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Hello fellow writing goons, I'm dropping in because I've started writing again after not writing anything of substance for over ten years and am excited to write and talk about writing again. About a week and a half ago, a story suddenly entered my head fully formed (on a high level, at least), like Athena or some poo poo. The muse that bit me must have been rabid because the compulsion to write is incredibly strong, like I've stopped playing video games, possibly broke my doomscrolling habit once and for all, been shirking chores, not been thinking about fixing my house that is literally falling apart, and have been contemplating playing hooky from work, all so I can write more. So in the last week and a half I've written over 16k words, plus several pages of handwritten notes and sketches and also a ton more stuff swirling around in my head. Is this sustainable or am I going to burn myself out? Has anyone else experienced being hit with a story like this and being afflicted by the opposite of writer's block and if so how did you harness it? To note, this isn't the Next Great American Novel or anything, just a dragon rider fantasy that's so far been hella fun to write, with lots of wouldn't-it-be-rad aspects I've been throwing in because why the gently caress not. It's very trope-indulgent, both in that I'm unabashedly playing into tropes I like and heavily subverting the ones I hate. It's not groundbreaking or particularly original, just fun and compelling and hopefully also good. Right now this manuscript is in a lovely first draft state and is not fit to be read by anybody - I'm extremely rusty and I've been writing so fast that my prose is complete poo poo and the worldbuilding and nitty gritty lower level details are like shifting sands and there is a ton of internal inconsistency, missing context, sloppy characterizations and dialogue, clumsy scene design, etc. - but in the future I might be interested in some alpha/beta readers. In the meantime, I would be more than happy to read/provide feedback for other fantasy works, so please hit me up.
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Nov 8, 2022 22:36
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Stuporstar posted:I’ve been through this, to the point where I even stopped sleeping for days at a time. And yes, in the end I burnt out badly. That is a good deal like me, actually. I have ADD, diagnosed and for the most part medicated. I am also medicated for seasonal depression. But honestly, the meds might make it worse because then I can sustain engagement with writing and the story a whole lot longer. However, a key difference is that new ideas for big projects that I actually feel compelled to execute happen to me exceedingly rarely, probably because the compulsion needs to be extremely strong to actually get me off my rear end. In the last ten years, I have written NOTHING. So it's not like I've been picking up stuff and then ditching it, I haven't been doing anything. And my interest in stuff is fickle, so I want to write as much as I can while I'm into it. With this new story it feels like I have a trifecta - a complete story complete with all the aspects I really like in a story (this is the major one), characters I enjoy writing quite a lot, and my current headspace/mental state aligns with the character and story for once (I have a much older perpetually unfinished and currently shelved fantasy project that I can't progress in because I can't get back into the depressed, angsty headspace I was in when I originally started writing it). But I hear you - the last thing I want to do is let the obsession get out of hand and burn out and toss the story aside. I guess a good sign is that I'm remembering and once again feeling all the passion and joy that writing brought me in the past when it was one of my few real escapes and joys before smartphones and ubiquitous internet connectivity came along and ruined my happiness, creativity, and productivity. I will try to work on this thing at a healthy pace and definitely not pull any all-nighters on account of it. I've started convincing myself that once I do a chore or submit my poo poo for work, then I can make some tea/pour a booze and go write for a couple hours, but not before. It's a good motivator. Also, first time I didn't get antsy at a symphony concert in a long time because I just sat back and worked out backstory in my head while floating around in the lovely music.
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Nov 9, 2022 01:21
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Stuporstar posted:That’s seriously awesome. Like finding that writing high again so you can just flow, it’s the best feeling ever. Yeah, having found the high again is amazing. It had been so long I didn't know what I was missing anymore and kinda just stopped looking for it. I contemplated trying to revive my old project a few times but was never feeling it because of headspace mismatch, even during depressive episodes - what I experience nowadays is bland, listless sunlight deficiency and not melodramatic teenage angstfests that had the side effect of supercharging my creative passion. It seriously feels so good to be writing again. I don't think I realized how profoundly unfulfilled I was creatively and and how much I needed this. But now I have it so I'm running with it. And it being an entirely new project that I'm approaching with a new-to-me method (establishing story parameters and framework BEFORE setting the characters loose in it and also doing planning and even outlining) is really helping too. quote:And yeah, I’ve been really strict with my bedtime, because that’s often the first thing to go in a hyperfocus bender. I did the same thing, making sure important non-writing stuff got done before letting myself write. I'm terrible about bedtime discipline. And Google Docs is a blessing and a curse because I can work on this thing on any device, but I can work on it on any device, including my phone while in bed at 1 AM while pretending to sleep. Going in to the office (which is optional at my job) is proving to be helpful at establishing boundaries and separation, though, so I think I'll be doing that more regularly. I haven't yet experienced any slump in interest, just imposter syndrome (which might be elevated because I'm writing so fast that everything is coming out sloppy and lovely), but I've so far been able to counter it by reading a random passage from Eragon and then all of a sudden I feel way better about this project and my writing ability in general.
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Nov 9, 2022 23:24
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Marsupial Ape posted:I have a ton of what I believe to be legitimately interesting ideas and I have absolutely no idea how to translate them into the written word, let alone a narrative. This is something I used to be good at and I don’t know exactly how or when, I got in my own way, creatively. It’s incredibly frustrating and makes me feel like a fraud. I hadn't written anything in like ten years and then all of a sudden I was struck with an idea and started writing and what I've been writing is utter garbage because my creative writing ability has atrophied so much from not writing. Honestly, it's pretty hard, especially as someone who often deals with crippling perfectionism, to write down something that is complete poo poo, know it's complete poo poo, and to move on and write more. But every day I do it, it gets a little bit easier and I feel a little less bad about the quality of what I'm writing as I undo the atrophy, re-expand my vocabulary, find the vibe, and settle into the characters. I guess it's like getting back into shape - at first it sucks and you just have to power through it, but then after a while you start to feel good and see results. I don't know if this is too writing-exercisey for your liking, but one thing that I found helpful in the past for pinning down a story was writing random chapters. Not self-contained short stories or journal entries or anything, just chapters that read as if you opened a random book you'd never read before to a random page in the middle. Apply your ideas to the character(s) and scene at hand and don't get caught up trying to establish the setting, immediate context, backstory, or the greater plot. If it's compelling, write more along that thread and start answering your own questions about backstory and plot and whatever. If it's not, ditch it and try out a totally different scene with different characters. I have no idea if this is a valid method other people actually use, but for past projects I've gotten several characters and interesting story aspects from it. And it can be pretty fun. As for drugs, being properly medicated can be a huge help, especially in the areas of motivation and focus (if what you deal with includes depression and executive functioning issues). I have been helped immensely by stimulants and antidepressants, personally. If you think you should be on meds, get yourself to a psychiatrist. isaboo posted:I've written a few (mostly) true stories in GBS, and even self-published a book of them.. I miss the days of weird and wild stories in GBS, and wanted to bring a little of that back. This looks awesome and I shall buy a copy. Also for some reason there's something absurdly funny to me about seeing MS Paint illustrations in a printed book and I want it on my shelf.
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Nov 15, 2022 17:42
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Stuporstar posted:I’ve done a lot of this. I’ve written so many chapters and scenes that haven’t made the cut into any of my novels, but they help me figure out characters and setting and what’s not working so it’s not wasted time. And I write all my novels out of order. Scrivener ended up the best writing program I’ve ever found because its non-linear format works best for my non-linear brain. Ooh this was very informative. I think I too am a methodological pantser. But back in high school and into college, I was a hardcore angst-fueled intuitive pantser. The results I got from writing as an intuitive pantser were dark, passionate, atmospheric, totally disorganized and a mess, and never finished because I churned through revisions endlessly. I have entire notebooks filled with chapter fragment writings, and like 95% never made its way into an actual story, but having written all of it gave me the ability to find/distill the stuff that worked. Kind of like strip mining your own brain, so arguably super inefficient, but sometimes I need to sift through everything to find what I'm looking for because I'm not even sure what it is I'm looking for until I find it, so targeted extraction won't work. I also tend to work pretty non-linearly and keep a bunch of scribbles and notes on the side, so I've been thinking more and more about picking up Scrivener. quote:I also call my first drafts “draft 0” because a lot of it is written more like a long synopsis than actual words that are gonna make it into the actual story. When I get to my actual first draft, I rewrite everything from almost scratch Me too. Usually these are handwritten, but with this most recent story I didn't have any empty notebooks on hand and was too impatient to start writing to go to Walgreens and grab a new notebook. Also doesn't help that the legibility of my handwriting has degraded substantially. But the simple act of typing up a handwritten draft would deliver so much improvement. I'll have to print out my typed draft zero and type it back up into a new document. Pththya-lyi posted:The Romantics, despite their accomplishments, really hosed up our idea of what it means to be an artist. According to the view we inherited from them, artistic talent isn't a skill you can get better at at, but a divine gift you receive. Don't practice at your art and get better at it, just wait for the Muses to bestow their vision upon you!* Don't listen to feedback from your peers, they just don't understand your genius! A crappy work can't be improved on, you just don't have the gift! This whole attitude hosed me over for a long time, both in writing and drawing/painting. Part of my problem was that I had plenty of innate artistic talent, which enticed me to just coast through the creative process and not consider it or develop/hone my skills with regular practice, so I was quickly surpassed by less talented people who actually practiced/studied and otherwise worked at it. Innate talent and/or divine inspiration will absolutely give you a head start, but a head start doesn't mean jack poo poo if you won't put in the effort to finish the drat race. change my name posted:Plus, getting high or drunk has never worked for me. In those cases I'd rather play a videogame than stare at an empty Scrivener page (or just fall asleep). I've found that being buzzed will help me loosen up and just write without getting tangled up in my own perfectionism and doubt, but the trade-off is that the quality of my writing takes a massive hit. But being high or full-on drunk is the opposite of helpful.
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Nov 15, 2022 21:51
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Wungus posted:"oh poo poo actually you know what'd be cooler" Yeah this is great. I'm doing a fuckton of this, sometimes to the point of having a bunch of redundant scenes in the same chapter or abrupt conversational shifts to capture whatever cool new/better idea/direction. With the way I write, everything other than the skeletal main arc is kind of shifting sand in my head in the very beginning, so aside from sloppy/rusty writing, my zero drafts do a ton of heavy lifting to find the story's optimal course, and that's honestly the more important function. Like I don't mind if draft 0 -> draft 1 is a 100% rewrite. I can always fix word choice and sentence structure and poo poo later so I try not to worry about it early on, but if I do come up with some elegant little morsel of prose, whole hog retyping makes it easy to pull it into subsequent drafts while leaving all the chaff behind. Definitely a pantser thing.
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Nov 15, 2022 23:45
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The only thing I'm capable of outlining reliably is project specs at work. Story-wise, I can plan/plot at a very high level, like main arc and identifying moments/scenes I want to hit while actually writing, but I have a hard time sticking to any detailed outline that I write beforehand, either because it kills the fun or I have a sudden new idea and the outline is thrown to the wind.Admiralty Flag posted:I'm in awe of pantsers and the skill it takes to write that way, but that's just part of my personality and likely the way I handle my ADHD. For example, I don't know how people cook without using recipes. If I tried to write without an outline, it would be very challenging, almost certainly would turn out as a huge mess, and probably would lack a lot of the elements of symbolism, foreshadowing, etc., that I get with my outline. This is fascinating to me because I thought it was my ADHD that was contributing to making following recipes difficult and stressful, especially if there's sensitive timing and multiple parts that need to be handled in parallel. I am not truly comfortable cooking a thing until I'm good enough at the techniques and/or have done it enough so that I DON'T have to follow a recipe. Ultimately though, I find the writer-type labels helpful.  In getting back into writing and digging into the terms and types of methods/processes, I've been able to identify why my previous projects failed and and also identify why I'm so much more productive on my new project (25k words in 2.5 weeks, so far) and how to keep doing what's working.
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Nov 16, 2022 04:49
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Beaten by several hours, but here's the story I wrote for the challenge: The Oracle Jackjaw was an oracle. All dogs were, or so they claimed. Their messages were all crude and simple, and one hardly needed to be an oracle himself to know that they would come true. They all predicted that the sun would rise and then set and that they would return to their sacred places each day at the prophesied times. Of course they would, though, because their Masters dragged them on chains to those places with uncanny regularity. They were all frauds, of course. Dogs in the thrall of the Masters could not be oracles. Everyone knew it. But Jackjaw had no Master and was therefore a true oracle. He lived in a dusty alleyway behind a terrible restaurant. There was always plenty to eat and it was paradise. The sun had barely touched the tops of the telephone poles when Jackjaw woke up from a vivid and terrifying dream. He had foreseen the end of the world. Everything would end in fire, and soon. Jackjaw panted nervously and let out a whine. He licked his balls to calm himself down so he could think properly. He didn't have much time. How could he get the word out? How would he even describe his vision? It was far vaster and more complicated than anything he had foreseen before. He had to tell everyone. It was his duty as a true oracle. Jackjaw wolfed down some restaurant scraps before taking off on his mission. He trotted up and down the blighted streets, looking for someone, anyone, he could warn. Then across the way he spotted a dog with his Master. A golden retriever with bad hips. Probably not too bright, but beggars couldn't be choosers in a part of town where dead warehouses heavily outnumbered Masters’ homes, and Jackjaw needed to tell everyone he could. “Hey rear end in a top hat!” Jackjaw shouted. That got the retriever’s attention. “What? Also gently caress you!” “The world is going to end! I’m an oracle and I saw it in my dream. And gently caress you too!” “Bullshit! I’m an oracle too and I didn't see the end of the world in my dream.” The retriever’s Master was becoming agitated by the shouting. Idiot. “But I’m a true oracle. You're not. Please listen - the world will end! In a fire! Tell everyone you can!” The Master squawked a silencing spell and the retriever did not speak again. He gave Jackjaw a last glance before being pulled away by his chain. “gently caress,” Jackjaw growled. That didn't go well. He’d have to try again. He ran through town, shouting to all the dogs he encountered, warning them about the end of the world. He couldn't find the right words, and the other dogs laughed at him or told him to gently caress off or were silenced by their Masters. He sought out other free dogs, but they had all been captured. As afternoon set in, Jackjaw stopped to rest under a ragged shrub adorned with garbage. He was failing in his mission. How could he make them understand? What kind of oracle was so pathetic and utterly incapable of telling the tale of prophecy and imminent doom and making them believe? “What troubles you, Jackjaw?” An unconcerned voice drew him out of his despair. Butterknife was sitting beside him, watching with either bemusement or contempt. It was always hard to tell with cats, especially a cunning lord of the streets like Butterknife. “They won't listen to my prophecy. The world is going to end and I need to warn everyone.” “And so you've been shouting your head off all day like a loving lunatic?” Butterknife laughed. “I thought you were smarter than this, Jackjaw.” Jackjaw sighed. “What else can I do?” Butterknife licked a paw. “Isn't it obvious? Overwrite the words of the frauds. They're everywhere and they stink. And they're insipid. ‘Chump was here.’ ‘Peanut likes peanuts.’ ‘Bella’s butt smells nice.’ Give me a break.” Jackjaw’s eyes widened as it dawned on him. How could he have been so stupid? The means to spread the prophecy and tell the story had been with him this entire time, stored in his very loins. He leapt out from under the shrub, energized by his renewed purpose. “Thank you, Butterknife! I will go tell the prophecy and all will be warned!” Butterknife shrugged. Jackjaw bounded down the street towards a fire hydrant. With his nose he could read the countless vapid messages of other dogs, all of them frauds. But now he would overwrite all of them with the words of a true oracle. He lifted a leg, for the story of the end of the world would be written in piss. The End
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Nov 16, 2022 20:18
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2022 was an interesting year in terms of writing for me. I hadn't written anything at all for like ten years, with a long-simmering fantasy project indefinitely shelved due to being utterly unable to get back into the right headspace for it, and no ideas or inspiration for anything new. But then out of nowhere in late October I was struck with a nearly complete fantasy story and possessed by a rabid muse and I finished the super rough zeroth draft of this thing the other day. Literally within two months  The draft is sparse, kind of chaotic, and full of giant holes (was writing so fast that I got way ahead of my worldbuilding), but I finished a thing holy poo poo. Now I'm forcing myself to sit on it for a couple weeks before revising and starting in on the next draft (which will be a straight up rewrite). So in the meantime I've gotten a few thousand words into book 2 (which is now more or less fully formed in my head I just need to write it down). But I really need to take a real break and read some newer fantasy stuff to get a sense of what's going on with the genre these days (in addition to not writing for a decade I hadn't read much either). And I owe an alpha read, which I'm looking forward to. Overall it's been a passion project bordering on obsession. This story is literally all I can think about these days and I get all irate if I don't get my time to write (or at least zone out and conjure up new scenes or something). Basically, it's been like having an emotional affair with myself. So yeah, I think 2023 will be a good year for writing. Hell, maybe I'll get the first book in a good enough state to start sending out to agents.
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Jan 2, 2023 17:53
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magic cactus posted:I think I'm just going to go with creating a unique font for now, but it's a back pocket idea for sure. If it's a weird mysterious noise the characters are hearing in the background, what about, possibly with the help of a sound designer, creating/synthesizing the noise, recording it, and representing it with a straight up oscillogram in the text? Then your most dedicated nerd readers can extract the audio and hear what the mysterious noise actually sounds like (or you can troll your readers and use oscillograms of fart noises or something). Or you could make a font script that resembles oscillograms in some way. Speaking of conlangs, I'm reminded I need like...four of them for the thing I'm working on, including one in detail that has its own (weird) script. I can do histories, religions, cultural customs, architecture, and fashion no problem (thanks design school!), but I can't do languages for poo poo.
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Feb 1, 2023 06:04
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General Battuta posted:I don't know if that made any sense and I certainly didn't keep it short. This was excellent and made a ton of sense and hits at the core of my own beef with the Sandersonization of magic/storytelling/worldbuilding in fantasy. I recently started writing a fantasy after not writing anything for like ten years and also not reading anything new, so it's been interesting, to say the least, to return to the genre to find that quantifying and systematizing the absolute poo poo out of everything is all the rage, a la hard magic systems and LitRPG and progression fantasy and such. On magic in particular, I've always been partial to what Sanderson defines as soft magic, both reading and writing it. I guess what I like about it is the mystique and brushing up against the unknown (and unknowable), and a larger focus on what the magic feels like and, like General Battuta said, what it means to the characters and the story. Like, what does it mean if you can't add more than 6.4 globblespoons of blue nershgersh per pint of oobleblargh without causing an explosion but you CAN add at least 9.2 globblespoons of red nershgersh and even though red nershgersh has the side effect of giving you dick warts, it'll let you make a powerful enough batch of ooblegersh to magnify your scrying radius beyond your baseline of 5.6 miles so you can then spy on the enemy army that is camped 5.9 miles from your current position? As far as the story and characters are concerned, the important takeaway is that hopefully the intel gained is worth the dick warts. Was it the right decision? Was the quality of intel worth the sacrifice of MC's dick's wellbeing? What does this sacrifice mean for MC's relationship with his gf? You don't need to know the maximum safe nershgersh:oobleblargh ratio to answer those questions. Maybe it's my raging ADHD, but more often than not I find these sorts of hard systems exhausting to read about, especially when I don't actually need to understand low level details (like explosive threshold numbers) to follow the story or relate to the characters. There's just too much cognitive load involved, especially when, as a reader, you're just a passive, non-interacting observer.* Even though there are some good pointers and nuggets of wisdom in Sanderson's advice (like figuring your poo poo out in advance, maintaining internal consistency, depth before breadth, considering costs and limitations in magic), I find that the way it's presented is too rigid and prescriptive. And in my opinion, he kinda does soft magic dirty in his magic law write-ups and discounts the whole magic-with-meaning angle, where the magic is some allegory or about representing something more profound than a means to solve a plot puzzle, like a spiritual/religious experience, transcendence, deeper character moments/growth/discovery, and so on. * If that hypothetical alchemy system I just made up was in a video game, I'd be alllllll over it - as the player with the controller in my hands, I'm the one who gets to gets to dick around making potions and I don't have to remember or think about the numbers or rules or limitations because the game is there to actively enforce them for me, and I can learn those rules and limitations in fun ways, like discovering what the explosive thresholds are by accidentally blowing up my alchemy lab. Playing/interacting with a system like that would be SO much more fun than reading about it. At least in my opinion.
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Apr 4, 2023 21:24
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Leng posted:For my part, I make no secret that Brandon Sanderson is absolutely my author goals insofar as it comes to running a business. Dude is a top tier CEO and way ahead of the curve as far as the publishing industry goes. There is a solid business rationale behind everything he does, from his choice of prose style to how he comes up with stories to how he interacts with his fan base and how he responds to critics. It's why he's so commercially successful. Yeah, I agree that writing as business vs writing as art is a very important distinction because there are different end goals, different best practices, different audience considerations, etc. Back in my freelance days, I did cover and web design for some indie pulp authors and I gained A LOT of respect for what they do and it made me way less precious about my own writing at the time and it made me consider things like creating vs consuming, what purpose genre classification actually served, and what readers wanted from/got out of the books they read. Right now I'm writing primarily for my own creative fulfillment but I'm keeping considerations like marketability and such on the back burner so that if I do publish/get it published, other folks would actually enjoy it. If I was writing for business/self-pub success, I'd be writing VERY different stuff. quote:I mean, he probably didn't help his case by naming his opinions "Sanderson's Laws" but he also didn't expect to go viral and just wanted to have some fun with it. To add some context/clarification to my feeling that Sanderson's advice felt overly perspective, my take is mostly based on his writings around the laws (and maybe I just feel extra attacked because I write squishy soft lawbreaking magic according to said laws). I've only seen a couple of the lectures, but I've enjoyed and generally found useful what I've seen so far But yeah, maybe "guidelines", "tips", or "theories" would have been better than "laws", because even though Sanderson himself stresses that they're just his thoughts/opinions and not hard and fast, it's that everyone else seems to take them as gospel. quote:To be honest, I think the greatest problem is how people are tending more and more towards ONLY reading what they already know they like, instead of reading more widely and taking risks with their choice of reading, and together with recommendation algorithms it's creating a vicious feedback loop. Holy poo poo this. I used to just go to the bookstore with all my birthday money and look at all the rad illustrated covers in the fantasy section, pick up the raddest ones, read some blurbs, maybe read a prologue or first chapter if I was intrigued, and then buy a bunch and read them. Sometimes I'd go in with some knowledge I'd picked up from those old human-curated rec lists on early aughts Amazon (I learned about ASOIAF and Robin Hobb (one of my faves) from one of those), other times I'd buy books/authors I'd never heard of before and read them with zero preconceived opinions/knowledge. It was so much fun. I mean sure, there were some I didn't like, but then there were also ones that I loved that I probably never would have bought if I'd run it through some personalized taste compatibility checklist beforehand. It's like the algos have sucked every last drop of joy and spontaneity out of the book discovery process. The current fantasy cover design trend of drab and serious stock photo composite covers isn't helping. I was at Barnes & Noble recently looking to buy some fantasy books and walked past the fantasy section twice because it just looked like more general fiction and I used to just be able to home in on the fantasy from across the store because of the covers. But I guess attracting eyes in bookstores isn't as big of a deal when so much book discovery and buying happens online where algos control want you see, enforcing a feedback loop of authors writing to appease the algos which in turn work to appease incredibly picky readers that were able to become incredibly picky thanks to the algos. Not optimistic about what the algo-driven future holds for authors or content creators in general. The present is weird enough. quote:Honestly, I think the gravitation towards hard magic systems is due to how society is shifting in how it relates to the world. We don't know a lot, not really, but we have the illusion of knowing a lot so instead of attributing events/phenomena to the fantastical, we go looking for the great unified theory that must exist to explain it all. I'd bet that is a huge reason behind the appeal of hard magic systems. That and gaming and a widespread understanding of game design and game mechanics. Makes sense. Also kinda sad when you start thinking about it - that we're so caught in our own web of societal systems and structures and orderly manmade surroundings that our sense of magic starts to reflect those systems and structures and surroundings. And maybe that's why I've been drawn so hard to magic-as-mysticism - because it's an escape and the opposite of manmade order. As for the video game influence, in my previous post I'd originally written some rambling paragraphs about my thoughts as a UI/UX designer on the trappings of video games influencing the genre, but deleted them because I was getting way into the weeds, but the gist of what I was getting at was scratching my head over how/why LitRPG is popular because the way you interact with a video game is so different from how you interact with a book and in turning the video game experience into a book you lose out on all the player-directed interactive aspects and at that point I'd rather just go play a video game and make all the choices myself. Or maybe there's a meta appeal in getting into the nitty gritty of the underlying systems like the leveling and maybe even the engine itself? Even though LitRPG sounds like it's really not my cup of tea, I'm kinda interested in studying it because it's just so weird to me.
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Apr 6, 2023 05:52
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Wow I left this reply tab open way too long. Re: use of italics: I use them sparingly, and mostly in dialogue. Outside of dialogue, there are a few words that I've italicized for emphasis or to express a particular vibe in the context of a character thinking about something. I write limited close third and do not use italicized inner thoughts (because I personally don't think via internal monologue and I've never liked italicized thoughts anyhow) so character thoughts bleed in with the exposition so there's a bit less formality than I'd be going for if I was writing omniscient third. DropTheAnvil posted:I think Brandon Sanderson did a good comparison on explaining magic vs not. Essentially Lord of the Rings doesn't explain magic, cause its.. magic. While with Sanderson, he wanted the reader to be able to piece together how the protagnist was going to "win" in fights, so the explains the magic system in depth. Except it feels like he fails to consider the possibility that a magic system could still be governed by well-designed, internally consistent rules even if those rules are never explicitly exposed to the character(s) or reader. Also it seems to me that he fails to consider or ignores the idea that magic can be used for narrative/thematic reasons other than either a tool that characters can use to resolve conflicts and advance the plot in the case of hard magic systems or "for visuals and for ambiance" in the case of soft magic systems. As a soft magic writer who's currently breaking all of Sanderson's "laws" to bring forth a magic that I use to explore themes of power, control, and mysticism, I feel kinda patronized whenever I read them. That said, there some solid nuggets buried in them, namely the bits about internal consistency and considering cost and limitations. Having a well-designed. internally consistent system is good practice, regardless of whether your magic is hard or soft. It's simple good planning so that you don't have to resort to rear end-pulls and the like down the road. Whether the rules of the system are exposed to the end user isn't nearly as important as Sanderson makes it out to be, in my opinion. I almost always find explicit depiction of hard systems to be too much cognitive load and much prefer learning the capabilities and limitations of a system by inference and trial and error, more like how you would interact with a hard magic system in a video game, where as the player, it's not your responsibility to remember how all this poo poo works because you can go try things and they'll work or they'll not because the game, its UI, and the environment is enforcing the rules of the system for you (Tears of the Kingdom is loving great for this). General Battuta posted:I wish Sanderson had never opened his mouth about magic, it has wasted so much time in so many minds. He’s just saying “I want to write fair play mysteries but magic” which is a much better thing to say than “I don’t understand Tolkien and I’m going to make it everyone’s problem.”  It would have been so much better if he'd presented them as "Brandon Sanderson's Guide to Sandersonian Magic Systems" or whatever instead of trying to map all the magics in the fantasy genre to his insufficient spectrum.
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Jul 30, 2023 19:06
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Stabbey_the_Clown posted:In my current WiP, I originally tried starting diving right into the action, with an attempt on my heroine's life in the middle of a big public speech (the Inciting Incident), then only after that, to do some major character introductions and a flashback. I recently saw something on story structure where the very first part is noted as the Exposition which should set up what counts as "normal" for the protagonist. It sounded reasonable, so I rolled the clock back a bit to 3 or 4 hours before the assassination attempt to do some exposition and setting stuff there. Personally speaking, I'm not the biggest fan of in medias res openings because more often than not, I just don't care yet and I don't appreciate having to exert a higher than normal amount of mental energy to comprehend what the hell is going on for the sake of characters/a situation I don't know yet. Furthermore, there's the issue that you mentioned above in that you don't first learn what is ordinary/normal for the character/setting/state of things before you are thrust into the thick of it and therefore miss context for comparison. Just going off the B-version of the first line, I feel it kind of defeats the establishment of the ordinary state by telling you what the inciting incident is first thing. It also seems like it's preemptively removing any tension there might have been in the lead-up to the actual assassination attempt. I mean, I'm sure it's probably obvious to the reader what's going to go down (if they read the blurb), but perhaps it's not immediately obvious it was THIS speech she's about to give during which the attempt occurred. The heroine going about her prep routine to give this speech is an establishment of the ordinary. Has she done this before? What is the speech about? She probably cares a lot about the issue she's going to speak about (what she cares about tells me something about her), and surely the issue is important to the greater plot/establishing the state of the world/setting as the story begins. When she gets up on the stage, does she get a weird vibe from the crowd? Does she have a bad feeling? I think you can focus the opening on her making her speech and ratchet up the tension/let non-ordinary things/observations seep in and build. The reader no doubt knows that something is going to wrong/there will be an attempt on the heroine's life (since it's highly likely it'll be mentioned in the blurb), so they're anticipating that something is going to go down. Sometimes it's fun for the reader when they know bad poo poo is about to happen but the character doesn't, (I mean, she didn't at the time, but does in this apparent retrospective narrative framing which may or may not color/bias the retelling) and since you're arriving at the bad poo poo pretty quickly, it's not going to feel dragged out/overly coy. Kinda got rambly - hope that makes sense. quote:However, there are two things about this change I now have to consider. The first is that a reader is not going to immediately know who major, minor and walk-on characters are if I give them all names. Is the best way to handle that to just not name some of the background characters (even if she would likely know their names)? I call the way I handle this kind of issue Arriving at the Lake Cabin in the Middle of the Night. When you drive up to the lake cabin in the middle of the night, it's super dark and the only things you can see are what's illuminated by your headlights, so basically just the road. But at that moment, only the road is important. Then you get there. You know the cabin is there, but it's dark and you can't see it. You use your flashlight to get to the door, turn on a light, and can see the interior, but out the windows it's black. But what's outside is not important right now. You just need to turn on the water heater and make the bed so that you can take a shower and go to sleep. Then the next morning, you look out the windows and see the lake and the boat by the dock and you go outside and you see the cabin and the woods around it etc. Basically, when you're starting the story, focus on what's immediately important to that establishing scene. Are the water header and the bedsheets important characters in the long run? Not at all, but they are important when you first arrive. The lake and the boat are WAY more important characters overall, but they aren't introduced yet because they don't have anything to do with your midnight arrival. Essentially, I try to keep a tight leash on the scope of the scene at first and avoid introducing characters/plot points/etc until they are actually important. In your case, if the character is not important to the scene, consider just not introducing them just yet. If there's a super minor supporting character (like an assistant/errand runner) that needs to perform some function necessary for the scene to advance and they only show up in that scene once, no need to name them right then, and then if they're going to be a reoccurring character later, then give their name later. If you have an issue with the heroine encountering too many characters that require introduction in the buildup to the inciting incident, you can always try re-blocking the scene. Like, if there's a character in the heroine's path who she knows and would talk to and you don't want to deal with it because you've already introduced other characters and don't want to get too bogged down, then move that character to the other side of the stage so she doesn't encounter him until it's more pertinent to introduce them. I've found that re-blocking/redesigning the scene itself can often solve these sorts of issues while minimizing contrivances and risk of going OOC. You can go as far as physically blocking the scene if it would be helpful. Like go to your kitchen, take out a cutting board for the stage and grab some apples or spice jars to represent the characters and figure out where everyone needs to be for things to play out the way you intend. quote:The second thing is that I now need to add in a Goal and a Conflict for this brand new chapter which didn't exist before. I'm a little fuzzy on that, but I guess her goal would probably be to try and get into position to give the speech without being stopped or talked out of it. I'm interpreting the "goal" here as being more about the design/construction of the chapter than the characters in it and what they're doing. Like, what does the chapter itself need to accomplish? Like, typical goals for a first chapter might be to introduce and establish the protagonist's character and portray the inciting incident. The character's personal goal of getting to the stage to deliver her speech is secondary to the greater purpose of establishing her as a character and covering the inciting incident within the chapter. All in all, nothing I've said here is a hard and fast rule or anything, just methodology I've been using that works for me when it comes to building scenes/chapters.
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Oct 9, 2023 00:00
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Stuporstar posted:Excellent words about writing in first person So I'd actually been toying with the idea of doing a self-indulgent creative exercise in which I rewrite the first chapter of my story (which is (pretty deep) limited third) in retrospective first person just for the hell of it. And now you're making me really want to do it even though I really don't have time for it. In pondering how it might work, I've realized that EVERYTHING changes. And there are so many questions. What's the retrospective lens? Is my protagonist looking back from having recently finished his arc (putting him in his early 20's), or is he looking back as a much older man? Either way, he's been through some harrowing poo poo, so how does his experience color his retelling of the event that started it all? How does he view the naive attitudes/choices of his past child self? Is he sympathetic towards them? Bitterly cynical? How does he introduce/describe important characters? How does he talk about the people he encounters as a kid who later become enemies that he kills? I could go on. There's so much nuance and so many things that affect and inform the narrative and voice. Even writing in strict limited third, I find myself making a lot of the same considerations that I'd make writing in first person. I am very much in my characters' heads, delivering the story as they see/experience it through their eyes and filtered through their understanding and opinions, and the narrative never jumps outside the character's mind for those "little did he know" omniscient moments for the reader's benefit. It's really fun and rewarding to write, as a huge reason I write is to get out of my own head and into different characters, and gives me the opportunity for a lot of variation in narrative voice for the different POVs, but it also comes with a slew of narrative challenges, namely that it limits how much contextual exposition I can provide (because lol who sees their best friend and then stops and thinks about what they look like in excruciating detail?), and requires me to be very careful about how I design scenes and sequences and place POV characters so I can get the story coverage/context that I need. Now that I'm thinking about it, you get back some narrative leeway in retrospective first person because your narrating character has the advantage of hindsight, so that could be a tool for providing context beyond what a character is experiencing at the moment (as opposed to immediate first or limited third). Stabbey_the_Clown posted:I recently saw something on story structure where the very first part is noted as the Exposition To add the chorus of Just Write, don't worry too much about all this stuff while you're writing, especially your first draft, and especially if you feel hobbled by trying to adhere to all the bullet points. I got curious and dug up some online articles on story structure etc and even though they say that there are no hard and fast rules and that it's just guidelines, some of them were written in a very prescriptive sort of way. Ack. If you want to write a scene, just write it and don't fret about whether it hits one of those prescribed plot beats or whatever. Once you have the whole thing, you can look back on it as a whole and revise/add/subtract as needed. I personally find that looking into story structure is much more helpful for self-analysis and troubleshooting after you've written a bunch of stuff than it is for guiding your writing. For example, I was grappling with the odd two-act structure I'd arrived at in my book, in which there's a major poo poo-hits-fan moment mid-story that divides it into two "acts", before and after poo poo hits the fan. It's definitely NOT a three-act structure, but then I did some digging and it turns out that structurally, it's basically Freytag's Pyramid, down to the centrally positioned "climax" and the "catastrophe" at the end. Did I set out to write this structure on purpose? Nope. It just happened. Besides, all those writing articles would tell you that using Freytag's Pyramid is a dumb because it's dated and overly focused on tragedies. But now that I've identified the sort of structure it ended up being, I'm having an easier time adjusting narrative beats and such. Same kind of thing happened with hero's journey. I didn't go out of my way to hit all the beats, it just kind of happened, and I was able to go back and analyze what was going on so I could make it better/clearer.
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Oct 11, 2023 03:50
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Wungus posted:Not to encourage some possible Difficult Choices but I got 40k into my last book, realized something wasn't quite hitting right, did this, and wound up rewriting the whole thing from scratch into a really voicey first person and it absolutely made the book a way better thing. Stuporstar posted:Hell yes! HELL YES! Playing with all this is so much fun. This is where 1st person really shines. What it does better than even close limited 3rd. Like Wungus, I’ve completely rewritten novels for pov and voice, and yeah it takes a lotta time. I’ve never regretted it though. It’s always come out a billion times better than before. I also write novels for fun, first and foremost, and don’t have any deadlines. So if rewriting a wholeass novel from scratch feels like alotta fun, I do it. Hell yeah! I think I just might. For funsies. Perhaps it'll be creatively informative/helpful in getting me into the protagonist's end state headspace better (I'm a fan of understanding my character arcs in a holistic fashion) and help me loosen up and work on atmosphere and vibe. But as the story is now (and the main threads and principal cast are pretty solidified at this point), I don't think first person (or really, single POV) is a viable option beyond being a fun experiment, unfortunately. To be clear, that's not to say it's not viable because I'm unwilling to rewrite what I have - I most definitely am. Hell, a major part of my process is to fully retype/rewrite chapters as I redraft them. It's a very freeing way to (re)write and apply revisions, and despite all the extra typing, I find it faster than picking through and editing and getting overly attached to existing docs. This story absolutely needs to be multi-POV - it's a fantasy, and while the story is pretty strongly centered around the protagonist, it's bigger than just his arc and his experience, and even with the benefit of retrospect, I don't think having him narrate the stories of the other principal characters (large parts of which happen far away from him) would remotely do them justice, and I am loathe to even consider multi-POV first person without a bunch of elaborate framing to make it not awkward/confusing. Besides, I really like my other POVs (especially protag's sister, whose arc is absolutely insane and could not be done justice by being told by someone else). So deep limited third is where I landed because I can do multiple POVs and still get deep into my characters' heads and be voicey and subjective with the prose. Stabbey_the_Clown posted:To be clear, I did not start out going “okay, I have a story structure, now let me think of beats which go here.” It was “here are the rough story beats in my head, and hey, they seem to fit onto this traditional pattern.” Please don't bite (stab?) my head off for I meant no offense  It just seemed to me, from my read of your posts, that all the story structure stuff you kept referencing might have been weighing a bit heavily on your process/the way you were thinking about what you are writing, so I just wanted to say not to sweat it too much or let it stop you from writing what you feel like even if it doesn't fit/contribute to the structure/your outline or whatever. To what Doctor Zero said, I think what most of us are saying is along the lines of not getting hung up on stuff if it slows you down or pulls you away from what you want to write. Getting hung up on poo poo is a problem I have a lot and it stops me dead in my tracks a lot of the time and the only way I can move past it is to stop caring for a bit and just write something without worrying about whether it covers X plot beat or where it is on the timeline or whatever. Stuporstar posted:I will be writing in past tense. Personally, I’m not really feeling keen about a retrospective narrator approach, because I intend for there to be an element of mystery which I want the reader to be thinking about and trying to solve alongside the characters. Going retrospective feels like either I would have to be going “wink wink nudge nudge” to undercut the mystery, or else remaining silent at the exact points where a retrospective narrator should be going “wink wink nudge nudge,” which I feel would be 'cheating' the reader. So, one of the most riveting football games I've watched was one where I knew the outcome (watched via DVR). Coming up on halftime, our team was losing BADLY and I got up and left because it was hella bleak and I wasn't interested in watching them get curbstomped (by their arch rivals no less) and out of morbid curiosity I checked the score and to my utter surprise, they had won. So I went back to the TV den and kept watching because now I had to know how the gently caress they managed to pull it off, and holy crap it was exciting to see them do it. And I'll bring up Eldest (sequel to Eragon) by Christopher Paolini because it's an example of how insisting on "mystery" and having a "surprise" at the end can get in the way of a potentially much better story. In the beginning, the fan favorite character Murtagh disappears in an accident and is presumed dead despite no body. Oh noes. Then we follow protag Eragon and we also have these two other POVs which are absolute slogs. In the finale, there's a new bad guy dragon rider and it is "dramatically" revealed to be none other than Murtagh, who was not actually dead. Surprise. And we find out that Murtagh was kidnapped, hatched and bonded a dragon, got corrupted and was forced to serve the big bad and wait why the gently caress didn't we get to see THAT story?? A Murtagh POV would have been SO much better than the boring useless secondary POVs we did get, and the book might have even been good. I did not feel surprised. I felt cheated. So sometimes the most compelling mysteries are not the ones you think (will they win vs how did they win), sometimes what's compelling isn't the mystery at all, and sometimes surprises/dramatic reveals aren't remotely worth it. A retrospective POV in particular gives you ample ability to play around with this and frame your mysteries and what you reveal to the reader and when. Gauging what works can be really tough though, but this is where beta readers can really help.
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Oct 12, 2023 03:01
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So I did a thing, mostly for my own amusement/as a warmup to that alt perspective experiment I am totally going to do, but also because I want to clarify my point about using narrative perspective as a means to manage the story's mysteries and the reader expectations around them. The thing I did was rear end-pull a random and fairly generic passage from a nonexistent story about a guy and girl who meet up and leave on some adventure/quest/thing together and then write it four ways: Preparation #1: limited third: quote:Johnny was already there when Sarah arrived, leaning against the gnarled old tree. A smile spread across his face when he saw her, one of his broad, beautiful smiles that shone in his eyes. Cool, I guess Johnny and Sarah are going to go on an adventure together? What is this thing that they have to do? And I suppose it'll maybe be dangerous (read: exciting) since they're both scared. I don't know a lot about what they're doing or where they're going, but I guess I'll read and find out. The mystery is that I don't know what's going to happen next because I haven't read it yet. My questions so far are pretty general ("what happens next", basically). Maybe I want to know more about Sarah and Johnny's relationship and where it'll go. I am curious about this in general, but I don't have any specific expectations because none besides really general ones have been set. This is what I typically write in, and it serves my style and my story quite well. You're close to the POV character and you ride with them and see/experience the things that they do as the story unfolds. You can get pretty deep with it, which makes it more visceral and voicey. Benefits include not requiring any sort of narrative framing/context, and enables multiple POVs. Preparation #2: (immediate) first person: quote:Johnny was already there when I arrived, leaning against the gnarled old tree. A smile spread across his face when he saw me, one of his broad, beautiful smiles that you could see in his eyes. Here it is again in "regular" first person. It reads very similarly to the limited third - it was basically just a pronoun find/replace and some grammatical tweaks to make it sound a bit more like someone (Sarah) could be speaking it out. You still see things as they unfold through the POV character's eyes. It's easy (and fun) to write and make the reader feel close to the character, and it generally reads pretty easily, and great if you have just the one POV. You can get away with no/minimal narrative framing/context, but also, Sarah-as-narrator doesn't come through as a distinct voice as the story teller because it's more of an extension of Sarah-as-character in the moment. You can still get nice and voicey with it. The questions I have are still the same as the limited third version because it reads so similarly and I still have the same character lens context. Preparation #3: retrospective first person done poorly: Stabbey, I made this one for you because I've gotten the sense that this is what you think we mean when we talk about retrospective first person. quote:Johnny was already there when I arrived, leaning against the gnarled old tree. A smile spread across his face when he saw me, one of his broad, beautiful smiles that you could see in his eyes. It's basically the same as the regular/immediate first person version above except with a "little did we know' interjection of vague and not very compelling foreshadowing reminding you that this is retrospective. The interjection is pretty coy and doesn't give anything away but also doesn't really provide you with anything new in terms of establishing/driving mystery or expectations. I guess it's intrigued me a little bit by hinting that they have a rough road ahead of them, and maybe some bad things happen if she wishes she'd have made a different choice. To note, when I'm talking about "mystery" here, I'm talking about it as a thing the reader doesn't know but wants to know as a literary device, not mystery as it pertains to the mystery genre (which I can't speak to because I don't think I've read a proper mystery novel since, like, middle school). Preparation #4: retrospective first person gone hog wild: Well this was a loving blast to write. Also significantly more difficult to write than the other perspectives, even in the case of adapting this disembodied little snippet, but totally worth it. quote:Johnny was already there when I arrived, leaning against the gnarled old tree. He smiled when he saw me. It was one of his old smiles, and I can still remember it perfectly, as close and vivid as though we were still standing in that forest clearing, still innocent, still whole. The memory of that smile is one of the only things I have left of him as he was before. He was never the same after his time in the Tower, after they took his eye, and even though he would still smile, there was something pale and desolate about them, like the ghosts of smiles. It was more than just his eye that they took from him, I knew, even though he would never admit it, never even speak about it. So yeah, it's QUITE different from the others in terms of vibe and voice, seeing as Sarah-as-narrator comes off much more strongly as a distinct character from Sarah-as-character, and very different in how it handles mystery and expectations. Everything really does change. Despite the fact that this version "gives away" quite a few details about what's going to happen in this story, it poses way more questions than the other versions. Basically, I've dispensed with the mysteries of "what happens" in order to replace them with more specific, and in my opinion more compelling, mysteries of "how does this happen" and "why does this happen". I've also shown the reader specifically what they can expect to find out about if they keep reading. In the other versions, my reader questions about this story were very general ("what happens next", "how does their relationship grow/change") and very few. My reader expectations were also very general ("I guess it'll be interesting", "I guess I can expect some danger and a tough journey"). But in this version? First of all, holy crap Johnny loses an eye?? How? Who takes it from him and why? Who are "they"? What's the Tower? Why was he there and for how long? What the hell even happened there to wreck Johnny like that? What does she mean when she says they used to be whole? Johnny loses an eye but what happens to her to make her not whole? What does this do to their relationship? Are they still together? Is Johnny even still alive? What's this darker realm they pass into? Is it metaphorical or literal? Why can't they ever return? So yeah, using the retrospective POV, I was able to completely change up the mystery aspects, raise a ton of questions for the reader (and myself) to stew over, steer the focus/anticipation towards certain story elements, like this Tower and whatever the gently caress Johnny goes through. There were other directions I could have taken it too, like maybe being more explicit about this Tower and being more coy about Johnny losing an eye by describing it as a price Johnny pays or something. And it turbocharges the narrative voice. Seriously, this is a super powerful narrative tool. Challenging, though, because the narrative perspective is a character it its own right that you have to develop, you need to know how everything happens and the end states of your characters so you can properly and accurately retrospect, you need to set up your mysteries and tension and stuff by choosing what you want to reveal or not, you probably need at least somewhat of a narrative frame, etc. Overall it's tons of fun and everyone should try it. Queen Victorian fucked around with this message at 07:54 on Oct 14, 2023 |
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Oct 13, 2023 05:40
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Re: never giving the character's name: I think it would work just fine if the main character is the only presence or at least the most prominent/central. And there's lots you could play around with in regards to the narrative perspective to express the descent into oblivion, like start deep-limited and drift towards detached-omniscient as the character becomes more distant/oblivious and divorced from the narration itself. I've done the not-naming the POV character in a much smaller sense: my main character suffers from nightmares, and in the nightmare sequences he doesn't have a name because he doesn't have a sense of who he is right then. He's just "he" when he's dreaming (but never "the boy" or anything distant because it's still close third even if he doesn't currently remember his name). Pronoun confusion isn't an issue because he is the only "he" in these sequences while any other entity he encounters is an "it". I have a character that appears later in the story who's presentationally genderfluid and he only has his name when he is in his "default" identity/presentation, and then when he presents as female, his pronouns change and the POV lens becomes more distant (like being referred to as "the girl") because he's kind of dissociated from his default self, and he is not referred to by his name because he's not currently who his name refers to. I've done some experimental chapters/vignettes with him and writing him is weird and challenging but also fascinating. So yeah, playing around with characters' sense of identity and self (or lack thereof) and the evolution of that sense of self is a ton of fun. This is one of the aspects of writing that's like crack to me.
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Nov 6, 2023 19:28
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Stuporstar posted:This is true but with a caveat. You can’t win with terminally online tumblr kids. Even if you ARE LGBTQ+ or BPOC or disabled, you will piss off people who have the same disability, sexual orientation, gender expression, same culture, etc. if they’re the type who love to spew vehement takedowns on social media, because naturally your personal experience (or research) will differ from their personal experience, so they’ll insist you’re wrong no matter what. Captain Log posted:I'm not going to lie, writing experiences outside of my own cis-white male scope terrify me. From a rational standpoint, I know very well to give no fucks about the terminally outraged opinions of the terminally online, but I still find myself worrying about it sometimes. Because like, as a straight cis-female WASP, wtf do I know about anything? I dunno, fantasy in particular feels like it's a damned if you do, damned if you don't sort of situation these days - everyone's clamoring for diverse representation and non-Euro-centric settings but then these online types get all mad if you try to do that while not being of the people/group/place of origin that you're basing your stuff on, and sometimes even if you are. Only thing to do is write what you want to write and not worry about it. Stabbey_the_Clown posted:Even what I'm doing now, writing in first-person as a woman (without being one) could be considered reaching too far. But I'm going to attempt it anyway, because that's what the story needs. The story would not be the same story with the same feel if the protagonist was a man; a male protagonist would have very different problems. except the inverse. My protagonist is male (I'm not writing in first person, but I have no qualms about doing so if the story had called for it) because I just like writing male protagonists and also the story just doesn't work with a female protagonist, given the setting, which I want to be deeply, authentically medieval (like, based on actual medieval history and not other pseudo-medieval fantasies), complete with a pervasive patriarchy and a pre-Enlightenment, pre-feminism mindset. I've always had a thing for writing male protags besides, even back in grade school, probably because I was a tomboy with undiagnosed ADHD, which meant I didn't have the patience for or interest in trying to understand other girls and the complexities of girl socialization. So I didn't want to write about girls or being a girl, and I also wanted to get out of my own head, and writing male characters was an easy way to do that. And even now, my cast skews heavily male, and if I ever finish/publish this thing, some tumblrina will definitely give me poo poo for my gender handling/representation but gently caress 'em.Also, that genderfluid character I mentioned earlier was originally a girl who masqueraded as a boy (I think more for safety/anonymity than being truly genderfluid), but it just didn't work for a multitude of reasons, so I switched him to being male and genderfluid and it, like, solved all my problems and then some. Sometimes a character's gender matters in a fundamental way and you just gotta roll with it.
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Nov 13, 2023 00:39
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Waffle! posted:How do y'all feel about prologues? I heard some people don't even read them. I had an idea for an early peek at one of the creatures in my story. Nothing as encyclopedic as Tolkien, just something scary and weird to grab attention. It wouldn't be a huge time skip, maybe a month or few weeks before the rest of the story. Oh man I love prologues! There are plenty of ways you can use them, like as a means to info dump outside the main narrative to provide the reader with pertinent context for understanding the story/world or as an exciting/compelling cold open to hook readers. It does seem that the cold open style prologues are what's popular right now, and there isn't anything wrong with them (I quite enjoy them), but I think the best and most effective ones of this type use the prologue scene to not only grab the reader's attention but to clue them in to a major element in the story, like a main plot arc premise, an important character (like the big bad), a core theme, a historical event that has major ramifications in the main narrative, or even as a means to establish a vibe or mood. An ineffective prologue is one, to me, that doesn't offer any unique narrative vantage point - it reads like any of the other chapters and might as well just be positioned as the first chapter. Going off that, a prologue is a good opportunity to do something different from your main narrative, like if your story's all third limited, you could do an omniscient overview, use a one-off POV that's not otherwise in your POV cast, you could do epistolary texts or letters, establish a (lightweight) framing narrative, or otherwise fiddle around with a different narrative voice or vibe for it. One of my favorite prologues (in any medium) is the one in Beauty and the Beast (the good one that was nominated for Best Picture, naturally) in which the movie opens like you're being read a fairytale, "Once upon a time" and all, and tells the backstory in stained glass stills. It does such a good job of not only setting up the premise of the story but also setting the mood, starting all beautiful and fairytale-esque and quickly getting darker as we learn how the prince and his castle came to be cursed, and then it merges with the main narrative/animation style when the Beast slashes the portrait of his former human self. It's just soooo good. I know it's film and therefore has imagery and music at its disposal, but I think this sort of stylistic differentiation would still translate well into a written prologue. For my current fantasy project, I'm not doing a full-blown prologue, just a 300-word excerpt from the in-story Bible equivalent that covers an important historical event/foundational tenet of the main religion (as foundational as Jesus dying on the cross in Christianity) that everyone just knows and therefore would feel info-dumpy af integrated into the narrative (why the hell would my character stop and explain to himself how his own religion works at a fundamental level even though he's been steeped in it his entire life?) The information in this excerpt is immediately relevant, as the first chapter covers a religious ceremony that harks back to the historical event, but also, as the story progresses, we learn that this event may not be quite what it seems. For my particular story, the religious text excerpt works way better than, like, covering some past battle or something and in way fewer words. As for other extras like appendices, maps, and glossaries and whatnot, I'm all about that too. Sometimes it's just nice to have extra information and context when reading something - feels more immersive because you know more things that the characters know and would inform their thoughts and actions. I've been developing all sorts of background information that'll probably not ever be directly addressed or even mentioned in the main narrative, but I need it so I can be internally consistent - this is stuff like family trees, profiles and heraldry for the various noble and royal houses, more religious text (there's a Book of Revelation-like chapter in the holy book that I've been working on writing in its entirety so that I can play around with different characters with different motives quoting/cherrypicking/interpreting it in different ways - way easier to do that if I have the whole text at my disposal), lots of notes on customs in various cultures, multiple religions and how they work, and so on. It's a ton of material that would never fit in the story itself, but since I'm putting it all together, why not publish it, either in appendices or on a website?
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Jan 17, 2024 02:24
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:I tend to skim prologues because they sometimes feel like an author going 'no, no, wait, don't leave - yes, my opening chapters are boring, but there's going to be cool poo poo later, look at my worldbuilding/mysteries!' and it's just like, I don't know, maybe construct things so the early chapters are exciting, too? This is pretty much how I ended up handling the prologue expectation gap issue - I've got my 300-word in-world text excerpt to provide some immediately relevant context and then the exciting interesting poo poo starts going down right in chapter one because gently caress if I'm going to have a dozen chapters of superfluous slice of life boringness before poo poo actually happens - I can't stand writing that stuff so I wouldn't expect my readers to read it or enjoy reading it. Stuporstar posted:
Heh, I have thought (and drawn) way too much about the particulars of my dragons (because I care about how their form informs their movements and behaviors and stuff). Overall I could probably pull off an entire wiki. Would be better organized and easier to maintain than a bunch of web pages, probably. One thing I don't have is conlang stuff because even though there are several different languages spoken in this realm with some of the principal characters being at least bilingual (the fantasy trope in which everyone on the entire giant continent speaks "common tongue" or whatever pisses me off - just look at all the languages spoken in Britain in the middle ages and earlier, and then consider how Britain is not at all a large land mass), I am not a linguist or conlanger by any stretch of the imagination and I am not going to pretend I am, so I'm not making up vocabulary or anything beyond establishing a "vibe", so to speak, mostly through giving names in that language a certain sound and a distinct set of rules to follow. I'm a designer, however, which means I've been obsessing over all my little cultures and their general aesthetic - architecture, clothing, armor, hairstyles, everything - and have been working on bolstering my artistic skills (that anatomy drawing video course linked in the resources thread is very good and worth the money, fyi) so I can eventually draw EVERYTHING. Oh, speaking of languages, I'm reminded of something I've encountered in my story and I'm curious about how other folks handle it: When you have a bilingual character and both their languages are being spoken in a scene, how do you differentiate between languages? I'm currently italicizing dialogue in the "secondary" language in the scene, but then in the next scene, the languages switch positions and what was previously the secondary language is now the primary language, so that would change which language is italicized. I'm otherwise explicit about which language a character is speaking if there's potential for confusion, so maybe that's enough? But I can see how that could get people mixed up, especially if they aren't reading closely, and that's an issue in a few scenes where the character isn't assumed to speak the secondary language so they're basically talking about him while he's standing right there, under the assumption that he doesn't understand them. Maybe this is something I can just not worry about until a future revision, but it's kinda bugging me.
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Jan 21, 2024 04:59
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Does the silver for magical purposes need to be pure? If so, does he have the means to refine silver? Because silverware is going to be sterling, which is 7.5% copper (pure silver is too soft to hold up well as silverware). Also, one thing to consider is silver plate. Not sure of the time period/time period analogue, but in households of the nouveau riche/bourgeois wannabes, you're probably going to find silver plate - it looks the same as sterling but is a fraction of the price, due to not actually being very silver (like not enough to be worth stealing and melting down and refining). It is also much lighter weight. I'm sure the character, who's an experienced smith, would instantly be able to tell upon picking a piece of it up. This is probably totally superfluous to the story/lore, but I think it'd be funny if he goes to all the trouble to break into a house to steal the silver and it's all silver plate and he's like "ugh loving posers". source: I live in a Victorian designed and built for bourgeois posers and own a fuckton of silver plate so that I can have fancy dinner parties and pretend to be old money rich But yeah, agreed that it'd be kinda weird for his employer to not supply enough material for him to do his job, forcing him to resort to burglary, so it makes sense that he'd have a side gig making things that are outside the purview/jurisdiction of the school. re: handling bilingual characters/multiple languages being spoken in a scene: Thanks everyone! Lots of good stuff to think about. I will certainly be trying a few methods and thinking about little things like contractions and grammatical structure when it comes to more subtle indications of different languages being spoken. Come to think of it, one thing I've already kinda done (but probably need to reinforce harder in subsequent revisions) is that protag's mother, who speaks the "main" language as her second language, has her dialogue shift vibes depending on which language she's supposed to be speaking - when she's speaking her native language, her dialogue will be very natural and have contractions and whatnot, but when she's speaking the "main" language (her second language), her dialogue becomes more stilted and formal and the contractions go away. I don't actually indicate which language she's speaking in a given scene, but chances are that when she's alone with protag and/or protag's sister, they might be speaking her native language. But I never point it out because so far which language they're speaking in private has zero bearing on the story. I guess it's just a super subtle litter easter egg/detail that's not necessary but I just felt like including. Fluffy Bunnies posted:two things: what hand exercises are you guys doing these days to relieve pain? Wrist curls with a ~5lb dumbbell. Also rock climbing. Not sure about it directly relieving pain, but having stronger, better conditioned wrists/hands/forearms has definitely helped with preventing/reducing soreness I'd get from doing computery stuff/writing by hand. quote:you ever just wanna take a grinder to your brain meats while going "shut up, god drat, I can only write so many words a day" but also absolutely relish the fact that the story is flowing well? Yes. I've kinda been in this state for over a year now and it's still happening. Kind of insane, especially considering how ADD I am. I've never before experienced the combination of sustained obsession in a project for so long and said project working out really, really well. Like, it just keeps effortlessly figuring itself out. My previous major attempt at a fantasy was, in retrospect, a disaster because even though I was passionate about it, it was just a giant plotless flop in which nothing but a bunch of angst and navel-gazing happened because I was unable to resolve a ton of critical story and worldbuilding issues. So it just kinda withered away. Even if I wanted to try to go back to it and attempt to work out the issues, I don't think I could because I wrote it while in suuuuch a different headspace. Maybe in the future I'll strip it for parts and try something new with the aspects that did work in it (a couple of the characters and one or two key concepts).
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Jan 31, 2024 05:01
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Waffle! posted:Thank you for the insight. I think amounts of pure silver would be controlled and recorded by the Academy, so he has to improvise with what he can find elsewhere. That could lead him to getting into business with shady characters, like The Mandolorian working for Beskar steel. I saw a video of coin collectors at a convention, and the major players would use a magnet to test for fakes before they bought anything. I think he'll have to use a Fence to melt down his stolen goods, refine, and craft for him, so that no impurities show up in his work forge. I think a simpler (and probably much safer) option for him would be to have an arrangement at a smithy run by a shady dude in a seedy part of town in which he rents the use of their smelting equipment and pays extra for them to not ask questions. He'd have an alias and disguise, of course. I dunno, the idea of him paying someone to smelt and craft for him while he does the burglary seems backwards - precious metal smelting and magical silver smithing seem like waaaay more expensive services than burglary - I'd sooner expect him to pay a burglar and have an alternate smelting/crafting setup (at a shady smithy or in his basement or something - not sure what sort of facilities/equipment he needs to make the magical weapons after he purifies the silver) to do the highly skilled expensive work himself and not have outsourcing it eat into his profit margin. So to me, it makes sense that if you want him to do his own burglary (of course you do because that's pretty fun), then he'd be handling all steps of the process himself - the fewer other people involved, the greater his personal profit and the lower the chance of one his contacts loving up/loving him over/ratting him out/loving him up/killing him. So yeah, I think that working with a single blacksmith who turns a blind eye would be a better and more logical route than dealing with multiple layers of criminals and also using school equipment to make illicit poo poo - much lower risk all around.
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Jan 31, 2024 16:40
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Re: grammar craft etc: There is already a huge pile of great resources and advice, but I'll go ahead and add my meager contributions anyway. Two things that helped me a lot with grammar stuff and crafting prose at the sentence level are 1) having done a lot of sentence diagramming in middle and high school, and 2) technical writing, namely in the area of writing software SOPs and documentation. Sentence diagramming was already regarded as pretty archaic when I learned it in school (late 90's-early 00's) so I don't know if it's a thing anymore, but I personally found it extremely enlightening. Most of my classmates hated it but I loved it. There is established notation for all the grammatical aspects of a sentence (like subject, verb, object, dependent clauses, etc) and you would take a written sentence and draw it out as an exploded diagram of its structural building blocks. I've lost most of the technique and grammatical vocabulary since then, but it had a lasting impact in how I think about sentence structure, which has been good for my writing. And then doing technical writing was another huge boost. It is VERY different from creative writing in terms of style and goals, obviously. Writing SOPs for complicated processes in B2B/enterprise software forces you to think about how to convey this information in the most direct, succinct way possible so that the people using this software can do their goddamn jobs without harassing support. At a sentence level, it's very simplistic, really just subject/verb/object, prepositions, and maaaybe some adjectives. Individual word choice becomes crucial. There can arise deep considerations and debates around semantics. An extra challenge was that the software I was was writing stuff for was specialized and esoteric with lots of novel entities and processes in it, so I also had to maintain a higher level thread of purpose in these docs, like "what am I even doing and why am I following these steps". Overall, it was a lot of poo poo going into a 250-word set of instructions. I totally hated doing it, but it absolutely made me a better sentence writer. Not that I'd recommend going out and getting a job in technical writing, but maybe like, reading up on the art of technical writing and studying/analyzing written instructions and stuff you find in the wild. Waffle! posted:Problem is now I'm having a Boba Fett/Darth Maul scenario, where a side character is potentially cooler than the main one. My main character is cool, but I haven't put as much thought into her story beats as this one, lol. I have this issue as well (not gonna call it a problem because I don't view it as a problem, just an issue to contend with and otherwise be aware of), where I gave my protag a younger sister, initially as set dressing (if you're part of a medieval royal family you're bound to have siblings as backups in case you die too young), but she quickly spun herself up into a major scene-stealer. I keep giving her more page time because she's really compelling to write about (and funny). But at the same time, in this particular story, she's not main character material. She's almost TOO intense to be the dominant POV, and for her to be the main character, the overarching story would have to be about something else entirely, and given the world I've built up, it'd probably focus on overcoming a deeply entrenched patriarchy and sexism in a pre-Enlightenment society. That would probably be an awesome story, but not the one I want to write right now. Or I'd have to build a different society for her to exist in, where sexism and patriarchy aren't major obstacles, so I can tell the story I want to tell with her as the MC, but then I lose the historically inspired immersive medieval vibes I've been working so hard on researching and constructing. So she remains a principal supporting character with her own arc apart from the MC (one thing I did manage to pull off (I think) is that a ton of her story and character development happens while NOT in direct orbit of the MC). Which means that she can become as awesome as she wants and I'm not concerned about her stealing the show from the MC because for a time they are in separate storylines in totally separate locations. So they each have their own stories and contexts so I never have to temper her awesomeness. Also MC is super cool in his own right, but in a VERY different way. Not sure anymore where I was going with that, but I guess don't rein in cool side characters just because you think they're cooler than your MC. Give them an appropriate stage and outlet for their coolness and let them be as cool as they want. People like reading about cool characters and I don't think it matters which of a story's characters they find the coolest. Otherwise if you try to forcefully designate your MC as the coolest character, it could very well end up like that ReBoot episode in which Enzo wants to be the smartest person in Mainframe so he talks to the processor and the processor indeed makes him the smartest person in Mainframe... by underclocking everyone else, rendering them uselessly dumb.
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Feb 5, 2024 18:30
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FouRPlaY posted:You're reminded me something I was going to say during prologue chat, so I guess I'll do it now. Add mention of Patreon and it's maybe no longer/less out of date.  But yeah, I have a lot of material that could be used for these sorts of purposes, like "deleted scenes" that are more just slice of life/character vignettes that don't serve any purpose other than to flesh out the world. My story takes place over a number of years (I really don't like when fantasy stories take place over an absurdly unrealistically condensed timeframe (looking at you, Inheritance Cycle)), so there are often time jumps of several months between chapters, leaving a lot of room for plot-inconsequential but potentially fun and interesting "side quests" and extra scenes I could write out and have as additional content. I mean, hell, I already have thousands of words and plenty of scenes I'm probably going to cut in future drafts, so all candidates for converting to subscription-only bonus content if/when I publish. I also have plenty of worldbuilding backstories and in-world histories taking on a life of their own. For example, there's a past king who's referenced a bunch because a lot of consequential foreign policy things happened during his reign, whose rise to power I based on that of Edward III of England. That would be a fun as hell spin-off novel to write: a grim coming-of-age story in which a newly crowned boy king has to navigate the realities of ruling a kingdom in turmoil and confront and overthrow his scheming regent uncle who's using him as a puppet but probably wants him dead in the long run. Like, this backstory has zero business being discussed at any length in the main story, hence designs on a spin-off novel. More than just a "deleted scene" extra, but yeah, a fun and awesome side effect of detailed world- and character-building is giving yourself a ton of additional content and off-shoot story ideas to write about. quote:EDIT: I do not know any good resources, otherwise I would have mentioned them. I no longer have ANY idea what the hell textbook we used or if it was worksheets and pamphlets or what, or how to identify a "good" resource. Only thing I remember about it was that it was great for getting me to really analyze and understand grammatical structures.
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Feb 6, 2024 01:23
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Leng posted:Hi thread, it's been a while since I've asked for a blurb crit so here goes. This is for a second book in a series, which I'm probably gonna be pitching as "Six of Crows meets The Well of Ascension" (or maybe a vastly inferior The Monster Baru Cormorant because everybody hates The Well of Ascension). I have two options that I'm debating: Option 1 hands down. Being familiar with the story, the first one feels much more true to what you're going to get. Also it's waaay more compelling to me personally because I love character stories and character strife and conflict. I don't think the focus on Rahelu is necessarily going to have people thinking it's all single POV - she's the main character and predominant POV and so carries the story so it makes sense to keep the blurb streamlined and just talk about her, and plenty of books are multi-POV and still revolve around a single protagonist. All in all, blurb sounds like something I'd read. The second one gives me inspired-by-my-D&D-campaign ensemble cast kinda vibes, as well as the kind of tabletop worldbuilding (the kind I don't like) where there's a lot of emphasis on factions and arbitrary alternate terminology for everything and probably not so great character writing because all the creative energy went to worldbuilding the factions and whatnot (when I know for a fact that there is indeed great, voicey character writing). Basically, it kinda sells the story short, in my opinion, and would likely make me pass on the book if I saw it in the wild. Sailor Viy posted:Also, I think what's missing from both blurbs is something that conveys: "to find the Endless Gate, they have to get on a ship and sail to the edge of the known world". Because that's a key selling point for fantasy series IMO--in the second book I want to see the world open up, geographically as well as politically. You absolutely deliver that in the novel, but it isn't apparent from these blurbs. Definitely agreed on this.
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Apr 6, 2024 04:27
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I'd say any model of laptop that is optimized for portability (most important quality of a writing laptop for me because I like to be able to write from anywhere). Word processing and dicking around on the internet do not require much in the way of computing power or any fancy displays/graphics so you can go with whatever. Though I would recommend something relatively lightweight and portable with good battery life if you like writing while you're out and about/traveling. Personally speaking, I bought a MacBook Air last summer specifically for writing (previous laptop was a 17" beast workstation) and it's been fantastic. I bought a padded case for it so I can toss it in my tote and take it out for the day - generally don't need to worry about charging because the battery life is fantastic. In terms of processing power it's hella overkill for what I do on it but whatever (I was not expecting it to run Minecraft as well as it does). I was anti-Mac for a long time but ended up finally caving and buying one because it was convenient, using one at work familiarized me, I'm still mad at Microsoft for trying to forcibly infect my computers with Win10, and I'm too lazy/addlebrained to deal with Linux. Only downside was that it was expensive.
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Apr 30, 2024 18:02
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Oh man, nothing beats old school Thinkpad keyboards (the pre-chiclet ones that had a deep, almost mechanical-feeling action and also an overlight (which beamed from the top of the screen so you could see your fingers and also notes and stuff - so much better than backlighting). For the best laptop keyboard, see the Thinkpad 701c. Even the new chiclet keyboards on the Thinkpads are pretty good (at least as of... a while ago, which was the last time I bought a Thinkpad). I also liked the keyboard on my HP ZBook (great computer but a beast), and the MacBook also has a good one. Also helps that I can plug into a mechanical keyboard when I'm home (one of those that's made with the old IBM tooling from the 80's).
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Apr 30, 2024 18:47
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