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Dec 15, 2022 16:05
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| # ¿ May 9, 2024 22:22 |
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hey there gang I have been working on a half novella, half set of short stories that are all set in the same universe, and I was wondering if anyone could tell me if the idea is compelling or only appeals to me as a weirdo basically there was a strange kind of apocalypse where abruptly necromancy became possible, but also computer technology stopped working and a lot of people died (both directly due to the change and in the chaos afterwards). this story is set about 300 years later, when society has recovered to a large extent, and the nation where this novella is set is one founded by former mercenary necromancers. they were in a 30 years war style brutal stalemate and got sick of it and just annexed all the border territories in one area into a new country, having amassed a huge army of corpses by that point. Now the country is well established, having used non-sentient undead labor to basically create a socialist state, with the world's first necromancy university. but that's all basically window dressing, the focus of the story is on a club for undead people who were reanimated wrong in some way, and don't fit in in even 'normal undead' society. because the undead don't sleep, there is a super active night-club scene, but they're not solely dance clubs, they're clubs for any sort of hobby or interest. The Society for the Unfortunately Resurrected is a fairly small club, and on this specific night they get together to discuss new potential members and tell each other scary stories, because even the dead have things they are afraid of. i put a lot of effort into working out exactly how all the necromancy and such would operate, but I don't want that detail to drown out the characters or the story. it's currently rough draft, as-it-came-out-of-my-head prose so uh yeah, but i was wondering if this would sustain peoples interest or not
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Mar 24, 2024 21:30
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DropTheAnvil posted:It sounds neat, but I don't understand if the S.U.R tell stories because they are unfortunately resurrected? The way you describe your story, the Unfortunately Resurrected part seems to be a footnote, which is a shame because its the most interesting part. I would say it is compelling enough for my to pick up, flip through a few pages. the circumstances of their resurrections and how they each see both each other and themselves does feature heavily, there's a framing device around the stories that is pretty substantial. they're specifically telling stories this night because they've been losing members to the Tragicomic Death Club due to having a lot of overlap in their member pool, and part of the TDC's success is the inherent participative storytelling element of their club's premise. out-of-universe i also wanted to show interesting episodes from the characters' lives in their own voice, and explore what constitutes a horror story in a society that has demystified and destigmatized a lot of what we find scary or gruesome.
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Mar 24, 2024 22:24
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General Battuta posted:You are killing me with this pitch bro! Not because it's bad but because you bury the link to some halfway decent prose in one word at the bottom — Sorry, I wasn't sure what the protocol was for linking longer stuff. I struggle a lot with pitch writing, i always end up including too much extraneous info. In retrospect you're right and I should have just ditched the first paragraph.
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Mar 25, 2024 13:43
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mewse posted:Forced labour (skeleton army) and genetic nobility (necromancers) created a socialist state? Necromancy is more of a technology than an inherited thing, the necromancers primarily run the military (for the same reason there are a lot of soldiers in the army) and academic side of things. The majority of state matters are managed by a civilian council of basically guild representatives. They don't sleep so they have plenty of time for the interminable loving meetings that the system requires. There are both non-sentient dead that operate as extensions of the necromancer and sentient undead who retain their original personality (although they do keep changing over time which can make them pretty strange eventually). It's more time consuming and expensive, and needs special knowledge, to bring someone back intact so it was initially rare and often restricted to the necromancers themselves. But since its founding the country has advanced a great deal in infrastructural terms and material wealth, and so a higher percentage of the population is now able to be brought back intact. Which is kind of a problem. To counter the 'threat' to their pool of non-sentient labour, they've been importing corpses from other nations (who all have different modifications they make to the corpses they export to 'guarantee' their soul can't be enslaved with their body, e.g. removing and cremating the brain, or the entire head). It's also just a way to kick the can further down the road, and one that has led to the necromancers trading things they really probably shouldn't trade to secure those funerary trade contracts. It's a socialist nation in that all essentials (housing, food, education, healthcare) are free to citizens (living and undead), but everything operates on a 'triage' basis that has just been in place since the violent, impoverished early days. The ability to provide a good life to their citizens is primarily made possible by the simplified logistics of the undead, access to a kind of automation the rest of the world lacks, and the small size of the nation. Life is good in the nation, but it is largely subsidized by the literal death of people elsewhere in the world. There is a big issue with effectively The Founding Fathers almost all still being around, and having disproportionate political influence whether they like it or not. edit: i should also say that there are also 'unliving', who are spontaneously arisen, more monstrous undead. they've been regarded as non-sentient and dangerous for a long time, but one of the members of the S.U.R. is one of the unliving and perfectly nice, which raises very uncomfortable questions for the entire society juggalo baby coffin fucked around with this message at 15:51 on Mar 25, 2024 |
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Mar 25, 2024 15:47
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beep-beep car is go posted:I have about 100k of a story that just kind of petered out. It needs another 50k to "be done" but I don't want something that long. If I feel like going back, I'll mercilessly hack the boring parts out. I tried to make a cyberpunk space opera and I think I need to do one or the other. theres some interesting tension between cyberpunk and space opera, like cyberpunk is cynical and often focused on how people are trapped, where (at least the most classic formulation of) space opera is romantic and often about freedom (lots of exotic locations, untamed planets etc), and both genres are 'enabled' by technology.
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Mar 30, 2024 20:14
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One piece of feedback i get pretty often on my writing is that I'm good at world-building, or I guess more specifically introducing people to worlds I've built, and I see a lot of work in all forms of media where there is a great world built, but it's let down by not conveying that world well. I feel weirdly arrogant telling anyone else how to write but eh w/e, here are my tips: 1: Don't feel like you have to explain everything at once - this is something people understand a lot better when writing short fiction, but are less good at in longer format. It's understandable to want your audience to understand the world so you can get on with the business of telling your stories in that world, but loading up too much too fast will a) not stick in your readers brain and b) not explain why the reader should care about all this detail. This is something my own posts in this thread will show lol, I am terrible at over-explaining when I am speaking in my own voice and not my prose voice. Short stories often function like mystery boxes, unfolding gradually as they go, but you can treat your setting like a mystery advent-calender, introducing elements that make people say 'huh what is that?' and then revealing it a little while later. I sometimes think of this strategy as mention, mention, explain, mention. You have characters refer to something, or perhaps use it in a 'black box' way, an appropriate number of times, then later have a situation that requires greater elaboration on the subject. So for example, I've got a setting about necromancers, I mention 'blacklight' a few times in ways that suggest I am not talking about UV light, but the characters don't clarify. The reader learns somehting about how it looks, and the effect it has, but it's not until much later on that a character has to maintain a blacklight machine that exactly what it is is gone into. Then afterwards, when blacklight is mentioned the reader, they have a new context for it, and a new context when they look back on stuff they didn't understand earlier. I'm simplifying a bit ofc for the example. This can also give the impression of hidden depth that may not be there (yet). If you mention a thing by name a bunch, then later reveal that there's rich lore behind it, it suggests to the reader that everything else you've mentioned also has that detail just beneath the surface. Even if that detail is always just made up on the spot. The real world is infinitely complex and you aren't going to be able to replicate that, 2: Think about the setting you live in - another kinda obvious one, but a very solid exercise. Thinking about how you interact with your world is a good way to both find how a character from a world thinks about that world. For example, when you go outside, do you look at a car and think 'ah a v-6 internal combustion vehicle, invented 125 years ago, fuelled using a slurry of processed ancient plant remains'? You might know all those things, but they probably aren't at the forefront of your mind in your day-to-day. Predominantly, you think about things to the degree they provide friction in your life; good or bad. But if you ARE the type of person who looks at a car and thinks that, that is also valid because it tells the reader a lot about the character. How much a character knows or thinks about the details of their setting is a valuable narrative tool. Acknowledging how much of our lives are shaped by the weird world we live in can also help you avoid having a fantabulous weird setting where everyone still somehow behaves and talks exactly like 21st century sci-fi writers. Especially today it is noticeable how huge the impact of modern society has been on human relationships and social structures, looking at what your own actions are incentivized by can help you see how your characters lives would be different, based on lacking or intensifying those incentives. Thinking about the day of an average person in your setting can also help you notice which elements your setting doesn't have yet 3: Understand your setting so you can gently caress it up - ultimately your world is a kit of parts, like a machine, to make cool stories happen. And like a machine it is advisable for you to understand how the pieces of it interact, so that if you gently caress with it you understand the likely consequences. This is most often a problem in fantasy settings: something gets introduced that, if you think about it for more than five minutes, removes half the incentives that made the setting interesting to begin with. Good ol JK rowling did this with the time turners, then fixed it by having the cupboard with all the time turners in get pushed over. However, there's a better way to tackle that type of thing. You're always probably gonna miss some detail somewhere, but if you understand your setting from its first principles, you can mine a LOT of story out of how that setting responds to a shift in its basic incentives. I'd argue that if you do introduce something that feels 'videogamey', having it get taken away from the characters outside of cutscenes will only make it feel extra gamey. Working through how it all interacts can give you ideas you never would think of on your own. A world is a mass of opposing tensions, and destabilising that will lead to it settling into a new stable shape.
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Apr 6, 2024 18:20
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im currently going thru the adhd diagnosis process and i have been worried that i will write less if there isnt a sucking black hole of dopamine-lust driving me forward also by way of writing advice here are weird things i do that work for me: - tricking myself into writing by starting a different task i like even less, and letting myself procrastinate by writing. it seems to shortcut some of the executive dysfunction for me. - my best prose is always written via the extremely stupid technique of imagining a scene, then imagining a cool narrator describing the scene and just writing down what they say. sometimes I have trouble accessing that voice, but when it works I can rattle out surprisingly good prose, and it flows more naturally and easily. - sometimes i prime the pump for writing by going for a walk and thinking about how i'd describe stuff i see and experience on the walk, it puts my brain into 'putting words in order' mode better than just sitting at the keyboard trying to remember how to fuckin write.
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Apr 10, 2024 20:34
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| # ¿ May 9, 2024 22:22 |
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HopperUK posted:I found getting medicated helped me to do creative things. I spend less time in executive function paralysis these days. That's a relief to hear. executive function paralysis makes writing pretty hard, since writing is like making thousands of decisions in a row. Stuporstar posted:These all work really well for me too. A few others: I've done a couple of these but will have to try the others, the human brain seems great at crunching stuff behind the scenes. Like i'll struggle for an evening trying to figure out how to write a scene, then wake up the next day and it'll seem obvious.
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Apr 11, 2024 18:41
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