I kind of laughed when my son posted this b/c technically, it's not alliteration. It's assonance. Alliteration by definition is the repetition of beginning consonant sounds. A is a vowel--thus assonance.
clever boy, nevertheless; there's hope for America.
Well. that's amazing! And I learned a useful word, too. Anaphora. To repeat a word again and again for emphasis or other literary reason.
Technically, isn't alliteration reference to consonants? "Always alliterate" is alliteration because of the "l". The "a" sound in both do not sound the same, in fact. "any and all available adjectives" has three different "a" sounds among the five words (maybe four if "and" and "adjective" are slightly different because of the difference in monosyllabic versus stressed syllable).
@ Charles
1: Your inability to understand analogies is not my issue,2. It was not gibberish. You have absolutely no understanding of what you speak of. You can identify with many things that you are not in a 3rd party fashion. You can identify with the victim and the villain even if you have been neither, because they are both rife with human feelings and the inner workings of the human mind as well as analogous situations and circumstances to which you can relate.
3. Yes, you identify with through your fears, through your empathy, sympathy, thoughts, and many other, more subtle aspects.
1: You don't know anything about reading or writing a novel or else you might have used one to show your point as I have done. Your knowledge of comic-book movies is sufficient, though, but completely irrelevant except to show even more clearly that the "real" people of those are always boring and ordinary and nothing of the stuff for a good novel. If it is the objective to write a book about "real" ordinary people to act as props to "identify with" and to love or hate then the objective is to write a boring book about a bunch of ordinary people. The style of naturalism, the alternatives to which I am sure you have no idea exist, does contain a lie about the importance of ordinary people with whom we are supposed to "identify with" by casting ordinary people in falsity of oppression or mental degradation or other such social-justice propaganda in straight drama or in the false universe of magic or spiritualism.
2 & 3: "You identify through your fears, etc." If you mean to consider of the fictional character as the same as oneself, why don't you direct your response to what I said rather repeating yourself:
I am saying that such truth, feelings or situations, is always contextual and not classifiable as something "which can be identified with." What you can identify with may not be something I can identify with, so how is the author wrong in choosing me and not you as a target audience, except, perhaps, in a bean-counting way? Sometimes it is that a real person is simply boring and sometimes a real person has a disjunction between events and his feelings over those events that any normal person will not identify with -- see: Bret Easton Ellis, for example.
There are few examples of contemporary and well-known novels not of the naturalist style, even if not completely surrealist or neo-romantic in the avant-garde European way: Palahniuk and Ellis of the former and Ayn Rand of the latter and those never use characters as props for the reader to "identify with" but also never have boring and uninteresting/pointless characters as do 99% of contemporary novels that you would hold up as example of good writing if you ever read any.
If you have not read a single novel, and I don't mean the movie version, that is not naturalist then you have nothing of interest to say about the inclusion of "truth" in writing, period.
Man, youre missing it entirely. What is the difference between the new Spiderman movie "The Amazing Spiderman 2," and the first Spiderman movie with Toby Macguire ? They were both had plenty of CGI, special effects, plenty of Spiderman, Villains, and dialogue, yet one was beloved, while the other scrutinized, hated, and generally trash-talked, even to the point of Sony firing the actor.
This is what you are missing. The SITUATION may not be real, but the FEELINGS are. That is why it is important to "Get into character," to understand the character, to know the character, every character, no matter how small their part. Two Face isnt real, but we know hate, we know anger.
This is because we MUST identify with it on some level in order to care, and we can only identify with something that has an element of realism, AKA, the truth within a lie.
For one thing, you are missing the point that we all ought to be referring to writing as a novelist or short-story crafter or essayist, not a hack movie/TV writer. I'd say exactly what has happened to American literature, to contribute to its downfall as any kind of art form, is that authors are thinking like only so much as contributors to TV/movies and not as the sole creator of a product that is and ought to be always very different from movies. The novel can afford to be more complex and heavily crafted than anything put on film, and the rule of thumb since novels have been adapted for movies, is the better the book, the worse the movie, for something, and often so many things, have to be left out to make a movie. Maybe it is true for the commercial product of the movie is that it is only so much can be devoted to any one character and all which MUST be identified with, but movie studios have had a history in making the flop, probably predicted so much as a flop -- the artful flop having a different approach -- so long as the studio's annual balance sheet is in the positive. Those flops, I guess, are not anything you have seen or care to see, but from time to time the "low-budget" film does make it commercially. Something by David Lynch comes to mind. Tell me with which character in Mulholland Drive is a normal "real" person is supposed to identify?
Second, "The SITUATION may not be real, but the FEELINGS are . . " is just so much gibberish on the tropic of truth written into fiction, for no one including me has suggested that fiction contains anything that is not really 'not real' in toto, but rather from what truth can an author draw to make fiction, and I am saying that such truth, feelings or situations, is always contextual and not classifiable as something "which can be identified with." What you can identify with may not be something I can identify with, so how is the author wrong in not choosing me as a target audience, except, perhaps, in a bean-counting way? Sometimes it is that a real person is simply boring and sometimes a real person has a disjunction between events and his feelings that any normal person will not identify with -- by Bret Easton Ellis, for example.
Third, I disagree with the premise: "This is because we MUST identify with it on some level in order to care . . " because "identifying" and "caring" might be subordinate to anything else the author wishes to convey, and I think perfectly rightfully so. Both in the novel and the movie American Psycho what is it that we're suppose to identify with and/or care? Victims of senseless murder, in some sense, possibly, but to think that was the point of the story is to completely miss the point of the story.
Yes, I don't remember what Orson Scott Card did, but putting the name with a context, and not just the name, helps. Names and relationship of people are usually harder to do and especially over volumes.
Like penang, I use a spreadsheet to keep track of every named item I have in my story (stars, planets, ships, characters, military ranks, etc.).
Dirk
I was wondering: in the type "space opera" -- of which I have read something by Orson Scott Card, and I did have this problem because I read fiction very slowly; a novel takes me a year -- if the author has to go to extraordinary external means to keep track of his stars, planets, ships, etc. how is a reader to keep all that together in his head? Or is it the creation is quite different from the consumption?
My point was in the psychology of it, not literal translations of metaphor and analogy. Superman was also Clark Kent, Spiderman was Peter Parker. It is in this, in their mannerisms, their thoughts, their feelings, their humanity, good or bad, that the connection is made, because that is what people identify with. The supernatural does not do without the element of realism. Even aliens on Star Trek have a decidedly human element. We route for Ripley on Alien because of the infinitesimally unlikely, yet significant (in our minds) possibility of ending up in her position. Even the quirky, unlikeable, or even villainous traits of a character can be identified with. It is only through this identification that the character can be hated or loved. Contest it all you want, but the fact of the matter is, THAT is the truth, it is the realistic elements that that draws us to a character, and that is why Stephen King speaks of the truth in the lie, the Peter Parker in the Spiderman.
I would say that the exaggeration brought by comic book characters, in their disguise modes, makes the notion that "real" people are boring more palatable. In a broad sense, the style extant in American literature across all genres that is "naturalism" is a hoax for the agenda-driven author to pretend he is giving the reader "reality" when he is in fact giving no such thing. In contrast, somewhat in reaction to naturalism, neo-romanticism and surrealism, carries with them a style a kind of honesty in purpose and have given to literature real art by embracing idiosyncrasy (or "the best" particularly in romanticism) and a purpose-driven story that is transparent rather than phoney as it is in naturalism.
Moreover, I contest the notion that character "traits that can be identified with" is something important, but rather it is the artful means to transport the reader's mind to understand traits that cannot be identified with, some being that which one is not, is important and makes for a great story. In the end, even for commercial purposes, hating or loving a character is unimportant, but instead it is in having interesting, purpose-driven characters. It cannot be that a "mother" character who likes to bake cookies and never has an unkind word for anyone has any particular purpose for an author or reader except to operate cheaply and at a low intellectual level through stereotypes.
It isnt so much truth as it is A truth. I have always thought of it this way. Your characters ARE NOT you. YOU are not your characters. BUT, you MUST UNDERSTAND your characters.
This is why it is easier to model our characters based on ourselves or people that we know, or use real life events, changed or modified to fit. It is because that is what we know. That is what we already understand. The characters that are nothing like us, those are harder, because we must come to understand a truth that we do not already know. So, basically, each character and each situation must be a truth, even though it is, technically, a lie. For no character goes loved or hated if it is not within a realm of realism.
Real people are boring, and it is a little surprising how authors are real, boring people. What they do is put real (boring) people in unexpected, unusual, or fantastic situations and conjecture what happens. Conversely, there is the hero character of the fantasy put into real(ish) situations and conjecture what might happen. A difficult story is one in which the main character or some ancillary characters are not "real", rather quirky, annoying, and not all that likeable. That is a story for the ages if not for TV and pulp novels. For that reason I'd have to say that I disagree with: "For no character goes loved or hated if it is not within a realm of realism," for why should a character be loved or hated rather than just appreciated for what he (really) is even if he is not like "real" people -- so long as he is not boring?
lending truth to lies and myths on the subject.<<Hmmm. Wonder if that what Stephen King meant.
Alas so, then.
"Writers write what they know." I've always heard that. Stephen Kings says, "Fiction is the truth inside the lie."
For the sake of discussion, how much "truth" do you put into your fictional writing? How much of yourself is part of your characters?
I have been inhibited by the near certainty readers will just assume far more truth in all or some of the particulars of what I write than is actually true. Necessarily "write what you know" means believability of scenes, such as New Yorkers interminably writing stories set in New York, as if everyone should care anything at all about New York, per se. An author whose great Aunt Flossie was a manic-depressive alcoholic and therefore must know everything there is to know about bipolarism and/or alcoholism gives way to a fallacy of appeal to authority, but, on the other hand, an author who has had no close personal contact with a manic depressive will be guilty (perhaps) of lending truth to lies and myths on the subject.
Yeah, well, two spaces even in the modern era of computer proportional fonts still looks right to me. It was MS Word grammar checker that forced me out of that long habit.
I sometimes have to try hard not to overuse these, and Im sure there are a bunch of others, but these come to mind as the most irritating for me.
Shine
then
glinted
saw
wondered
thought/think
said
smiled
very
slowly
started
liked
began
dark
light
few
several
little
lot
some
there
determined
shine, light, glinted, dark - if key to theme, character and plot should be repeated, even to a little annoyance.
latin-originated like "determine" should rarely be repeated.
some, little,lot,few,very you will find are not necessary
"-ing" words -
English has this odd progressive verb tense and otherwise continuing verb tense that[1] uses participles: I am reading; there are .. German, for example, has "es gibt" for "there is" using [1] an idiomatic *active* verb, but English has this "to be" condition and a predicate construction so there may be [1] in narration and certainly in non-fiction many "there"'s and participles which can be tiresome, but "I am reading" is always the correct way to put "I read" for immediately current action, but modifying participial phrases like "reading a book" is frequently overused at the beginning of sentences and rarely correct at the end of a sentence. "Reading a book, Joe ran into the wall" is better put "While reading a book, Joe ran into a wall"; and "Joe ran into a wall, reading a book" is incorrect. I don't think that I have ever read anything put up on NTBW (even my own stuff) that does not have this incorrect dangling participial phrasing at the end of sentences.
[1] "-ing" or "that" or "there" - English language must use these repeatedly.
Just, though, and that are my big ones. I also find I'll use the same word over and over in a chapter randomly - the other day, I was editing one and realized I'd used the word door 24 times. Yikes!
I don't think repeating a noun is such a sin, and may indicate the author's desire to add emphasis to a word or to use the word as a leitmotif. In a preamble of 86 words I used the word "book" 8 times, 10 times the percentage of "door" 24 times in a 2400-word chapter. I'd think the reader would have to be an idiot to think that I did not mean to say something by that.
Just to play devil's advocate, these words are part of the English language, so I have little concern about using them. The only people who might care are editors and fellow authors, neither of whom is likely to be a significant part of my target audience. I prefer to write stories the way I would tell them.
I'm in the middle of a Star Wars novel. They break all kinds of rules about good writing. Yet, the story reads well throughout, except it has too mansy names of places, technology, and charactes.
End of rant.
Dirk
I think there is writing suitable in the heat of the moment, and then there's writing after reflection. The saying that time is the best editor is a good saying. I think there is some official house sheet of copyeditor's rules that unwisely excludes most adverbs, but "very", "actually", "really" and others naturally flow out in that initial desire to emphasize, but in later reflection those words can be thrown out as unnecessary.
I was wondering if anyone else is experiencing problems with regular reviews. The text on the far left of the book I'm trying to review is cut off (roughly the left-most character of each line in the book. It appears to be a relatively new author, so I don't know if he can read inline reviews (or if he's even still on the site), so I'm just guessing blindly as to which kind of review to leave. I tried using a new tab in my Google browser to write the review, but the problem persists. I also tried completely rebooting my machine. Still no luck. I'm pretty much stuck right now, at least as far as that author is concerned.
Thanks.
Dirk
Happened to me once. It may have to do with reader font enlargement when the author has posted a fixed font (pt and not px)
The big problem is that publishy and bookish people have no concept of the electron.
I predicted this radical change 4 years ago, stating here that eBooks would take a large percentage of reader's money, time and space.
We can all together look forward to the days when ebooks do to reading what texting/twittering has done to conversation.
Bookstores, libraries of the future will only offer database access for a price.Printed books will become novelties, as the work of monks scribing did.
My wife runs a university library. She's inverted the entire physical place to a meeting place with access to databases. The physical books remain, but the cost of repair, replacement, cataloging and physical moving of them makes them obsolete as more and more books are turned into organized electrons that weigh almost nothing. Most of the paper books go to the dump or used book stores for the poor.
That will certainly make the job of the firemen of Fahrenheit 451 much easier. Think of it! With a touch, and no fuss, that impermissible collection of electrons can disappear as easily as any Tea Party IRS 501c4 exemption request
You could affect God with a different personality for each MC by different speech patterns and such like. I'm thinking of the common scenario of the devil on the left shoulder and an angel on the right shoulder which would be two "gods" for one MC, but in my opinion if you really want to impress the reader that it is *not* the very same God giving different advice to the two MC's, it is mandatory that the God(s) have different personalities. Your idea is a very good. I might steal it.
I think the end question for the future is will there even be authors remaining? This topic is interesting in that it leads to discussing the rip current while the Tsunami isn't far away. Quill is an existing artificial intellligence that already can take data and rearrange it in a story mode setting for easier understanding by clients. The developers of Quill and many others are already predicting similar and more advanced AI will soon be able to construct stories as good as any human author. As it was with the first: calculator, PC, television, etc. time is on the side of such technology. What we may laugh and feel confident won't take place, will simply be staring us in the face later on. I used to play a mean game of chess, and thought no AI would reach a point where it could beat a world champion. Along came Deep Blue and put an end to that. One more piece of motivation to get our writing done asap.
Certainly we have put AI in the Whitehouse, so literature and then all the arts cannot be far behind for the exact same purpose.
If you leave all fields blank but for the genre you get all those in that genre
Magnifying glass; leave fields blank; click search posting
drop down genre to {selection} and {type},
leave author/title blank; click search
Looking back, my first draft was absolute garbage. I bought several books on writing, from which I learned a lot of what a typical book entails (story arcs, character arcs, hero's journey, outlining, etc.). I tossed v1 without ever finishing it, although I still borrow from it. I'm treating v2 as my figure-out-how-to-write draft, including some significant, unplanned detours that weren't in my outline. I'm overdue to reorganize the outline to ensure I haven't written myself into a corner.
It's a balancing act between the amount of structure a new writer needs vs. the ability to write based on inspiration. There are good authors on both ends of the spectrum
I have to agree that method of organization varies from individual to individual. I may be able to keep an outline plan in my head for a very long time, and others do not. I wrote my PhD thesis entirely without written outline, although it had already been organized by virtue of being printed up in four papers, with my supervisor at head, before I submitted the thesis. I did, however, in the orals get some comments regarding its 'uniqueness' of style (and not in a good way), and I probably gave myself unnecessary grief in worry about my method. As to fiction, I feel I have never finished anything, partly from perfectionism, but, I have to say, that an organic growing is a slow, never-ending process.
I have read in several writer's advice to other writer's books and posts that is important to make notes on what you plan to write about in a bit of detail and/or ask some questions for yourself for the next time you sit down to write. It gets you started at least. Outlines also would help keep you on track. I'd tick off what has been covered but in a different color of ink or text I'd include on the outline any unfinished business or remaining questions.
It may be that novels (not applicable to non-fiction books) written from outline are formulaic, dull, and staid. If a successful writer has found his formula to make him plenty of money from book to book using the same formula from outline from book to book, writing from outline and notes is certainly a good idea. He writes out his outline including some facts to look up, practicality of scenarios to consider, etc, , pays his staff to fill in those pesky details, fills out the rest, and turns it back to his staff to polish it off, and he has written the same money-making book over and over again. For a novice, unpublished author, writing to formula and outline may mean writing to someone else's formula. I think an author, not a TV/movie hack, to make his mark ought to allow as much "organic" growing of his work as possible. Certainly, the advantage of putting things down in notes and very rough drafts is to enhance retention in memory those great ideas that can flash before him in a moment of inspiration but then as easily flash out of existence.
I've noticed a few different authors on the site using different rules to break up paragraphs, especially when it's mixed with dialogue. Following is from one of my chapters (with paragraph numbers for clarity):
1. Next, Joseph exited the bathroom, set the weapon back to full power, and fired at the glass booth over the head of the remaining guard. It exploded in a shower of glass, momentarily stunning the guard. Joseph quickly reset the weapon to stun, then fired repeatedly at the man until he was sure this guard was unconscious as well. He called to his fellow slaves and said, “Everyone, Paul and I are leaving. If you want out of here, we can escort you.”
2. Paul and the others came running.
3. At Joseph’s direction, they carried the unconscious man into the bathroom, stripped both guards of their uniforms, and placed them in restraints. Joseph and Paul quickly put the uniforms on, grabbed the rifles, and led the others out of the warehouse. “Try not to act suspicious,” Joseph told everyone. “It’s a simple slave escort. Nothing more.”
4. The group walked past multiple open warehouses where other guarded slaves loaded and unloaded ships.
5. “So far, so good,” Joseph said.Should the sentence in (1) starting with "He called to his fellow slaves..." be a separate paragraph? It's still a continuation of Joseph's actions. Does it come down to stylistic preference?
Same question for the dialogue in (3) that starts with "Try not to act suspicious..."
Should paragraphs (2) and (3) be combined? What about (4) and (5)?
I'd be interested in hearing as many opinions as possible.
Thanks.
Dirk
The easiest way to rid your writing of any POV/perspective confusion is to always provide a separate paragraph when the subject/object/dialogue changes from one person/topic to another person/topic. This may result in a sort of choppy and fatiguing experience for the reader and may then indicate an overall flaw in the writing style. [IMHO, due to avoidance of good complex sentences that will handle multiple topics in relation to each other at one time.] You have done that perspective change by paragraph change perfectly well. That this is the *best* way of writing a novel is a matter of taste: unambiguous versus elaborate, nuanced style is a matter of opinion and to a degree genre-dependent. Sci-fi/action/thriller is generally written in the safe way and not in an elaborate way because boys and men are literal-minded, rather than laterally-thinking, for the most part, and thus simple is better.
Well, as best I understand you, I think I disagree. I also think that there is choice-of-definition here, as well as personal taste, so I don't have grounds, beyond my own judgement, for my disagreement.
Now, if you were to argue, as some have, that a pizza should not be called a pie, I could point to that towering popular standard, That's Amore!, in appeal to authority.
Okay, two examples: (1) The Twilight Zone episode in which robbers of gold are put into suspended animation and in the end the last remaining re-animated robber is found dead clutching a gold bar, and his discoverers in the future world tell us (to the effect): what an idiot, we can make gold cheaply and certainly gold is no longer worth dying over. Of all the themes, characterizations, and plotlines contained in that story, for one to complain: Oh, science says that we will never be able to make gold cheaply (alchemy/magic versus chemistry/science) means he has stick up his ass.
On the other hand, example (2): The author imagines a future world as a post-socialist, nonviolent androgenous communist utopia in which "money" is spending credit allotted to each according to his needs, healthcare is free, and sexism, racism, and homophobia have disappeared entirely. His utopia is made possible, in part, he imagines by engineering the Y chromosome out of human beings and making gold from lead or any other base metal; the economy can be made to expand infinitely by infinite expansion of the money supply and with people not doing that male thing of greed and competition. This is to say that we are to accept by willing suspension of disbelief a magical kingdom created by magic -- something that has an internal logic that magic-fantasies do have but which conflicts with every detail of reality. I believe an enthusiast for such a story is either a child or a moron or a communist, i.e., a moronic childish communist adult like Michael Moore or Sean Penn. I think you claim Moore and Penn have right to their personal tastes, opinions, etc. -- that I do not deny -- and all such magic-fantasy authors masquerading as sci-fi futurist authors have a right to cater to those tastes and opinions -- that I do not deny -- but that misses the greater issue of the propagation of evil ideas that can do nothing in practice other than destroy lives. Similarly, freedom of and to religion does not deny the freedom of authors of such texts which sanction the beheadings of Christian Americans, Shiite Muslims, and atheist Japanese in the deserts of the middle east, but it should not also deny a righteous condemnation of the magical thinking which creates such texts for/by/of the purpose of willing suspension of disbelief.
Dagnee's point about the willingful suspension of disbelief seems to be the key point here. The science fiction part of Dr. Who changed from storyline to storyline but the writers kept the viewer involved. The categories only tell us something about the assumptions built into the fictional world.
and my point never denied the importance of WSD but rather the confusion of sci-fi science with magic is not worthy of WSD.
Though Sir Arthur wrote: "Any sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from science" he implied the converse of "any sufficiently utilized science is the same as magic." That is to say a magician's black box that appears to do magical things can be in the end explained fully in the context of reason in which there is no magic, but a scientist/engineer's black box cannot be (unless there is fraud and deception involved) ever explained leaving such a mystery as if just maybe there might be magic involved (Nobody but the wizard engineer can understand the thing). Of course, as I finish this explanation, I realize it is probably more confusing than if I just said nothing, but damn if I going to throw away a fine set of highfalutin verbiage.
BTW I never considered Dr. Who (except perhaps in the first Doctor fifty years ago) Sci fi but rather in that TV, almost cartoonish, fantasy class.
Charles - I take my Climate change myths directly from NOAA and try to squash them to bits in my novel. As I consider the other evidence of what affected Earth's climate in the not that distant path, such as the PDO, AMO, Sun Spot records about the last Little Ice Age that happened in the 1800's etc. It's like they want to pull the wool over our eyes, but we should never forget the two things that have the biggest control of our planet's climate and that's the Sun and the Ocean. These two things work together to not only create our atmosphere, but also to create that wonderful insulating system we love. Without out it...well I think you know where I'm going with that. I could go on but I'll stop now.
Oh, but don't you see? When *we* the deniers sneak our opinions into mainstream, we are called kooks and our work is denigrated as sub-standard.
