Chat amongst yourselves–what are your current WIPs, problems, brilliant new ideas, plans for Halloween, whatever! And ask if there’s anything you’d like a blog post on. Or anything you’re sick of hearing me rant about…
Chat amongst yourselves–what are your current WIPs, problems, brilliant new ideas, plans for Halloween, whatever! And ask if there’s anything you’d like a blog post on. Or anything you’re sick of hearing me rant about…
Learning to describe things! Worldbuilding and characters are way different than setting and character design and I’ve been bare staging SFF even more than I thought. That stuff doesn’t interest me but I 100% know it and the reader also tends to need to.
The fun thing is I’m 4 layers in and still haven’t made clear basic wardrobe on most characters, that they have clan tattoos deliberately made visible for reading, what the buildings are made of, since it’s not generic castle, or that there are guards deemed not invisible by the characters chatting together.
Like this is hard and not just because you have to scatter description but because I’m typically oblivious to anything not direly necessary, and no wonder friends always said I write spare and they need more help to track.
I’m reading books, doing exercises, and going through my scenes in more layers and in trying not to overwhelm my readers with too much information because worldbuilding, I’ve been giving way too little re: scene setting.
Remember that unless it serves the story, world-building can be a distraction.
Most writers suffer times when we put in stuff that is unnecessary because we like it.
Then, it may be useful, or cool enough for the readers’ interest. It can be hard to judge.
Worldbuilding is my freebie. Salient setting description is… decidedly not. I’m not the least concerned about overloading worldbuilding, much more concerned with learning how to include setting beyond in some mountains bordering plains on a planet somewhere these almost entirely undescribed people do things.
Finding the balance will be great but for me, adding it in at all was layer one. Making it match character POV was layer two. Then there’s actually this stuff has plot relevance, sucks to be me. Then there’s all the other potentially probably relevant forgotten things. Then we can worry again about which ones can wait and which ones shouldn’t.
Do learning. A lot.
Ah, I think I see why you mentioned that but I’m not overincluding worldbuilding and think because the amount I need to include to render a scene understandable means I can’t weigh it down with description too. Like at all. Which is a horrible answer that historically doesn’t work. Right now, I’m slowing down instead.
Revising a novella, and I’ve already realized there’s no point to spell-checking.
I’ve gone ahead and let my crazy loose. In 30k words or so, I’ve mixed cowboy talk, gangster slang and technobabble. I had the most fun writing it.
But spell-checking? Every other word is a non-standard spelling! To quote my viewpoint character, Fuggedaboudit, pardner! 🙂
I have different custom spell-check dictionaries for my different settings/series, not for frequently-used non-standard spellings but for character names, other names, and various coined terms.
Also a D&D custom dictionary, for monster & character names, along with various game terms. And a toolbar and macros to switch between dictionaries.
An excellent approach! In my case, I’d need a new one for every new piece I work on, but it might be worth it…
Thanks!!
I’ve been working on a 7-tale series of short stories circling around the ancient Greek god Hades that is near and dear to my heart.
The first reviews just came in and, so far, nobody likes it. Ouch! Not much I can do about that, I know, but it still is not pleasant!
Darn. Sorry to hear that.
Thanks. Sympathy helps!
I hate it when that happens.
Ain’t it the truth! ::wry grin!::
Will you do a post on how to handle subplots, specifically in a single-viewpoint story? I am relatively new to writing longer fiction and have never dealt with them before.
Thanks!
I would like to hear more about researching for writing, e.g. to figure out some worldbuilding or plot possibilities. When you have a weird question (e.g. “If someone gained encyclopaedic knowledge of an advanced civilization, how could they improve technology in a medieval fantasy world?”), how do you research it?
How do you phrase or split a question like that into something that someone has researched in the real world? Where do you look if basic googling doesn’t get answers?
In my case I can use “How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler” since it’s the book that inspired my story in the first place, but I’m not sure how I would proceed with searching for more sources.
Related, is there something you have researched for a book that was particularly difficult, surprising, or interesting?
Look for non-SFnal survival guides and how-to books. One that helps with a ton of low-tech medicine, diseases, and hygiene is _Where There Is No Doctor_.
Slow progress continues with my WIP, only now I’ve discovered that I’m gonna need more chapters. I thought I was within two or three chapters of The End, but it looks now like I’ve got four or five to go. And the chapters in this one are longer than my usual.
It’s not in the “Mary Gentle, tree-killer” class, but it is already north of 100k words.
As for requests: Elevator pitches, are there different varieties? (Because I’ve heard them described as both one-sentence set-up only, and as three-sentence complete but extremely abridged plot summaries.)
I got a very nice rejection letter from the editor of a small literary journal the other day. She said my short story had made it through several rounds, and that she enjoyed reading my work. She encouraged me to continue to submit. So I’m 1 for 3 at that journal. As things go, I took that as good news!
Congrats! That’s huge! Magazine editors are too busy to write personal notes to be nice or just for the heck of it. If she went to that effort, it’s because she really liked the story. Send her more new ones!