The All-Purpose Writing Thread!

Tell that to the internet.

I especially liked reading one blog rant about how people kept saying telling the author of th rant that bestselling authors used adverbs too. The response? "I don't care how many books they sell! It's still bad writing!"

He nodded, signifying he understood what was being said, despite it being not. Said, that is.

Have you read 50 Shades of Grey?

I did. And truthfully, I didn't even really notice the bad writing (I did notice the crap story). But as I mentioned earlier, that's probably because I'm not a native English speaker who learns all his English from the Internet. Bad writing doesn't really bother me unless its exceptionally grating.

I think many people go overboard with analysis of writing styles. Considering what is out there and what sells, most readers don't care about things like this at all provided the story is good.

I would generalize that with "most readers will tolerate bad stuff if there's some good stuff in there". There are plenty of books that have trite stories but make up for it with exceptional characters, settings, or prose.

Dan Brown called from his private island to agree with you. Except for that good story part.

The problem with "He gave her a sinister look" and "He looked at her sinisterly" is that both sentences tell not show. How was the look sinister? The shape of his eyes? The contortion of his face? The length of the gaze held? Well written the word sinister would not appear but would be inferred from the detail supplied. ymmv

That's the point I'm trying to make -- most people know what a person's facial expression is like when they're looking at something 'sinisterly'. On the one hand it's "telling" because it implies intent, but on the other hand it's actually showing because we insert our own idea of what that look is.

It is extremely difficult (for me) to rewrite that into something that is still concise and conveys the same meaning, all via pure physical description.

Telling has its place in fiction writing. If one were to show everything then the final result would be bloated beyond recognition.

i feel like we need to know whether the sinister look is important or not or if look can be replaced. "look" is sorta general and screams out for replacement a lot of the time.

I saw the best thing ever today for how to recognize passive voice.

I finally learned how to teach my guys to ID the passive voice. If you can insert "by zombies" after the verb, you have passive voice.

— Rebecca Johnson (@johnsonr) October 18, 2012

It makes sense. "Susan's car was stolen." + by zombies = makes sense, ergo passive voice.

"Zombies stole Susan's car." + by zombies = makes no sense, ergo active voice.

Love it!

I know we've got some comics nerds on here--I need someone to bounce some ideas off of. Do you know the Marvel universe? Do you want to tell me an idea is stupid? LET ME KNOW!

Seriously I need to bounce some back story stuff for some characters off someone and see what works and what doesn't. PM ME OK!

I am a comics expert! (How did I miss this question, oy...)

Shame, Nute, shame. *shakes head*

What kind of poems do you write? (I hate that question when it is asked of me, btw) Where can I read some of your work?

Does anyone have any experience with blog writing? I wanted to start a blog on taking care of pets (long story as to why). I wasn't even sure of where to begin, though.

I've had some classes in creative writing but not any in article writing, so any tips in that area will be helpful as well.

*raises his hand* I do! We have a bunch of bloggers here - Calistas and Brian Rubin come first to mind, and I'm sure we have many more who'd be happy to help. edit: derp, I should also give props to owen_magnetic.

Regarding where to begin - I think there are two basic (and non-mutually-exclusive) approaches to blogging:

1. The "column". Regularly publish a helpful or thought-provoking article on your subject, in this case pet care (I try to write a decent-sized piece every weekend). Over time you'll build up a core of regular readers interested in your next insight, plus people will stumble across your site just by googling relevant terms. I would say the typical news/politics/economics/"serious" blog falls into this category (but there are exceptions!). So does, say, Rock, Paper, Shotgun.

2. The "roundup" (or, to use the current buzzwords, a site focused on "curation" and "aggregation"). This works best with more frequent (daily?) posts. Comb the internet for relevant articles/news on pet care, and turn yourself into a one-stop-shop for the busy reader who doesn't want to have to visit 1,000 different sites. Good examples of these sites include The Passive Voice (self-publishing and e-publishing) and Marginal Revolution (politics, economics, and cool trivia).

Again, these two types of blog aren't mutually exclusive, so you could perhaps experiment at first before seeing which one better suits your vision.

As to which platform to use, you can either jump straight to a paid provider, or set up a free blog. If the latter, I highly recommend you create a free account at wordpress.com. This has a few limitations (e.g. no ads), but it is easy to set up, largely absent of technical hassles, and again, free! A free wordpress blog can be cheaply, and easily, redirected to a paid one once you decide to stick with the project. I believe I used a free wordpress blog for the first ~9 months or so of my site and then moved home to a paid site at Dreamhost.

Why Wordpress, you might ask? It's simple but powerful, flexible, and easy to reskin. There are even paid plug-ins that can transform it into jobs boards and online stores!

If there's anything else you'd like advice with, let us know or send me a PM!

Oh, hello.

I would like to say that nothing is as important as writing every day. Even if you don't publish it. Even if you think it's terrible. The writing bit of your brain is a muscle - it doesn't get better unless you work it regularly, and it atrophies from disuse.

Good luck, Lady Silence!

Here's my blog where I've posted some of my poems.

Thank you very much! That was better than some of the advice I've seen from web searches I've done. I appreciate it.

Help me refine ideas for a serial fiction website

(Posted w/permission of Lum)

For a couple of months, I've been working on ideas for a serial fiction website. I originally envisioned this as a fully-fledged site for authors to selfpub their works a la KDP/Smashwords - there are a few serial fiction publication venues already but either they don't provide a way for the author to get paid (Wattpad) or they use a traditional publication model (Amazon Serials) - but I am open to suggestions! I've spoken to a few author friends, who like the idea and who've provided invaluable feedback; now I was hoping to hear from a few more voices. Specifically:

What would you like to see, both as readers and as authors? In particular, what business model would you like to see? For example:

• Would you like to see a selfpub site or a curated, tradpub-like site?
• Would you like to buy chapters one at a time (with an option to purchase the entire book if it's complete) (1), or would you like to - say - buy a subscription that unlocked all premium content, along the lines of cable TV or a newspaper paywall? (Authors, how much would you charge to have your work included in a subscribers-only archive?)
• Would you even be interested in buying/selling serialised fiction? Authors, would you rather prefer a wiki where you could add links to your work?
• etc

If this idea is feasible, I'd love to get it up and running. I want to give fledgling authors a platform to showcase their work, receive encouragement from readers, and hopefully make a bit of coin in the process, and success would mean quite a bit to me. :) So I'd really appreciate any feedback you guys could provide. Thanks!

(1) I'd rather avoid a "buy the whole book in advance" option; that opens up a gigantic can of worms if an author fails to deliver or pulls a GRRM.

I am so goddamn stuck right now. It's a sports story book, if you've read "Seven Seconds Or Less" you know what it is. Basically I hung around a professional soccer team as if I was a member of the staff. Turns out that season is the best in the history of the club (they won the double; League and Cup). Anyway, it's in four parts: Winter, Spring, Summer and Fall, where every part is introduced by a chapter on the last 24 hours of the season, where we went to my home town and beat the most successful club in the country to win the title. This actually works and it's simply too late to change now. However, the Winter chapter itself (basically the story of the pre-season) is a goddamn mess. It's 50 pages of stuff written and it's all over the place. I'm going to print it out and manually cut and paste everything into its correct place. I guess. I should probably do that right now, and NOT just sit and stare at it for another week, right?

This is a really neat idea! From a reader's perspective, I'd prefer a subscription-based model to avoid the problem of paying for chapters of a book that's never finished. (Honestly, it seems like the main problem with the idea as a whole is making sure authors publish on a schedule and don't abandon their work.) I guess authors would be paid based on page views, in that model?

I agree, this is a neat idea.

On your specific questions:

Q: Would you like to see a selfpub site or a curated, tradpub-like site?

A: I'd prefer a curated site rather than a wild and woolly one. If there's no attempt at some sort of quality control it's unlikely people will sift through the stories to find the good stuff.

Q: Would you like to buy chapters one at a time (with an option to purchase the entire book if it's complete) (1), or would you like to - say - buy a subscription that unlocked all premium content, along the lines of cable TV or a newspaper paywall? (Authors, how much would you charge to have your work included in a subscribers-only archive?)

A: This depends on how the site is set up re: the question above. If it's curated a subscription might be more appealing but I'd suggest going with a series of payment options instead of a single fixed one. Let people buy individual installments (good for sampling/impulse purchases) or the whole package and also offer subscriptions in some form.

Q: Would you even be interested in buying/selling serialised fiction? Authors, would you rather prefer a wiki where you could add links to your work?

A: Yes, I'd be interested in buying/selling! I don't understand the wiki question. Are you envisioning the site as a wiki? I tend to think that wouldn't work well. There should be a controlled submission process, not a do-it-yourself setup, though it's also important to give authors the flexibility to describe/promote their work, within the bounds of the site

Another way to control quality might be to only accept stories that are already complete but written in a format that can be serialized into installments. This is kind of cheating (what would Charles Dickens think?) but it would eliminate the potential issue of unfinished stories.

Good luck, Hammett!

Honestly, I haven't thought ahead that far yet. That's one possibility - thanks for the suggestion! Another possibility is that I pay authors a flat fee up front, like a magazine... but that's risky. Fiction magazines aren't exactly a thriving business, and if even Baen (an established science fiction publisher) couldn't pull it off a few years ago, what chance do I have?

(Incidentally, the problem I discovered with selling chapters a la carte is that the economics don't really line up. Effectively, for purchases of circa $1, upwards of $0.30 - and possibly up to iirc $0.45 - is eaten up by transaction costs. For the author to get a decent chunk of change, that leaves the site running on fumes.)

Good point! I think Wattpad, probably the #1 player in this space, is a case in point - they have a lot of stuff, but at a first glance, it doesn't seem much better than the contents of fanfiction.net. Since Wattpad seems to already have "anything goes" selfpub nailed down, some level of quality control would be a way to distinguish this site. :)

Sorry for the confusion - one alternative idea I had was a simple wiki where authors could index stuff they had hosted on their own sites. But it sounds like that might not be the best.

Thanks for the suggestion! I'll probably start out this way, by seeding the site with a few free, already completed, novels (once I get their authors' permission - I already have permission from one). The premium stuff can always come later.

Also, thanks again for the feedback, Nerys and Creole Ned ! The site may well end up as nothing more than "Mind Elemental and his buddies'/fellow Brokenites' fiction archive", but I'd still like to give it a go anyway. Do let me know if you have anything that you'd like to release for free. :)

As an added service, offer copy-editing to your authors at a fee or for an additional cut of the sales. If you aren't a copy-editor, get one and offer them the fee/share as their pay. One of the few things that really turns me off from self-pub and fan fiction is when they are asking me to pay money to read it but they apparently aren't willing to spend money to makes sure the work is spell checked and at least moderately grammatically correct.

This is a bad idea. Charging writers for copyediting doesn't make you look like a traditional publisher with standards; it makes you look like another scammy self-publishing company.

No. Scammy self-publishing companies are ones that REQUIRE you to pay for copy-editing. Traditional publishers appear to offer it for free because its cost is built in to the gigantic cut they are already taking. Mind Elemental could do that, offer to pay less and include copy-editing. Or, it could be an optional, added service that authors can choose to take advantage of, or not. Perhaps this isn't a problem if the content is curated - but then all you are really doing is pushing the onus of copy-editing onto the author prior to submission. Not a bad thing, but then the submission page should clearly state "You should have your work proofread and copy-edited before submission. It will greatly improve your chances of being approved to publish here.", otherwise the curators will be wasting time declining works that skipped the proofreading and copy-editing steps.

I forgive places like Amazon for having poorly edited crap, because they offer free samples and it becomes entirely my fault for not taking advantage of that and purchasing a shitty book. If I had to buy the book first, then I'd be angry at Amazon. So, in lieu of copy-editing, Mind Elemental's site should always offer the first chapter/episode or two of a serial for free. All I know is, if I go to the site, can't sample, have to buy, and get a poorly edited story for my money, I'll hold the site responsible, not the author, and won't buy there again.

Behold, the (very, very, very) early incarnation of the site! http://www.serialfix.com/

As you can see, it's still in its infancy; I just have one test story there, and I haven't yet added a way for people to submit content (or even a set of submissions guidelines), or a way for authors to make money from paid content. However, it IS ready if any of you guys would like to post a story. :D

Very minimalist. I like it!

I have nothing to contribute (yet).

I really like it. i have a few stories i need to edit and then they shall be added

Just for funsies, here is the first paragraph of what will hopefully be the short story for my creative writing class.

i want the george orwell line to end in "-sia." let us read it when it's done!

Thanks! The long intro sentence was on purpose, but it certainly bears consideration. What I'm going for with this story is sort of an exaggerated / nonsensical version of corporate America. Corporate Compliance (our heroes!) exist mostly to see that the Corporate Code of Conduct (CCC, Triple-C) is adhered to. They see themselves as high priests tending to a document of almost Talmudic significance; in reality the only reason they're around is to provide indemnity against legal action, as well as because the CEO has forgotten they exist. So in that sense they're rather pathetic. Only it turns out the Triple-C may have taken on a life of its own and it's maybe at this point basically the animating force behind the company! Which of course can't be a good thing!

Lol Microsoft.

Read Eileen Gunn for ideas.

Once I finish my story for my creative fiction writing class, I'll at least post it here on BF and most likely on serial

I'm looking for volunteers to read and offer feedback on my collection of short stories. I plan on self-publishing the whole bunch (30+) in a single volume when done. The bulk are speculative fiction and horror, with a sprinkling of science fiction and fantasy tossed in.

The first story ready for people to beat with a stick is "The Cobalt Sensation vs. a Small Town", one of three stories depicting the shenanigans of a Chicago-based group of superheroes. It's short and light, like a skinny dwarf. The feedback can be anything you like but looking it over with an editor's eye would be most appreciated. The compensation is a call-out in the book's acknowledgements and a cherished place in my heart forever 'n ever.

If anyone is interested, let me know what format works best for you and I will send a copy your way.

As always, if I get no response I will cry myself to sleep.

I'm always down for editing!