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.

Okua: Oct 30, 2016

We know that 500 question character sheets suck, but does anybody have some actually good resources for creating characters?
I'm starting a new novel and this time I'm trying to *actually plan things out* and have some reference sheets for setting/characters/magic stuff.

# ¿ Feb 27, 2017 14:18

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# ¿ Apr 30, 2024 16:50

Okua: Oct 30, 2016

I started a novel today.
I'm not afraid of not finishing it (I have a good track record) but I am afraid of ending up with something Bad because of insufficient planning, a weak plot, etc etc etc.

The last long piece of writing I made ended up at 60k, but I have no idea what to do with it. It doesn't feel long enough for a novel to me, and besides I've stared at it for so long while I got through the second draft that I no longer even know whether or not it's any good.

showbiz_liz posted:

my writing teachers all said that you had to start out writing literary fiction even if you wanted to write SF in order to get the fundamentals down.

Maybe I'm biased because I write mostly fantasy, but that is weird advice. "The fundamentals" are the same no matter the genre imo.

# ¿ Mar 6, 2017 20:07

Okua: Oct 30, 2016

I've even seen the line go on after the "said"-tag for maximum confusion.

quote:

-- Hello, she said. How are you doing?

But that's usually only in older books.

# ¿ Mar 7, 2017 17:52

Okua: Oct 30, 2016

Scrivener just betrayed me. My computer shut down accidentally (the start button is kind of broken) and now every attempt to open my project file gives me the message that it is "incompatible with this version of Scrivener."
Even with backups, except for if I go so far back that it doesn't matter anyway. Googling shows me a common fix involving editing a version.txt document in the project folder - nice, except that it results in a version of my novel that can be opened but is not at ALL up to date with 90% of all the files misisng. No real loss of words since I have all the raw text documents and can import them to Word and work there, but I had just color coded and organized everything, goddamnit! :eng99:

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.

anyone got any tips???

it sucks
I've had those days where I open the document and just groan and slump over because it's so bad what was I thinking. But I appreciate that I am at least conciously incompetent. It is the most annoying of the four stages of competence and it just keeps coming back. Better than not seeing the problems, though.
On a more basic level I like to have timers instead of word goals at times like that because then I know exactly when I can move on from the project and its flaws. Makes it a bit more bearable.

# ¿ May 18, 2017 16:38

Okua: Oct 30, 2016

Here's some venting: Coming up with titles is haaaaard.
Is it even possible to come up with a fantasy title that doesn't sound cliche as hell.

# ¿ Aug 28, 2017 19:44

Okua: Oct 30, 2016

Burkion posted:

Also don't play things too close to the chest as I found out!

As it turns out, Sitting Here, at the least, did not pick up that what I was doing with my Thunderdome submission was a black market organ theft kind of deal. I thought I had made that fairly explicit, but apparently I walked the line a bit too much.

Do not be afraid to be overt with your stuff. A lot of readers aren't going to read into it with the same level of detail as you will think it through

I thought the organ-selling was really obvious when I read it. -v(ouo)v-

# ¿ Sep 20, 2017 17:43

Okua: Oct 30, 2016

I use Cold Turkey Writer for when I need to just write already and hit a wordcount. It locks down everything, no alt-tabbing out, nothing you can do but work until the progress bar is filled. I love it. And it even tells you that you've done an awesome job when you finish and save the document! :toot:

# ¿ May 2, 2018 18:45

Okua: Oct 30, 2016

magic cactus posted:

Well see, that's the question. Originally, my Armenian friend was the person who suggested I use the language. So I did. Now after thinking about it, I don't know if I'm in the right to do so, but I also recognize that I have tunnel-vision here. The "random Chinese phrases" objection is one I've been thinking about as well. My answer to that is I'm explicitly not slapping words together willy-nilly ala "this character says peace but actually it means something entirely different." I'm taking care to make whatever words I use be as accurate as I can get them, and taking care to have them make sense in the text itself. However I recognize that I am not a professional translator and neither is my friend, who speaks this language at home, albeit as a second language and not at native level.

The problem with the conlang route is that I'm not sure that it conveys the relevant information in sufficient depth. Real human languages have a conceptual depth that most conlangs (with the exception of Tolkien, maybe Magma) don't seem to have. Tolkien, being a linguist, is the exception. You can learn several dialects of elvish as fully featured languages. I personally don't have the linguistic background to be able to whip up such a feature-rich language, I imagine most people don't.

The tl;dr as to why I don't whip up my own conlang is that I don't think I can make it as feature rich as an actual spoken and written language, and thus won't be able to adequately illustrate the concept loss that comes with translation from a source language to another target language.

Maybe it's a bit out there, but it is possible to hire someone else to make a conlang for you. Look into the Language Creation Society. They can let you put up a post on their job board.

# ¿ Jan 31, 2023 23:19

Okua: Oct 30, 2016

Ruud Hoenkloewen posted:

What kind of things do you keep in mind for line edits? I'm chewing through a project by feel at the moment. Once I'm done I'm planning another pass for specific things:

- Passive voice
- Filter phrases/weasel words (just, somehow, feel, sees, still, maybe, a bit, possibly, very)
- Is-verbs ('He was angry' -> 'He fumed')
- Sentences with ellipses, dashes, semicolons (I tend to write unwieldy run-on sentences)
- High focus on body parts ('She held out her left hand to the doorknob and twisted it open' -> 'She twisted open the doorknob')
- Stage directions ('He turned to look at her then walked to the other side of the room. She turned and looked out the window then turned back to look at him.')
- Unnecessary prepositions ('She dropped it down onto the floor' -> 'She dropped it')

I sometimes worry I'll go too far and end up clipped and unreadably terse, but that's probably a better problem to have than the opposite?

I find myself doing a lot of "stage directions". I'm curious about what's considered bad about them. And is there something that you would generally advice one to do instead? Just leaving it out or...?

# ¿ Jun 23, 2023 21:50

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# ¿ Apr 30, 2024 16:50

Okua: Oct 30, 2016

Good points! Thank you. Something to add to the pile of things to look out for in the second draft.

# ¿ Jun 26, 2023 07:54

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