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speaking of great prompts what's everybody's favorite past prompt? could be either your favorite prompt you wrote a story for, or if your ego is an unbridled stallion, your favorite prompt you came up with in true shitposting fashion I have not taken the time to figure out my own answer before posting this question
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Jun 8, 2023 14:40
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Flyerant posted:Any tips on incorporating colors into story? Right now my TD story is like "ohh there was red, green , blue." Seconding a lot of what Azza said, but also you can vary how you reference the colors so that you're not just giving a straight description of "the sky was very azure, so cerulean, boy was it ever cobalt". draw a comparison between the color and something tangible, align it with some sort of emotion, describe how it changes, link it to a character's emotional state somehow... basically you can kind of get a two-for-one deal out of any sort of descriptive language by incorporating some sort of emotional weight into the description of the color. make it work overtime for you, you'll need it with a 500 word limit edit: derp said it better, faster
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Jun 9, 2023 16:12
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Idle Amalgam posted:I will crit your piece. Everybody else has hit on a lot of what I was going to say re: unpacking and applying crits, but I wanted to add that when I first started doing TD I tended to treat it as a sort of laboratory for applying crits, so if I was getting a lot of "the story just happens to the main character" crits I'd try to intentionally write a piece where the main character was the driving force of everything in the story, possibly to the detriment of the entry. I don't know how successful I was in actually doing this, but it was at least the intention I went into some weeks with. My theory was that Thunderdome is kind of uniquely suited to that sort of play and experimentation, and if it didn't really work, well, there's always next week to try something different. I kind of viewed it like when I was first learning to play guitar, and my dad was teaching me how to tune the guitar--he'd tell me that if the string was flat, it'd take too long to nudge it just a little sharper, over and over, until it was in tune, so instead it was quicker to overshoot and sharpen the string too much, then split the difference back down, etc. until you sort of homed in on the right tuning. It's the sort of advice that is useful when you're first learning to tune a guitar, and then eventually you do it enough that you just get the right feel for it. I still sort of think of crits in the same light, if I'm getting the same general responses over and over, sometimes the best from a self-development standpoint is to go too hard towards correcting the issue, then finding the middle ground that works for you, and eventually you just get a feel for what aspects of any given crit are going to resonate with you and be helpful, and similarly I think you develop a feel for how you could adjust your approach to incorporate them. It's probably the most useful aspect, for me, in doing TD multiple weeks in a row.
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Jun 13, 2023 23:14
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Flyerant posted:Thank you! just a heads up, only stuff posted in the main TD thread will get added or logged in the archive, so if you want "credit" for these crits you'll need to repost them there if you don't care about that kind of thing then proceed about your business
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Jun 16, 2023 15:56
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have you told them how really cool and handsome we all are
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Jun 19, 2023 22:04
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Chernobyl Princess posted:Yes I told them they'd fit right in boy are they going to be surprised
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Jun 20, 2023 01:58
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I don't think Thunderdome has any one unified goal but based on my experience, it's a lot about just improving progressively by writing, so while aiming for a theoretically perfect story is a good goal, it's never going to be the likely outcome. You write what you're able to write in the span of a little less than a week, and take another stab at it when you have the chance. Nobody's going to fault you for not trying a little harder because I guarantee you've already tried harder than the lowest-effort entries TD has seen. really the only thing that will get someone to yell at you in TD (at least in a non-kayfabe, earnest way) is entering repeatedly but not really taking any heed of crits, especially if the same issues are being brought up over and over. edit: also I feel like we used to say this a lot but it probably mostly gets said in the discord: as long as you've submitted something borne of genuine effort, you've basically succeeded at Thunderdome. even a loss isn't a failure, the only way to fail is to submit nothing. MockingQuantum fucked around with this message at 15:32 on Jul 3, 2023 |
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Jul 3, 2023 15:30
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sephiRoth IRA posted:Looking back through the thread this is my vibe too. The criticism offered is real, and definitely avoids the hugbox, but isn't mean-spirited. I guess it used to he harsher? there was definitely a lot more kayfabe, and I think there probably was a higher proportion of genuinely aggressive/catty crits but they've never been exactly common, I think. When people say "brutal" I think it's really just shorthand for how drastically different the critiques you get in TD are compared to other writing groups or writing communities online, like nobody is going to take time to seek out something to compliment in your story just for the sake of complimenting something, they're going to focus on what worked and what didn't, and if the story just didn't work very well for them they're going to say so, without sandwiching it between platitudes that aren't actually useful in improving your writing. Which not everybody wants! and that's fine! but I do think the degree to which you'll get your story torn apart has been overblown over the years. It can depend a lot on who's critiquing, the story, the prompt, etc. also one particular core element of TD is that anybody can crit anybody's story, no matter how experienced you are, doesn't matter if you are brand new or if you've lost a billion times or the person you're critting has been doing this for 10 years, and I think that's a big contributor to keeping the crits honest and useful, there's no real pretension about any one person's crits being more valuable or valid than anyone else's. That tends to mean they are all be pretty genuine and useful, and also if you get one that doesn't really make sense to you or help clarify what you were trying to do in a story, well, it's just like your opinion, man. It's possible we don't bang on that particular drum often enough, it is a big part of what makes TD useful to me, personally, and I think more people would crit stories they enjoyed or hated or whatever if they knew they were literally allowed to, implicitly, at any time
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Jul 10, 2023 17:27
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 16:55 |
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I'm glad I jumped back in this week even though I'm pretty certain my entry is a load of hot poop
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Apr 1, 2024 03:36
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