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Phil Moscowitz posted:Question about dialogue and tense. Obviously, keeping tense consistent in a passage is important to ensure it's easily understood. But I'm in the process of writing a scene with a quick flashback to a relatively recent timeframe, and some conversation that happens in that timeframe, and I'm wondering what people think of using simple past dialogue tags as opposed to past perfect. This is probably a personal thing but I'm not a fan of how "had verbed" sounds and I try to avoid it wherever possible. I think if you keep them to single past-tense verbs and clearly denote at the start that the POV character is remembering something an hour ago, people will understand what you're doing. You already have it noted down in the last paragraph that the perspective is switching back to the present, so the end of that flashback is already marked.
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Mar 21, 2017 00:18
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Sitting Here posted:every time I open up the 2nd draft of this story im working on, I am overcome by loathing. Like if the words of my story were a person, I would forcefeed them drain cleaner. I'm probably going to die still wallowing around in first draft faffery. I can't even imagine going through this again when I finish my latest attempt at a novel. I have had a lot of difficulty with a weird sense of distaste for my writing for a while, so I think I know what you mean. I've been struggling to bounce between a couple of first drafts I still want to finish, but it keeps coming up and preventing me from doing a whole lot. What I've found kind of helps has been trying to conceptualize a scene, any scene, and mull it over. Listen to music that fits the scene, consider how you want the dialogue to sound, how the action should look. See if you can get some kind of excitement or interest in the scene, then try to sit down and work on it. It might not keep you going for long, enough to get some words down, but something is better than nothing. If you have someone interested in taking a look at some chunks and giving input (someone you trust, obviously, since you're sharing an iffy first draft) it may also help you internalize an outside perspective. I hate how my writing goes when I'm working on it but getting even some passing comments from my fiance definitely helps me appreciate it more.
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May 18, 2017 02:03
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MockingQuantum posted:Out of curiosity, how do you approach outlining? I am a pantser who direly wishes I was a planner but outlines have historically been the most sure-fire way to make my brain shut down and destroy my enthusiasm for a project. It's bizarre, because I'd think outlining would come a little more naturally to me given it's sort of how I approach a lot of the rest of my life. My plan for the near future is to try a few different approaches to outlining and see if any of them stick. I had a really hard time with outlines because I could not focus on something that felt so open-ended. Someone somewhere recommended the snowflake method and it really helped ground me on where to start and where to go. Basically start from a sentence, then elaborate that sentence into a paragraph, then each sentence into its own paragraph, etc. I'd definitely suggest giving that a try if you're having trouble figuring out how to start.
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Jul 31, 2018 18:09
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I'd like to rant for a minute among some people who might get the feeling, because, news at 11, writing is hard and making a career out of it is frustrating. When I was in college I could write hundreds of words of fiction in a day, multiple days a week. It was mostly bullshitting stuff with friends, but it also led to me writing a couple short stories that I managed to get published (definitely in large part because my now-estranged mother was the one requesting stories from people and editing them into a collection, but hey, I still wrote something decent nonetheless) and developing a writing style and themes that I overall feel pretty good about. Now that I don't have an English degree requiring me to read and talk about 10 books a month, dropped out of the bullshitting I'd do with friends, and have a 40-hours-a-week job, I've definitely slacked on the reading and writing front. It's especially bad now that I'm really trying to put in work for the two novels I've developed and really want to get out there. It took me a couple of years to find an outline writing method that actually worked for me, and I managed to get a 1,000-word summary down for one of the novels in two days. Then it took me months of fumbling with an introduction until I finally got the mentality of "gently caress it, get garbage out of your head and down on a page and fix it later, no matter where it is in the story" drilled in and slapped down about 4,000 words over a few days off and a few slow work days. It's incredibly slow progress, but it is progress, and putting it down here actually makes me feel a little better about what I've managed so far. The problem is that, despite how passionate I am about these things, actually working on them is much more of an ordeal than it used to be. I listen to music in the car for inspiration and come up with scenes and even dialogue that I think would be great, but when I actually sit down the words never end up on the page as well as I think they would in my head, or they're decent but it's a struggle just to get them down. Progress has been pretty good on that one novel, and I'm keeping everything I put down because it's a first draft and I can fix it up later, but the quality of what I'm getting down bleeds out into making me doubt the story and characters themselves. The same feeling has been getting into other projects I want to work on that aren't nearly as serious, like a backstory for a D&D character: either I struggle to get anything down, or I do and I kinda hate it and everything else by extension. I already knew that I would struggle with a longer writing project because I'm bad at settling on a point to start anything with, but I used to be able to struggle briefly with an opening and then let everything else flow pretty easily afterward. Then I get stupid thoughts like "I should be working on this project instead, the tones and messages in it would be a lot more applicable to what people are going through in the world now," or "if I'd started this sooner I probably could've been finished by now and had something out there," and deeper and deeper from there. There've been more than a few days off or slow days at work lately where I've planned to make progress in something, then sat down and actually stared at a page for a while and just went "...gently caress." I feel like I'm having to relearn everything that was almost instinctual just a few years ago, and I think that's what's most frustrating about all this. My only comparison point for how the stuff I'm doing should be looking now is how my stuff looked years ago when I was working on much shorter, more personal projects in a very different environment. I should probably look into some examples of what a first draft normally looks like and stick to the outlining process more. I've never been good at the editing process, so that's probably coming to a head now. I'm still gonna stick with it to the bitter end, even if that means I don't actually finish anything until I'm retired, but it just sucks.
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Dec 26, 2018 18:11
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Hungry posted:Don't feel like your efforts are wasted. Keep writing. Thank you for the encouragement! Yeah, I'm definitely not giving up. I just need to stop comparing what I'm doing now to what I used to do. I'm sure the quality will improve with the work I put into it; it's just a matter of keeping up with the process. I'm glad you were able to settle into the right space with your work, and hopefully I'll get there sooner rather than later.
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Dec 28, 2018 22:16
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The Sean posted:It's really weird, though, because I know it's not really perfect but I'm resisting the urge to just spend so much time making everything perfect. I'm trying to just take this as a sketch and just put words on page, but drat it feels stupid sometimes. It's a really weird feeling to get used to. It took me a long time to grasp, and even then I still have trouble. Practice will make it easier to resist, and it might help you to look for some examples of what's expected in a first draft so you have something to compare to. Your expectations are at "second/third draft," which is a lot easier to find comparisons for. Keep it up, and try not to look back yet!
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Jan 20, 2019 03:19
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feedmyleg posted:Are there any comprehensive resources for navigating this? Piggybacking off of Whalley, but a good exercise to figure out what works for you might be to just write the dialogue for the scene first, then figure out where it seems right to fit in some physical description. I've been reading the Witcher books lately as I try to expose myself to more writing styles, and the writing there is really weird to me because it's so, so dialogue-heavy when people are talking and so lacking in physical descriptions, but it still works. Since I tend to prefer to have at least a few descriptions to break it up, it's fascinating to read something that leans hard on the opposite end of the scale, and it also allows for some really good moments that physical descriptions could interfere with. For example, there's a whole four segments with absolutely no description and only dialogue, with one of my favorite parts: quote:“Don’t squeal. Practise! Attack, dodge! Parry! Half-piroutte! Parry, full pirouette! Steadier on the posts, drat it! Don’t wobble! Lunge, thrust! Faster! Half-pirouette! Jump and cut! That’s it! Very good!” Obviously the whole book isn't like that, but it's very important to consider that there are a bunch of ways to do what you want. This bit could be done with some physical description, but we already know these characters decently by this point, so we can mentally see what they're doing well enough and the breathless pace of it and the "wait, what" ending probably would be weakened by more description. That's why I'd suggest trying to write the dialogue first, then seeing how adding description sparingly around it goes.
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Feb 4, 2019 19:29
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Also consider the environment you're putting yourself in when you write, and whether that coincides with things that, for you, are the antithesis of casual writing. For example, my work has been stressful enough for the last few months to recently start giving me tension headaches, and my job involves sitting at a computer all day and writing letters or documentation or plans or otherwise thinking very hard about words. This has made my brain utterly shut down when I open up a blank Google document to try writing something I'm passionate about, or be daunted by editing something I've already written. It's incredibly frustrating and even my limited time off hasn't been enough to get rid of that intimidation. Recently, though, I was transcribing something I'd already written in a notebook for preservation purposes, and while there wasn't anything new going on, it was satisfying and relaxing. I feel like writing by hand will help me out a lot, though I haven't had space to really try that out yet. I definitely second the idea of taking time to actively not think that you need to write, and maybe every so often in the meantime, consider your current writing environment and how that lines up with other things in your life.
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Jul 15, 2019 22:59
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