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McAnally's (The Community Pub) => Author Craft => Topic started by: meg_evonne on July 08, 2011, 02:23:00 AM
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OK, I can pretend this thread is just for fun and for amusing writing breaks and I hope it will be, or I can tell you it's the truth, which it is.
You know you are in trouble when...
Your antagonist has ten times more depth and twenty times more 'want' then your two protagonists combined. ARGHHH!
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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. And then spend the rest of the day fretting about whether he's done that with work stuff and you missed it.
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The character you're writing about turns and looks back at you like Sonic the Hedgehog, giving you an "okay, now what?" look.
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...you realize that your big, complicated, twisted plot had a very simple solution and your MC could have fixed the whole thing tens of thousands of words ago. Now you either rewrite, or come up with a non-contrived reason why they didn't just do X at the beginning of this whole drug trip.
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...you get about halfway through a revision and realize that the convoluted and nonsensical introduction to several characters can be greatly simplified. As long as you go back and rip out practically everything you've written and just revised. :-\
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...you realize that your big, complicated, twisted plot had a very simple solution and your MC could have fixed the whole thing tens of thousands of words ago. Now you either rewrite, or come up with a non-contrived reason why they didn't just do X at the beginning of this whole drug trip.
Oh, that's easy. Have the character suddenly *facepalm* and tell on himself ("OMFG, it's so damn SIMPLE. I can't f***ing BELIEVE I didn't think of _____ before"), then let everyone laugh hysterically at him. Especially the BBEG. :D
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...you get about halfway through a revision and realize that the convoluted and nonsensical introduction to several characters can be greatly simplified. As long as you go back and rip out practically everything you've written and just revised. :-\
You mean there are people for whom it doesn't work that way ?
("Novels are like fish; pretty much always, at some point in the preparation, you find yourself having to cut off the head.")
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...you realize that your big, complicated, twisted plot had a very simple solution and your MC could have fixed the whole thing tens of thousands of words ago. Now you either rewrite, or come up with a non-contrived reason why they didn't just do X at the beginning of this whole drug trip.
Change the reason and the character so that it's something the character would literally never think of.
Example of this working well is Harry in DB spending half the book wondering what a bunch of numbers mean as a clue to where something is hidden and never thinking of GPS, which works because Harry's interactions with modern tech have been so well set up all along that GPS could quite plausibly never occur to him. I don't think not thinking of GPS would work for most contemporary Westerners, but it's well supported as something Harry specifically would never think of.
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The character you're writing about turns and looks back at you like Sonic the Hedgehog, giving you an "okay, now what?" look.
So I'm not the only one, that is quite comforting. Although I tend to find myself in a position where the characters seem to know exactly what to do, but they won't tell me. And then they complain when I let them do the wrong thing. Stupid characters...
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Yeah, in this particular instance, there were actually three of them there. :D
When the POV character's dialogue typed out as "What do we do next?" and neither of the others had a clue, I knrew it was time to go to bed. ;)
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When writing you know when you're trouble when you have a page count you need to make. You've written the 3rd Act first(Perfectly reasonable way to write), and just finished have the 2nd Act. You have a 2nd Act left, 4 characters to introduce, 1 subplot to still explore and....15 pages left....
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When you have created and deep and beloved character that you really like but you can't find a reason why he is in this story.
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...when you have made a character that everyone absolutely despises and can't come up with a good way to kill them. This has happened to me. Twice.
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Never, never, never work with Aramis, or with a character who is basically an avatar of Aramis.
Because nobody will ever be able to figure out what the ba*d is scheming. Including you. And when he's responsible for the bulk of the plot, readers get unsatisfied at not being able to get what's going on.
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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.)
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What fun to come back and feel the frustration from others. I had several sympathetic smiles and sighs as I re-read this.
this one in particular struck a horrid memory. When you have created and deep and beloved character that you really like but you can't find a reason why he is in this story.
I can't help you with guns, but with horses if you decide to use real 3d natural horse... let me at it. No sweat. Love to help.
You know you're in trouble when you plan on going to see HP and still reading JB books to finish up before the release. *sigh*
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...you realize you've been writing part freaking THREE of a series instead of PART ONE.
Yeah. That happened to me. Ob. Noxious.
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...you realize you've been writing part freaking THREE of a series instead of PART ONE.
Yeah. That happened to me. Ob. Noxious.
ROFLMAO
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ROFLMAO
Yeah. Ha-ha-ha. Ho-hee-ha-ho.
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...when you have made a character that everyone absolutely despises and can't come up with a good way to kill them. This has happened to me. Twice.
ROFL omg I love it. xD Just take a leaf out of Dresden's book. Frozen turkeys coming out of the sky FTW. Also, mutiny is an option. Heck, you could probably go with what people do IRL. Just have every character buy him ignore him until he goes away. Or an even more common and realistic approach. Everyone lets him hang around with them, but then the second he's gone they all spend hours bitching and moaning about how much they hate him.
... Hang on a second. I think your character might be my roommate.
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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.)
This qualifies as one of the simplest and most useful pieces of writing advice i have ever heard. Made me laugh a bit too :D
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Pardon my intrusion, please, but would someone pleast tell me the meaning ot "FTW"?
Thank you!
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"For The Win" ie. random internet speak. Don't ask what ie. stands for, I have no idea ;)
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"For The Win" ie. random internet speak. Don't ask what ie. stands for, I have no idea ;)
id est, Latin for "that is".
("Beware the ids that march.")
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You know you are in trouble when...
Your antagonist has ten times more depth and twenty times more 'want' then your two protagonists combined. ARGHHH!
ok took workshop from u of i. Willing to acknowledge that this male villain, at instructor's suggestion, might be the main character in a tragedy rather than my female protagonist. Disappointing, probably not marketable, but she is right. He's
simply too intriguing, too complicated, and too challenging to not write. That's the writer's life.
[/quote]
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Oh, guilty as charged:
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.
Yes, I use a Glock, and some writer of fantasy had a character mention that "the safety was on" on MC's Glock. For god's sakes the only safety a Glock has is the built in one in the trigger. You can't "turn it on" or off for that matter. I spent an enjoyable 10 min of mockery over that. Lost a lot of respect for the author.
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Oh, guilty as charged:
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.
Yes, I use a Glock, and some writer of fantasy had a character mention that "the safety was on" on MC's Glock. For god's sakes the only safety a Glock has is the built in one in the trigger. You can't "turn it on" or off for that matter. I spent an enjoyable 10 min of mockery over that. Lost a lot of respect for the author.
fwiw in 2003 they added an optional manually activated safety lock in the grip, if you want to interpret it that way. But even that option doesnt really work for the typical "oops the safety" trope, as it intentionally has a protrusion on the grip when activated so that you can feel that it is engaged.
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fwiw in 2003 they added an optional manually activated safety lock in the grip, if you want to interpret it that way. But even that option doesnt really work for the typical "oops the safety" trope, as it intentionally has a protrusion on the grip when activated so that you can feel that it is engaged.
It's very cheering to watch my point being proved before my very eyes.
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It's very cheering to watch my point being proved before my very eyes.
I try ;D
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Two from my own experience: 1) Finished story, off to beta readers. They all want me to write one particular scene - which I am finding very difficult to write. Could be worse, if I had no interest in writing said scene - meeting of two main characters, which at the moment happens off-page...). 2) when you're writing a scene, or worse yet, whole story, and realizing YOU are getting bored...time for a major re-write!
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.)
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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.)
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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*
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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*
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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.
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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
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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!
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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.
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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.
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You know something is wrong when your main character gets drunk without your say so. You would be surprised how often this can happen.
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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.
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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.
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I want to read this. Very much. Let me know if you get it published.
Or just want some betas to read it. :D
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I just started reading the first book of a new series and I already have a list of at least five elements in the world building that are strikingly similar to elements in the story I've been writing. It's truly bizarre. I'm at the point where I just start laughing when a new one crops up. ::)
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Gotta love when you look at everything you've come up with and smack yourself because between when you made them and now you've come across someone doing something incredibly similar. My biggest problem. Brandon Sanderson.
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Closest I've had to that happening was Mark Millar's Superman: Red Son, which is a DC universe Elseworld in which Superman lands in the Ukraine in 1939, is brought up as Stalin's heir and a sincere believer in truth, justice and the Soviet way, and takes over the world in a genuinely benevolent dictatorship which works because he has superhuman intelligence and superhuman benevolence. The pitch I'd been planning had Superman's arrival on Earth be the Tunguska explosion, and was going to be framed by an aging Bruce Wayne sending Lois Lane to interview the Superman, but other than that was very similar, and is now totally pointless. Which is annoying because while most of Red Son is much better than anything I could come up with, there are elements of the end that do not quite work for me in ways that are annoying to me.
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Quantus, Thanks for answering my question (back on page 2).
Saw a Garrison Keillor "Prairie Home Companion" Summer Love concert last week & was blown away by his mastery of timing and pacing and lyrical imagery. He did a couple of erotic bits that delighted me away without ever saying anything explicit. Made me want to get back to writing, which I haven't done much of the past two years.
Must get the house organized first. Am actually beginning to make notable progress in a few spots.
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...when a side project becomes more interesting to you then the main project it was supposed to supplement, despite having next to no conflict.
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...when a side project becomes more interesting to you then the main project it was supposed to supplement, despite having next to no conflict.
Eh, my latest project, whatever it is, is usually the most fun, no matter how much has gone into it or what the last project was... Is that a bad sign?
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you know when your intruble when you start in one tense (the first person)
and end up in a compleatly diffrent one about halth way though (therd person)
or am i the only one who has that problem?
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you know when your intruble when you start in one tense (the first person)
and end up in a compleatly diffrent one about halth way though (therd person)
or am i the only one who has that problem?
Thankfully, it never happens these days, but yes it is a common problem. Perhaps it's more a matter that your mind hasn't decided which POV (and also verb tense) choice to use. In that case, it isn't a problem, they are a wonderful subconscious suggestion that you should consider carefully. Still, it is frustrating as H***, isn't it? I took a class with an editor at Philomel who made that comment to me one time. Once she made it? Things just clicked. My subconscious was more on the money than I was!
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You could be in trouble when you're not really sure who the main antagonist is. (So many to choose from). Another bad sign: you've spent the better part of two months brainstorming an outline, only to discover that it's just not going to work after writing 15 pages of actual prose. >:(
On a high note, as I write this post, I find myself subconsciously answering a lot of the lingering questions in my mind. So, the story's not a complete wash. I just need to weed through the peripherals and find its center.
you know when your intruble when you start in one tense (the first person)
and end up in a compleatly diffrent one about halth way though (therd person)
or am i the only one who has that problem?
I tend to write in the present tense when I'm scrawling down the first version of a scene. I often do this for a half page or so to jump start the scene and try to feel out if it's really worth pursuing.
As far as first vs. third person goes...You might try presenting some first person voice narration as journal entries (or blogs, case files, etc.) in a story that's told from the 3rd person POV. I'd recommend being judicious with it, but I've seen it done before in published novels. It can add an interesting dynamic to a story as the first person is usually more intimate.
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Thanks for all yo help with my tens problem
its hopuly will stop me from changing tenses halth way though :)!
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...a minor character suddenly becomes more interesting than the protagonist and tries to take over.
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^ I call that "fun".
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...a minor character suddenly becomes more interesting than the protagonist and tries to take over.
Gotta love it. OTOH, I didn't write a word two weekends ago, but I WROTE the most incredible full bodied minor character into a inter-related key element. Word count ain't everything, and sometimes, I think it is one of the minor functions of effective story telling.
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When an idea you hoped would be a 5000 word short story is now at 10000 words, and your critique group tells you "you're telling a lot. You need to expand this whole chapter into two or three and show more."
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... you can't write the first chapter. AAAGHHH! It's so frustrating! I've got my outline written, but i can't write the first freakin' chapter! Not even the first page! AGGGGGGGGH!
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... you can't write the first chapter. AAAGHHH! It's so frustrating! I've got my outline written, but i can't write the first freakin' chapter! Not even the first page! AGGGGGGGGH!
Then write the second chapter, and the third, and maybe the fourth. Come back to the first chapter when you feel ready for it.
Craig
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When an idea you hoped would be a 5000 word short story is now at 10000 words, and your critique group tells you "you're telling a lot. You need to expand this whole chapter into two or three and show more."
Sounds like a good problem to have. Didn't the Codex Alera just start as a bet for Jim? Surely he wasn't initially looking to write an entire series of books when the idea first was presented. Keep at it. :)
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you know when you are in trouble when you run out of milk duds and coffee.
:o
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When a scene refuses to behave...
Try to fix it.
Try to fix it.
Try to fix it.
Finally---cut it.
Why couldn't I have figured that out before I spent an entire day on it?
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When you absolutely hate the story you working on, but have to get it finished because the story you really want to work on would totally spoil the plot of it.
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When you realize that you HATE dialog but have to have people occasionally speaking.
::Ponders how hard it would be to turn everyone in the story world into mutes::
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You have written all of the good parts and can't seem to force yourself to write all of the nessasary junk in between.
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^ this. Or when you have left out a scene because you can't figure out exactly what to write / what happened, and all your betavreaders tell you that you really need to write that scene...