This. So fucking much - I’m reading A Song of Ice and Fire and thoroughly enjoying it, but even he - like Tolkien - feels the need to include the full lyrics to songs at weddings and what not… at least the always use a different font and layout, so you can just skim.
Regarding critique and workshops, I think the secret is to find a good workshop or a single good editor - not just every random person who reads the text. Or at least be good about knowing what to listen to and what to ignore.
I work as an editor (non fiction) and I’m really good. I’m harsh, but I’m good at pinpointing what works and what needs to go - I’m also a decent writer (in my own language at least) but I think I’m better at going over other peoples texts.
My point is that critique and rewrites are a good thing - but you have to find an editor/friend who understands your voice and know what you’re trying to do, so he/she helps you do this but doesn’t try to turn your work into something else.
Ha, I knew that sounded wrong when I wrote it. I was just saying that if you went up to someone on the street that was a casual reader but had never tried to write or studied writing and told them “You know who’s a great resource on how to write? Stephen King.” They would think you were pulling their leg because he’s generally known as a mass-market churner. That he also really understands the craft would be surprising to most, I think.
I’m going to point out that blogging has done a world of good for me to find a strong voice, especially for nonfiction essays, which for me, are mostly humorous stuff about parenting or family.
100% agreement. In fact, posting to QT3 and forums makes people write, and I don’t think a lot of potential authors realize how much forum posting (and even reading) forces them to hone their skills. It’s like a writer’s workshop without the stress of being judged on your writing, so you just concentrate on the message without worrying about the frills.
But then when we go to write our ‘real’ stuff we freeze.
I’m also a big advocate of writing groups.
Where do you find something like this? I’ve been sort of trying to goad a friend of mine into coauthoring some fiction with me, but he’s not taking the bait (since ‘coauthoring’ is a good way to force someone to read your shit =) ).
you become a better writer by offering critiques of others’ writing, even if you don’t get as much feedback as you give.
I think this is true of most things (certainly in sports). Watching others make mistakes forces you to understand if you make similar ones, and makes you go through the process of trying to address those mistakes without the confusion/distraction of having your identity mixed into the middle of it.
If a competent editor had gotten his hands on LotR, it would have been a short story rather than an epic trip through zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
Oh if you guys want to know which parts the reader will skip, feel free to hand me a copy of your manuscript.
The rain soaked through my water resistant CID jacket in the five seconds it took me to get through the front door
A what? Time to wiki that. El Cid? Cool let’s read about him. Hey, Valencia is neat. What was I doing again?
Oh right!
We got three Mills clones working here and the victim was their supervisor." If it was a murder, that limited the suspects.
Ah a thing.
“DNA was found on the body: a Mills clone. Three of them work in the office.”
The same thing again.
If the MPs were right about the security footage, and we were sure they were, the murder were among the three clones.
Deja vu. Also typo.
We switched on Fawkes computer to peek at what he worked on. Fawkes’ loose interpretation of the rules disgusted me. The private (and graphic) emails on his work computer, the barely passable evaluations from his superior, and the clone fetish porn all pointed to the scum rising to the top. Shari said, “I haven’t seen that many naked clones since I worked at the CloneWorks birthing tube facility in Virginia.”
Porn.
Then I hung up.
Afterwards I farted.
Make’s
Typo.
Too bad I couldn’t tell whether she was about her other statements.
It sort of makes sense in context, but missing verb.
every Mills clones
Typo.
except NOUN never VERB it was Z. PRONOUN asked if PRONOUN VERB “PRONOUN” better than Z and PRONOUN said yeah.
Not what happened.
Then PRONOUN VERB NOUN as X but PRONOUN notices PRONOUN has Y’s THING. They VERB and PRONOUN VERB him."
I was entertained, but I couldn’t keep the characters straight because holy fucking numbers batman. You have weird detail inclusions and some awkward syntax, but the setting was interesting enough that I finished it. Whodunit was a little rough in execution. All of that can be fixed by practice, so no real worries there.
Biggest problem was that you kept swapping who the hell was being interviewed so fast that I couldn’t develop a feel for which character was what where Colonel Mustard in the tub with the dildo. Slow down the transitions and it’ll be way more readable.
If it were a tv show you could get away with those fast cuts. I’d piece them together with visual cues on their various outfits. But in a short story where the characters are freaking numbered clones and you only reveal identifying characteristics waaaay deep into the story? Nah, brah, nah!
His comments were fair, but a little over the top (e.g. “I don’t know what a CID is – would you expect a typical reader to know?” would have worked better as a criticism) or nit-picky (hey, there was a typo; and another one; oooh, another typo!). Pointing out typos is important for proof reading, but when looking for feedback it’s generally assumed that you can say “I saw some typos and grammatical mistakes” and that would cover it.
I’d say Aeon is accurate but could frame it a bit better. I agree with all of his criticisms of my writing but there’s a solid line between “don’t bend your elbow” and “you’re bending your elbow like a goddamned fruit you miserable sonofabitch.”
Actually I had no quarrel with his criticisms of your writing, they didn’t seem acerbic to me. But his commentary on russellmz0’s story was a bit…not mean spirited, but definitely a little more on the ‘make you feel bad’ than the ‘consider this’ side.
I’m in agreement that some writers have a tendency to become a bit too heavy on the describing.
On of my peeves with for example, A Song of Ice and Fire, is Martin always writing down what everyone is wearing even though it rarely is relevant (Tyrions sample chapter for aDwD had it again). This however does mean that in my own writing I almost have no descriptions at all, which isn’t good either. So I’m currently struggling to find a good balance for that.
That all said, here’s the prologue for my current project for you to tear apart (or hug!).
P.S. English isn’t my native language so there probably are a ton of verbs there with the wrong tense and other assorted errors that the spell check doesn’t pick up.
This is a characteristic of a lot of popular writers, especially with readers that like ‘immersion’. There’s a class of reader that want everything described in excruciating detail in order to see the author’s view (as opposed to filling in the blanks on their own).
I said this in the Book Thread:
As a rule unless I need to know that someone is wearing a linen shirt, don’t tell me it’s a linen shirt.
Caveat: I’m a notorious skimmer, and when I think an author is basically just filling in a bunch of unnecessary shit I glaze over and start skipping ahead to something more relevant. I also watch TiVOed shows with closed captioning enabled and on fast forward, so yeah…
On of my peeves with for example, A Song of Ice and Fire, is Martin always writing down what everyone is wearing even though it rarely is relevant (Tyrions sample chapter for aDwD had it again).
The other thing I’ve noticed – and this may be specific to fantasy authors – is a propensity for describing meals. Vance definitely does this. It’s never “He sat down to eat” but “He sat down to eat his dinner of roasted goose, boiled potatoes, and fresh kale”.
Part of me wants to psychoanalyze this and just say that some authors fall in love with their characters and worlds to such a degree that they feel the need to describe everything in order to make their stories ‘more alive’. That saying “Wyatt entered the throne room at an angry pace” is somehow a disservice compared to describing his clothing, people’s reactions, what he’s carrying, if he’s hungry or not, why he’s angry, what the temperature is, and what it smells like.
This however does mean that in my own writing I almost have no descriptions at all, which isn’t good either. So I’m currently struggling to find a good balance for that.
I don’t think you need to have much description at all. I’m of the “it’s filler” camp, so as long as you describe enough to know what’s going on, that should be fine, especially if that style is more natural to you.
You can easily establish that someone is hot, sweating, and thirsty in one sentence (“The desert had no end, and Wyatt was out of water”) or you could spend three paragraphs doing the same thing (“The desert stretched as far as Wyatt could see, with no mountains or hills to indicate a break in the monotonous and mesmerizing pattern of cracked earth. Small shrubs struggled blah blah blah blah blah blah…tried to recount the last time he’d refilled his now empty canteen. Was it yesterday, at the mud bed where he’d found blah blah blah blah”).
It’s okay. It’s stilted and too adverb heavy, with some grammatical issues for good measure. Not horrible, and the pacing is reminiscent of many authors with a more sedate style.
You use the word “usual” three times in the first paragraph alone. I don’t want to go too nuts because if English isn’t your first language it’s hard to figure out what’s “English isn’t good” vs. “stylistic choice” vs. “writing needs improvement”.
Could likely be edited down by 15% or so. Sentences can be combined to provide a more organize description, as opposed to “Describe scene. Describe thoughts and reactions. Repeat.”
If I could recommend a single thing, it would be “write active, not passive.” Taking your first paragraph:
Talia woke up before dawn as usual. With her usual heavy sigh she lingered for a moment on the edge of her bed. The shallow light of the morning sky started to fill the small servant room and she could vaguely make out Kirsha’s shape in the bed next to her own. Kirsha was still fast asleep. This was also as usual. And so was the swift prod with her left foot that stirred Kirsha into action.
I would change it like this:
Talia woke before dawn. Sighing, she lingered for a moment on the edge of the bed while the night’s dreams faded. She could vaguely make out Kirsha’s shape in the bed next to her own by the dim morning light filling the small servant room. Soft snores came from the blankets. Realizing they might be late she roused herself and gave Kirsha a swift prod with her left foot, stirring her into action.
The main changes were to make verbs active where possible, and to provide reasons for actions. Why did she linger? She was still drowsy. Why did she kick Kirsha? Because they might be late. If it’s important to get across the idea that this is a typical morning, then have Talia bitch at Kirsha about it rather than telling it directly to the reader.
Don’t have things begin to happen or start to happen or have happened, make things happen right now! Give reasons why they’re happening that are immediate “Shit we’re late!” rather than narrative and obscure “as usual.” This is my universal first rewrite pass on my own writing, because I do it just as much as you. I think we imagine stories passively as we’re creating them, but we want them to be active when we’re telling them.
I am finally going to start a book, one I mean to finish and sell. That’s so far down the line I cannot contemplate what happens when I get that far.
I do, however, have some questions before I dive too deeply into the actual writing of copy here.
What is germane to this:
I am working on a piece of historical writing, namely a biographical piece about a real life human.
Research on said human is not so easy. Thankfully, I have the Library Of Congress and a very, very helpful local librarian living in the town where the subject of the book I want to write lived a decent-sized portion of his life at my disposal.
Following from point 2, this person lived at a time when record-keeping was spotty at best, and many of his significant life events were not of the sort or in the setting that they would have been particularly documented at all.
Further complicating things is that my research thus far indicates that this person had a tendency to gild the lily to no small degree, and that many of the facts of his life come directly from him as a source.
So. I am left wondering at the construction of what I am right now calling a “book” and not a “biography” or history of any sort. I am thinking my approach here needs to be similar to the approach that TC Boyle took with his novel Water Music–plenty of historic facts to form the skeleton of the narrative, but with the color of what is a fairly threadbare story woven in through reasoned speculation and humor. In other words, historical fiction, and historical fiction of a rather whimsical and humorous bent is what I’m currently thinking my approach should be.
Ha ha. I actually think what Aeon found is what happens when someone reads to find things like that. A lot of that stuff a reader would read right through.
The things that readers tend to criticize when it comes to indie books are typos and formatting.
You’re right about spelling and basic formatting being important. I realize it’s tedious work, but if you don’t have a copy-editor and you don’t read your book over in detail for typos and other glitches, I don’t want to read your book either. If you really can’t bear to read it over yourself, likely your readers will agree with you…
For that matter, even if you do have a copy-editor, you should go over the galleys or whatever the digital equivalent is. It’s just too painful to read through an entire fantasy novel in which the word “deity” is misspelled dozens of times*. And if it clears the spellchecker, that’s just the first step to fixing all kinds of correctly spelled solecisms.
I will however grant you leave to turn off the damn grammar checker. If your grammar is that bad that most of its suggestions are good ones, maybe you shouldn’t be writing a book in the first place. It’s incredibly annoying to have your deliberate and carefully considered turn of phrase marked as a bad usage by a crude parser that doesn’t have the faintest understanding of natural language.
Without having read the story (sorry), I’d say most of Aeon’s criticisms seem reasonable from the quotes. A couple are minor nitpicks that wouldn’t be too bad on their own, but of course should be fixed anyway once pointed out, since they seem to be legitimate.
*This actually happened in Godshome, one of Robert Sheckley’s last works, which somehow got published with no editing at all. This is a fantasy novel about mythical gods, and they’re all called “dieties”. One of the chapters begins with a “quote” which is actually the author’s outline notes and shouldn’t have been included in the text at all… I wonder how the usually professional Tor editors managed to let this one slip through.
Ignore everyone, that snippet was awesome. Totally up my alley in terms of the kind of fiction I like to see! But then again, I love the slow burn, I don’t mind immersing myself in prose that takes its time to get where it’s going.
