Yay for finishing backdating! That is a big undertaking, but a good feeling when you finish. You'll have to let us know if you notice increased readership after adding new tags.
LOL Yep, that happens to me a lot. Sometimes that is all I get done in the day, and sometimes I'm able to push through it and make myself write more. But hey, every little bit helps, and if you feel that satisfied with each paragraph or line, that's great! Hopefully you'll be able to string more of them together as the story goes on.
It did feel nice, although I think there's a glitch because it still says that I finished posting it in 2021 even though I changed it, so who knows! I would be very sad if I truly had started PBox in 2005 and finished it in 2021, lol. The series, fine. The one book, eek, lol. So far, no increased readership; will continue to provide updates.
I was able to push through it yesterday, but not the first time it happened this week. It was just a line with a lot of alliteration, so it felt almost lyrical. I would have shared it because I enjoyed it that much, but it would have been spoilery. You're right, we've just got to keep on stringing words and sentences together! I'm glad I'm not the only one that happens to; I wonder why our brains do that.
Yes! It's better to learn by doing, even if that means doing things the "wrong" way at first and figuring out for yourself how to do them the "right" way. I definitely needed my purple prose phase to get better. That's how I made the transition from writing those novella-length "novels" that still had a lot of telling to writing actual novels that have more depth and description. We had to overwrite to find that happy medium.
I feel like a lot of new writers get bogged down by the "right" way to do things. And browsing r/writing or r/fanfic has only made me feel more that way. And I think that's disheartening that people are so paralyzed by the thought of doing something "wrong" in a creative medium that they're afraid to try. And I get wanting to help people avoid the pain of rejection for something simple like "use strong verbs instead of weak verbs paired with adverbs," but I also think that if anyone's seriously pursuing publishing that they would find people to read their drafts before sending them out to agents or publishers. And those beta readers would say "have you considered 'sprinted' instead of 'quickly ran'?" or whatever. And fanfic, even more so, I can't imagine anyone's going to pop into a review unprompted to talk about the use of adverbs or plot holes or whatever unless it was a clarity/format issue that made it hard to read/understand.
I can't remember if we talked about this back when we discussed "breakout" stories or not, but do you remember actively thinking "Oh, x is a "writing rule" I am breaking, what can I do to make my story better?" Or "I feel like I'm not doing x well enough, what can I do to fix that?" Anyone else can answer too, as always.
I know I had a PDF I'd lovingly saved to a floppy disk at my mom's work so I could bring it home to my internet-less computer because it talked about story structure and character arcs, but had a section specifically focused on villains. And this would have been when I was working on that 2003 OF because I think I some point I realized the villain was just evil for the sake of being evil and it was kind of boring. So I went on this whole research project to figure out what I was "doing wrong" with my boring villain (who shouldn't have been boring, they were a literal god and awesome in theory). Anyway, long story short, the answer was something to the effect of "because they're evil isn't a good motivation for a villain to do the things they do, so they should have a reason just like the heroes have a reason, which probably isn't 'because they're good'." Anyway, the point of this story related to BSB fanfic was that I got it figured out for that story and took it to heart when I was crafting Justin and Renee in PBox, and I like to think they're better for it. But I wouldn't have gotten to that point without reading other villains that were good and writing a bunch of BSB fanfics where the "villains" ("rivals" is probably a better term) were ho hum.
I realize this particular example isn't directly applicable to many BSB fanfics, it's not like cancer has a tragic backstory where it was shunned by the regular cells for being a little different, so it decided to make other cells like it and destroy the world. (Or maybe that is the backstory for every cancer cell, lol.)
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy...
That would have been much funnier; I have failed in this joke.
Author
Topic: Writing & Thread (aka The Writing Thread 4) (Read 352749 times)