|
Naerasa posted:I'm very curious to know which great books you think don't have a plot, because I'm guessing that most of them actually do. I think this is more of a thing in short fiction, but it's definitely a thing. One of my favorite short stories ever is The Author of the Acacia Seeds by Ursula K. LeGuin, which is just a collection of three articles from a fictional journal about the literature of animals. (It's very short, so I recommend reading it, even if just to argue with me about whether it counts as a story!) I wonder if this is more common/accepted in speculative fiction? This is definitely not the only example I've seen of an SF story that explores a concept without particularly bothering with a plot.
|
#
¿
Mar 6, 2017 19:07
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 28, 2024 12:57 |
|
|
In the past year and change I've gotten more serious about ACTUALLY writing fiction rather than daydreaming about it. I've written about 80K words total of increasingly non-crappy stuff, and I'm starting to produce some writing I actually feel comfortable submitting to my critique group (the group meetings are typically 8-12 people and 2-4 stories being critiqued, so it's not that weird that I haven't submitted yet). It's been incredibly valuable to attend these sessions and give critiques as I've been working on this. I know that according to the advice in this thread I should have been submitting things the whole time even if they were crap, but c'est la vie I guess. I spent years periodically trying to write fiction and then giving up almost immediately. I'm a grant writer for my day job and I'm pretty drat good at that, but I wrote some terrible garbage in a few creative writing classes (why would I, a college junior from a city in NC, write a story about a middle aged woman coming home to rural West Virginia to take care of funeral arrangements for her dead alcoholic sister, WHY), and after that, I'd do the thing where I just sat down at a computer and stared at a blank word doc and didn't write much of anything. After I finally started (because I finally thought of an idea I just NEEDED to write), I figured out a few things I'd been doing that were just completely wrong for me. The first one was that I had been trying to write literary fiction even though I don't actually read it or like it. When it comes to short fiction, I pretty much exclusively read speculative fiction, but my writing teachers all said that you had to start out writing literary fiction even if you wanted to write SF in order to get the fundamentals down. Deciding to say 'gently caress that' was what finally got me actually writing. The other thing was that I stopped sitting down in front of a blank page, which I know is heresy! But my brain just refused to cooperate with that, and I wasn't productive at all until I tried something else. I didn't set out to do it this way, but it's been working for me: what happened was, I got an idea in my head, and I just kept thinking about it periodically during the day, especially at times when I had nothing else to focus on - particularly during my subway commute, but also in the shower, while falling asleep, etc. So I started taking notes on my phone or in a little notebook, just whatever came into my head. Could be a whole chunk of dialogue or description, or an idea for how to get from emotional point A to emotional point C, or a note on a little tic I wanted a character to have in a specific scene. Then I came home and dumped everything into a word doc and arranged it in chronological order. Once I got a few thousand words down, THEN I'd sit down to actually write the thing (or a chunk of the thing). Does anybody else do anything like this? showbiz_liz fucked around with this message at 20:49 on Mar 6, 2017 |
|
#
¿
Mar 6, 2017 19:34
|
|
|
Some people really need to be told to reign it in and learn the rules, but the way I was initially taught creative writing was kind of paralyzing, because it had me convinced that the main focus of learning to write should be constant vigilance for all the mistakes I was sure to make, instead of like... trying to come up with interesting ideas and express my thoughts on paper and have fun with it.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 9, 2017 18:32
|
|
|
This is a neat guide to the types of cheesy choices that new (or just bad) fiction writers can make. It's on an SF blog but most of it applies to any fiction writing. Examples- Nowhere Nowhen Story - Putting too little exposition into the story’s beginning, so that the story, while physically readable, seems to take place in a vacuum and fails to engage any readerly interest. Fuzz - An element of motivation the author was too lazy to supply. The word “somehow” is a useful tip-off to fuzzy areas of a story. “Somehow she had forgotten to bring her gun.” The Grubby Apartment Story - Similar to the “poor me” story, this autobiographical effort features a miserably quasi-bohemian writer, living in urban angst in a grubby apartment. The story commonly stars the author’s friends in thin disguises — friends who may also be the author’s workshop companions, to their considerable alarm.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 10, 2017 19:31
|
|
|
Somewhat related, I just finished a sci-fi anthology in which three of the ten stories were variations on "the inner life of a middle-aged man who hosed up his marriage and family by being incredibly self-involved and emotionally stunted, only to realize it too late, but he totally regrets it so he's still a sympathetic character I swear!" Like, drat, is the editor of this collection trying to tell us something?
|
|
#
¿
Mar 10, 2017 19:36
|
|
|
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.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 17, 2017 18:40
|
|
|
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.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 17, 2017 19:52
|
|
|
Hello pals, I just submitted a story to a publication for the first time and I am jazzed, and even if they never respond this is still a personal milestone, so yay.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 7, 2018 18:36
|
|
|
feedmyleg posted:There's nothing wrong with palatable. You can be palatable and challenging at the same time. Yeah like I get wanting to see more variety and experimentation, but that's different from "I'm not enjoying the experience of reading this so it MUST be good!"
|
|
#
¿
Apr 9, 2018 20:25
|
|
|
Oh speaking of (sorta) - I just read About Writing by Samuel Delany, which I enjoyed and identified with a lot more than the last book I read on writing (Bird By Bird). However, along with a lot of really solid advice and interesting perspectives on fiction writing, it also had a lot more emphasis on ~magnificent craftsmanship~ than I personally care about. I think if I had read it a few years ago, I would have found it more discouraging than inspiring, because it sort of dismisses 'merely good' writing as being fundamentally less valuable than 'great' writing, a stance I can't really agree with.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 9, 2018 20:33
|
|
|
After The War posted:Hey, I've got that sitting on my dresser right now! With that book, bear in mind that Delaney is basing it around lectures and essays for people already in writing programs, so there's an expectation that they're comfortable enough with their work to share it. And having taken those classes, I know how important it is try and get a little more "oomph" out of participants. This is all totally fair! And I'd still definitely recommend it. (It also made me want to check out his book Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, which as I understand it is about 50% intricate meditations on the nature of urban space and 50% memoirs of gay orgies in '70s porn theaters.)
|
|
#
¿
Apr 10, 2018 16:25
|
|
|
Safety Biscuits posted:What did you disagree with here? The distinction between competent and interesting writing seems pretty inarguable to me. I'm not saying he's wrong, just that I would have found it personally discouraging, for not-necessarily-rational reasons. It took me a long time to get over the feeling that if I couldn't immediately produce a flawless masterpiece, I really shouldn't bother trying to write. I only managed to start producing work once I got over the feeling that it Had To Be Perfect.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 12, 2018 00:05
|
|
|
Lately I've been having something that feels like writer's block but worse, where the very idea of sitting down to write something feels actively humiliating. Like there's no way I can produce anything that wouldn't be laughably terrible so even trying to do it would be embarrassing. I don't know where this is coming from but I just keep opening up my draft file and closing it again. I've had good feedback before from people whose work I respect! I sold my first story right before the pandemic hit! Why am I like this!
|
|
#
¿
Feb 14, 2021 20:59
|
|
|
Thanks, guys. It sounds like I just need to try brute-forcing it for a while.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 15, 2021 20:38
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 28, 2024 12:57 |
|
|
Whalley posted:Definitely have breaks when you need them, if you need them. I've just come off the back of a week's break and it was super needed. Oh I'm definitely depressed lol, no question about that. But I think the "reading a lot of good poo poo" thing is also affecting me. I used to participate in a pretty serious sci-fi writing critique group, and being able to read other peoples' unpolished work regularly was always good inspiration. I haven't been participating in the Zoom meetups of that group since the pandemic started but I really should. I'll see when the next one is.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 16, 2021 22:25
|
|