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Comments
So, on another note, while I was on the 10-hour drive back to Maine, I got another idea for a story that I might submit for the next workshop.
Basically, it's a series of moments in the lives of multiple groups of drivers on Interstate Highways, mostly occurring in Massachusetts (I choose Massachusetts because it had by far the worst drivers my friend and I had the pleasure of sharing the road with today, so it should make for the most interesting driving stories). Transitions from car to car would happen based on when one set of characters passes another/observes others/stops at a rest stop and sees other people in the rest stop. It would deal with myriad issues people might be dwelling on while on the road, and if I weren't a sheltered brat, I might even be able to weave meaningful social commentary into this. Thoughts?
It might work. I'm not so sure how well it'd work in text format, though.
If you want an example of something that's sort of the same but also different, try giving this fanfic a shot.
I guess, if there's one thing I might offer up to you, it's that you shouldn't immediately try to end the story when they pass the other car, etc. You should definitely make note of what the other car is doing, but then you should tie off that person's story before you swap to the next scene in the other car.
Also, interactions at... rest stops, gas stations, etc, might work better than simply passing another car, although passing a car would probably work once. It affords you a better chance to establish who the other person is, which will make them more recognizable to the reader.
What's the point of writing if I can't push boundaries and do something new? :[
Can do.
I feel like I should know better than to do that, but I'll definitely try to be conscious of it.
Well, for passing cars, I think that was gonna happen once or twice, but another shift I was thinking of was one wherein a driver on his permit is taken out onto the highway by his parents, and after narrowly dodging a pileup (that may or may not be the result of a race between two or three cars, but that's definitely one of the things that'll be in there), his parents comment that, hey, it's just a few more assholes outta the way, and the kid is just silent from there on out, but it's subtly established that he'll at least go on to be a pretty good driver. I don't know if I could use too many rest area interactions, since, well, I never interact with anyone I don't have to when I'm stopping.
To tell a story.
Not that. Like...
"The man in front of me placed a bottle of water and three bottles of juice on the counter. He paid in cash and thanked the cashier, then swept out of the gas station, barely glancing at me."
...
"Garret slid into the driver seat of his car, then turned and handed a bottle of juice to each of his children."
It's less repetitive than a constant stream of "I saw him in the car", and it can establish a bunch of minor details that you couldn't otherwise do without interrupting the story's flow.
Well, that's the sort of thing I meant, actually. I don't mentally file that as an "interaction."
Yeah, but if someone else has already told this story and made it stick to the field of literature, what's the point of writing it again (except, I guess, in homage, or for satire's sake, or maybe even to get one's feet wet, or something like that)? But mostly, I'm hesitant to accept an idea being too difficult for prose. Too difficult for an inexperienced writer like me to fully pull off, probably, but there are probably plenty of people out there who could tackle, for instance, this idea.
I don't know what else to call it.
I don't know. Let's ask... Star Wars. And Lord of the Rings, and Harry Potter. All of which tell almost the same story- in broad strokes. HP doesn't do anything particularly new, but it does tell an old story in such a way that many people enjoyed it.
I didn't say it'd be too difficult. I said I didn't know how well it'd work.
In a visual media, such as... I dunno, a movie, you can have the camera spin around to focus on the second car, then spin again to be in the second car.
You can get the same sort of effect in prose, but mostly through the use of repetitious phrasing and stuff. It doesn't work quite as well as in visual media.
Exactly. Broad strokes. Even if those stories fit the same story archetype, they use different elements of characters, and setting, and so on, to create new details that the readers/viewers will remember, and that might have different bearings on the moral/intellectual considerations put across by each story. Star Wars didn't have rescue eagles and rings given to racially-divided kingdoms, and Harry Potter didn't have any of those things, and neither of those things had magic systems involving Latin incantations with a system of magic that can be expanded upon by a miserable teenager, nor were they set in the modern day, and Harry and Luke didn't have huge hobbit feet or treefolk friends, and neither Harry nor Frodo (as far as I know, not being familiar with LotR) got their arms cut off by their fathers and had to survive in an arctic environment. You probably get my point by now. If we reduce a story to "he defeated the bad guy," or "everyone died," or "he went from poverty to success," then there really are no more stories to tell.
I might have lost my previous point by now, and in fact I feel that this probably aligns pretty well with your own argument, but if we don't reduce a story about people on the highway to "everyone was miserable," then maybe we can do something new.
It would probably work better in movie form, yeah (at the very least, transitions from character to character would be easier on some level), but until I hear that such a movie exists, I'll ride this one out, so to speak, while trying my best to make it memorable.
I'm, uh, not sure what the point here is any more. @_@
To be honest, I'm not sure either. I just didn't like the idea that I should accept that I'm writing a story that's too similar to one that already exists, or that I shouldn't try to demonstrate certain capabilities of prose writing.
Well, you asked what the point was of writing a story that didn't push boundaries or make something new.
I never said that yours was that, note. I've read one thing that sort of did something similar. My point with what I said was that I honestly didn't know how well such a story would work in text format, as that sort of thing is more suited to visual format, although not impossible to do in text format.
I then answered that as a separate question.
If it turns out that my idea isn't that original, I have to accept that. It's just that, well, why not try to find a new twist on things? At the very least, I want to bring something to workshop that my classmates couldn't have thought of by half-assedly reflecting on any clichéd incidents or stories they already knew about or had read already (so far, I've read a story about a kid discovering magic and staying with a mentor figure to learn about it, with attempts at philosophy and everything; college-bound kids who think they're "such nerds" going their separate ways; a girl being goaded into doing something daring by her cousin; an attempt at parable with an anti-mob mentality moral; you probably get the picture by now).
Is the fanfic you linked me to similar to my idea in that it deals with perspective changes after certain interactions, or does it also involve people on some road with shifting perspectives built around that? One of the things that I was going to attempt was trying to capture the feeling of cars moving on the highway, at whatever speeds the drivers may choose to travel at, while using the highway as a device for shifting perspectives while each driver/passenger's observations adds new insight in some way, or offers a new dilemma. One of the things I want to capture is that all of these moments go by really, really fast, as do the cars these people drive, and so it's easy for them to make snap judgments about the other people on the road and dehumanize them. I suppose this is played-out in its own way, since most people should be capable of intellectualizing their road rage, but I feel like there's something here worth tinkering with.
It's, well... There's two ways to go about things, I guess. You can try and make something relatively new, or you can go back over something that's been done and attempt to make it better. There's nothing wrong with either way (and, in fact, I actually prefer the second).
... Sort of. It actually deals with an overarching story.
In each chapter, the focus is brought on one Warder. The Warder then meets up with the one that will be the focus in the next chapter; they might actually physically meet each other, they might just pass in the halls, they might just hear about the other Warder, but the important part is that each Warder that will be focused on is brought up in the previous chapter.
I guess I think of that as making something new, too, in that it's revitalizing an older story in such a way that it's increasing the reader's understanding/knowledge/emotional depth beyond what it was. So I guess we're at the point of pedantic debate, or differences in opinion, as tends to happen? I'm fine with that.
Ah. Well, I'll try to read for a few chapters. I hope I won't drown in all the adverbs. :V
I guess so.
I'd worry that the bigger problem is not understanding anything that's going on because you haven't read the series. :P
whatever
I like it. Feels satirical. Minor criticism is that there are some word choices that sound awkward.
Gonna have a drama pilot script coming up in a few days, if anyone is interested in looking at it.
Any ideas on how to write a charming french male character?
1. write charming character
2. make them french
Read a bunch of Lupin stories?
^^ Any half decent references?
So, today, I read a fanfic. Oooh, big surprise.
But... this one's actually good. And I'm not sure why.
It has all the classic marks of bad writing. It doesn't always use proper grammar. The sentence structure is nonsensical. It uses metaphor in place of substance, it swaps POV's between chapters without telling you so, and it's raw and unfinished.
And it works. It makes the story so much better than it would otherwise be.
So, I wanted to share it with anyone who wants to read it, because it's a pretty great example of a story that supports the story with the actual writing itself.
And if you don't want to read the entire thing, I'll post a snippet below.
So I wrote a short script. In it, I killed my main character at the climax of the story. My teacher and classmates told me he liked the character too much and that killing him was wrong.
keikaku doori
Nova: That's actually pretty interesting.
If they liked the character to the point that they're sad about his death, then you did a good job by getting them to invest in the fate of the character.
If the story's point involves the death in order to be conveyed to the audience, then congratulations, good job.
Yeah, I think it is interesting when people got mad at Whedon for killing the characters. It means he did a good job.
So I'm going to make a Critique Circle account, but I'm hung up on a username, of all things. Do I go with my Twitter name (@ElfOnADinosaur) or a pseudonym I just came up with (I want a name that makes more sense than All Nines this time)? Or just my actual name? Hmm . . .
While I entirely agree that it's come to a point where it's become hack-y as shit (And really, it all ties into Whedon having had a peak in his career as a writer back with Buffy and Miss Calendar), I'd still say that if his characters are likeable enough to cause that reaction when they die, it's because he's good at creating likeable characters. Which is honestly the number one reason people are so willing to forgive a lot of the shit he pulls, writing-wise.
I was mostly talking about Buffy-era anyway.
Curious, what shit does he pull writer-wise, Juan?
Yeah, but I meant that everything after season 2's moment with Jenny Calendar was just...eugh. At least, in regards to his killing shenanigans.
Well, except for Doyle, but honestly, I always suspected the good things about Angel came from Greenwalt as much as they came from Joss.
As for the shit he pulls off writer-wise, it's just...well, the deaths, the somewhat shallow characters (Not always, granted, but a lot of his characters tend to just fullfill an archetype with a Whedon-y spin, like banter. It's always banter, really) and the plot structures are somewhat all over the place.
There's also Serenity, which, again, has a hugely likeable cast, but the plot pretty much tosses every single good thing about Firefly, from the moral ambiguousness to the general feeling of "Dudes trying to survive". and uh yeah.
I love Whedon, mind you.