recent DnD character commission – a gnoll adventurer having a peaceful evening under the northern lights.
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#fascinated by how viscerally disturbing this is #I actually recoiled when I saw it #no not the gnoll‚ they’re fine #the aurora #I recently spent three months writing a story from the perspective of someone #whose homeworld had their Carrington-Event-equivalent when they were at a ~1930s tech level instead of 1850s #((he wasn’t born until several decades later‚ but it’s had an impact on the culture)) #(he ends up on a world that’s happened to have made it to ~modern tech level *without* any major grid collapses) #(that is still naive enough to casually place its trust) #(–more trust than ever–) #(in big centralised electricity supply) #(he’s terrified the Big One is going to hit before he has a chance to talk some sense into them) #apparently this has left its mark on me #(plus of course the fact that‚ well‚ there’s a reason I wrote it that way in the first place) #a big part of me is looking at this picture and going #’how the fuck are you having ”a peaceful evening” under a harbinger of doom’ #(yes I’m aware that the answer is ”when you’re that far north‚ auroras don’t mean much”) #((and it’s D&D so the answer is probably also ”what’s an electrical grid”)) #tag rambles #art #D&D #apocalypse cw
The 4 approaches to “orphaned etymology” problems in fiction
1. Obviously we can’t call it French toast if there’s no France so we’re just gonna replace it with something else.
2. The word abattoir sounds too French so it wouldn’t make sense for it to be here without a France. Even though we use English without there being an England.
3. This is called a Ming vase because when you tap it it makes a “Ming!” sound.
4. I am JRR Tolkien and every single word I write has a fictional etymology attached to it that I am translating into English for your convenience.
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#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #(approach number 3) #language #writing
all the movies and tv shows over the next few years that will have to decide if they’re canon compliant or a canon divergence no plague au
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#I have already started seeing this happening with web serials and it’s beautiful #also‚ like‚ there are more than two options here #I had a dream recently where I had time-manipulation powers #and in the dream I discovered that in my original timeline the plague was unusually *late* #most timelines have a coronavirus pandemic in 2015 or late 2014 #there is absolutely nothing stopping you from setting a story in one of *those* timelines #you could totally split the difference and set a story in a significantly *post*-plague 2020 #the characters wander through a grocery store chatting and about 5 – 10% of background patrons are masked #”yeah‚” a character offhandedly mentions in one episode‚ ”I can’t make it ’cause I got COVID-14” #”don’t worry‚ I got my booster this year so I’m gonna be fine just gotta stay home for a bit” #it’s never at the forefront‚ it’s never a major plot point‚ it’s just casually there in the characters’ past informing their present #(I feel like this might be helpful for certain kinds of emotional processing?) #tag rambles #covid19 #illness mention #writing
I thought it would be interesting to try to write my review of the Diving Bell and the Butterfly in my head without setting pen to paper until the end, and to convey at least some of it by blinking, since I find the fact that the author wrote the whole book in this way astonishing. Perhaps experiencing that process myself would improve my understanding of things, such that I wouldn’t be astonished.
I think trying to do this was an even better exercise than I expected, though by the end I was frustrated to the point of tears, and I’m still feeling kind of annoyed, having just put it up.
(Hopefully this was also a vivid and enlightening experience of signing up for annoying projects, which I do often, but usually the annoyance is months later than the agreeing, so I’m not sure that my intuitive anticipations make the connection.)
Before I go and do something anti-annoying, I figure I should write some notes on the experience, while it is fresh.
Some notes:
It did feel fairly encumbering. There were nascent sentences that I might have tried to poke in somewhere, then play around with, then look at and move or get rid of, where the prospect of trying to do some equivalent of all that in my head while keeping hold of the broader paragraph was too intimidating, and I watched them go by. And the sentences I did write felt like half my attention was on something like balancing them on the end of a stick and not having them fall on the floor, and really sculpting them would have required too much dexterity.
Though I think in some sense they were much more sculpted than usual, because I did think about each one for longer, and often hone it into something more succinct and memorable instead of writing down the first ramble that entered my mind. I’m not sure how that fits with the above observation.
It felt mentally strength-building – as if I was exercising a capability that would improve, which was exciting, and I briefly fantasized about a stronger and defter inner world.
I started out looking at things around me as I composed, like my resting computer, and the table, and the sea. But after a while, I realized that I was staring intently at a long rug with about as many Persian whorls as paragraphs in my prospective post, and that as I envisaged the current sentence, I was mentally weaving it around some well-placed sub-curls of its paragraph-whorl. Looking away from it, it was harder to remember what I had been saying. (I have noticed before that thinking in the world, I end up appropriating the scenery as some kind of scratch paper – you can’t write on it, but you can actually do a lot with reinterpreting whatever it already contains.)
For words with lots of synonyms, I kept selecting one, then forgetting which and having to select again (e.g. ‘lively’ or ‘energetic’ or ‘vigorous’?)
I originally set out to compose the whole thing before writing it, but this was fairly hard and seemed somewhat arbitrary, so after composing the basic outline and a few paragraphs, somewhat discouraged by the likelihood of forgetting them again imminently, I decided that I could instead compose chunks at a time rather than having to do it all at once. In the end I did it in paragraph chunks. Which is probably a much easier task than Bauby had, since if someone was coming to transcribe stuff for hours, one probably wants more than one paragraph relatively well prepared.
Thinking lots of thoughts without saying or writing them can feel a particular kind of agitating.
It took about 20 minutes for my boyfriend and I to transcribe a single sentence using roughly the winking method described in the book, for a speed of around 1 word per minute. The scheme was for him to run his finger over an alphabet reorganized by letter frequency, then for me to wink when he reached the desired letter. We added some punctuation, and a ‘pause! let me think!’ signal, and ‘yes’, and ‘no’. These last three got a lot of use. It basically worked as expected, though one time we made an error, and I didn’t know what to do, so I continued from the beginning of the word again, which made the sentence nonsensical, which confused him for a while, but he figured it out.
I wondered why Bauby and his assistant didn’t use Morse code, or something more efficient. We didn’t try this, but some forum users also wonder this, and one claims that he can wink out about 20 words per minute in Morse code, but that the large amount of blinking involved is ‘pretty tiring’.
We made a huge amount of use of my boyfriend guessing the rest of the word, from context and the first few letters. In the book, Bauby describes how people frequently mess that up, or fail to check that they have guessed correctly, or refuse to guess and conscientiously coax forth every letter. This all sounds terrible.
I’m aware that some people probably compose things entirely in their heads all the time (people have all kinds of mental situations – some people can also reliably imagine a triangle without it being more like the feeling of a triangle laid out in a kind of triangle-like space, or breaking apart and becoming a volcano full of red and white flowers), and my notes here probably sound to them like a person saying ‘for a bizarro experience, I tried to walk across the room without holding on to things, but it was obviously a total disaster – knees bending every which way, and imagine balancing a whole floppy and joint-strewn human body on top of two of those things, while moving! Such sympathy I have for those who have lost their walking frames.’ I’m curious to hear from them whether this is what it sounds like.
(I will tentatively put this comment here, but let me know if you would prefer I comment through worldspiritsockpuppet.com in order to have a central comment collection point. I’m a bit wary of Disqus because of its fragility (Disqus widgets don’t preserve successfully in the Wayback Machine), but it’s not a dealbreaker.)
—
I do compose posts in my head sometimes (though not always, and not this one). The post mostly doesn’t strike me as overtly odd (in an absence-of-ability-I-take-for-granted way), but I think that’s because it all traces back to this bullet point:
“I originally set out to compose the whole thing before writing it, but this was fairly hard and seemed somewhat arbitrary, so after composing the basic outline and a few paragraphs, somewhat discouraged by the likelihood of forgetting them again imminently, I decided that I could instead compose chunks at a time rather than having to do it all at once. In the end I did it in paragraph chunks. Which is probably a much easier task than Bauby had, since if someone was coming to transcribe stuff for hours, one probably wants more than one paragraph relatively well prepared.”
Left to my own devices, I would interpret having to write-by-blinking *as you go* to be a *handicap* relative to composing the post in advance, and the rest of your post feels sense-making in large part *because* you were operating under that handicap.
(I didn’t read the review until afterward, and as such didn’t initially realise that you only blinked for the first sentence.)
Composing mentally, in my experience, is a form of memorisation. While I am walking or performing janitorial duties at my restaurant job or what-have-you, I run through the post in my mind over and over, musing on it, perhaps tweaking it, but also just repeating the words I have already chosen.
(And then, after I’ve written them down and made any final tweaks and–if applicable–posted them, I’ll usually re-read them a few more times over the following couple of days for good measure. I also occasionally archive-binge my own blog. Some of my posts I can *still* recite mostly or entirely from memory, and I almost always have at least enough sense of [what else I’ve posted] to know what things would be useful to link to in order to provide context to my current posts.)
The Wikipedia article says he wrote about half a word per minute in four-hour sessions, which would mean his sessions were around 120 words each. Given a day to think over how I’m going to use 120 words (and not a great deal *else* to think about, comparatively), I think I could probably wear the groove of that memory deep enough to rattle the words off when the time came.
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#reply via reblog #paralysis #writing #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #amnesia cw
Y’know what I find absolutely fascinating about fanfiction? The trope trends that pertain to individual fandoms in each fanfic community.
I marvel at this every time I poke my head into a fanfiction archive somewhere, after finishing a series or a movie when I’m not quite ready to let it go but I’m not quite willing to dive in and participate. There’s always certain kinds of stories that are intensely popular in a self-contained fandom that are enormously rare in others.
There are, of course, some tropes that exist in virtually every fandom. You will never not find a Harry Potter AU or a coffee shop fic if a fandom has existed for longer than a couple months. The bigger the fandom, the more of them you’ll see. This is an Absolute Given. But others are less universal.
Some are self-contained types of AU’s that simply can’t work in another fandom, due to the nature of the original content’s story…but despite dozens of other potential tropes, one is just seized by the fandom as a fan favorite (literally). Take, for example, the plethora of chimera!fic in Fullmetal Alchemist (or at least, back for the 2003 anime there was a plethora of it. Maybe it’s changed since then, it’s been a while since I was in the fandom). It’s not really a concept that works in other fandoms, because the idea of chimeras is so strongly rooted in the source material’s lore, ‘magic’/science system, and concepts. But despite there also being dozens of other things you could run with in this universe too, this was a fandom-trope that was super popular.
But there are other things that I continue to be surprised at to this day. I watched a movie the other day and decided to poke my head into the fandom community and just scroll through AO3 without any filters. Every single page had at least one vampire AU, but that’s not something I see a lot in other fandoms. Why vampire AU’s? I don’t know, but something about it appeals for that fandom, clearly!
Sick!fics are super popular in several of the fandoms I’ve hung around in, but in others they’re all but impossible to find. In some fandoms whump or hurt/comfort is overwhelmingly the majority, and in others the bulk of what you can find is fluff so sticky sweet you’ll get a toothache. I’ve seen dozens of niche, oddballs sorts of premises or AU settings when browsing fanfic archives that seem to exist in only one fandom, but in that fandom they have an incredible amount of power.
It’s just fascinating to me, to see how trends fall based on what is presented in the source material, and the kinds of people that are drawn to that material. Things that are enormously popular to the point of being almost commonplace in one fandom might be a breath of fresh air in another. And clearly, no idea is every really ‘old’ or ‘done to death’ or ‘unoriginal.’ It’s all about the context of where you’re writing it, and about perspective.
As a reader, I like worldbuilding, even (and sometimes especially) the expository parts. I read SFF because it’s the genre that most delivers that. It feels actively annoying when I have to sit through Plot that I’ve seen a million times before to get to soak in a world that I haven’t, or even to look at (say) extruded D&D fantasy in fine everyday detail with new eyes.
I feel like this should be obvious, but I still see, pretty regularly, appeals to authors to stop so much worldbuilding and focus on what obviously really matters to presumed readers, the story. I’m sure there are plenty of readers for whom that’s true! Good for them! But it’s not universal and we’re living in a long-tail world. Unless you’re right on the edge of being able to write full-time and writing to market means the difference between having a day job or not, don’t let The Average Reader become a sort of imperative-issuing Big Other. I would guess there are many more readers who love baroque expository worldbuilding than there are people who are really into, I don’t know, mpreg werewolf fanfiction, but there’s a thriving audience for that and more power to them, so don’t let them hog all the fun!
Amen.
This can be applied more generally to showing-versus-telling, I think. If you’ve got something that’s more interesting than the beat-by-beat progression of your yarn, you should tell us about it, rather than slicing it up into little pieces and embedding those pieces in the unfolding plot.
…but then again, I read splatbooks for fun, so maybe I’m not the best person to ask.
…but I’m probably not the only one who does that kind of thing.
Regarding “show don’t tell” – I went through books at an immense speed as a child. Real-life social interactions were mystifying, but books offered me all they lacked: they explained what was happening, why it was happening, what people felt when it happened, and how their reactions related to their feelings. It was a cheat sheet for human behavior, and it made little me more empathetic and interested in people even when my experiences with them were unpleasant. When I encounter books that took “show don’t tell” to heart, they confuse and sometimes anger me. What do the characters mean by raising an eyebrow, or blinking slowly? Why are they reacting with anger here, and nonchalance there, and why do your other characters treat that as meaningful and informative? It’s like dramatic face shots in movies, where the actors stare blandly at something and there’s emotional music and it’s obvious it’s supposed to convey something, but I never know what that is. There’s a weird opposite phenomenon of characters reading facial expressions and narrating their readings “the look in his eyes told me he was deeply troubled by what he just saw” – they’re eyes! They’re orbs with lenses and people use them to see. How can you tell? Obviously reading facial expressions is not magic for everyone. Still, I miss being catered to by writers allowing me to get a good view of the inside of character’s heads without having to throw up my hands and say “well I guess these people have reasons and emotions but I’ll never know which, thanks a lot”.
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#re: OP: #yes this #I looked in the notes and found this branch #which is not *as* pure in its Yes-This-ness as the OP #but is interesting and definitely has its moments of relatability #(I distinctly recall going on a similar rant about ”the look in their eyes” in my early teens) #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #autism
(This post was inspired by the incredible writers at the 2018 Fic Writers’ Retreat, which has just wrapped, and especially by @shamelessmash and @nautilicious. I love you awesome nerds!)
I have a confession to make: for a long time, I thought I was a writer who could not receive feedback. In an effort to hone my craft, I attended workshops and took classes where critique circles were part of the deal, hoping that some insight that my crit partners offered would help me get better, and better. This, I thought, was what I needed: another flail, in addition to the ones I applied to my work myself.
You know this kind of workshop, and this kind of attitude. Maybe you are holding onto it yourself: good writers are forged in Hell Places where All Mistakes Must Be Pointed Out and Eliminated and If You Can’t Take the Heat Get Out of the Kitchen. I was told that my use of commas was annoying. I was told that my choice of subgenre was untimely. I was red penned into a stupor.
Despite the fact that I was able to edit myself to the point where I got a few pieces accepted for publication, crit never, ever worked for me. I emerged from these experiences both pissed off and self-flagellating. I couldn’t see through the multiple and often contradictory corrections offered by my fellow critters, or the instructor, when I was taking a course.
Any piece I exposed to someone else’s crit, I always trunked, totally convinced that the problems with it were intractable, and that there was no point in trying to fix it. Worse yet, I felt like somehow I’d failed as a writer: I couldn’t take the heat. Perhaps it was time for me to exit the kitchen.
After a few failed attempts to find a crit circumstance that worked for me, and a really long bout of writer’s block, I managed to recover myself enough that I could write, by convincing myself that maybe I was just not a crit sort of a writer. I limited myself to troubleshooting my plots with my partner, who is great at reworking plots. As for making my craft better, I decided to go it alone.
Then I met @shamelessmash, and everything changed, because she changed the way I look at the act of beta reading, and the way I do it.
Way back when (uh, at 2017’s Fic Writer’s Retreat?), Mash and I were both working on longish projects, and, in part because I had a hand in helping her develop the idea for her lovely Sherlock fic A Case of Identity–The Musical, we agreed to trade beta.
(I can admit now that I hoped that she would accept beta from me and then like, forget that she’d offered to beta my fic in return.)
When she first asked me to read a chapter of ACOI, she specified that she wanted squee only: just positive feedback on what was working so far. I’d never had anyone ask that before, so I had no idea what was going to happen next. (Spoiler: really great things.)
At first, I thought, no problem! The fic was in the early stages of development, and we all want a little bit of encouragement along the way. As I read, and I thought, oh, there’s a comma here, a verb that could verb in a verbier way over there, I was tempted to mention it, but then I remembered her request and I refrained. I try, when I can, not to be a shitty friend. I also try not to be a shitty beta, which, hey you guys, means respecting the writer’s right to ask for the kind of feedback they want, and trying your best to offer it.
At the same time, the part of me that wants to be useful was squirming. How could 100% positive feedback possibly help someone hone their work into something better?
Boy was I about to find out. You will too, under the cut.
i haven’t ever managed to write this post but even though i’m primarily a spag (spelling punctuation and grammar) beta by instinct, i feel so passionately that the primary duty of a beta is to help their writer *flourish*. i use parenting tips like “always sandwich a criticism between two pieces of encouragement / squee” to make sure i’m not discouraging my writers. the worst thing you can do as a beta, a fundamental betrayal of your own craft, is to make your writer want to stop writing. and yet it’s so common! :P
(your writer will not necessarily *tell* you “your feedback was too harsh / inconsiderate / brusque and made me want to stop writing”. so you have to keep an eye on yourself. even if you’re correcting the thousandth misused semicolon in a spag beta, you *cannot* get snippy or snarky unless you know for 100% sure that your writer will find that amusing and not hurtful.)
another thing i do, another rule i try to follow as a beta to make sure i’m supporting my author, is whenever i point out a problem, i try to offer a solution. sometimes i don’t have one! sometimes it’s “this word order feels clunky but i’m not sure what else to do with it, what do you think?” but i try to always offer a solution or open a dialogue or both. sometimes it’s “how about we move this phrase over here”, sometimes it’s like “does that make him feel like this, or that, or more like the other thing”, sometimes it’s “is he still sitting down or did he stand up?” sometimes just checking on what an author meant to do is enough to help them realize they didn’t do it.
and like op said, don’t be afraid to squee. even when i’m doing a straight-up spag beta, i’ll wind up throwing in a few “i love this turn of phrase”, “this moment is adorkable and amazing and perfect”, “PRECIOUS DINGBAT”, because if you like something, why not say so? and if you don’t like anything your author is doing, why the fuck are you betaing for them?
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