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
Thread Question Humanity is almost wiped out. Their replacements are looking through relics of our time billions of years into the future. They find a USB stick with one of your stories on it. What will they think about humanity after reading it?
Thomas Ross
I'm about to start writing right now. Going to fire up Libre Office and do my thrice-weekly writing. I'll be back when I'm finished.
Okay first paragraph >There was an admirable simplicity to the Land of Darkness. The Dread Lords adhered to a nebulous code of conduct, in a bid to win the favor of the Makers, concocted over the ages. The gist of it was to show a deference to visitors from the World of Light not afforded to their underlings, the monsters of the Land of Darkness. Successfully operating in the Dark Lands came down to appreciating the wraiths’ eagerness to earn the respect of The Makers.
This is chapter fucking 12 already. How the fuck are the Dreadlords finally introduced? Is this a recap? New villain? If it's the latter, you should sprinkle it around the next few chapters instead of a huge info dump. If it's the former, then get rid of it
Angel King
For anyone that has experience publishing on RR, how long are your chapters usually? And how do you deal with publishing serially? I find that I usually need to return to previous chapters and edit them when new inspiration hits me later on.
Evan Parker
You dont' edit RR. Write on the "fly" because it shows the author's "sudden passion"
Carter Foster
>I find that I usually need to return to previous chapters and edit them when new inspiration hits me later on. Never do that. Employ the techniques of chinese masters and liberally retcon instead.
They'll understand, in great detail, why we're not around any more. Then they'll find some Kurt Vonnegut, and find it optimistic and uplifting in comparison.
Lincoln Martin
seethe
Isaiah Howard
I'm reading EM Forster the machine stops, it's kinda like this. Earth destroyed, people isolated, little knowledge of the past
Matthew Edwards
>how long are your chapters 3k give or take >how do you deal with publishing serially? you tell your readers the schedule and then you stick to it come hell or high water >I find that I usually need to return to previous chapters and edit them when new inspiration hits me later on Okay. I recommend drafting far enough ahead that you don't do too much of that.
Aaron Johnson
So, our world, the last time Facebook went down for a few hours.
Michael Sanders
I can almost smell the faint acidity of a yellowed book freshly opened over fragrant backdrop of brewing coffee. Do you have old hardwood floors that creek just a bit too? That would complete the aesthetic.
I really need to hit up the used bookstore again.
Nathaniel Cruz
I wish, flippers delight floors. It's shitty bamboo "engineered wood" that cracks because it's buckling, due in no small part to tight installation and the absence of leveling compound! It would be a bit of a bother to install, but I do have enough hardwood flooring, in my shed, to do the front of the house in 3.5" oak t&g. Whether I have the will to interrupt my reading and writing is another question.
Indeed, as it were, if one might get straight to the point, in a manner of speaking, those yellowed pages on the left are "cream" from everyman's, lots of people choose off white for finer books. The Schiller on the right is also antique laid paper.
Angel Richardson
I have acne taking over my body help me
Alexander Ross
Charcoal soap. And since you're sitting all the time, your pores are grabbing tons of dirt on your back. Get a back scrubber too
My acne disappeared when I began limiting my slat consumption.
Jose Johnson
*salt
Jeremiah Lee
>how long are your chapters usually? Between 3k-5k. >And how do you deal with publishing serially? I must be the only fucker on that website who actually plans stories ahead, writes chapters in advance, and edits.
Adam King
So what's up with the weird symbols?
Camden Sanders
it's a base sixty number system, the date of the coin is '59-57-28-9' or, 9th day, 28th week, of the fifty-nine-sixties-and-fifty-seventh year, or in base ten, '3597-28-9'. It's really hard to write here, but I have a video explaining it. youtu.be/gqjDtWRc7AM
I've been playing around writing some sci-fi stuff recently. What I'm wondering is how does one justify the inclusion of humans doing anything practical in an advanced sci-fi world? How do I get around the fact that anything remotely technical or practical would be done by an AI? What role is there for humans in such a setting? How do I justify say a pilot of a ship when space ships would likely be fully autonomous? What about a solider? Why wouldn't all wars be fought using AI controlled weapons? I'm not sure how to build a plausible world. It seems inevitable that AI would be able to do anything remotely interesting that a human character would do. How do I answer this question without resorting to just ignoring this or making up some kind of cliché like "AGI was outlawed following intergalactic war XYZ"?
Leo Garcia
In a post-scarcity society people can do whatever they want, this includes jobs that are not in any way necessary or practical.
Gabriel Bailey
So I am doomed to write stories about tourists and hobbyists? Is it possible to write a heroic character in such a setting?
Caleb Phillips
Have you ever heard of The Culture series by Iain M. Banks?
Michael Martin
I take AGI pretty seriously, even some of the MIRI junk, but I don't think it's implausible for progress to plateau in the near future. The current approach could turn out to be a dead end, useful but not human-level. I like the take on AI in Distress by Greg Egan. There are programs that can do internet sleuthing and theorem proving on a superhuman level, and they can hold conversations that relate to that, but they clearly aren't people. It holds up well for something written almost thirty years ago. Ignoring it is reasonable. A Butlerian jihad also seems reasonable, though I'd only do it if there's some interesting meat to it, not if it's a throwaway justification. Probably a bad idea, but if you want to do something a little more out there, have your spaceships and so on piloted by simulated humans (ems). If you can upload brains then you can clone the galaxy's most skilled pilot a billion times over and simulate him at 10× speed to enhance his reaction time. Many of the same practical advantages as AI, plus weird ethical issues. qntm.org/mmacevedo is a short story about this, The Age of Em by Robin Hanson is a nonfiction book that delves deep into how it could play out economically, demographically, socially. (It's dry and dense but I found it very interesting.)
Jonathan Evans
Hi guis. So I'm new to literature and only read a few books so far but I feel an urge to write something. So I'm typing something up in a document titled "Touch Grass" which I'm kinda treating like a diary/journal but simultaneously refining to a book in a collection of essays format as I write it. The book will be intended for neets and depressed zoomers who realize there must be more to life than jerkin' it to anime porn and wish to break the cycle. In the book I will also put forward my own philosophy of pluralistic correctness that has given me much wisdom and has ultimately helped me become less autistic, always agreeable and more confident in unfamiliar social environments. plz review this opening essay that will follow a preface section: pastebin.com/d1P9BJJH
Nobody here *reads. Please remember that your meme is dead because tons of people here now write, but no one who posts their writing ever admits to reading a single book.
Carter Diaz
Nobody here sneeds.
Joshua Harris
>YWNBAWriter Yes, you will, and you don't have a choice in the matter. You will sit down and write every day. You will seek criticism and grow your technical knowledge. You will find joy in every word. You will make it.
how do I write interesting relationships? does it require sadistically bullying my characters instead of sheltering them? if a story just tragically fucks them as hard as possible with a few false upswings, will that make it more interesting?
Chase Brown
You don't have to bulli them. You just have to let them interact with each other. Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises has great character relationships and none of them are particularly tortured in it.
Angel Torres
I've only read Consider Phlebas, although it was a while ago. I remember that book taking place mostly outside of the culture, and the protagonist being explicitly anti-culture partially because he felt that the culture kind of makes humans obsolete. So I'm not sure exactly how Banks justifies humans working within the culture. I have a copy of Player of Games that I've been meaning to read. Thanks for the suggestions. I like the idea of advanced AI being simulated humans, and the ethical issues around that justifying why AI isn't totally ubiquitous. I was playing with the idea of a world in which super intelligent AIs basically unionised, making it again be cheaper / easier to use humans for things like fighting wars, piloting ships, and so on.
Ethan Hernandez
>You will find joy in every word. Every writer that's ever lived has admitted that writing sounds great but actually doing it is a nightmare.
Jason Lopez
>actually doing it is a nightmare This sounds like something George R.R. Martin would say
Jace Ortiz
Joy is found after you either get a stroke of ungodly luck and produce something kino on the first try, or edit until your kidneys start to rot. Worth it in the end tho, definitely.
Aaron Ramirez
Marketing is fun. I could see why people make this a career.
Liam Kelly
I find joy in writing everything since I got good, maybe the issue is your process is soulless "outlining" where you them write to meet the checklist?
Parker Myers
>pastebin.com/URyCT3vr I've been working on refining this since I can't really concentrate enough to write new passages until my family's left from their visit. I've whittled it down to what I find acceptable, and any input would be appreciated.
Not really, I have a rough list of plot points I wanna hit, but nothing I'm religiously adhering to. My issue is that I get stuck in editing hell, endlessly revising and altering already written chapters. True, it does improve the quality of my story overall, but it considerably slows down my actual writing.
Brandon Rivera
>since I got good That line of thinking is why you don't find writing miserable. You have "got good," in your head. It's a static viewpoint, and one which precludes further improvement. The misery in writing is that need to be constantly in that restless process of getting better. If you're not hurting, you're not improving, and if you're not improving you're stunted.
Owen James
Never do the "as you know" shit. It's the worst way of delivering exposition. If a person knows something, there's no reason whatsoever to tell them they know it. Removing that would be an instant improvement.
Jacob Hill
No, that's wrong. You're not supposed to hate the experience. If you do you have mental health problems.
Jaxson Johnson
Not that user, I love the experience of writing and editing to a point, once it becomes an endless dance of revising the same 20 chapters over and over, it saps the life out of it for me. I am well aware that this is because I'm categorically retarded and unable to achieve satisfaction in my own work, and while it does help out in the long run, in the short term it sucks donkey sack.
Landon Hill
Would you say that a long distance runner will see improvement without pushing themselves to the point of misery? Can a doctor go through years of intense academia and then more of residency without feeling miserable? You literally can't develop a skill without pushing yourself out of your comfort zone. The muscle builds AFTER you tear it. No tear, no relentless and constant self-criticism, no working until you feel like you can't anymore, no gain.
Yes, I know it's aggravating. That is, as you might not know, intentional. Thanks for the critique though.
Cooper Russell
>Would you say that a long distance runner will see improvement without pushing themselves to the point of misery? As a long distance runner: yes. Running gives you a high. If you're miserable while running, you're hurting your body. Hurting your body doesn't improve it, it causes damage. >Can a doctor go through years of intense academia and then more of residency without feeling miserable? I don't know any doctors. > You literally can't develop a skill without pushing yourself out of your comfort zone. The muscle builds AFTER you tear it. No tear, no relentless and constant self-criticism, no working until you feel like you can't anymore, no gain. You seem to be conflating being slightly uncomfortable due to strain with being miserable. This lack of nuance is common in young people these days. People only use the most extreme adjectives, love or hate, to describe how they feel about things. Misery is far, far too extreme to describe the burn of your muscles or the weariness caused by a long run. Please increase your vocabulary so you can more properly express a wider range of human experience. Then we can bypass confusion like this in the future.
Noah Wright
You inapt analogies aside, enjoying the experience does not mean enjoying every single facet of it at all times. If you legitimately don't enjoy writing wtf are you even doing get a new hobby.
Colton Stewart
>post scarcity society Does not exist.
Parker Butler
They don't even have a link to kishotenketsu, they're clearly sour about the influx of anime influenced writers here and would rather go back to the good old days.
