Previous Thread:For General Writing >The Rhetoric of Fiction, Booth >Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft, Burroway >Steering the Craft, Le Guin >The Anatomy of Story, Truby >How Fiction Works, Wood
Technical Aspects of Writing >Garner's Modern English Usage, Garner >What Editors Do: The Art, Craft, and Business of Book Editing, Ginna >Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style, Tufte
Books Analyzing Literature >Poetics, Aristotle >Hero With a Thousand Faces, Campbell >The Art Of Dramatic Writing: Its Basis in the Creative Interpretation of Human Motives, Egri >The Weekend Novelist, Ray
No furry, but I think it’s sick that the stupid cartoon bunny was deleted but not the previous dude with a gun to his head. Violence isn’t anymore work safe than “sexual imagery”
Ryder Parker
Thanks, user.
Juan Martin
Post poem, nerd.
Dominic Young
The first thing I do when writing fan fiction is to look for a version of the source material I can Ctrl+F. If it's for a book, that means converting it to plain text. If it's for a video game that means finding or creating a text dump. If it's for a movie, I download the subtitles and look for the script. In a pinch a wiki might work, but I dislike the editorialism and prefer the immediacy of a full text search. Ideally it takes two seconds to find the bare truth. For WH40K it's more difficult, but maybe you can manage something. There is such a thing as being too anal about lore. Breaking with canon is regrettable, but not ruinous. Sometimes it's even worth doing deliberately. At the same time, don't neglect fuzzier aspects. I spend just as much time nitpicking canon as checking to see if I've got characters' voices right.
Unlucky, user. Getting shortlisted is still quite an achievement.
Samuel Ward
I think the fact that it was a bunny weighed just as heavily as the sexualization. This website has a thing about that.
Nathan Nelson
Shortlisting is still an impressive accomplishment!
Joshua Phillips
>another 1.2k done I keep thinking i'm close to closing out the arc then i remember i have another pov and plot point to add.
James Cook
Thoughts?
"What most men don't understand is that putting a cock up your ass has the same feeling as shitting. If you don't believe me you're free to ride on a cock and see it for yourself. And sucking dick? Well, suck one of your fingers and the feeling will be pretty damn close. Where I am getting at? It should be obvious. You probably had some logs passing through your butthole that were longer and girthier than most dick around. So, if somehow you end up in jail and a big dude is coming up to you just pretend you're shitting. After all, you lost your anal virginity a long time ago." And then I woke up. Those nightmares were getting weirder and longer since I started taking antidepressants. But what could I do, my life was getting nowhere with a dead-end job and no social life of notice.
Brody Taylor
Why does everyone feel the need to be so crude, just add a little nuance to it for fuck's sake
Jaxson Taylor
Much appreciated. It's definitely going on my CV. I would, but I don't wanna dox myself, b.
Mason Parker
epic for the win
Nathaniel Foster
It’s my style cousin. Some people dig it.
Andrew Thomas
That "style" is overdone and banal.
Gavin Cox
You guys building your audience and news letters yet? Just getting started anons.
David Martin
Anyone willing to give feedback? Please be unwavering and as harsh as possible in your criticisms, thanks.
the sun doesnt sleep, no more honeyed chumps, choked or drowned; bathed in basin bare, a travelling salesman - little Lucy: danced, squared, and downed.
Flesh echo, so dear, forgotten in blue, Turn Back Time and MEMORIZE; touch, taste the night dancer - no haste - in barren, cold, dark, Lucy dies.
The clouds dont exist, no more blue stars, stock in store, or return - chumps cheer. He wept - congregation: dear child, the best for poor moon, left lonely, and Lucy to burn
Andrew Bailey
First paragraph offers very little clarity, also pic related: >Macabre miasma >A cursed concerto, accompanied by a choir of retching babes, a distant hum of biplanes, and a soft patter of rain.
A horror serial, “Whispers from Hell” >Though it seems strange to say, the four years in prison which inaugurated my manhood now appear to me as my happiest days as a man, for it is with their conclusion that my world begin to descend into a hellish madness unfathomable in my unholiest nightmares. So forgive me if I dwell briefly upon my incarcerated existence that I may have some meager reprieve from recalling the horror which followed my release.
A serialized, literary screwball comedy, “The Fortunes and Affairs of Benedick Gascogne” > Louis saw to it that his son had all the upbringing of a proper gentleman, or as much of it as could be obtained in America. Besides an exemplary classical education, Benedick was given a rigorous regimen of swimming, riding, shooting, hunting, and dancing. Of all that he was taught he excelled in, but nothing pleased him so much as fencing: he was so enamored with it that the proscription against living by the sword in the Gospel he took for a mandate, perhaps the sum of the Gospel itself. Louis cultivated his son’s passion and ultimately obtained private lessons for him with the famous Maestro di Vino, who brought the boy to a startling dominance in the sport.
>banal >anal I see what you did there and laughed heartily :D
Zachary Gonzalez
It's not that purposefully purple; I just have a thing for alliteration I swear! :^)
Cameron Perez
Hey smart fella, why don’tcha grace us with some not overdone and banal prose sourcing straight from your, I bet, sweet sweet head?
Ayden Howard
huh?
Easton Morgan
I'm huge on alliteration (I'm tongue side preference/loose alliteration user if you were around for that convo) but I'm afraid I read on and the purple diagnosis is final.
Don't get me wrong, you have a talent for simile/thematic prose but you're very raw in expressing it (overly poetic as that Aristotle piece describes), losing clarity which is king in prose.
>tongue side preference/loose alliteration I wasn't around for such a conversation, but it sounds quite interesting. I've always been fascinated by how certain words combinations sound so much better than others. Or how certain phrases will roll off the tongue, or be stunted based on how individual, choice words are placed in sentence. Have you studied much linguistics? More specifically the oral anatomy of phonetic consonants, vowels, etc. and how those influence the aesthetics of phrases? Take for instance the two parses:
>warm whispers vs >warmed whispers
While both are alliterative, the phrase "warm whispers" sounds better (at least to me) than the other because the ending phonetic sound of warm—the 'mm' sound— has the same lip and tongue placement as the next proceeding phonetic sound—the 'whi' sound. While the "de" sound finds the lips apart, and tongue pressed behind the teeth—thus, slightly more harsh and disjunctive. Hell, even
>harsh and disjunctive Sounds better than the converse >disjunctive and harsh
for similar reasons. It's far easier for the mouth to transition between 'sh' and the 'a' sound, than between 'vv' and 'a'. I'd use the phonetic alphabet to better illustrate my point but that's way too many alt-codes, and I feel like by now you get my point. Shit's fascinating.
Lincoln Moore
Feeling the urge to write for the first time in months but my old ideas aren't organized enough. Give me something fun to try, it can be schlocky/anime/self-indulgent/etc idc. The more autistic and less pseudy it is the more likely I am to do anything.
What are some ways to bring across a culture of desperation, hopelessness and impending doom in a fictional culture?
Levi Rivera
A mainstream press that relentlessly provides the impression that things are hopeless, solely to drum up their flagging ratings? Focused on the survival of their business model, they never see they're causing the catastrophes they're supposedly reporting.
Evan Parker
Sure, if you don't mind a rando doing it very differently (and probably slightly worse) for practice.
Jason Lee
Writing filthy faggotry doesn't make you mature and it definitely won't make you successful
Hudson Perry
You should put more internal thoughts of the narrator and less blatant descriptions of whats happening
Jace Jenkins
Made you hot-headed the fact that you're no better than a random fag when you're shitting and feeling the same sensations he feels when he sits on cock? lmao
Carter Cruz
Here's a short story idea: someone buys silver bullets to kill a werewolf, the salesman guarantees they're silver, and later, when confronting the werewolf, the shooter recognizes the clothes and realizes it's the salesman, and thus the bullets aren't real silver.
Evan Martinez
So is Yoda now trolling on Yea Forums?
Jose Ross
user we should used to make jokes about that in middle school. There's really nothing profound or original about what you wrote. It's just filthy faggotry thats cringeworthy to write as an adult.
Parker Lee
Maybe once I finish my novella about if cows invented tools and one of them kinda looked like a saw but the rest of them didn't.
Kevin Brooks
I was saving this idea for my next novel but go ahead.
A man who lives alone one night decides to try to suck his cock but something goes wrong with his back while trying to do it and he becomes paralysed. The story then shows his thoughts while desperately trying to move again and get help, which he ultimately can't do it and then die of dehydration after ten days stuck.
William Johnson
have society very clearly stratified. the rich living right next to the completely destitute never ending holidays where the well off engage in conspicuous waste casual drug use/prostitution people not getting married. premarital sex/flings are common as is abortion. have an alchemist or witch produce concoctions to do this everyone having a got mine fuck everyone else attitude mercenaries/clear outsiders acting as para police forces
Lincoln Collins
>There's really nothing profound The fact that we're all taking cock each time we shit is profound. >or original Post 5 excerpts of books having a smiliar paragraph.
Jordan Robinson
There is no one so pointlessly stupid on this planet aside from you, so finding a book with any similarity is a zero chance probability.
Justin Ortiz
>says there is nothing original in what I wrote >can't post simple 5 excerpts from books with similar paragraphs Laughable.
Parker Nelson
>middle school humor is profound I guess we all operate at our own level.
Julian Martin
Why can't middle school humor be profound? Show me two examples of "profound" humour please.
Brody Morgan
I'm not super educated on linguistics but I was reading The Wheel, The Horse, The Language and the second chapter talks about basically the ideas you're bringing up - specifically that transitioning from sounds made at the back to front of the mouth (and vice verse) is challenging for our tongues and the source of a lot of errors while speaking and linguistic drift over time.
Phonetics gets really complicated fast and there are a lot of other categories of sounds we make (plotives vs nasals, etc.) but the quick & dirty rule I use based on that idea I just call "loose alliteration" where I divide consonants into front mouth (t,n,p,d, b, etc.) vs back mouth (g, m, l, k, etc.) sounds. I consider words starting in vowels to be neutral. I just try to use it as is reasonable with the plot/characters as clarity and character always comes first.
To your point about V -> A transition though I probably should take vowels into account, but I just like the simplicity of my current system and like what it's done for me so I bring it up sometimes in case others get anything out of it too.
>harsh and disjunctive - Sounds better than the converse Agree and I think it's the "J" transition as you say, some words have exceptionally strongly pronounced mid-word consonants that need to be considered almost as two words in one for flow purposes.
The vibe I get from your narrator, is soemone writing down what happened later, as opposed to it actually happening in real time. If that's what you were going for, then cool, but if not, then I would definitely take more time to discuss the author's feelings about what's going on.
he had to claw at a dead pregnant woman. does that make him feel bad? disgusted? afraid? horrified, who is this person? And if the idea s that he doesn;t know himself, maybe give some clues in his actions that inform the reader of who he is.
As it stands, it just seems overly descriptive, without actually describing anything, and far too rote and mechanical to get a feel for the protagonist.
But, I do see some value and talent, just needs some refinement.
Thomas Bell
That's more decadence than an otherwise functional society staring down the barrel of an apocalypse desu.
Levi Richardson
You broke the code! LOL
Chase Price
So, nearly every cyberpunk novel in existence.
Lucas Mitchell
So, an ersatz version of "Gerald's Game" by Stephen King?
Ethan Brown
what kind of doom is impending?
Is it a slow one that is killing the land?
A sudden one?
natural or nonnatural?
inside or outside force?
Is it just one civiliation inside the world or the whole world?
Xavier Russell
"The Sirens Of Titan" by Kurt Vonnegut "Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy" by Douglas Adams
Isaiah Thomas
why is it an ersatz version?
Parker Mitchell
I added 6,800 words to my novel's first draft this weekend! I'm still nowhere near the end...I estimate another 15k-20k, giving me plenty of space to ruthlessly eliminate anything that's not working.
