When writing, you know you are in trouble when...

[the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh]

As Kathrine Rusch writes in one of her recent blogs, writers need to be storytellers first. If your story is boring, no one will read it beyond a few pages, no matter how finely crafted the words on the paper are... (admittedly, I stop reading even interesting stories if the spelling, grammar, etc. Is really very bad, but if the technical aspect of the writing is average, I'll put up with a certain amount of errors if the story keeps me interested.)

The problem with that is that boring is different for different people.

Me, I get bored with romance. I very easily get bored with action scenes.  I get incredibly bored with unresolved sexual tension, very fast indeed.  What fascinates me, in books as in real life, is people sitting down for long focused chewy discussions of complicated ideas. It's become clear to me that I do have to compromise somewhat on what bores and what interests me personally in order to write books that will appeal to more than about a dozen people.

(Also, any scene can become boring when you have had enough edit passes through it.  When you can recite it by heart standing on your head while juggling knives and flaming torches, singing "Famous Blue Raincoat", and solving simultaneous equations.)

[Figging Mint]

You know you are in trouble when you get two-thirds of the way through writing a movie review and then realise which of your characters is writing it and how much you disagree with him. 

*laughs*

And then spend the rest of the day fretting about whether he's done that with work stuff  and you missed it.

*dies*

[meg_evonne]

As Kathrine Rusch writes in one of her recent blogs, writers need to be storytellers first. If your story is boring, no one will read it beyond a few pages, no matter how finely crafted the words on the paper are... (admittedly, I stop reading even interesting stories if the spelling, grammar, etc. Is really very bad, but if the technical aspect of the writing is average, I'll put up with a certain amount of errors if the story keeps me interested.)

I can take heart then, but it's still better that I keep working on my grammar skills.  *sigh*

[Quantus]

As Kathrine Rusch writes in one of her recent blogs, writers need to be storytellers first. If your story is boring, no one will read it beyond a few pages, no matter how finely crafted the words on the paper are... (admittedly, I stop reading even interesting stories if the spelling, grammar, etc. Is really very bad, but if the technical aspect of the writing is average, I'll put up with a certain amount of errors if the story keeps me interested.)

For me I can dont really mind the minor errors in and of themselves, but if they are glaring, or are legitimately making it difficult to read or interpret, it will destroy the rhythm of my read enough to turn me off the book.  If it engaging enough and I can still decipher the text without significant extra effort, I can forgive quite a bit of spelling/grammar as just a stylistic quirk of the author.  But if Im constantly having to stop and reread the sentence to figure out what exactly its trying to convey, it knocks me out of the story head space, like a loudmouth at a movie theater.

[Bearracuda]

like a loudmouth at a movie theater.

"He's BEHIND you.  He's BEHIND you.  Oh, that's just ridiculous.  They just shot HOW many bullets at that guy and he didn't get hit?  WAIT, GUYS!  I THINK THAT'S DANE COOK!!"

I wanna reach over and smack the guy across the head.  XD

[meg_evonne]

Ditto on the loud mouth, of course, that person the last few times I took my 80 year old mother to the movies----was HER! I swear, I'm never taking her again to anything....  Worse than a crying baby! I know they were slower paced sort of arty films, but...

I fear that I am extremely critical of errors in published books. If I run across them, they are bad. If I found them in an e-book, I'd be even more critical. I do hold the written language in great admiration, even when I fail badly myself.

What I've become even worse at forgiving is the blatant repetition of backstory and plodding, non-ending boring plots and characters that have lost all their luster--all within the same book! One of my favorite female authors (not Shannon, not Cat) broke my heart. (cough, cough, C cough V) Her last book was so-so. This recent one? I still can't decide if I should send her a note and ask if she had read it out loud to herself. I mean, how could she have missed it--unless she just doesn't care any more. These big named authors that start a series and then have fresh new writers write for them--maybe that would be a good idea for one writer at least!  Where were her betas? Where was her professional in-house editors? Where was her agent? Maybe she didn't have the power to postpone like Jim did. Maybe the time pressures of releasing NYTime Best Seller annually just become too much?   *Arghh*  One more reason to NOT get published until I know that won't happen to me!

[Aminar]

You know you are in trouble when your narrative requires you to talk about guns or horses.  Because of all subjects, guns and horses are the ones where it is least possible ever to do enough research that an expert specialist will not find some technical error to argue with you over.

One of the best pieces of writing advice I have ever heard was that, if you really want to give a character a gun, whatever it is, describe it as "modified".  If it's a "modified" 1911 Colt, you have a getout clause for deciding it takes 72-round magazines if the story wants.  I kind of took this aboard when it came to horses as well, which is why in the four stories of mine that have characters being mounted for any length of time, in one of them they ride a form of diatryma (terror bird), in one of them the alien animal that serves as a steed is very much not a horse, in one of them the horses are virtual simulations, and in one of them the only horse to appear on-screen has at least a quarter demonic ancestry. Modified horses ftw.

The great thing about writing far-future space opera is how easy it is to avoid horses. (Also, unless like a number of published writers you have a peculiar hang-up with wanting to recreate Napoleonic battles in space, anything to do with sailing ships, which are a good candidate for a third subject on which it is impossible to do enough research.)  And in the central culture of the one I am writing now, they have spent sufficient of their history on spacecraft with hulls that using a fire-arm inside could easily puncture that there is a cultural revulsion at the very thought of projectile weapons as visceral and intense as any culture has ever had for any concept (think of the thing that revolts you most in the world of anything any human being has ever done, and that's how they feel about fire-arms); they use other weapons instead, which I can make up safe, in the knowledge that nobody's going to quibble with me on the precise technical details of antimatter-sparked hand-held fusion reactors based on personal experience.

(There are two incidental cultures that use firearms.  They have deep and bitter divisions over terminology, so that what one lot calls a magazine, the other calls a clip, and either side will argue their point endlessly. This stops me actually needing to remember which is which.)

Got another one.  Dinosaurs.  If you talk about dinosaurs odds are you'll get something wrong. And it's harder to modify dinosaurs.

[the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh]

Got another one.  Dinosaurs.  If you talk about dinosaurs odds are you'll get something wrong.

I disagree here, actually.  Dinosaurs are a field where there are differences in interpretation of the fossil evidence in the scientific community, which probably won't be definitively resolved any time soon, so you just pick one that suits what you want to do in your story (I find the approach taken in Robert Bakker's The Dinosaur Heresies very appealing, though that's long enough ago that a fair bit of what he says is now mainstream rather than heretical) and then keep an eye on the literature for anything you need to take into account; anything really groundbreaking and new about dinosaurs will be in New Scientist or Scientific American in fairly short order. 

And it's harder to modify dinosaurs.

In what sort of setting ?  If you want to time-travel back to the Jurassic, you can get away with a small degree of variation on the grounds that the fossil record we have is incomplete and can be read different ways (even with a fairly well-characterised dinosaur like Tyrannosaurus, estimates of the weight of an adult vary between four and eight tons, and that's looking at the same skeletons).  If, like me, you're interested in putting dinosaurs in a space-opera setting, somebody has to have intervened to put them there, and that same someone can have modified them if need be. 

[Nickeris86]

You know something is wrong when your main character gets drunk without your say so. You would be surprised how often this can happen.

[Aminar]

I disagree here, actually.  Dinosaurs are a field where there are differences in interpretation of the fossil evidence in the scientific community, which probably won't be definitively resolved any time soon, so you just pick one that suits what you want to do in your story (I find the approach taken in Robert Bakker's The Dinosaur Heresies very appealing, though that's long enough ago that a fair bit of what he says is now mainstream rather than heretical) and then keep an eye on the literature for anything you need to take into account; anything really groundbreaking and new about dinosaurs will be in New Scientist or Scientific American in fairly short order. 

In what sort of setting ?  If you want to time-travel back to the Jurassic, you can get away with a small degree of variation on the grounds that the fossil record we have is incomplete and can be read different ways (even with a fairly well-characterised dinosaur like Tyrannosaurus, estimates of the weight of an adult vary between four and eight tons, and that's looking at the same skeletons).  If, like me, you're interested in putting dinosaurs in a space-opera setting, somebody has to have intervened to put them there, and that same someone can have modified them if need be.

True, but dinosaur nuts are picky bastards.  Not that that's going to stop me.  The biggest thing I've seen is really just getting what dinosaurs were when wrong, I've been real careful to pick late cretaceous.

[Bearracuda]

If, like me, you're interested in putting dinosaurs in a space-opera setting

I want to read this.  Very much.  Let me know if you get it published.

[Quantus]

I want to read this.  Very much.  Let me know if you get it published.

Or just want some betas to read it. 

[Dresdenus Prime]

When writing, you know you are in trouble when your 1 year old son loves to attack you and distract you the moment you sit down to write lol.

Also, for me this is kind of humorous, but all my life I've never been a huge reader. I started consistanly reading books (The Dresden Files of course) around the time White Night was released in Hard Cover. In the past year, I have read more books than I have in my entire life previously. The downside to this is...I am finding so many books that I'm enjoying that at times when I should be writing I'm reading.

Currently I'm enjoying...

Twenty Palaces by Harry Connolly
Hard Spell by Justin Gustainis

Then I decided I wanted to try a couple books outside the supernatural

The Alex McKnight series by Steve Hamilton
The John Rain series by Barry Eisler

Then of course I can't be reading without a fantasy series, which of course is the Game of Thrones series.

[Aminar]

I want to read this.  Very much.  Let me know if you get it published.

Anne Mcaffrey did it once if you haven't found it.  I think it's Dinosaur Planet and return to Dinosaur Planet or the like.

[the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh]

I want to read this.  Very much.  Let me know if you get it published.

Trust me, if I get anything published, this whole forum will know about it.  In large letters.