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How do you all write texts? When it's a single text, I've been writing something like "I received a late-night text from Mom:" and the text comes after the colon or on the next line center-justified like a screenplay. But I'm writing something now that requires an entire conversation. I've been writing it using the framework of actual texts. Person texting the protagonist is left justified with their name and a timestamp under each and the protag is right justified with "me timestamp" under it. I think it works though it's taking up a lot of space for a small amount of words. Exmond posted:Let's talk about writing Third Person Omnscient. I have a short story (I'll post it to TD soon so you can critique it later), that is set in that POV. One thing that is bugging me is my characters are called, "The Doctor", "The Father" and "The mega-shark". People have given you good advice but another thing you can consider is dropping the articles for one or more characters. "Doctor" or "Doc" vs "The Doctor". Makes it easier to read. I'd recommend reading "Milkman" by Anna Burns. Nobody is named and characters have awkward sobriquets like maybe-boyfriend, third brother-in-law, tablets girl. There's three different varieties of "Milkman" that reference two different characters. Good stuff.
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May 18, 2019 05:41
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I've been writing and submitting seriously for the past few years and started collecting personal rejections from fraction-of-a-percent acceptance lit mags (on duotrope). I just received another that was super detailed and encouraging (and from multiple people) but also maddening because I was so close. I've noticed a rejection trend across multiple stories and genres of 'writing not quite strong enough' or 'not smoothly written enough', which I am interpreting as meaning my sentence-level prose, like the actual craft, isn't there yet. I think a big part of my issue is I'm a lovely editor/rewriter. My rough drafts are far less rough than average, but they're still rough drafts and I don't spend enough time on them. Even then, while I feel confident pointing out the bad sentences, I don't necessarily have a grasp on which ones classify as 'not smooth enough'. My wife is a business writer and regularly takes classes. She suggested I take a workshop class or two. I'm somewhat resistant to this due to past experiences where workshopping was entirely made up of genre and wish fulfillment or otherwise fetishized Hemingway and minimalist writing (excuse me, long sentences are winding and beautiful and endlessly deliver gifts.) But it's worth a shot, I think? Anyone want to share their experiences? I live a few blocks away from this place: https://www.writingsalons.com/, which doesn't matter in Covid times but hopefully will matter again soon. I figure I'd email them to check which of the two fiction workshops fits what I'm looking for better. In any case, I'd love to hear some advice on this particular topic.
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Jun 9, 2020 05:15
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Wallet posted:I'm not sure what advice you're looking for. Some workshops (or classes with focused critique) are amazing and can really help you hone what you're doing (or not doing) and push you to grow in ways that are difficult to accomplish without outside feedback, and some of them are hot wet poo poo where you have to attempt to seriously critique absolute drivel and then politely ignore critiques from people you wouldn't let write the copy on a bag of dog food. A workshop (or a class with focused critique) is only going to be as good as the person running it and the people in it. w/r/t what I'm looking for I guess general advice on getting over the help as well as hearing past experiences with focused critique classes or ways to find good workshops. It's a little more daunting that it could be a waste of time when dropping a few hundred bucks for the experience. Good call out on not pre-judging though. Djeser posted:Obligatory "have you tried thunderdome I've tried thunderdome before, years ago. I think it's neat and I should give it a shot again sometime but it's not really what I'm looking for. It takes me about a month or two to write and polish a good 3500-4500 word story and that's the point I need to improve upon. I haven't critiqued fiction in years, that's a good point. I used to critique screenplays and now I occasionally critique essays and the latter definitely helped me zero in on eliminating passive voice unless 1000% considered and intended and now a blinding light shines from the page every time I see the word 'just' or 'simply'.
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Jun 10, 2020 03:35
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Doctor Zero posted:Write more. Read more. I read every day and I write almost every day. I do the thing where missing 1 day is OK but never 2 in a row. Sure, here's the first scene of the story I was referencing: Story posted:The first time it happens she is at a so-called happy hour sipping a martini that tastes like a corroded battery. She is surrounded by the type of people you label colleagues, not friends. Dave and Rahul are leaned forward listening to the new girl, Val, tell a story about her recent trip to Myanmar, replete with last-minute plan changes, amusing cultural mishaps, and lengthy pauses meant to build suspense. The story is dull. Everyone is smiling. She is not smiling but her mask is. Val is presenting as beautiful today, which may play a part in Dave and Rahul’s apparent interest in the terribly dull story. Or wait, maybe the story isn’t dull at all, but instead fantastically interesting, and it only appears dull because the part of her brain that determines which stories are dull and which are fantastically interesting has only just now flared out like a sad pink firework.
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Jun 19, 2020 19:45
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Thanks for the feedback both of you. Yes, I was opening that up to critique after Doctor Zero asked me to post. Shageletic posted:Are you looking for criticism here on that sample? Because Id love it if you stated the character's name in the first sentence and "are leaned forward" needs another look grammatically. The protag is never named. I agree 'are leaned forward' is awkward and I'll give it another pass. The dangers of writing something already happening in present tense. Wallet posted:I'm going to assume that you are looking for some kind of criticism or you wouldn't have posted the sample. Not completely following your last paragraph. To me, copyediting is finding typos or fixing tense. What I need to improve on is exactly what you described: clumsy/repetitive/unnecessary.
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Jun 20, 2020 18:56
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Thanks everyone. I found the feedback valuable. Same with the english lesson. I have no formal training so reading the explanations of things I only know by feel was enlightening. I think the best thing is to just rewrite the story but I'm going to respond with some general points and then some more specific ones since people took the time to respond. Also, if anyone (whether you responded or not) wants some critique of their own stuff, I'll definitely pay it forward and help. I last edited this story 6+ months ago so I'm sufficiently distant from it. Enough that I noticed some stuff when posting that tidbit (unnecessary words like 'utter' before 'lack of recognition'). 1. "Val is presenting as beautiful today." In other words, she took great care with her appearance -- makeup, dress, etc. She didn't put her hair in a bun and come into work in yoga pants. It was not a reference to a mask like the protagonist is wearing, but it is a sort of mask, a point the story makes later on. Multiple people were confused by this which is useful because I was taking it for granted. I've heard women describe other professional women like this, but only among my friends or co-workers so I'm probably in a bubble. Point taken. 2. "She" vs. a name. I feel strongly about no name but I need to think harder on this. There's only one other scene (much later) in the story with pronoun ambiguity like this but I figure the reader is used to it by that point. It's much harder to swallow in the first paragraph. I'm aware of this and it used to be worse. I'll think this one over. 3. FWIW, the next sentence after the scene I posted starts with "The next time it happens [...]" It becomes immediately clear that memory and the cowboy show in particular are important parts of the story. 4. I've used "scanning my/his/her memory" in multiple stories. I need a better way to convey that sense of going back through your memory. 5. Tense and adverbs: I understand how these can be pitfalls. I used them intentionally, which isn't to say I used them well. I appreciate Djeser's explanation. Progressive tense is the most common case I will use "is [verbing]". It's to describe things that are already happening, or things that are happening at the same time. That said, I still have trouble with active and urgent vs. setting the scene. For instance, I'm editing a different story now and I think the beginning is the weakest part. The second paragraph was originally shorter and more "active" but it felt lifeless. I tried to add more detail and ease the reader in, which involved a more passive opening: Old: My first encounter with both father and daughter came on the former’s final day on the job. After receiving an urgent call regarding trouble in the cemetery, my partner and I tore down ‘3 and skidded into the parking lot, upsetting quiet mourners with the wail of the ambulance siren. An old man lay crumpled beside a grave half-dredged. His leg twitched. He’d lost a boot when he crawled from the seat of the excavator and his big toe peeped from a hole in his sock like a curious grub. New: My first encounter with both father and daughter came on the former’s final day on the job. I was reclining in the driver’s seat when the ambulance’s radio crackled with a half-intelligible description of trouble in a nearby cemetery. I threw the truck into gear and my partner and I bounced along the local backroads and skidded into the parking lot. Black-clad mourners looked up in weary disbelief at yet another siren. We tumbled out of the doors and found an old man crumpled beside a half-dredged grave. His leg twitched. He’d lost a boost when he crawled from the seat of the excavator and his big toe peeped from a hole in his sock like a curious grub. I'd probably lose that half-intelligible, but I'm not sure how much that paragraph actually improved. Quoted responses: Sham bam bamina! posted:(That appositive phrase also needs a "would" in there; the reader doesn't label these people colleagues, because they don't exist.) Does grammar acknowledge that the characters in the story don't truly exist?? You're right. It definitely reads better with "would". wallet posted:To give a concrete example of the quantity of words in here that aren't really doing any work for you (some comments in italics): I see where you're going with this, but to me the end result feels sterilized. "so-called" sets up the tone of the story and also tells you the character isn't happy. "Or wait" further sets the tone and demonstrates a major theme in the story: the protagonist arguing with herself. Again, this isn't to say I'm using the right words or using them well, just what I am trying to convey. The story is dull, but everyone else seems interested. Protag speculates that this is because a) Dave and Rahul are thirsting after Val or b) her brain broke. I feel like that gets stripped out with the cut details. Safety Biscuits posted:1. Some word choices and descriptions are inaccurate or peculiar, e.g. the "weathered" clock or the mask with "hare-like" ears that attach to the side, not the top. I like comments like this. I feel like sometimes I write details and don't think them over well enough. I had to look up "weathered" in the dictionary to understand what (I think) you mean. I was using it to mean old and worn but distinguished. I think what you're getting at is that something can only be weathered if it's exposed to the outside. So for the sentence to work either someone would have to have left the clock outside or otherwise it's made of weathered wood. As far as the ears go, I was thinking:  But I also don't know what the hell the difference between a hare and a rabbit is. Can hares have floppy ears?? In any case, my wife pointed out that "elf with bunny ears" does not suggest "professional at ease." The whole thing needs work. "Doctor Zero" posted:Better example of this is the aforementioned "Dave and Rahul’s faces are traffic lights turning green." I still have no idea how to take that, even if I kind of like it. Maybe everyone else gets it, but I didn't. I wasn't entirely sure of this as I wrote it. I'm still not. The idea I was trying to convey is the focus of Dave and Rahul's faces goes from their eyes (the red light, watching Val) to their surprised, opened mouths at the weirdo protag interrupting with a nonsensical comment (green light). It's also supposed to be a little cartoonish, which is something that occurs in the story overall as it focuses on the cowboy show. Doctor Zero posted:Ultrachrist, what I didn't say because I feel I already say it a lot in this thread, is that you are free to take or reject any of the feedback you get. It's your writing, and every reader is going to give you different advice. Maybe I am missing the point on some things. What you have to be careful about is if a lot of different people give you the same feedback. If many people say that not having a name for the protagonist is confusing, ignore that at your peril. I'm not saying you have to give her a name, but just know that you might lose people at this point. Maybe later in the work it all becomes clear and I can go back and read the opening again with perfect information and understand. Personally, I love that kind of thing. But as an opening if you confuse the reader, you run the risk of them quitting and moving on to the next story, which would be a shame because, again, I think it's very good. This is good advice and I agree. I am trying to be sensitive to the points that came up multiple times. With regards "all becomes clear later", it's something I struggle with and am always working on. I love love love starting a new story confused and unsure of what's going on, especially when it's weird. Reading, I mean. I know others hate that and there's a fine line between 'unclear but compelling' and just 'confusing'. One point that came up multiple times in the professional feedback I received was that the foreshadowing and gradual unfolding worked. . . but the fact that it's never confirmed one way or another if the protagonist's masks are "real" left at least one of the readers unsure if that really worked or not.
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Jun 22, 2020 04:25
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FWIW, the comparison blurbs on the back of books often do a terrible job of describing the text. They're more about being provocative than accurate. Does anyone know if there is a word in english that is like 'filial' except instead of describing the duty of child->parent, it describes parent->child but is also not gendered? So, not paternal/maternal.
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Jul 14, 2020 03:20
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'Parental' makes the most sense but it also feels like a modern term that implies a modern familial relationship and the context was a present day character theatrically telling a story about the 15th century. I think there might not actually be a word for what I am looking for and I'll try a different sentence structure.
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Jul 14, 2020 16:57
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Crowetron posted:I had this idea for a character in something I'm working on to try to cope with trauma by learning a musical instrument. The thing is I don't know how to write effectively about music without lyrics. Does anyone have any suggestions of books or stories that do that sort of thing well? Where should I look to learn how to describe music? I just read Utopia Avenue by David Mitchell, which is about music and honestly wasn't great and probably his weakest work, but I thought of this thread when a character says late in the book: Utopia Avenue posted:“I’ll take ‘indescribable.’ Like Charles Mingus says, writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” Anyway, it's super hard to pull off imo. I really can't think of fiction that's done it well. I think it's more important to communicate the emotions the music is evoking in a character rather than the music itself. If the minutiae of learning an instrument is important to the story, I'd say you almost definitely need to tinker around with learning that instrument yourself.
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Aug 8, 2020 04:44
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I've noticed that for SFF as well, whereas regular literary mags nearly always accept simultaneous subs. They're far more likely to ask for a $2-10 admin fee though. Dr.D-O posted:Recently I wrote a piece of flash fiction for a contest Weird Tales was running. Despite not writing a lot before, I really enjoyed it and was hoping to write more short fiction in my spare time. Ideally, I'd like to submit my work for publication somewhere. I use duotrope.com to track my submissions. You can search markets there, track your submissions, and see other user reported stats (acceptance rates, average response time, form vs personal rejection, etc.) There's a $5 monthly subscription fee but I find it worth it. A majority of magazines use a submission tracking system called "Submittable" that also helps track submissions, though plenty of them don't and sometimes you'll be using UIs like time capsules from 2001. Know that most good magazines have a 1% or less acceptance rate and it's extremely difficult to get published. They are also dying all the drat time because no one reads short fiction. Most of the time you submit a story, you'll receive a generic form rejection, but some magazines are intentionally more beginner-writer friendly and are more likely to give feedback (another useful data point in duotrope). Make sure to read the submission guidelines closely. SFF submissions often require an archaic font and page layout. Plenty of lit mags don't give a poo poo but others are general or specific on content (e.g. one mag says "light genre elements fine", another details how much they love Henry James.) Nearly all of them will suggest you read a few issues to get an idea of what they like to publish -- this is great in theory, especially if you have the time for it, but it's likely that you will to submit to more magazines than you can possibly read in depth. It's a good practice to get into though and sometimes If I'm not feeling productive during a writing session, I go read magazine shorts. Writing flash fiction isn't a bad place to start if you haven't done a lot of writing -- it helps you hone your language and makes it easier to finish things. I started with shorter pieces too. I've since moved away since I much prefer both reading/writing 3-6k word stories (also more markets there.)
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Aug 17, 2020 20:47
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I liked Annihilation well enough (and the movie too), but god that 2nd book was awful. That paragraph doesn't even do it justice.
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Sep 17, 2020 04:29
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I admit 'protagonist is an idiot' is a tough sell for me. Unless it's funny. I got a second round rejection from Clarkesworld, continuing a maddening trend of close-but-not-that-close. I need to cure myself of overanalyzing magazine submissions and duotrope numbers and just write. I dream of an idyllic future where I have so many stories written that I transcend to a constant state of submittal and rejection and thus no individual matters anymore. The problem is I keep retiring old stories for not being as good as newer ones.
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Sep 24, 2020 01:11
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This thread gave me excellent tense advice in the past and Google is failing me, so here's a dilemma I'm running into: When a story is in present tense but describing events that occurred in the past (and concluded in the past), how should those verbs be written? Example: quote:Perhaps here it should be mentioned that the windows cannot be opened, not at all, not even after she chipped away the paint. Is 'chipped' OK? Should it be 'had chipped'? If I was speaking out loud and announced "My windows don't open, even after I chipped away the paint." that seems fine, but I'm unsure in text. If the sentence was something like "She walks up to her window, which still refuses to open even after she [had] chipped away the paint." then I feel like the 'had' is necessary, but this is purely gut feel. Here's a similar example: quote:Her name is Stacey, though she often goes as Stace and for a stretch her dating profile listed her name as Thrace, that is until a pencil-dicked classical history PhD quizzed her on the global origins of such a name, which promptly led to the end of that. I feel like 'had' before listed, quizzed, and promptly led would be weird, but I also feel like it might be correct. Please help.
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Oct 9, 2020 03:28
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Thanks for the responses. That's very helpful. Prior to the first sentence, there's context that would make it clear she didn't just chip away the paint since it's not the first window problem mentioned and the reader knows she's been dealing with this for a while. If I were to write this as a rule, it would go like this: When writing in the present tense and referring to the past, it is fine to use the past tense but it must be clear roughly how long ago the verb happened (a minute ago, yesterday, in ancient times, etc.)
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Oct 9, 2020 19:09
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Bert of the Forest posted:So I've been trying to get into horror writing for a while since it doesn't come as easy to me as comedy/satire, and so for October this year I recently finished my first proper short horror story about This was readable and I read it through from start to end. I stumbled over this sentence "My family cried for him, holding up mirrors for him, screaming at him to notice." It seems like the tense is wrong but I'm not 100% sure, other goons will be better line readers than me. You should probably economize on language. For example: "I’d soon find myself spending my days trawling through google" could be "I spent days trawling Google" I think the idea is sound. Here's my issues with it: 1. I am absolutely not someone to step on the 'show don't tell' soapbox, but this story is 90% a guy telling me thing so I could never get close to the horror. It's a fine framing device but it's needs scene-meat in between (usually). 2. As a big consumer of horror (mostly film) I understand every good monster is an allegory, but it's a tricky balancing act. You can't be too obvious too soon (usually). I rolled my eyes when I read this: brain worms posted:They said that a single touch from an outside source would cause them to go into some kind of overdrive, eating their way through the marrow more vigorously. No one dared even attempt it. From a horror perspective, it is completely unbelievable that no one dared attempt it. Worse, it betrays the allegory. People obviously do try to remove Qanon brain worms. That it doesn't work is the scary part. "Person believes something stupid and dangerous" can be scary, but it's also mundane and happens to everyone sooner or later. "Person believes something stupid and dangerous and doubles down on stupider and more dangerous and blatantly false things while isolating from family and friends (who try but fail to help them) and seeking others like them" is far more horrifying imo. 3. What does this mean? brain worms posted:A few success stories would occasionally rise to the top, a news piece interviewing a former victim, describing their own roads to the startling revelation that these things were chewing away at their skulls. Stories so familiar, but so different from our own, with the missing link that differentiated our experiences remaining ever intangible. "It was the same... but different. I am completely incapable of describing what I found so different." I like the idea here... other people succeeded, why can't I?? but it doesn't make any sense as described.
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Oct 22, 2020 02:14
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Bert of the Forest posted:Thanks for giving it a read! I can appreciate the point that I got a bit overindulgent on trying to use colorful language. For some reason it always feels more like I'm writing "real" horror when I spin up a sentence spaghetti like that. But thanks to your specific callouts I can see what you mean about it interfering with readability/clarity in some key spots. I'll try and loosen up on that the next go around. No problem. I think your 2nd paragraph is a great idea. As for scope, yeah, flash is everywhere now for internet reading, but flash is hard to write really well. It also naturally discourages wordier styles.
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Oct 22, 2020 16:09
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A schedule is key. I was doing an hour a day in the evening, but then earlier this year when I went perma WFH and didn't need to commute, I added 45 min in the morning and it makes a huge difference. Especially if I gently caress up on one of them, I know I have the other and the day doesn't feel like a waste.
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Nov 20, 2020 04:37
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Weird coincidence. Just yesterday I was in Green Apple with that book in my hands. Decided to buy some other books though.
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Jan 14, 2021 19:23
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BurningBeard posted:I hope I’m expressing this well, because I think it’s one of those misty places in the creative process that is difficult to talk about. I’m less interested in objective truth since I don’t think it exists for this, and more interested in your subjective experience of coaxing those clear and present character voices into your undirected writing time. I read the Best American Essay and Short Story collections each year. In 2020, there was an essay about inspiration (Ode al Vento Occidentales by Mark Sullivan) that I had taken a photo of and your post reminded me of it:  Part of the thrust of his argument is that Woolfe's/Emerson's/Shelley's notions are seen as outdated and romantic to modern writers, since the emphasis on good writing is Work. This makes sense because A) Writing IS a lot of work and B) it's hard to communicate or teach something as intangible as a "moment of being". But it's also dumb and arrogant to ignore some of english's greatest writers' thoughts on the subject. There's another essay in the book about Gertrude Stein's writing theories that reach a similar point albeit in a more abstract manner given her writing. She viewed writing as this sort of flow that can't be overanalyzed when transmitting between brain and pen. All this to say: I understand what you mean. When I'm "on" with writing, and especially in a character's voice, it flows naturally and absolutely seems to come from somewhere else. I always find the common character sketch methods of "What does the character want? Why can't they get it?" to be hollow. It doesn't align with how I conceive of characters, whether writing or reading. They're unfolded rather than defined. I'm not sure there's much you can do to more consistently achieve whatever this state is. The writers I mentioned were often in maddening pursuit of it. One thing I think is important is to pay close observance to the way people speak, act, think in day-to-day life (one of the worst blows of covid for me personally is missing out on the weird interactions I would witness on the bus, street, bar, whatever). Despite the seeming mysticism of all this, it's really just coming from your brain. The more input you feed it, the more potential output you have. Anyway, I gotta read this Saunders book.
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Jan 27, 2021 23:27
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I'm assuming they mean something like... "He was very tall-- nearly everyone had to crane their neck to see his face." or "He was very tall; nearly everyone had to crane their neck to see his face." or "He was very tall. Nearly everyone had to crane their neck to see his face." If that's correct, I don't know if there's formal rules. I use whatever feels better. Going purely by feel, a period = pause for a new, complete thought, a semicolon = a related thought or aside, and double hyphen = expansion of thought. I'd be curious if there was formal rules myself.
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Feb 10, 2021 18:22
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I came up with that sentence to help articulate what Coquito Ergo Sum was describing. It's not actually from my writing, but yeah, I would definitely make it one sentence. "He was so tall that nearly everyone had to crane their necks to see his face."Coquito Ergo Sum posted:Yeah, that's exactly the instance I was going for. I have some people critiquing a novel I'm working on, but after some bad experiences, I'm giving each person their own .doc file. When I first put my work out there, I just let whoever had the link post whatever critiques they wanted. As a result, I one person would make a criticism and then everybody would immediately go "yeah, he's right." After that, one or two people would dissent against what the first people said, and even with a good argument they would get shouted down. With separate commentary, I've gotten better critique, but it's also resulted in situations where I will get one person saying I should go with a semicolon, one with a colon, another saying I should go with a hyphen or double dash, and several people just ignoring the passage. Sounds like the goon consensus is they can all be used with slightly different meanings. You should post a specific example. When a bunch of people zero in on the same thing but with different solutions, it's often because they're objecting to something else about the writing and don't know it. Either that or it's just noise.
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Feb 11, 2021 17:19
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Grammar time: Can you use "There's" to describe a plural? For example: "There's six birds in the tree." To me, originally from New England, that sounds perfectly natural and something I would say aloud. But if I think about it for three seconds, "There's" is a contraction of "There is", and "There is six birds in the tree" is obviously wrong. Yet "There're" is nonsense. You're already pronouncing "There are". On the other hand, I would never do the same with "where". "Where's the birds?" But my parents probably would. My conclusion is that "there are / where are" don't have contractions. Despite how correct "There's" sounds to my ear.
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Mar 24, 2021 03:36
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quote:Any advice, or books that have helped? I know, just write, etc. But I don't know how to convert "cool idea for setting with interesting protagonist" into "story". You can always take one of the timeless plots: a dead body found, a political assassination (or more sci-fi specific: contact with colony/vessel goes dead, aliens invade, a bomb goes off) and then you're forced to move things since your characters will need to act and react. I would also recommend just writing some shorter stuff. If you've got this whole world set up, then write something shorter than a novel and focus on a specific event instead of a whole overarching sequence. You don't need to solve it all immediately.
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Jun 22, 2021 07:09
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I use Google docs. It’s easy enough to organize folders and obviously access on different machines. Sometimes I’m away from home and have a great idea how to fix a sentence and just pull it up on my phone. I write mostly short fiction though. I did a writing workshop recently and a few people used Word, it’s not that weird.
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Jul 24, 2021 17:57
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Workshopped a story recently that received really good feedback and I'm in the process of painstakingly editing it. The story is first person literary fiction in the past tense. There's points where a sentence describes something in the past tense (what happened that day, in the past) but then makes a global statement in the present tense (what happens always). Not sure if there is a technical name for it, but to give you an idea (not from the story), something like: The weather was bad. It always rains in July. So in the my workshop draft, the second sentence of the story was: story posted:The earth labored in the clutch of mid-August humidity, where the air drips, shade offers no balm, and the thermometer reads the same at noon as it does at midnight. The idea being, again, the earth labored that day, but the air drips in all humid August days. At least one reader got hung up on tense. Also, my wife pointed out 'where' should be 'when', which seems like it has to be correct but feels slightly weird. If I put it in past tense, it feels wrong. But I can't say exactly why. story posted:The earth labored in the clutch of mid-August humidity, where/when the air dripped, shade offered no balm, and the thermometer read the same at noon as it did at midnight. I'm at the point where I've stared at the words so long they've started to lose meaning and could use another set of eyes. Some other examples of whatever you call the past/present split from the story: quote:He clapped me on the back with his free hand and I returned the gesture. We do not shake hands here. quote:His ranch house lay a mile down narrow trails snaking through the pine forest, labyrinthine at first, until you realize that all paths lead to the pond's fragrant shores
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Sep 15, 2021 17:12
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Yes, it's literary fiction and already workshopped. I'm following a rule where if more than one person flagged something, I change it. Only one person flagged this case and only on that first sentence, so I didn't really ask to discuss it. But then my wife read it and also flagged it and I'm anxious about it because it's the second sentence of the story. First impressions and all that. For context, it's about a man returning to his rural place of birth (after living in a city for several years) after his childhood best friend dies. He doesn't really belong in either place, so it's important which areas he includes himself in ("We do not shake hands") vs not. It takes place in multiple timelines but they're all in the past. There's never a present narrative moment, but there's a light sense that the protagonist is telling the story. He doesn't directly address the reader but there's asides, footnotes, and rhetorical questions. I suppose I feel this way about most first person narration though-- they're telling the story to someone. If not another character, then the reader. Thanks for the feedback. I'm not sure I've reached a conclusion, but you've all given me valuable things to think about. newts posted:I don’t know, it just reads more easily to me. The only place where I wouldn’t mind what you have, is if you’ve got weird narrative stuff going on: a narrator telling a story that jumps in time or other timeline strangeness. Honestly, I would like to be able to say "Past tense is simpler" and just do it. But those rewritten examples just feel off to me. I think it might be because of what Wallet is saying: it makes it feel as if those things happened in the past and don't happen anymore. Also probably the same reason kaom added "always" to the first sentence. kaom posted:It’s possible something along these lines would read clearer? These are really interesting rewrites. You've made them past tense without triggering my sense of "off" that I mentioned above. But for whatever reason, I also feel like the language distances us from the character and setting. Huh. Wallet posted:That said, while I recognize that the comma after 'humidity' in the original version might reflect your intended syncopation it also makes it less clear if what comes after is an expansion on the idea of mid-August humidity or if it's an addendum to your description of the earth. It's significantly clearer (to me) if you remove it. I get what you're saying and I absolutely over comma. I feel really unsure of the flow without the comma though. Feels like a mouthful. Trying it on for size. quote:The earth labored in the clutch of mid-August humidity where the air drips, shade offers no balm, and the thermometer reads the same at noon as it does at midnight.
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Sep 16, 2021 03:54
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Safety Biscuits posted:ultrachrist, hope I'm not late to the party. Definitely not, will be polishing this for a while yet. I actually had been thinking over breaking it into two sentences after reading Wallet's suggestion about the colon. I'd arrived at your third line: The earth labored in the clutch of mid-August humidity. The air dripped, shade offered no balm, and the thermometer read the same at noon as it did at midnight. This was OK, but I didn't like the new rhythm of the paragraph and it also made it sound like this state of affairs was only that day and not all mid-August days. So I tried: quote:The earth labored in the clutch of mid-August humidity. Another day where the air dripped, shade offered no balm, and the thermometer read the same at noon as it did at midnight. Taking this idea further... quote:The earth labored in the clutch of mid-August humidity. The air dripped, shade offered no balm. Another stagnant day where the thermometer read the same at noon as it did at midnight. (maybe just cut the thermometer line, I guess) For context, since the first two examples are in the first two paragraphs, here's the beginning of the story. The (1) is a footnote. story posted:I trudged through the woods with a 2 x 4 x 96 whitewood stud slung across my shoulders. The earth labored in the clutch of mid-August humidity, where the air drips, shade offers no balm, and the thermometer reads the same at noon as it does at midnight. Sweat washed me, soiled me, then pooled in the soft hollows of my body. The stud dug into my skin and my neck throbbed under the dense pressure. When the pain reached a predetermined threshold, I switched positions so that the stud was tucked beneath my right arm with my left crossed over my body to keep it steady. The wood rubbed against my inner wrist, tempting hungry welts to rise from my skin and meet it. When, again, the pain reached the threshold(1), I slung the stud back over my shoulders. (Oh, I'm doing the tense thing again in the footnote) I've become uncertain about the ranch line. Might rework that in general. I also want to cut fragrant, maybe "waiting" is better. The name of the story is "The Pond, Again", so readers would know the pond is important in some way before reading the actual text. And here's the shaking hands paragraph. Even managed to work tense discussion into the narrative itself! story posted:“Hello Wayne.” I leaned the stud against the porch and climbed the unfinished wooden steps to meet him. He clapped me on the back with his free hand and I returned the gesture. We do not shake hands here. Wayne smelled of cigarettes, exhaust, dirt, sweat, B.O., and faintly of oil-- a variation on the cologne all men from my hometown wore when I was young. I suppose I should stop thinking of them in the past tense, as fossils calcified in my childhood. Not only are they still here, paws slick with grease, they’ve been here all this time-- tinkering, wearing out jeans, developing cancer. The world didn’t stop when I left. ultrachrist fucked around with this message at 17:54 on Sep 17, 2021 |
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Sep 17, 2021 17:51
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Nae posted:It's that time of year again where I'm jumping into the querying process, so I'd love some feedback on my most recent query if anybody's got the time. I'd advise against leading with the passive voice. The first paragraph starts with two sentences worth of it and then closes on another. The cult killed his brother. Make it active, then make his responsive active. I'm no querying expert but I'm not sure about that swap to a second character. If the first guy shows up anyway, why not have him lead the transition to introduce the other character? And what's a wave of power? Am I correctly understanding that Anari intends to wipe out both humanity and chimera? "With less than two months until the summoning ceremony, Anari doesn’t need any distractions" ... "doesn't need any distractions" sounds like someone studying for an exam, not summoning a god to wipe out sapient life. I don't get how their goals are different either. They both seem to want to wipe out the chimera. Lastly, I don't really get a sense of either character. Like who they are. Makes it hard to care about the stakes.
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Sep 18, 2021 03:50
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Wallet posted:I've got ~100,000 words I'm supposed to be editing but it's easier to gently caress around with stuff someone else wrote so for funsies and/or procrastination (hope you don't mind): Of course I don't mind! Thanks for the edits and suggestions. It's always useful to see another interpretation since, in addition to generating new ways to phrase things, it forces me to consider what I'm trying to communicate in the first place. I particularly like the punctuation change to the sweat line and will likely use it. 1. I see you moved the footnote. Someone else in the workshop had suggested this too since it's the first occurrence of the threshold, but to me it feels like the reader doesn't have enough understanding of what's happening until they finish that sentence. The footnote references the switches, which aren't described at the moment of the link in the main text. 2/b. Not following. I'm reading both sentences as describing almost the same thing with yours putting emphasis on the throbbing. Related: I used 'dense' to try and articulate the sensation of a heavy object placing all its weight (pressure) on one part of a person's body. It feels like the weight of the object is concentrated entirely in the area touching the skin, as though it is very dense. I'll consider some alternatives to describe this. 3/e. "as the crow flies" is an idiom. It means a direct line between two points, as opposed to a road or path that might wind around objects. I'm playing a little fast and loose with this since he's not walking a literal direct line, just a shorter route than the road. Agree it's probably not essential though animals and idioms (and animal idioms) figure heavily in the story.
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Sep 19, 2021 04:21
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The notion of characters writing themselves irritates me almost as much as ‘I am a professional LIAR.’ I understand the appeal of memes since they often generate discussion but I’ve found most of the posted ones reductive and/or wrong (thinking of that pain one in particular.)
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Dec 31, 2021 16:26
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Anyone with an ounce of creativity has experienced “wait no, what if THIS happened instead?” without a clear idea of where the ‘this’ came from. That’s just writing/directing/painting/whatever. Mysticizing this is kind of weirdly self-aggrandizing and can propagate the myth of writer as effortless creative font. It’s not a big deal at all, but I think that’s the grating part that some people like myself feel.
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Dec 31, 2021 19:47
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I keep anything significant I cut in a separate doc. Or more commonly: When I make significant cuts, I create a new draft and name it v1, v2, etc. I almost never go back to the old versions and restore-- if you had to wonder if it should be cut, it should almost always be cut. I also have a separate doc where I paste troublesome paragraphs or sentences to edit isolated from everything else. If it turns out the problem was actually in a previous paragraph, which imo is usually a different problem than a bad sentence, then worst case I cut it later after some polishing practice. Rewriting the same sentence over and over is just part of the (my) process and often enjoyable anyway.
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Jan 2, 2022 18:36
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HIJK posted:https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/literary-fanfic This is an interesting article about how fanfiction is bleeding into literary fiction. Excerpt: Fanfic: The origin of short sentences, italics, repetition, and the present tense.
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Jan 5, 2022 19:43
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I use Times New Roman. But I also use a variation on the trick Djeser mentioned. In google docs, I let a story languish in single spaced default Arial until I've written enough that it feels like a decent idea I want to take to completion. Then I switch it to TNR, fix the spacing, add page numbers, etc.
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Jan 20, 2022 01:41
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For obvious reasons, few books/movies kill their main characters and of those that do, extremely few do before the end. Usually it’s about stakes or theme, not realism. I have big doubts that death or realism is the reason the commentator doesn’t read adult fiction.
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Jan 23, 2022 02:29
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Hi goons, looking for some feedback on a long short. Background: I used to write in genre but over the past few years, I gravitated more to literary fiction (though sometimes it's weird enough to be submitted to genre mags too). Then, early last year, I was feeling inspired by the Gormenghast novels as well as Piranesi and wrote a ~8800 story in a castle. I polished it and submitted it and got some feedback from the EIC at Beneath Ceaseless Skies but barely anywhere considers such long stories so that was mostly the end of that. I found myself thinking about it lately, possibly expanding upon it. And since I now have a years worth of distance, feels easy to just post on the internet! I'm not in dire need of line edits, but feel free to call anything out, especially clunky or difficult to understand sentences. Curious about story, character, pacing, overall feel... all that stuff. Anything you want to say really. Link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/16xpqZmGD4noL8l07YjcHglUCj05_j_OjrwkZ1qTqbzo/edit?usp=sharing I can post the gist of the professional feedback I got later, just don't want it to color initial opinion.
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Jan 24, 2022 18:44
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Sorry for the late response. Some stuff in my personal life blew up. Big thank you to those that read the story!Dream Weaver posted:I am going to repeat what I keep seeing. When was the last time you bought a short story book? Let that be your guide. Thanks. I haven't read Gideon the Ninth but it's on my list. With regards to your last question: I read Cold Springs by Richard Ford two or three weeks ago. If I look at my goodreads, I read 11 short story collections in 2021, which is about 25% of my total reading. I figure they probably are guiding me? I don't know. I read George Saunders' Russian book and one of the most helpful things was hearing his rewriting process, which I was already doing a weaker version of. Milkfred E. Moore posted:I read "filthy shades of gray" as "fifty shades of gray." Can't unsee now. Sailor Viy posted:Hope this helps. It helped a lot, thank you. When I first wrote it, I was already worried that him changing his mind came too quickly and when I reread it recently I had the same thought as you that he should find the book after the first scene rather than reflect on it. So that was validating. When I think about making it shorter, I don't feel much interest. When I think about making it longer, I'm intrigued but also trepidatious. Re: voice. It's a good point. This isn't my regular writing voice but something intentional and it's difficult to tell when that works or not. Agree on em dashes.
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Feb 3, 2022 05:00
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newts posted:Blurb writing is, perhaps, the most painful aspect of the whole writing process for me. It’s just… not fun. Here’s a blurb for my book, which is a mystery/detective story, and a sequel: To me, this feels very unspecific. There's a lot of heightened phrases that reminds me of the "In a world. . ." movie voiceover without a lot of detail. Like he has a unique ability but I don't know what it is (empath made me think of City of Heroes). Similarly, there's harsh laws. There's a choice. A previous violent ending. Like it's a list of important conflict beats. I don't think you need to explain everything but some specific details would probably draw me in more. The obvious killer isn't the killer is timeless hook but again, what makes me interested in this specific version?
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Feb 3, 2022 05:06
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That sentence construction seems fine to me. Losing the 'my' enhances the immediacy of the action. This is gut feel, not adhering to a specific rule or anything. That said, I'm not sure what's actually happening.
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Feb 22, 2022 04:28
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While we're discussing grammar: Does one forage for mushrooms? Or do they simply forage mushrooms?
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Feb 22, 2022 17:39
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