrapped intro scene; the real writing came later.) I've spent most of this month alternating writing with reading a few books on writing (to give me some guidance on the nuts and bolts of doing this), as the longest non-academic thing I've ever written to this point was about 9 pages. I finished September 23rd with 113K words. (It's fantasy with some unique world building, so I don't think this number is 'wrong.') I'm semi-retired, so I have the time to do this, and I've discovered I write extremely quickly with an outline. Quality? Well, that's what subsequent passes are for. I've spent the last three days rereading and editing to put in content/foreshadowing/character beats I thought of later, looking for egregious mistakes*, knocking out unneeded sensory words (" (* and found one huge one, where a secondary character knows a main character's major secret before he reveals it, whoops!) Here's the thing: I can't bear to look at the damned manuscript again today. I don't know when I'll be able to bear to look at it again. But I want to work. I intentionally wrote it as an open-ended novel to admit of a sequel, with at least a trilogy possible if I didn't light my computer on fire out of embarrassment after the first novel was done. (I also have an idea for a pulpy paramilitary sci-fi idea bouncing around in my head -- this would be shorter, maybe 40K words, the first in a series of short stories.) I think I already know what the answers will be but I believe I just need permission. Do I put the novel aside until I get my readers' feedback and start outlining the sequel? (Or maybe my sci-if idea?) Regardless of how long my readers take, how long can (or, perhaps, should) I put it aside for before I have to knuckle down and get back to it?
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Sep 27, 2022 17:47
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Dr. Kloctopussy posted:Getting feedback elsewhere on the internet My first two alpha readers have my first novel in their hands -- I can't believe I actually put my work in someone else's hands to read! It's exciting. I've got some other alpha readers lined up. (I want to roll it out in waves, so I can get feedback, iterate if needed, and then put out a revised version to a couple more readers rather than blowing my whole alpha pool at once.) But I have to start thinking about getting some writers' critiques eventually. I don't know how valid the quoted websites still are in terms of quality; the OP is 5.5 years old and I don't know if this section has been updated. In any case, to get anyone to read my work I'm going to have to critique other people's stuff first, either because of credit systems or because no one is going to pick up my tome and critique it without knowing that I'm contributing, and I'd like to get started on that. (Of course, I'm also going to start looking for a writing group and develop that way, but I think that's slower than what I need right now to get this novel done; I can work that in parallel.) TL;DR: My novel is high fantasy and is currently 114K words. Any contemporary recommendations about which of these (or other) online communities to go to to start building rep/credits for crits?
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Oct 2, 2022 23:23
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Sailor Viy posted:I used sff.onlinewritingworkshop for a while. It was pretty alright. REMEMBER SPONGE MONKEYS posted:Can we imply, from your use of the term “crittee” that one who gives is thus a “critter”?
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Oct 4, 2022 23:55
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Wungus posted:and you're going to have readers who get angry at you for calling your money "shinnars" because everyone knows money is dollars Oh poo poo in my fantasy novel series money is called sorbets in one land. gently caress, time to erase the files and start over. Maybe romance this time. Actually, they're called sorets but I'm leaving that autocorrect. When are my alpha readers all getting done? I've been promised end of the month but it's killing me waiting.
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Oct 23, 2022 17:22
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Pennsylvanian posted:My fantasy France country used Royales because they were one of the few absolutist monarchies left.
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Oct 27, 2022 23:06
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Marsupial Ape posted:The answer is drugs, right? I’m willing to skip over journaling and writing exercises and get right into drugs. That "romantic" ideal went out with having to inhabit an unheated garret in some European city to be a successful artist. I would never have been able to write the way I do when I was still drinking and I certainly didn't read the way I do now, which is just as important as writing well. Plus, I almost never dreamed, or at least remembered my dreams (because I'd pass out instead of sleep), so I didn't have access to that realm of creativity. Sorry if this is me missing  , or if you were in fact referring to things like ADHD meds (but it didn't sound like you were).
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Nov 15, 2022 18:28
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Pththya-lyi posted:*She said, procrastinating on her own writing
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Nov 15, 2022 19:18
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Sitting Here posted:draft 0 buddy checking in Perhaps if I were a better writer, I wouldn't be so afraid of rewriting everything, but with a detailed outline prepared before word 1 touches paper, my first drafts (though still lovely in a lot of ways) have had good structure, action, pacing, and a decent first pass of dialogue. (That's not to say that I don't slash, reorganize, or rewrite large chunks of text, up to a chapter at a time, in my second passes...not that I'm an expert; I've only got one novel with line edits redlined in a binder waiting to be typed up and a second novel that has finished its second draft. NaNoWriMo really came at a bad time for me as a first-time participant.) Losing manuscripts made Hemingway a better writer. I think it would make me quit the hobby. https://lostmanuscripts.com/2010/07/31/hemingways-lost-suitcase/
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Nov 15, 2022 22:42
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Stuporstar posted:This is basically the plotter process. In the end a plotter’s first draft is often a lot cleaner because of all the careful planning that went into the story before writing. It’s us messy-rear end pantsers who more often have to do a total rewrite because our first draft wasn’t well thought out before then. Hence the draft 0 designation I'm in awe of pantsers and the skill it takes to write that way, but that's just part of my personality and likely the way I handle my ADHD. For example, I don't know how people cook without using recipes. If I tried to write without an outline, it would be very challenging, almost certainly would turn out as a huge mess, and probably would lack a lot of the elements of symbolism, foreshadowing, etc., that I get with my outline. For me, the biggest challenge with heavily plotting is that my characters can't always follow the outline and stay true to themselves, which leads to lots of ignoring/updating the outline when I write character-intensive scenes.
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Nov 16, 2022 02:05
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Pththya-lyi posted:I'm not saying get swole or run a marathon, but maybe take a walk once in a while? Sometimes that helps me when I get stuck on a story. I think it's a combination of getting away from the computer and touching grass (even if it's with my feet) and decontextualizing my thinking (things look different when I'm exerting myself and panting).
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Nov 16, 2022 06:08
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2022 was my first year of seriously writing. I wrote 2.5 novels last year. One was self-published on Amazon, the second is under edits using feedback from alpha readers, and the .5 is the half of a first draft that I wrote during NaNoWriMo. It's been an amazing year for me, considering the most I've ever written before has been under 10 pages at a time, barring academic writing.
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Jan 2, 2023 05:08
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Sitting Here posted:I kind of want to change the thread title for the new year. Any ideas? "Fiction Writing Advice & Discussion: ", with the final space and changing the 'and' to an ampersand, is 37 characters. "The act of writing itself is done in secret, like masturbation." (62 characters) --> "Fiction Writing Advice & Discussion: Writing's done in secret, like masturbation" (37 + 43 characters = 80, if that's the title length limit. The original is a quote from Stephen King.) Also found this when I was trying to attribute the above quote: "Writing is like masturbation. It might not bear fruit, but it certainly does feel good." (Charles Delmar)
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Jan 3, 2023 21:14
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magic cactus posted:But I'm not suggesting alieness, I'm using it to suggest the sonic concept of noise at a textual level. The graphetic equivalent of say, a distorted wave form or feedback, because one of the questions I'm trying to explore is how to write that kind of sound without just mashing together onomatopoeia. But the second point is that I'm using different translation techniques to highlight the conceptual loss that often times happens during translation of a source language to English and back again. If I had written something like "oh yeah these aliens are called <armenian word> and they're unknowable cosmic horrors" then yeah, you'd be right. But to the best of my ability I'm explicitly trying not to do so. I do see the concern however. That's kind of why I'm on the fence. Let me challenge you with your own admission: you're using the Armenian alphabet because you like the way it looks. What are your feelings about people who get random phrases in Chinese or Japanese tattooed on themselves because they look cool? Second, having varying degrees of proficiency in a number of languages both living and dead, I'm well aware of the difficulties of the conceptual loss in translation. (I originally learned Ancient Greek to read Plato in the original, for example, to mitigate these difficulties.) To be frank, your experiments with Google translate and a friend for whom Armenian is not even a first language seem vaguely patronizing. Why not come up with your own different translations of a given piece of alien text/sound/etc.? Why do you have to use a specific real-world language to filter it? Edit because you posted while I was writing: re your point 1: This seems like it might be extremely distracting to the reader unless it's done very well, and I'm not sure what that would look like. Not saying you can't pull it off, but maybe workshop a chapter or two featuring it to neutral audiences and see what they say. Admiralty Flag fucked around with this message at 06:32 on Jan 31, 2023 |
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Jan 31, 2023 06:28
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CaptainCrunch posted:I'm at an impasse on a creative decision I made in my novel. As you point out, 1st to 3rd POV switches are nothing new and aren't necessarily jarring, which means the obvious (though not definitely correct) answer is that you need to do some work, perhaps in beefing up the character development, perhaps in simple signposting (e.g., chapter subtitles indicating POV/whatever -- "[Character A]" vs. "The Chronicles of [Character B]"), or perhaps in just having 3rd POVs start earlier in the book (overlaps with idea about character development, maybe, but the issue might be that all of a sudden, 75% of the way through the book, there's 3rd person POV, while having a few sprinkled in earlier chapters might have fixed that). Can you go back and ask them what they thought was so jarring? Sudden switch far along in book vs. side character suddenly getting spotlight vs. whatever?
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Feb 28, 2023 22:50
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General Battuta posted:I once got in a squabble with a Sanderson fan who said his (Sanderson's) work was superior to Tolkien's because it was possible to understand how the Lord Ruler, a Sanderson guy, could fight a United States Army armored division. But it wasn't possible to know how Gandalf would conduct that fight, because his powers are so unclear. And I tried to explain: Gandalf would not fight the United States Army armored division. Tolkien hated industrial warfare, and he would not write Gandalf's power as something that would be matched directly against the war machine. He would simply not put Gandalf in that position. Or he would have Gandalf make himself understood to the soldiers. Or he would have Gandalf not be there, because the creatures of the forest or whatever warned him of the enemy's approach. But that's cheating, the Sanderson fan said (actually he called it complete bullshit). Gandalf can't just decide what happens. And I tried to explain that yes, he can, because Gandalf's power as a Maiar is tied not just to a set of rules within the story, but to a concept of divine providence which is so fundamental to Tolkien's writing it determines what kind of story Gandalf can be in. But the Lord Ruler has superpowers you can put in a wiki, I guess. As to the quoted part: that's not a bug, but a feature. There are people who want to know not whether Captain America can beat Batman in a fight (a plausible discussion for comics aficionados)*, but whether Superman could beat Goku.** Or, as in an interminable YouTube video my wife's brother-in-law showed me, could Godzilla beat Ancalagon? Or could a Star Destroyer beat the Enterprise-D? Could one Raven Guard space marine have made it from Paris to the bunker and killed Hitler? You get the idea. The desire of nerd fandom to stack favorites up against each other and see who wins goes back to childhood and bashing figures against each other, in an age of innocence before we (at least those my age) even knew what polyhedral dice or hex-and-counter games were. It all goes back to mashing plastic dinosaurs against cowboy dolls and seeing who's tougher. * It's a shame that back when I played HeroClix I never sat down and posed a 1:1 match to see what the results would be. ** I'm not a DBZ fan so I can't speak authoritatively, but I've heard this asked and answered in manner somewhat reminiscent of your answer with Gandalf: Goku and Superman would realize that they're both good guys, they should be friends, and they need to team up to defeat the plans of the bad guy behind the whole problem, at which point someone says, "But imagine they don't. Who'd win?", missing the point that metatextually Superman's better stories are all about finding a solution to a problem without trading punches with the obvious bad guy until one of them falls over.
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Apr 4, 2023 18:04
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Thranguy posted:Doing it five times in a row gets annoying, and sometimes it's an easy way to misplace the participle. ("Being of sound mind and body, the stairs in the house are no danger to me." Grammar nerds would say it's the stairs that are sentient. There are probably sentences where both readings make sense and there's real confusion.) 
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Oct 24, 2023 03:34
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Stuporstar posted:Also read more fantasy...If you want the best written fantasy then read Ursula K Leguin. But in any case, quote:I can’t say this enough, read read read
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Mar 22, 2024 14:33
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fridge corn posted:Hi! I've decided I'm going to start writing. But I don't have a computer! I'm wondering if there are any considerations to take into account when looking for a computer that will be used primarily for writing. Is this the right thread for this or is there a better thread to ask? I'd be very careful about overbuying for a hobby you haven't even started. Can you concentrate in coffee shops? If not, and you don't anticipate moving around, then get a desktop. Can't work at home? Laptop it is. Are you a plotter as opposed to a pantser (I.e., fly-by-the-seat-of-your...)? Then an additional vertical screen is invaluable at a fixed installation to look at your detailed notes. Can you borrow a laptop for a little while and see what works/doesn't work for you while you begin outlining/making notes/writing/etc. in different locales? As we say in woodworking, buy once, cry once. The one irrefutable piece of advice is to get a good keyboard and mouse to avoid hand issues. edit: just for background, I can't concentrate in coffee shops and the like, and do all my writing at my desktop setup, where I have a dual monitor setup (side vertical one for notes), standing "secretary's clipboard" for transcribing handwritten notes, my thesaurus and manual of style, etc. it works for me, but wouldn't for a lot of other folks. But the opposite is true too. I just would hate for you to spend a bunch on a laptop, e.g., and find that you could have done with a desktop that can handle your games and have better specs for the same price. Admiralty Flag fucked around with this message at 18:47 on Apr 30, 2024 |
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Apr 30, 2024 18:37
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