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If anyone is interested, here's my experience of using Critters (aka critique.org) for several years. tl;dr I don't really recommend it. So this is a critique group website with a credit system that requires you to send critiques in order to receive them. Fair enough, that makes sense, although the way the system works is a bit weird. You don't actually bank up credits, rather you have to keep your crits/month above a certain level or your story won't be sent out for critique when it reaches the front of the 'queue'. The problem is that the queue is only a few weeks long (possibly due to declining membership numbers?) so if you want to get "full value" you have to be putting a new story into the queue every few weeks. Another issue with the credit system is that you get 1 credit no matter how long the story is, so stories longer than 5,000 words usually get very few crits. If you post a story under 5k with an enticing title then you will probably get 5-10 crits, which I think is pretty good. The interface of the site is pretty ancient. All the stories have to be submitted in plaintext and get sent out by email which is weird but you get used to it. I eventually changed the settings so I didn't get any emails and just read the stories on the website. The rules of the group are sort of "hugboxy". The central tenet is that you aren't allowed to say anything is objectively bad, you have to frame it as your opinion. So you can't say "this makes no sense" but you can say "this makes no sense ~to me~". Once you get used to the style it is very easy to be critical of things without breaking the rules, and conversely, it's easy to tell when someone hated your story even though they can't say it openly. This means that the crits don't really sting any less than the "brutal honesty" style crits you get in Thunderdome. The actual crits you get are pretty good - most people make a genuine effort to help you improve your writing. The stories posted are pretty variable in quality. I've read a few pieces that wouldn't look out of place in a pro market. On the other hand it's not uncommon to read pieces with spelling errors, abrupt non-endings, and other issues that make it seem like they didn't put a lot of effort into them. This is sort of depressing and makes you lose respect for the whole process. All that said, I do think that every story I put through the critique process was improved significantly, and some of them even got published. So I wouldn't say it's a complete waste of time, but I feel like there could be a better critique community out there somewhere. I'm curious to hear if anyone else has experience with other similar sites/workshops.
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Oct 30, 2020 08:09
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This article has helped me improve my efficiency a fair bit: https://www.sfwa.org/2011/12/14/guest-post-how-i-went-from-writing-2000-words-a-day-to-10000-words-a-day/ especially the bit about writing a synopsis of the scene before actually writing the scene.don longjohns posted:Oh, and starting my writing day by reading some good prose (N. K. Jemisin, at the moment) and sketching out what I might what to write that day on paper before I sit at the computer. Counterpoint: I have to avoid reading great books that are too similar to what I'm working on at the time. It makes me depressed to see how much better they are than me.
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Nov 22, 2020 09:31
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** Book Report ** I'd like to recommend to this thread the book A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders. It's a book about writing, structured around seven short stories by 19th century Russian authors (Chehkov, Turgenev, Tolstoy and Gogol). After each story Saunders dissects what the story does and how it works, tying it into broader questions about fiction - what is the purpose of stories? How do they engage or disengage a reader? What processes should we use to write? The book is not exactly a how-to guide (there isn't much about specific technical issues) but I've found it incredibly useful and inspiring. Saunders' writing is great, extremely direct, clear and funny, and his insights into the writing process feel at once profound and very practical. The stories themselves were all excellent, and they were mostly the type of story that I might not have liked without Saunders' elaboration on them. I am going to mangle Saunders' ideas by trying to explain them briefly, but some of the most interesting points were: - the idea of a story as a series of "gas stations" - things that give the reader energy and propel them forward through the story - and that all the writer really has to do is make sure that every line makes the reader want to read the next one - the idea that any writer can "find their voice" simply by revising a piece over and over again until it feels right to them (Saunders actually encourages the reader to try revising one of Tolstoy's stories, which I found a bit too daunting lol) - the idea that one doesn't need to worry about theme or "meaning" in a work - just write about whatever you find interesting and themes will emerge naturally - the idea that any moral deficiency we see in a story (e.g. that it is racist, sexist, etc.) can be formulated as a purely technical deficiency and solved as such If any of that sounds interesting I encourage you to check out the book!
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Jun 27, 2021 01:45
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FightingMongoose posted:Hiya. I've written a book that I'm looking to send off to agents soon, and I'm hoping I could get some feedback on this synopsis. It's an urban fantasy, but hopefully that's clear anyway "Actually he's just maternity cover" is a good hook imo. This line took me a few tries to parse: "Just as well for Tom, since when the sudden influx of ghosts turn out to just be a prelude for the rising of a greater daemon, Martha is one of the few people with the know-how to fight him." "Since when" is an awkward segue; "people with the know-how to fight him" should just be "people who know how to fight him"; and "him" is a bit ambiguous whether it refers to the daemon or Tom. I'm not sure what it means that the son "revels in playing both sides off against each other". Are the two sides the witches and the Unit 13, or the Unit 13 and the daemon, or...? The last line is tautological (he also has himself for help?) although it's probably good to circle back to the theme of bureaucratic comedy. I don't know this genre very well, but to me the whole thing sounds a bit generic? Is there a unique angle that your book has that others don't? The stuff about being a temp worker in a government bureaucracy is the most unusual thing that pops out to me. It has been done in the Laundry Files of course but not quite in the same way. Perhaps you could emphasise that aspect more? I'm also intrigued by the nepotistic bullshit implied by "since her son also works at Unit 13 she manages to stay one step ahead". Hope this helps 
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Jan 2, 2022 00:49
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Fate Accomplice posted:It’s me, the goon who has no idea what a maternity cover is. I hadn't heard the exact term before but I assumed it meant a temporary job covering someone on maternity leave. In Aus we would just call it "a maternity leave position". So yeah, probably worth clarifying that if it's a culture-specific phrase.
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Jan 2, 2022 02:47
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Dream Weaver posted:
Thanks for pointing this out, based on the Zogarth interview I got the impression that any LGBT characters would get your story downvoted into oblivion.
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Jan 4, 2022 23:49
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Junpei posted:Alright, fair enough. I linked my thread with my story earlier but I figure now it wouldn't hurt to be a little more direct and link the thing directly. Well, here's my opinion on the first few pages: It's very anime-inspired. The dialogue tics, like the cutesy stammering and the use of ellipses for dramatic pauses, don't work in prose the way they do in anime/manga. The first few pages throw a lot of information at the reader: names of several characters, stuff about wolves and bears, some clumsily introduced backstory. But it doesn't have a hierarchy of information; we're just seeing the characters chatting randomly about their lives. I would much rather see just one concept introduced but fleshed out in a way that engages me with the characters. What age range is this aimed at? The style and the mention of Deltora Quest makes me think 8-12s, but the characters are 17 years old? If it's inspired by Deltora Quest are there going to be puzzles?
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Jan 10, 2022 08:17
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Does anyone have any suggestions for reflecting on one's own writing practice? For example, I started keeping a book of "writing wisdom" that I write in whenever I've thought of something worth remembering (often these insights are specific to me rather than general). I also did a post mortem on my last novel, which I didn't finish. I tried to identify lessons and pitfalls to avoid so I would still get something productive out of the work. I should probably do something similar with my writing successes, to pick out what worked well so I can do that more. Anybody else have any techniques like that?
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Jan 11, 2022 09:46
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ultrachrist posted:Hi goons, looking for some feedback on a long short. I liked it. Some of the images were very nice, like the people peeping out of the castle with spyglasses to watch the Ragged Woman. I really liked this line: "If there had been a fight, if people had rallied together and sought to prevent this loss, then that fight too had been lost, so long ago that no one still living had any inkling of its details." There are a lot of digressions and things that take longer than they need to. If you want this to be your style (following Peake) then it should be a novel; if you want to write a short story then I think you could cut this down to 6k or so and still get your point across. The pacing feels wonky. The main turning point of the story is that the protagonist changes from a nihilist to an optimist, but the way he changes is basically that he thinks "hmm, maybe optimism is better actually?" If it were a novel, the pacing might make more sense if the inciting incident were him finding the book by B. Grin. But even then, it seems like it would be hard to dramatise the process of just reading a book and being persuaded by it. You have a habit of delivering very long lists of things which I found irksome. Also you overuse em dashes. Stylistically, it's a passable imitation of Peake, but not much more than that. At the risk of sounding like a self-help hippie, I think you need to find your own unique voice. Basically the question is, what will make your story worth reading instead of just picking up Titus Groan again? What can you give me that Peake can't? One possible answer is that you can connect this melancholy style with the ecological crisis we are currently living through. The passage where you described the collapse of food webs was one of the most poignant to me, and one that Peake, obviously, wouldn't have written. You could try to emphasise that aspect further. That's only one possibility, of course. Hope this helps.
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Jan 28, 2022 11:32
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Nae posted:Have some Sally Rooney, sliced right off the bone: I find this really irritating and affected, but also, I don't notice it after about five minutes.
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Feb 6, 2022 10:54
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Blamestorm posted:This is very useful. Apologies if this has been raised last few pages - I skimmed but couldn't see it - I'm at the point I have a nearly finished draft of a novel and I'd like to use people I know in some kind of a beta readers group. I've also been thinking about putting the draft on a shelf for a bit and working on something else before coming back to it, and I was musing about using a group of acquaintances with fairly diverse background and professional experiences on a chapter by chapter basis on this second project to get critical feedback as I go. In either case I'd be after feedback via email, I think. When you say a group of acquaintances do you mean basically your friends/workmates/etc? Just be aware that when you send your writing to friends, most of them won't read it and of those that do, most will just say "It was awesome dude, great job!" Not to say you shouldn't do it, I love sharing writing with my friends and family, but I don't usually get a lot of productive feedback out of it.
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Mar 8, 2022 10:07
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Wungus posted:A million Americans are gonna write poo poo that feels more American than I ever will, which is why today I included the terms "have a chunder," "she'll be right," "fair dink," and "you mob" in my writing today on this relatively serious secondary world fantasy novel and yoooo it feels nice to lean the hell into Australiana. That said, as was pointed out earlier, and in that piece, doing this will definitely, intentionally create a wall for certain people outside of ANZ. It's just a fight I wanna have, and if you don't wanna have that fight, it's easy enough to avoid. gently caress yeah mate. Gonna put some more currawongs in my fantasy novel right now.
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Mar 16, 2022 04:43
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Junpei posted:
I kind of disagree with this. Holding secrets close to your chest more often makes the story coy and twist-driven. In the example given--what's more interesting? A story where we learn about a character's childhood trauma and then see them deal with that? Or a story where a character acts weirdly and only at the end do we find out why? Obviously you need to parcel out exposition as a matter of practicality (people can't read more than one sentence at a time, so something has to come first). But the overemphasis on blindsiding the audience is what leads to crap like the last season of Game of Thrones. (I could be misinterpreting the book though since I'm only seeing that one page.)
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Mar 26, 2022 06:44
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General Battuta posted:Don't endlessly revise. In fact, maybe don't revise at all after a rejection - just send it out to the next place on your spreadsheet. You're better off moving to a new story than you are trying to perfect a past one. Write a piece, draft until you get it to a place you're happy with, then submit it to the best market. When it gets rejected, submit it to the second best market. Continue until you're out of markets you think are worth submitting to then trunk the piece. I made a rule to never revise a story after I started submitting it. That might have killed a few stories' chances, I don't know, but it's definitely preserved my mental health. It makes submission into a routine process divested of (most) emotion. Another rule I would recommend for people starting out on short story submissions is to never submit to a market that you don't respect. A couple of times I got a story published in a low- or no-paying market alongside stories that, in my opinion, weren't very good. And that was even more depressing than the story not getting published at all.
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Apr 18, 2022 06:33
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Coquito Ergo Sum posted:So I got some enthusiasm readers for my novel project and some interesting results. I think the issue here may be a mismatch of genre expectations. To be honest, your novel sounds fuckin' weird--I was really thrown when you opened with "it's like The Thing or The Descent" and then later mentioned there are elves and lizardmen. This isn't a bad thing imo--it sounds like you are trying to do something original with the genre. But it does mean you should think about what kind of readers you want to attract and how you're going to do that. Both in terms of marketing and how the opening chapters set up the reader's expectations. The "historical inaccuracy" thing is just dumb, especially if you're writing a complete secondary world rather than alt-history-with-magic. Some people are just... very blinkered about stuff like that. I once got a crit that it was "unrealistic" that my fantasy world was cold in the southlands and warm in the north.
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May 24, 2022 03:53
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sebmojo posted:Orson scott card: ah yes let's have a war where a kiwi wins a battle against the Buggers Look, we can't have this discussion without posting Servants of the Wankh  And the French version, of course. 
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Jun 23, 2022 02:47
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change my name posted:Speaking of, what’s everyone’s pace like? I write for a living so I often feel like all of my words are “used up” at the end of the day. This year I’ve only written 30,000 words of the first draft of my WIP I guess I've written about 100,000 words on my WIP this year, which sounds kind of good when I put it like that, even though it's felt way too slow most of the time I was doing it. At the moment I'm trying to figure out how to increase my pace by spending less time writing crufts, going down dead ends, and wrangling with structural problems.
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Jul 29, 2022 10:52
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SurreptitiousMuffin posted:the General isn't kidding lmao there's so much incestuous scene drama that comes out of that workshop, if two people in SF/F refuse to talk to each other they either beefed on Twitter or hosed at Clarion. Like by all means attend just be aware you're probably gonna generate at least one person you need to avoid at cons
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Jul 30, 2022 02:12
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SurreptitiousMuffin posted:That point about 50-60% of the way through an MS where all the streams flow together and suddenly the water's rushing downhill? Is it bad that I'm finding the opposite as my first draft approaches completion? I feel like the last 20k words is just a pileup of plans and promises I made that are working at cross purposes with each other. And everything is interlinked to the point where fixing one thing always breaks something else.
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Jul 31, 2022 03:07
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I don't know for sure, but I fear that using (or over-using) AI writing tools will wither your own creativity. If you are going to spend a lot of your writing time giving directions and then revising the work the AI gives you, then you will see less and less of your own voice in your work. On the other hand, I do think that as AI improves, it will at least get to the level where it can write a competent short story with minimal human intervention. Longer fiction will be more difficult because of memory limits--I don't understand the technology all that well but I believe it becomes more computationally expensive the more preexisting text the AI can "see". To have it "see" 100k words and write the last 20k would be prohibitively expensive and slow, for now anyway.
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Aug 5, 2022 08:11
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Megazver posted:To be a bit cynical about it, if I was trying to publish a fantasy novel soon, I'd probably put in a bit of effort to become a recognizable poster over at /r/fantasy, to increase your chances at being able to do a bit of self-promo, strike up a relationship or two with fellow authors, get an AMA, etc. rp'ing as a catgirl and ending every comment with "nyoro~~n" so people will recognise me and buy my book
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Oct 4, 2022 04:28
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Admiralty Flag posted:I still can't get over how awesome the OPs are. And thanks for the advice on my last question. I just needed a day's break and then I was able to continue working on it full-steam. I used sff.onlinewritingworkshop for a while. It was pretty alright. You need to take critiques from randoms with a big grain of salt because they might be idiots or (more charitably) have tastes that are incompatible with your own. If possible try to reciprocate crits not only to form a relationship but to know how much weight you should give to someone's opinions. I've only shared short stories on that forum but a lot of people share novels. The way the system is set up means you can only get crits on 4 chapters at a time, so you will often see people sharing "Novel Title, ch. 29". So if you want to crit that you will have to read all 28 chapters in their backlog library (for no credit) or you can just give your opinion on the chapter by itself, which is allowed but is probably quite useless to the crittee. The best thing that can happen in one of these credit-based crit groups is that you find someone whose writing you respect and who respects yours in turn, and develop an ongoing crit-sharing relationship. This has only happened once to me, but it rules.
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Oct 4, 2022 04:39
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change my name posted:One of my favorite recent fantasy novellas uses marks, I don’t know if obsessing that much over minor details instead of broader world building helps that much? That is, if it doesn’t actually figure into the story Details imply a lot about your world, and seemingly interchangeable words drag behind them a complex web of connotations. "Marks" sounds to me like it comes from an Early Modern, European, probably more "realistic" fantasy setting. "Gold pieces" invokes D&D or perhaps a fairy tale world. "Dollars" (in the context of a fantasy setting) might imply a world influenced by the Western genre. Individually, one of these choices might not do that much work, but a lot of them together add up to a richly characterised setting.
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Oct 23, 2022 09:37
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Hi everyone. I've finished the second draft of my novel and I'm looking for people to read it and give feedback. It's a fantasy novel, somewhere in between sword & sorcery and folkloric fantasy. The story is about a valley suffering a catastrophic flood caused by the god of rain, and a band of mercenaries trying to evacuate people while dealing with their own internal struggles. It is action-packed in parts, melancholy in others, and also (I hope) quite funny in places. Its biggest inspirations have been Gormenghast, The Black Company and Jack Vance's Lyonesse series. It's about 140,000 words long. If that sounds interesting to you, send me a PM here or on the Thunderdome Discord.
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Oct 27, 2022 01:42
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Marsupial Ape posted:Does anybody use mind-mapping as a tool for plotting, brain storming? I was recently Re-introduced to the concept. I won’t even reply, just assume I appreciate the input. Yeah I've used it in the past for mapping out the themes/plotlines of a novel. It's useful because it shows you where things are tightly interconnected and where they're hanging loose--if a particular character or plot thread is only connected to the whole by one or two strings, then it probably needs to be brought closer into the web, or cut entirely. But those strings can represent thematic resonance as well as literal connections.
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Nov 18, 2022 01:05
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I've been reading Save the Cat Writes A Novel by Jessica Brody, which as I understand it is roughly the same as the original Save the Cat but focused on novelists rather than screenwriters. I know it's a pretty influential system so I'd be curious to hear what others in this thread think about it. Some of the stuff in the book seems a little prescriptive or even cultish (like the assertion that every great story must follow this formula, or that the formula is literally "written into our DNA") but overall I think it will be a useful tool for me. I tend to overcomplicate my novels with lots of characters and subplots, so it could be helpful to have a semi-rigid structure to fit all my scenes into. The part of the formula I like least, so far, is the idea that every novel must have a "life lesson" and the protagonist must succeed at the end by learning and applying that lesson. I guess some writers could do this subtly, but I feel like if I aim for that, it will end up being bland and didactic.
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Dec 29, 2022 01:13
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I had one story published last year: https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/empty-appendages/ which was really exciting. And I wrote the whole first draft of a novel, it's now in the beta reading phase. Just as important, I think, is that I started sharing my writing with a regular critique group that's supportive but also pushes me to improve. And I feel that in a nebulous but decisive way, I started to behave more seriously in regard to my writing. Before last year I was just sort of noodling along. Now I feel like I am moving forward. I haven't decided yet whether to submit my novel to agents or self-publish it, but I'm confident that I'll do something with it before the year is out.
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Jan 2, 2023 00:22
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SurreptitiousMuffin posted:Oh hey, same! I handed in Dawnhounds 2 in 2021 and still don't have the first edit letter back and I'm starting to think it's just getting quietly shitcanned. I spent all year not being allowed to write while the money ran out. It sucks! Man, that sucks  I hope your and GB's books both emerge from purgatory soon.
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Jan 3, 2023 00:13
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fwiw I think it's a cool concept. The other posters are probably right that you shouldn't use a real language as a signifier for "weirdness", but it's hard to say for sure without seeing an excerpt.
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Jan 31, 2023 09:40
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So far it seems like a massive headache for the slushers but not necessarily a problem for authors themselves except in that it lengthens response times. There is no way GPT-3 is writing a story that gets published in Clarkesworld. At least not without enough human intervention that they're basically writing it themselves anyway.
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Feb 18, 2023 04:04
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sebmojo posted:On a brief and extremely unscientific survey ai can write perfectly decent stories at a 12 year old kid level. They're not good, but they're also not conspicuously bad, so if someone put some time into it I can totally see an ai story being publishable. I've spent a fair bit of time generating fiction with GPT-3. Aside from problems with continuity, it is fundamentally limited by an inability to be creative, to add new elements to a piece. It seems impressive when you give it "X + Y" tasks (Dr. Seuss poems about Elon Musk, Seinfeld characters playing D&D, etc.) but it can't add anything more than the X and Y that you give it. Or if it does, it does so only by falling back on the most common tropes of whatever it's working with. If you ask it to describe a dungeon then it might fill that dungeon with a goblin, a spear trap, a chest of gold, but it won't present anything surprising to anyone even mildly familiar with the genre. For this reason I'm not (currently) too worried about AI replacing human writers so much as about it clogging the internet with vacuous text that superficially looks like it came from a person.
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Feb 19, 2023 06:31
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flerp posted:i think a big part is AI folks trying to get something published for a headline of "venerated fiction journal publishes AI work." doesnt matter if they flood a market with garbage or squeeze out genuine authors, they just want to sell AI as legitimate and they only view journals as a way to make AI look impressive if they can accepted. Yeah I think this is the game, because it really doesn't stack up from a purely financial perspective. Even gambling addicted crypto freaks would realise it isn't worth the time and effort of submitting a generated story (which you would surely have to edit at least a little bit by hand) for a tiny chance of winning... like 500 bucks.
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Feb 21, 2023 07:40
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Wungus posted:Yeah, there's a huge response post to that by a YA author that is basically like "literally every part of this is wrong, it was just written by someone making up lies in order to feel big" She makes some good points but lol at "ACOTAR is not YA"... keep telling yourself that bud.
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May 11, 2023 04:29
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Fat Jesus posted:I've been trying to write this thing, which started out as a early medieval story of a siege, since that's what I'm sorta knowledgeable on, which morphed into a horror fantasy. I got a problem. Evil Guy has this thing he gets power from. He soon finds that the more he kills the stronger he gets, but up to a point, for you see, he's been basically killing scum, and the Dark God demands the souls of the innocent. That is, children, mainly. I'm not sure how to handle that, given everything else is a world of eternal wars, mud, blood and poo poo. Piles of burning dead in a background of peasants cannibalizing the corpses hanging from trees with crows. Lovely. My pet hate of LOTR and other fantasy stuff is death is clean and often meaningless. Just say the children all got evacuated before the siege began. Or, idk, children don't count as innocent because they have no moral sense yet, you need souls who actually understand good and evil and chose the former. There are lots of ways to elide the stuff you don't want to write about without breaking the grimdark tone.
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Jun 16, 2023 09:59
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Did Sando ever actually say that "hard magic" systems are better, or just what he likes? The original "Law" he proposed was not "hard magic better" but: quote:Sanderson’s First Law of Magics: An author’s ability to solve conflict with magic is DIRECTLY PROPORTIONAL to how well the reader understands said magic. Which seems like a pretty good law to me, especially if you allow for the possibility that readers might "understand" the magic on an emotional level, or a level of general principles (e.g. "nothing is achieved without sacrifice"). I don't think Lord of the Rings really breaks this 'Law'--the magic is explained well enough for it to resolve the conflicts it does resolve (and notably, most of the climactic moments are not resolved by magic, but by courage, faith, physical endurance...)
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Jul 31, 2023 09:13
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I've got a question for all the people in this thread with experience of querying agents (of whom there seem to be quite a few.) I have a novel that's in its third draft. I'm very proud of it and I think it's great. It's about 135k words, and I don't think it will be possible to cut it down by more than a few thousand. Someone on Discord has told me that this is too long for a debut fantasy novel and it would really need to be in the range of 80-110k to have a chance of selling. They did suggest I might be able to pick out certain agents that are willing to read longer manuscripts by looking at their stats on QueryTracker. I am right at the beginning of trying to get this book published and I don't know much about querying beyond what I've gleaned from browsing this thread. Part of me wants to just say gently caress it and self-publish, but obviously this comes with many challenges of its own. What I want to know, before I commit significant time to studying querying, writing my synopsis, etc, is whether the length of the book is going to be an insurmountable hurdle. I know that trying to get a trad pub deal is something like a one in a million shot. I just don't want to waste my time if it's a zero in a million shot, if that makes sense.
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Sep 27, 2023 23:59
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Thanks for the advice, everyone. I think I'll take a crack at querying.
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Sep 29, 2023 00:23
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Captain Log posted:Howdy, friends. I like to think of chapter breaks as a tool in your toolbox just like every other part of the text. They have a specific effect on the reader that is subtly different from page breaks, so they can be used to different effect. Chapter breaks often mark a moment of dramatic tension or transition. In my current novel I usually have one POV character per chapter, but in a few chapters I have multiple POV characters separated by page breaks as a way to indicate they are still within the same scene or situation. I don't think the overall length of the chapters matters that much as long as it stays within a reasonable range--it's going to be weird if you have a 7,000-word chapter followed by a couple of <1,000 words each. Although even that can be done well if it's for deliberate effect (Faulkner famously wrote a one-sentence chapter in As I Lay Dying, and I'm sure other writers have tried similar).
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Oct 31, 2023 08:28
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Leng posted:
TSCTW is a great example because although it doesn't quite have chapters, it still has a clear structure that's given by the days of the story, the interjections from the frame narrative, and the shifts in POV. So you still feel your progress through the architecture of the narrative.
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Nov 2, 2023 07:26
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 01:54 |
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For me, the question of representing diverse viewpoints comes down to work. Yes, you can hypothetically write about any character in any situation, as long as you put in the work to do the research. But the further from your own perspective you go, the more effort you have to put in to do it justice, and at some point you have to pick your battles. Several years ago I set out to write a pirate-themed fantasy novel. Because who doesn't love pirates? But that led me to creating a setting based on the Caribbean, a place I've never been within 500 miles of. This meant I wanted to sensitively depict colonialism, slavery, Indigenous cultures, not to mention all the local flora and fauna I had no knowledge of. It was a huge amount of work, and eventually it got to the point where I felt I was expending a massive effort to create something that would end up, like, 70% as believable as the average book by someone who actually comes from that part of the world, or has Indigenous heritage, etc. I eventually gave up on the project (not only for this reason, but that was part of it). Obviously that doesn't mean my next book was exclusively about straight middle class white men. But I became a lot more careful about biting off more than I could chew.
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Nov 13, 2023 06:40
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