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Isn't a lot of this advice quite biased in favour of extremely formulaic genre fiction narratives with plot and characters as the main focus. like you're spending all this time talking about plot but lots of great books don't have much of a plot or its fairly unimportant?
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Feb 28, 2017 15:15
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Bad Seafood posted:You need to understand the fundamentals before you can break them. I can't really think of many writers off the top of my head this applies to. It often tends to be the opposite, where a writer's earlier works are more experimental and they write more conventionally(as far as that's possible) later on. Dr. Kloctopussy posted:When it comes to the idea that it is biased towards “creating narratives that focus with plot and characters as the main focus,” I have to really wonder what books you are thinking of that have neither of those as a focus? I'm sure there are some interesting experimental works out there that do so, but nearly every book, including the greats, not just “extremely formulaic genre fiction,” involve a good amount of plot and characters. Obviously there's not many books that have no plot at all, but there's a lot where the plot isn't very important, or is basically a few trivial or unimportant events, not the focus of the book.It's especially common in modernist stuff - think of Beckett for instance, who wrote a (very good)book that's just a guy in bed rambling for 200 pages. Wyndham Lewis's The Childermass is another good example - some guys walk around in purgatory for a while, and then the second part of the book is them observing some other people talk about philosophy, but it's very good. Characters are often fragmented or de-emphasised in modernism too, and there's some movements or writers where they barely exist - some nouveau roman stuff for example, or surrealism. I'd be more interested in this thread if there was more about prose style, more focus on language. That's where everything else comes from after all.
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Mar 5, 2017 14:16
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TequilaJesus posted:What's everyone's thoughts on spicing up dialogue tags? One person in my writing group says I use "he said" too much. When I try to throw in "he replied/he asked/he interrupted/he shouted" etc., another will tell me I need to stick with "he said." If you're feeling really cool you could just skip that stuff entirely and throw em dashes in front of everything (though this does require you to have characters with pretty distinctive voices). showbiz_liz posted: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 read 'literary' fiction almost exclusively and was thinking of that when I wrote that post, so I don't think so(though I'm sure there's sci fi and so on that does do that).
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Mar 7, 2017 13:09
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Chairchucker posted:wait what Bill Gaddis did it and it was good, not seeing the problem here.
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Mar 7, 2017 14:27
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Safety Biscuits posted:Quotation dashes are fine, you big babies. Trust your readers a little, why don't you? Thank you
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Mar 9, 2017 13:49
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The Saddest Rhino posted:Okay to make it more succinct than just a knee jerk reaction : when you give beginning writers advice (and honestly, if someone asks the "said" question they have to be a beginner), it's not good form to tell them to do something that deviates from the usual practice, since a writer need to be well informed of the usual method to know when the deviation works. I haven't read the works of Bill Gaddis (nor do I know who he is) but I have to assume he is seasoned enough to make that choice and not make it an awful gimmick. Is there like a stone tablet somewhere that says 'usual practice' that all the new writers need to adhere to or something
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Mar 9, 2017 14:02
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Djeser posted:Writing is first and foremost a communication of ideas from the author to the reader, and one of the most persistent problems amateur writers have is prose getting in the way of their ideas. This applies across all genres and styles. Effectively conveying ideas is difficult. A lot of the advice people give (especially in this thread, or in places like Thunderdome) is meant to develop the writer's ability to effectively convey their ideas. There's nothing inherently wrong with a stylistic choice, but a super common mistake amateur writers make is focusing on their stylistic choices to the detriment of conveying their ideas. I don't really agree with the notion that prose can get in the way of ideas, it's usually the reverse that happens. Content derives from form. If the form is bad, then I don't care about the content. Whereas fairly banal content or ideas can be great if the prose is good. SurreptitiousMuffin posted:A Human Heart, has anybody ever told you that you're needlessly abrasive? You asked a question, people answered it, then you insulted the people who answered it. You don't get to act like the !!!ONLY MATURE ADULT!!! if you refuse to court anybody who politely disagrees with you. I've been reasonably polite in this thread, and haven't insulted anyone.
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Mar 13, 2017 12:04
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