Debatably off-topic, but I thought I should mention this.

If you have no inspiration and no desire to write (but you also want to)

try this website


Basically you have 5 minutes to write, and if you haven't written a word for five seconds, all your progress is deleted.

I swear I've never written this fast in my life.

I would recommend at least giving it a try.

 

Thank you but no thank you. I've lost my progress only a few times in the past from regular errors and it has infuriated me to no end. I've also seen what happens when I turn off my brain and just crash out words across the page, and it is a very, very ugly thing. No interest in combining those two disasters into one. But kudos to you for finding the process meaningful.

EDIT: Okay, gave it a shot. Looks like you can get your words back at the end? Maybe not so bad then. Still, I prefer taking a bit more time to feel out what I'm writing as I go rather than just rush-rush-rush.

 

No different from most DLPers, I've read my fair share of how-to writing books. Naturally, I'm curious-- which writing tip has had the most impact on you? Which piece of advice continues to stick with you beyond the usual 'adverbs are evil'?

My tip answers (for me) the question of 'what is good writing?' Why can I read a cliche story with uninspired characters and terrible grammar all the way through, but sometimes, when there's this genius of a writer who dishes out the big boy creativity, the complex characters, the brilliant plot, the good pacing, The Prose(tm)... I find myself skimming? The second story is superior to the first in every way, but I didn't finish story two. I finished story one. If I had to rank both, is story one better? What was it that kept me reading?

It is 'shape'. When someone is a natural storyteller, what they are innately good at is shape.

Here's a quote from The Book of Skin by Steven Connor, which is not about writing at all, but the metaphor is there.

Abstract, but something clicked for me. People parrot that it's better to write out a first draft and then re-write it til it's crispy, but this excerpt is what actually stopped me from stressing over prose (if you want to dive into that all-consuming abyss, look up 'assonance'). Words on their own are devoid of life. A writer gives them life. Movement, purpose, shape. With a lot of on-paper great stories, I've found that, for whatever reason, the blood's not flowing and heart-flesh is peeking out the ears. Keeping the reader tabbed in is more valuable than including that gratuitous description of an Elizabethan chair, or that paper-thin "characterization" subplot (you know what I'm talking about), or that action scene whose only purpose is to show-off that you can write one. Fluff should emphasize the shape, not distort it.

Anyway. This is rather subjective and I'm sure someone will come in with a wildly different, but equally valid opinion. This helped me though.

So what about you guys? What piece of advice resonated with you?

 

This is a tricky question, there are many things that resonated with me on my first reading them, titbits that felt like light through crystalised amber, perfectly clear on reading it but that then slip away or that I can't always apply well.

The quote above, and Neil Gaiman's 'it's like driving through fog with one headlight' regarding creating a story really stick with me. When I try and do anything more than a <20k short story I always flounder. Still that said, there are a few things that have stuck in my head, which feel fundamental and which I do carry with me when I try and write, even if perhaps it's not reflected in the end product.

The first is from Amy Weldon, and it's essentially what Ched describes regarding linking or active description, except it calls it editorial language vs sensory language, so I won't rephrase that.

The second is from Rob McKee's 'Story' which I read after 'The Anatomy of Story', and I feel was when 'it' finally clicked for me, and writing to a template like Harmon's Story Circle, or the Monomyth, or Snyders 'Save the Cat' stopped being an explicit method of writing. It felt like I grasped the underpinning logic that they were trying to create and it was macroscopic and microscopic. The macroscopic was that internal character arc is the 'real' story, and the external events are just the structure you create to make sure your character begins one way and ends another. The internal creates the external (the plot events that you actually write with those story templates).

There was a part I can't find now, that spoke about blind 'pattern repetition', this is pretty similar:

This was the sort of thing that helped me feel my above paragraph was a revelation. That I had previously written 'Harry fights Voldemort and uses his new magic to cause rocks to fall and every one dies' in my plans, that it had all been 'plot' focused, where it should in fact be about what the specific pattern of story I wanted to tell was. Consciously.

The other part, the smaller part, was how to figure out how to make scenes that have a point. And that was all about value change and the gap between reality, and expectation, and the subsequent attempts to course correct by your character creating bigger and bigger risks for them, and thereby showing us, the reader, what they value at their core. Pressure equals deeper more 'true' character choice. The more you push your characters to extremes in order to show us their values the more successful it feels, to my understanding.

You have to overcome your own conservative nature, to have your character act sensibly and live easily. You need to look at what they're in and how you can push the left and right side of their life further from each other, to make that charge, that differential, wider. For the pressure. Does that make sense?

From the same book, it's described this way:

Bold emphasis is mine.

It's a bit pompously written but the truth is there, and here's 500 days of summer.


The other thing that helped me were the central chapters of the otherwise tedious and not re-readable John Yorke's 'Into the Woods: A Five-Act Journey into Structure' or something like that.

He talked about Syd Field's three act structure: beginning, middle, end. He talked about the saggy middle and what an 'Act' is, and I felt like it clicked for me then. I'd always wondered why people broke it up in certain ways, and why the midpoint wasn't an act turn etc. etc. He argues that five acts made more sense, and that acts were goal mutation as the journey and the character changes through discrete points, points where their journey is now not 'go-backable' to the last act's status quo, and that act number wasn't really fixed and that act number was just an organic macroscopic growth out of the basic scene that you get more of as your story gets longer. That a one act short story is one thing and that a five act Shakespeare play essentially the same thing. That the same pattern is replicated in a scene and builds and builds until you have a massive story with distinct turning points, that resonates because you've repeated the same pattern over and over again in bigger and bigger waves. But it's all the same thing.

The important take away was that it made me think of my story as a big story, and then each little part of it as a little story. Just repeat the same steps, over and over again, for each little section, and then tighten it up to make it one long straight line, once you're done.

Oh, lastly, (because I'm not transcribing any more quotes), the last most important thing is the scene purpose. Something has to change. As simple as that. Someone starts off with a certain Value: they're happy, they're sad, they're free, they're rich. The value that relates to their goal or that is compromised by their obstacle is then inverted by scene end. Positive to negative, or negative to positive. That's how I write my bullet point scene plans.

[Wednesday 11th November 2010 (negative to positive, proactivity) Taylor is at school and taking the abuse of bullies and a bully calls her pathetic, she decides that night that she will complete her costume and go out.]

That was the bullet point for my recent story opening scene at the first stage of making it.

So yeah, bit of a ramble, but that's my answer.

 

Has anyone got any examples of writing a character with depersonalisation? I unintentionally wrote a scene like that while trying to write confusion in battle, and then when I realised what I had done tweaked it a bit and ran with it. I was hoping to see other's examples though as I'm worried the dulled reality might be a bit difficult for readers to grasp.

 

Sometimes we enjoy waxing poetic to you about how great some of the authors on DLP are. You might be thinking that the advice we received could not possibly merit that kind of sanctification of the people who gave it to us.

But you - you reading this - you simply don't understand. Some of the heroes we describe aren't actually as good as we say.

They're much, much better. If you knew how much better you would be terrified.

That post above is my contribution: advice I received from swim about the present tense. There's more good stuff in the thread from a bunch of people. (we miss newcomb we miss newcomb we miss newcomb) I'm pretty happy Halt's going to start compiling this sort of thing because I think this is probably what makes DLP unique.

 

My advice is to first clear up the format of Halt's post. I mean this:

Original Author
Original Recipient
Submitted by

I wasn't clear on who submitted what in who's thread until Lungs' follow-up post. I propose something like this:

Advice giver:
Advice recipient:
Advice given where: WBA/FFN/PM/Discord/etc

I like the idea though. I'll trawl my WBA threads and some others I posted in over the years and see what comes up.

 

Glad to see this book mentioned here. 6-7 years ago I happened on this book when I was really looking for a guide on how to do effective descriptions. Some really good lessons in there - I'll second it as a good resource.

 

I felt attacked when I saw the second to last example, which indicates what I should be working on.

My poor, neutrally haughty heart

 

Which is correct?

or

Her's seems correct to me as it's ownership, but MS Word does not like it.

 

Without checking anything, my first thought is that the correct form is:

I don't believe "her's" is a thing.

 

Writing hack for cases like this. Simplify.

Would be correct if the sentence were more simple, and adding 'and Alice' doesn't change anything about that, so:

is the correct form. It's like the choice between 'He and I' or 'Him and me'. Try cutting out the conjunction part both ways, the sentence should make sense without that little addition and be easier to parse (due to being more familiar).

 

I think the question here isn't how to handle this clumsy language so much as whether the possessive descriptor is needed at all.

* They sat on the well-worn sofa. *

Unless this is some sort of couch competition, I doubt the ownership adds any necessary information.

 

Is there anything here on descriptions and scene setting? Seek to be struggling with that lately

 

"Her's" is definitely incorrect. There's no such form in English. If the ownership of the couch is important, Steelbadger already provided the answer. Is it though? Why not just write: "they sat on the sofa".