Broken_Erika
Play with me.
*pulls out high-pressure fire hose*
Wanna Drink? Open Wide!
Wanna Drink? Open Wide!
The very many questions-not-worth-their-own-thread question thread XXXI
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Broken_Erika
Play with me.
Synobun
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That is fairly vague. What do you feel, in particular, is lacking in your stories?
warpus
In pork I trust
I bought a book called "How not to write a novel"
It has the opposite approach than usual. I haven't gone through a lot of it yet, so I don't know how much content there is to make stories more interesting.. but there's 200 examples of things not to do, each one with a writeup, so you'd think there's stuff there about common "this story isn't interesting at all" types of pitfalls - and how to avoid them. I haven't read any of this book yet but it gets good reviews, people seem to think it's a good overview of what a good story should contain (by virtue of pointing out what it should definitely not contain).. So maybe worth checking out
It has the opposite approach than usual. I haven't gone through a lot of it yet, so I don't know how much content there is to make stories more interesting.. but there's 200 examples of things not to do, each one with a writeup, so you'd think there's stuff there about common "this story isn't interesting at all" types of pitfalls - and how to avoid them. I haven't read any of this book yet but it gets good reviews, people seem to think it's a good overview of what a good story should contain (by virtue of pointing out what it should definitely not contain).. So maybe worth checking out
schlaufuchs
Break My Heart
Read a lot. Watch a lot of movies. Really think about what those things you're consuming that you like are doing structurally that make you like them. Read your own work a lot and really scrutinize what works and what doesn't work in your stories. Show your work to a lot of people and ask them a lot of questions about what works and doesn't work in your stories. Practice A LOT. Writing is a skill, and as with any skill, it takes thousands upon thousands of hours of mindful practice and reflection to achieve competency.
Observation in general is also really key. To make interesting art you have to bring new ideas in to draw from. Sergei Eisenstein got the idea for his famous stairs scene in Battleship Potemkin (perhaps the most iconic scene in all of silent cinema) from observing a cherry pit fall down a flight of stairs. Busby Berkeley took a hot bath every morning and drew inspiration from the geography of the tiling in his bathroom when designing dance choreography for his films. Fritz Lang was the son of an architect and drew heavily from that background when designing the cityscape in Metropolis.
Beyond that there's not much that can be said without you being more specific about what you think you need to improve on.
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GenMarshall
High Elven ISB Capt & Ghost Agent
Mostly, everything. Since they're not very interesting to my audience.
May I offer your own signature back at you?
"Ultimately, I really make these comics to please myself. The rest of you are just along for the ride. If you try to please other people, then you'll never be happy with what you've done." - David Morgan Mar
Hygro
soundcloud.com/hygro/
Art is a function of your practiced craft, your disinhibition, and your inspiration. How much energy and stimuli you take in will translate to what comes out.
Your scenes ought to be linked by the words "but" or "therefore," but never "and then." That's what Trey Parker says.
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EgonSpengler
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Is Total War: Warhammer a good Total War game? Civ VI is just making me angry now, so I need a new strategy game. I like Warhammer well enough but I'm not nuts for it, so this would need to be a decent game on its own merits.
I haven't played it, but I watched this YouTuber named Pixelated Apollo who dedicates his entire channel to the Total War series. He has done some videos of it and he has a pretty negative opinion of it. His biggest complaint seems to be that siege battles have become too simplified and any tactical aspect of them is gone. The campaign also seems to be more linear and story-based than in previous Total War games.
Samez
Emperor
IMHO there are three major motivators in stories, which can be mixed to different degrees: violence, love/sex and curiosity. A thriller will probably contain a lot of violence mixed with curiosity, a love story will obviously have less of those and more love/sex ans a travel log might only satisfy curiosity. There are also "minor" motivators like humor but it is hard to construct a story around that. In the end you should know what kind of story you want to tell / what kind of motivations you want to satisfy.
My geography instructor in college was pretty accepting of people eating in class... particularly when the class was in the late afternoon/early evening. He said he didn't mind people stopping by the cafeteria and bringing their lunch or supper. Even during exams, that was okay by him.
Not so the other instructors. One of them snarked at me for bringing kleenex into the exam. I informed him I had a cold and had reached the chronically-runny nose stage.
Is this the one? https://www.amazon.ca/Write-Novel-T...6004&sr=8-1&keywords=how+not+to+write+a+novel
@CivGeneral: One of the things David Gerrold (the Star Trek scriptwriter and novelist who invented Tribbles and went on to have a career in writing) said in one of his nonfiction books was that if you want to be a writer, the first thing you need to do is write.
You also need to read - you need to be somewhat familiar with what is already going on (or has gone on) in your chosen genre(s). That way you can avoid the appearance of plagiarism (as happened to a friend of mine when she entered the short story contest at a science fiction convention one year; her story ended in a scene so similar to a scene in Carl Sagan's novel Contact, that the judges accused her of plagiarism... and she had never read his novel).
Camp NaNoWriMo is coming up in less than 2 weeks (see the thread in the Arts & Entertainment forum). That offers people a chance to write, and while the emphasis is on length rather than quality (nobody at the NaNo organization reads the entries; winners are determined by automated software that calculates whether or not you've reached your stated word count goal), it's excellent practice in disciplining yourself to write every day.
For example, if you choose a story length of 10,000 words in 30 days, that's just 334 words per day. I can knock that out in 20 minutes. You very likely write much more than that every day just posting on the forum.
Ah, yes, at uni they don't mind so much as long as you do not disrupt the class. Mostly.
My goal is to try to do 400 a day, every day.
I suspended that for the past 2-3 weeks because I had exams to deal with. But I still jotted down thoughts and so on -now to get back on the campaign trail.
warpus
In pork I trust
Yep, that's the one!
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