Fiction Writing Advice and Discussion: Read. Write. Crit. Repeat.

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > Creative Convention > Fiction Writing Advice and Discussion: Read. Write. Crit. Repeat.

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General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

DropTheAnvil posted:

Weirdest thing I encountered was someone trying to link my story to white supremacy because I used the number eighty eight in it.

Wait until you hear about being born in 1988

# ¿ Nov 11, 2023 21:40

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# ¿ May 17, 2024 15:23

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Wungus posted:

I'd love to read more books that take extreme liberties with their chronology. Like hell yeah, who said a book has to go from the first event to the last event. Go wild--just like, make it cool.

Read Vellum by Hal Duncan and let me know if you can figure out what the gently caress is happening

# ¿ Nov 13, 2023 23:31

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

You can use real people and brands freely. If you do sell the book to a traditional publisher their legal department will do a review. My next book has like a gazillion world refs but they didn't flag anything as a problem.

# ¿ Nov 14, 2023 17:20

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Waffle! posted:

I just introduced a new character in my story and his first three lines don't have contractions. But he's also intimidating a bunch of kids, so I think I'll have him be more chill afterwards.

When you think about it, aren't we all characters who are introduced through a series of contractions?

# ¿ Dec 1, 2023 14:39

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Hey congrats both of you, that's awesome!! Celebrate (imperative)

# ¿ Dec 2, 2023 23:29

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

It's an extremely arbitrary process. I've had agents who rejected my book come back after it was published and say they read it and loved it and must have been on crack. I have also had editors who rejected stories for publication in their magazines turn around and put those stories in years' best anthologies they edited.

# ¿ Jan 14, 2024 00:54

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

I think that first paragraph is gonna kill you. It�s too thick and nobody really does anything active until the Rain King starts wandering. I know it�s obnoxious and fussy to go after individual sentences in a paragraph but I think a query letter is the one place you absolutely need to use every trick you�ve got it perfect.

�The Rain King came back wrong� is a great hook but you make Emwort seem a bit dull - he�s trapped by flooding, forced to question his faith, must decide whether to trust these mercenaries. Is he doing anything? Driving anything? I am so confident he is in your book. But think of this query letter as just a little movie trailer. What scenes have you chosen to sell us on Emwort in this trailer? Wet, trapped, questioning his faith - he sounds like he�s just a sad lump! I don�t want to read about a sad lump!

Again, I�m sorry if this is too critical - my feeling is query letters are so important and so fast to iterate on it�s worth really banging on them. And they�re worth thinking about in the most facile stupid �you have ten seconds of attention to sell your entire novel� way.

# ¿ Jan 16, 2024 02:56

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

It�s become kind of a cliche since�Game of Thrones I think? To show your big spooky thing in the prologue then go to Regular Story and loop back around to the spooky thing eventually. I do get it though. It works on a very basic level.

# ¿ Jan 16, 2024 16:52

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

My latest book is stuffed full of my weird nerd stuff and readers find it INCOMPREHENSIBLE!!! But maybe, like Moby Dick, it will be redeemed

# ¿ Jan 16, 2024 19:33

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

I wish I looked as good as Hannu Rajaniemi/had an advanced degree like Hannu Rajaniemi

# ¿ Jan 16, 2024 23:14

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

BigFactory posted:

I just pass on sci fi and it usually works for me.

I'm gonna sci cry :qq:

# ¿ Jan 17, 2024 03:57

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

My noo book is out. My newb ook. My neubuk.

# ¿ Jan 23, 2024 16:40

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Well poo poo! That looks great!

# ¿ Feb 3, 2024 17:03

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

BigFactory posted:

Some people listen to audiobooks at 2x while working and say they read them.

I had a review complaining that my book was set in the present day but people kept talking about Obama, on the literal first page of the book it says it's set in 2013. Readers are baffling

# ¿ Feb 6, 2024 04:25

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Poor Masahiro Mori...consumed by tv tropes

# ¿ Feb 15, 2024 04:44

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Door blocked. Door blocked! Please! I beg you! We're dead! You're a g-g-genuine rear end in a top hat!

# ¿ Feb 28, 2024 14:20

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Stuporstar posted:

Yeah, I think you are misunderstanding because I agree that true objectivity is not real in narrative fiction (debatable if it�s something we humans can even claim to be). What I�m talking about is the illusion of objectivity that the reader assumes when reading a novel

Assumes? Professor Kinbote wouldn't lie to me :colbert:

# ¿ Feb 29, 2024 04:44

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

He had beautiful kobold eyes. �What an attractive kobold,� I thought

# ¿ Mar 15, 2024 02:40

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

cumpantry posted:

hello everyone i'm going to attempt to frankenstein some romance fantasy litrpg to life in hopes of crumbing together KU sales. here is a very brief prologue, this thread reminding me some significant and scary population of readers skip them, from being too weighty i assume. anyway be rough with me it's ok

Turn it down like 4 notches and maybe compare this to the beginning of something you, personally, really like and find engaging.

# ¿ Mar 22, 2024 00:13

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

I would suggest just focusing on basic prose structure before worrying too much about anything else. Try reading your stuff aloud to yourself�it will probably be tedious and exhausting. It shouldn't be!

Consider this often quoted but nonetheless very good piece of Gary Provost advice:

quote:

�This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It�s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety. Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences. And I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes, when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals�sounds that say listen to this, it is important.�

# ¿ Mar 22, 2024 00:35

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Weren�t you banned (and asked to not just paste random tumblr posts)

# ¿ Mar 23, 2024 22:51

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

juggalo baby coffin posted:

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

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 ��

quote:

It was in the City Polytechnika, in the peninsula nation of Panekrot, just after five pm. It was early by usual standards to be closing, but Krinos & Son was not an ordinary business, and so Viktor Krinos (the advertised son) was doing just that.

Krinos & Son Corpse Wax Supply had opening hours of 11-5 on weekdays, and was closed all weekend. They did little retail business; the bulk of their sales were direct due to the difficulty of securing a license to handle corpse wax, hands of glory, and other such mortuary goods. But they did, now and then, fill a prescription for some ailing body who did not metabolise other necropotents as readily as old adipocere.

Viktor�s father had (as he liked to remind people often) been in the adipocere business since it was just �buckets and bodies�. �A good corpsewax man can make a living wherever there�s buckets and bodies, and human civilisation provides no great shortage of either�; he�d wink after the second part, like he�d just shared some great, tragicomic revelation about the nature of the world. Viktor had found it tiresome as a younger man, but his father had turned out to have been correct.

The corpse wax business was a great deal more complex these days, though, much to Viktor�s chagrin. There were no end of variables to manage: oxygen, carbon dioxide, ph, pressure, level of light, age of corpse, diet of corpse, etc. What had just been �corpse wax� was now a thousand little subcategories of substance, so much had the necromantic arts blossomed. The interior of the premises of Krinos & Son was a warehouse, much like a small brewery, populated with a great many iron vessels fed by a great many pipes, large and small. The largest tanks were used to simulate the conditions of a lakebed; that was where the good stuff formed; the white adipocere that boils out of the corpses� skin like foam, but hard as castille soap.

That tended to be more desirable to consumers, the white stuff. Something about the tan colour of other formations, even just the brown fat of the very same corpses as the white stuff, reminded them overmuch of the origin of the material. Dead or not, people will be squeamish about what they ingest.

- but lead with a paragraph of backstory tedium before getting to your also pretty strong pitch (I am quoting it for the sack of clarity)

quote:

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.

So yeah, I think the idea's appealing! Don't bury the good stuff!

e: I wrote 'sake of clarity' as 'sack of clarity'???

# ¿ Mar 25, 2024 12:45

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

After years of delay and dissembling I have finally been coached into an appointment to get screened for Bad Executive Function :toot:

# ¿ Apr 10, 2024 14:41

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

There's a little bit of wonkiness in paragraph 2 sentence 2 where it sounds like the heart of Sabra's lover is a vast paramilitary conspiracy.

# ¿ Apr 15, 2024 03:32

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

I think overall my advice is the same as with many query letters - you're including too much information that's important to your story, but not important to the story of the query letter. Drop, simplify, outright lie if you have to.

There's also some missing information. What's bad about Harper, what's he gonna do to Geneva? Do these people have superpowers of some kind? What does 'hone her soul' mean and who's Sekhmet?

I think for the sake of structure it could use a third paragraph. There's just something nice about that "hook, meat, stinger" structure.

# ¿ Apr 15, 2024 14:52

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

I love POV swaps but I have to admit my last few books have suffered badly from wordcount bloat caused by having too many POVs. So watch out for that if you tend to go long.

# ¿ May 2, 2024 03:35

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# ¿ May 17, 2024 15:23

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Shogun has had two very successful adaptations now, and that's a super popular book which not only has a zillion POVs but changes POVs between paragraphs. Wild poo poo by modern standards but it works!

# ¿ May 3, 2024 03:04

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > Creative Convention > Fiction Writing Advice and Discussion: Read. Write. Crit. Repeat.

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