There are maybe twenty regular users here. Just don't bump. Jonsey is right. I myself think you need to practice in posting before you start writing. My mom was into writing a book (And wrote a few) for a bit and they really will throw your stuff away if you don't write it very well*. Unless you are going to publish it your self [pardonme]ha ha ha ha[/pardonme] which is very hard. Are you thinking novel or novella here? How many pages are you envisioning here?
*Unless it is good enough to be written in chalk on a sidewalk by a child with a sidewalk colored piece of chalk held in his cleft lip and still have an orgasmic affect on ANY being to read it.
In this thread, we discuss my ideas for writing a novel.
Moderators: AArdvark, Ice Cream Jonsey
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Too lazy to log in Bond
I was thinking full novel-size here. And, yeah, I see what you're saying. For me, the first two and the last one sentences are always the toughest to write. This includes if I break for five minutes and come back; I'll have real trouble coming up with a couple more sentences at the beginning. But once I get going, I have a tendency to write, and write, and write.
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Debaser
- Posts: 878
- Joined: Tue Jun 25, 2002 9:55 pm
- Location: Aurora, IL
Okay, JB, I am kind of reminded of a younger and/or less filled with self-loathing me and, while I will forever hate and despise you for that, it does put me in some sort of position to offer a couple pieces of advice:
Ideas are easy. Real easy. Myself, I probably get twenty or thirty ideas of one sort or another every week. But most ideas in and of themselves are crap. Read my outline for a Toad comic over in the other base. In my head, that idea seemed (and still seems) really cool and wonderful and fantastic. But on paper (or electrons, as it were) it doesn't look like much.
A building monster, a deconstructivist take on Satan; these things, or things like them, have been done before.
A superhero riding the edge of insanity while hunting down his girlfriend's killers? Old hat before I was born. Dreams actually existing in another dimension? Old hat before people wore hats. Space travel and high technology being lampooned by absurdist humor? At least as old as space itself.
And yet, I have just described the "idea" behind one of my favorite pieces of IF, one of my favorite comics series, and one of my favorite books. The art lies in the artistry.
Worm telling you to practice writing on these message boards is good advice. And I don't just mean for the case of learning how to properly punctuate and format a paragraph.
There's a rythm to writing. Even prose (good prose, at least) has something approximating a poetic meter. Really read the way Robb structures his sentences. Sometimes, the difference between something he writes eliciting a cackle of glee or simply a chuckle is the way an insertion of ", badly," alters the comic pacing. I'm constantly playing Salieri to his Motzart on that front, but I can't tell you how much better I feel about my writing (in the purest sense of the word "writing") since I first played Chicks Dig Jerks half a decade ago.
On a similar note (but one that involves less gobbling of Mr. Sherwin's nob), next time you read a book, pay close attention to the way it's structured. Figure out how characters are introduced, how information is imparted, how time is passed. Find the seams. I have no clue what books we've read in common or I'd provide examples, but when you read a paragraph in a book, try to figure out why it was placed there. Does it provide exposition, illustrate some facet of a character, provide "foreshadowing", what? Productive lines of prose often do two or three things at once, and hopefully manage to be entertaining on top of that.
The key, after that, is rewriting and realizing how much your shit stinks. If, in rereading your work, you encounter a paragraph of yours and you suddenly realize it sounds like absolute shit and you're never going to produce anything decent and everyone who reads this will be secretly laughing at you, then that probably means you're starting to develop an objective opinion of your own work. Rewrite the offending paragraph over and over until you don't feel that way anymore. This is actually a semi-decent way to "gear back up" for that difficult first sentence, since you'll be writing, but won't really be forced to come up with brand new material.
Anyway, that's my take. And it's based entirely upon assumptions since I've never read so much as a sentence of fiction from you, but I think as general advice it's pretty good. It's everything I've managed to come up with in a decade of not quite producing literature.
Ideas are easy. Real easy. Myself, I probably get twenty or thirty ideas of one sort or another every week. But most ideas in and of themselves are crap. Read my outline for a Toad comic over in the other base. In my head, that idea seemed (and still seems) really cool and wonderful and fantastic. But on paper (or electrons, as it were) it doesn't look like much.
A building monster, a deconstructivist take on Satan; these things, or things like them, have been done before.
A superhero riding the edge of insanity while hunting down his girlfriend's killers? Old hat before I was born. Dreams actually existing in another dimension? Old hat before people wore hats. Space travel and high technology being lampooned by absurdist humor? At least as old as space itself.
And yet, I have just described the "idea" behind one of my favorite pieces of IF, one of my favorite comics series, and one of my favorite books. The art lies in the artistry.
Worm telling you to practice writing on these message boards is good advice. And I don't just mean for the case of learning how to properly punctuate and format a paragraph.
There's a rythm to writing. Even prose (good prose, at least) has something approximating a poetic meter. Really read the way Robb structures his sentences. Sometimes, the difference between something he writes eliciting a cackle of glee or simply a chuckle is the way an insertion of ", badly," alters the comic pacing. I'm constantly playing Salieri to his Motzart on that front, but I can't tell you how much better I feel about my writing (in the purest sense of the word "writing") since I first played Chicks Dig Jerks half a decade ago.
On a similar note (but one that involves less gobbling of Mr. Sherwin's nob), next time you read a book, pay close attention to the way it's structured. Figure out how characters are introduced, how information is imparted, how time is passed. Find the seams. I have no clue what books we've read in common or I'd provide examples, but when you read a paragraph in a book, try to figure out why it was placed there. Does it provide exposition, illustrate some facet of a character, provide "foreshadowing", what? Productive lines of prose often do two or three things at once, and hopefully manage to be entertaining on top of that.
The key, after that, is rewriting and realizing how much your shit stinks. If, in rereading your work, you encounter a paragraph of yours and you suddenly realize it sounds like absolute shit and you're never going to produce anything decent and everyone who reads this will be secretly laughing at you, then that probably means you're starting to develop an objective opinion of your own work. Rewrite the offending paragraph over and over until you don't feel that way anymore. This is actually a semi-decent way to "gear back up" for that difficult first sentence, since you'll be writing, but won't really be forced to come up with brand new material.
Anyway, that's my take. And it's based entirely upon assumptions since I've never read so much as a sentence of fiction from you, but I think as general advice it's pretty good. It's everything I've managed to come up with in a decade of not quite producing literature.
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Lysander
- Posts: 1693
- Joined: Tue Jul 08, 2003 12:39 pm
- Location: East Bay, California.
Wow. Thanks a lot for that post, Debaser. That's really helpful there. I've written a lot of short stories in English class, many of them consisting of lotts of people getting real, real dead, and have continued doing so at times that are inappropriate (like, say, math class.) The problem I'm having right now, before I can get started, is trying to mass all of these ideas into one coheesive work of literature that has--hahaha--a plot of some sort. Yeah.
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