Writing Tips Thread
- Thread starter Navarro
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Deleted member 88
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Not sure how much advice I can give, except getting tone right is really important, tone plays into the character’s POV.
I’d say my Luke chapter in WGMC is one of my finer examples of effective tone in POV.
I’d say my Luke chapter in WGMC is one of my finer examples of effective tone in POV.
D
Deleted member 88
Guest
I think to have a mental outline, a course I want things to go.
It’s broad and can accommodate changes, but it’s got enough content to work under.
It’s broad and can accommodate changes, but it’s got enough content to work under.
Doomsought
Well-known member
Do not counter power with power. That path only leads to the ridiculousness of the lensman arms race. Counter power with consequences. Think about how characters would work around an irresistible force rather than meet it head on.
Lord Sovereign
The resident Britbong
Well we've already had some story advice, so here's a video I found that's hopefully useful for prose.
The channel in question does seem to be quite left leaning, but her advice on prose (the technical stuff) is entirely sound. For example, taking the "ing" sound out of my work as much as possible makes it sound quite a bit better.
The channel in question does seem to be quite left leaning, but her advice on prose (the technical stuff) is entirely sound. For example, taking the "ing" sound out of my work as much as possible makes it sound quite a bit better.
Bear Ribs
Well-known member
I had to laugh when I'd hit 4:00 and she mentioned how her advice would help you trim the fat, when I'd gone in 4 minutes already without anything on actual writing, just her yammering about how amazing her advice is. It is good advice once she gets there but it tends to drive me crazy how much Youtubers like their cruft and padding their videos. I almost always have to skip the first five minutes or so to get to anything meaningful.
Lord Sovereign
The resident Britbong
Is it me, or does this just seem common to the entire YouTube writing advice scene? Really useful advice and all, but could they just get to the bloody point?
Bear Ribs
Well-known member
Very much. I see people post Youtube videos all the time and then I click and there's ten minutes of introductions and chatting and they still haven't gotten to anything useful and I close it. Clownfish TV has reached the point where I auto-close anything I accidentally open of theirs because there'll be maybe three minutes of useful information buried under 21 minutes of chatter. I greatly prefer my information in written for these days as the format simply lets me get to the useful part more easily that any video does.
I suspect it's actually a result of Youtube's algorithm. I've heard it heavily favors videos of certain lengths so successful creators try to pad their videos to those lengths. I'm not certain this is the case, however it makes sense with what I've seen.
Doomsought
Well-known member
21 minutes of chatter is acceptable in a multi hour live-stream you play in the background while you work. Not so much for a news report. Format matters.
Zyobot
Just a time-traveling robot stranded on Earth.
Unless you have a good reason to take liberties, make sure your characters' dialogue and inner thoughts make sense. That is, similar to a point I made elsewhere, have their speaking style and thought process match their characterization, so that some generic fourteen-year-old who you incorporate into your story doesn't sound like an author or particularly attentive diarist (rather than, y'know, an average teen just trying to get by in school).
If, on the other hand, they're basically a Jimmy Neutron expy who already has ten Ph.D.s or something like that, then there's more wiggle room. Such a characterization itself sounds awfully Mary Sue to me, though that's probably a topic for a different post.
If, on the other hand, they're basically a Jimmy Neutron expy who already has ten Ph.D.s or something like that, then there's more wiggle room. Such a characterization itself sounds awfully Mary Sue to me, though that's probably a topic for a different post.
gral
Well-known member
AFAIK, it is indeed a result of YouTube's algorithm. IIRC, it tends to favor videos of more than 10 minutes.
Zyobot
Just a time-traveling robot stranded on Earth.
Another thing I just thought of is keeping the text focused on the matter at hand, deviating only a moment or two so that readers aren't so absorbed in all the side-details that they forget the bigger picture.
That's a piece of personalized feedback I received on a short story I typed up for my creative writing class in high school, since I got so caught up in detailing the scenery and every little gesture the characters made that it ran upwards of a thousand words. I'm still a stickler for rich description, so protracted write-ups are something I'm prone to in any case (which often causes me to forget that advice mid-way through writing
).
That's a piece of personalized feedback I received on a short story I typed up for my creative writing class in high school, since I got so caught up in detailing the scenery and every little gesture the characters made that it ran upwards of a thousand words. I'm still a stickler for rich description, so protracted write-ups are something I'm prone to in any case (which often causes me to forget that advice mid-way through writing
).
Navarro
Well-known member
Another thing I just thought of is keeping the text focused on the matter at hand, deviating only a moment or two so that readers aren't so absorbed in all the side-details that they forget the bigger picture.
That's a piece of personalized feedback I received on a short story I typed up for my creative writing class in high school, since I got so caught up in detailing the scenery and every little gesture the characters made that it ran upwards of a thousand words. I'm still a stickler for rich description, so protracted write-ups are something I'm prone to in any case (which often causes me to forget that advice mid-way through writing
I kinda feel I have the opposite problem, that is, not describing enough.
Zyobot
Just a time-traveling robot stranded on Earth.
I wonder if one possible solution is to think up a list of things in whatever scene you're writing--the dishes at the kitchen table, what's going through the guests' minds, the various subjects they'd probably discuss out loud--and pick from them, depending on what's most "appropriate" to focus on? Then, compose the actual sentences and arrange them in a logical order, maybe interspersing some clerkly words every so often (unless it's more appropriate to use plain English, such as for a kids' book).
Granted, I'm not sure whether professionals or more experienced writers would agree with that advice; I am, admittedly, an amateur when it comes to creative writing. Still, it sounds reasonable enough to me, so I don't think there's much harm in trying and seeing the results for oneself. Hopefully, I'm not too far off the mark with my two cents.
UltimatePaladin
Well-known member
Honestly, it’s a back and forth process. I find it easier to manually retype or rewrite a story chapter at times - as I do, I’ll end up making small edits along the way when I come across a section that doesn’t flow right. As part of that, I’d end up either cutting details where they’re just fat, or adding them to places that are more barren, otherwise.
Doomsought
Well-known member
Tropes/archetypes are a tool that lets you reduce exposition. Whenever you invoke a n archetype, you bring in between a paragraph and a page worth of description, which you can add more details to by describing how the situation or character diverges from the trope.
The problem that comes from tropes is not that they are bad, but if you rely on them to heavily you will forget to add the details that give the character life and originality. You should think of archetypes as a prefabricated frame for a house. They make building it faster, but you still need to add siding, drywall, and utilities to finish the house.
The problem that comes from tropes is not that they are bad, but if you rely on them to heavily you will forget to add the details that give the character life and originality. You should think of archetypes as a prefabricated frame for a house. They make building it faster, but you still need to add siding, drywall, and utilities to finish the house.
Tropes and archetypes are useful because they reflect reality in some way. They're actually how we see the world. When information is scarce or coming in too fast to process, our brains do a fast-approximation and fit the people and places around us into iconography drawn from our past experience. If you've seen one bearded, bald-headed biker dude, your brain makes a fuzzy image of that, and then fits all the other biker dudes you meet into that iconography. This iconography is overwritten as more data comes in, and that biker dude becomes Dave Jorgenson, the Weekend Warrior with strong opinions on barbecue sauce, but the iconography remains in your head. The tropes and archetypes become tools in the toolbox your brain uses to understand the world.
The amazing thing about fiction is that it allows us to gain understanding of new archetypes without experiencing them directly. We live the lives of fictional characters, and because those characters and the stories they inhabit reflect reality, we gain an understanding of the real world.
This might sound outlandish because fiction itself can be pretty outlandish, but fiction reflects reality, and you know it reflects reality because it gets popular when it resonates people and it gets iterated upon as people take the tropes out of the original story and use them to tell entirely new stories. That only happens when a trope contains an element of truth to it.
Lets take an extreme example: The mad scientist. For decades, popular culture was obsessed with the mad scientist. From when Mary Shelley penned the adventures of Doctor Frankenstein and HG Wells wrote about Dr. Moreau to the schlocky B-movies of the 1950s, the mad scientist was all the rage. And while there were no scientists turning corpses into jigsaw puzzles, the universities were filled with scientists and academics who insisted that God was dead and it was time to make the Modern Man, and scientists were dreaming of superweapons that previous generations had never dreamed possible, and more academics dreaming up new ideas and new inventions that would forever change the world.
I wonder if the Mad Scientist trope declined in popularity because we reached the point where we could no longer remember the world that was, and smart scientists with big ideas became passe.
Anyhow, fiction becomes trope-ey for two reasons. The first is when the author doesn't fill in the details. A mad scientist is just a mad scientist with a laboratory, and there's no detail to make him different and no effort to integrate him into the setting. Lacking that detail, he's just a plot device, not a human being. The other reason is when a trope gets so debased, it doesn't feel real anymore. It reflects some wishful reality that doesn't fit human experience. You see this more in woke or utopian fiction, where the author isn't concerned with telling a story so much as pushing an ideology.
Bear Ribs
Well-known member
Tropes are useful tools but only if you know why the trope exists. Once you know the reason for a rule or trope you can break and reuse it at will because you can compensate for why the rule is there in the first place. A good example is Watership Down, which on the face of it should not work at all, it's a serious, adult, bloody epic story where all the characters are cute fluffy bunnies. It works because the author expertly compensated for all the rules that kind of bizarre mashup breaks.
My go-to example to explain this to people is the broken ferris wheel. If you run into a ferris wheel in media that has the slightest bit of action, really any story except a couple on a date, the ferris wheel will almost certainly break and lead to an action sequence. You'd think ferris wheels are the most dangerous ride in the world going off fiction, they break more than any other ride. If you just take the trope at face value without knowing why, you'll have a broken ferris wheel in your story and be cliche.
But why do ferris wheels always break? Because ferris wheels are very tall, which creates a dramatic sense of danger; and also very slow moving with a climbable structure, so just about any kind of hero can do something about it. If the ride was, say, a teacup ride there's no sense of danger, the riders could just jump off the teacup. If you had a runaway roller coaster doing 100kph or a broken zipline ride no kind of hero without super-speed or flight would be able to solve the problem. Once you understand why ferris wheels always break, you can avoid putting yet another cliche ferris wheel in your story by finding something else that has the same elements of danger and being solvable, such as a paint scaffold on a skyscraper or a burnt out husk of a building that's coming apart from the weight of a kid who climbed onto it. You avoid cliche and still tell the story by internalizing the reason instead of copying the event.
Note that most of the stuff on TV Tropes aren't actually tropes, they're extremely vague listings of things like "a character has a whip" put together by people with no clue what that means or implies. Trying to use their ideas of tropes will not produce a good story.
My go-to example to explain this to people is the broken ferris wheel. If you run into a ferris wheel in media that has the slightest bit of action, really any story except a couple on a date, the ferris wheel will almost certainly break and lead to an action sequence. You'd think ferris wheels are the most dangerous ride in the world going off fiction, they break more than any other ride. If you just take the trope at face value without knowing why, you'll have a broken ferris wheel in your story and be cliche.
But why do ferris wheels always break? Because ferris wheels are very tall, which creates a dramatic sense of danger; and also very slow moving with a climbable structure, so just about any kind of hero can do something about it. If the ride was, say, a teacup ride there's no sense of danger, the riders could just jump off the teacup. If you had a runaway roller coaster doing 100kph or a broken zipline ride no kind of hero without super-speed or flight would be able to solve the problem. Once you understand why ferris wheels always break, you can avoid putting yet another cliche ferris wheel in your story by finding something else that has the same elements of danger and being solvable, such as a paint scaffold on a skyscraper or a burnt out husk of a building that's coming apart from the weight of a kid who climbed onto it. You avoid cliche and still tell the story by internalizing the reason instead of copying the event.
Note that most of the stuff on TV Tropes aren't actually tropes, they're extremely vague listings of things like "a character has a whip" put together by people with no clue what that means or implies. Trying to use their ideas of tropes will not produce a good story.
Navarro
Well-known member
This site is useful for writing mil-SF and military fiction in general, I've referred back to it a couple of times:
www.milsf.com
www.milsf.com