“I have spent a good many years since—too many, I think—being ashamed about what I write. I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer of fiction and poetry who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent. If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that’s all.”
Unpopular writing opinion: sometimes, telling is okay. Sometimes authors try so hard to show instead of telling that the writing becomes convoluted and difficult to understand. Sometimes, simplicity is all you need.
I really second this.
Sometimes you need to tell something, if nothing else then for pacing.
And sometimes it can be some sort of punctuation, a gut punch. The simplicity of telling juxtaposed with the emotional turmoil of the characters. I think I learned this from @galadrieljones? who I feel like does this to great effect.
Thanks@thevikingwoman ^_^ I remember this. I think I made a post once about Hemingway and how he does this in “Big Two-Hearted River.” I can’t find it on my blog (obviously thnx tumblr!!) but the thesis was something just like you said above. Like there’s this passage in the story that uses a long build of tension through observation of action and withholding of emotion as Nick, the POV character, watches a kingfisher dive down into the river. As the trout hide to evade the kingfisher, Hemingway writes in a very simple, telling fashion, “Nick’s heart tightened as the trout moved. He felt all the old feeling.”
In the story, Hemingway focuses on action, process, and description of the natural world, to emphasize Nick’s detachment from his emotional life as a war veteran. To describe his state of mind, Hemingway will always keep things simple, ie: “He was tired and very hot.” In doing this, Hemingway concedes that Nick’s emotional state is so complex that any attempt to articulate it with some sort of elaborate descriptive language is doing it a disservice. It is the act of withholding language that communicates the power of the emotional sub-text. Sometimes, a person is just sad, and you just tell it as such, and there is no more to say.
A similar example of this exists in Joan Didion’s essay “Holy Water,” which is about the priceless, almost holy nature of water in California. Didion writes: “I replay a morning when I was seventeen years old and caught, in a military surplus raft, in the construction of the Nimbus Afterbay Dam on the American River near Sacramento. I remember that in the moment it happened I was trying to open a tin of anchovies with capers. I recall the raft spinning into the narrow chute through which the river had been temporarily diverted. I recall being deliriously happy.”
Didion builds the tension of the scene by focusing on utilitarian descriptions of action and the environment. She filters all of her observations through recollection and memory, but never description of emotion. As a writer, Didion is not as stylized as Hemingway; however, like Hemingway, she tends to only reveal emotion when it is absolutely necessary. Here, Didion builds a scene systematically using lots of action, and then in that last sentence, she reveals a gut punch by summing up her emotions in a moment of powerful simplicity: “I recall being deliriously happy.” This simple act of telling does not have the same gravitas if the author tells even a little bit more or a little bit less about what she felt in that moment. It’s the act of withholding, which culminates in a simple, telling emotional reveal, that holds such power.
This sort of stoicism is not for everyone; however, even very emotional writers who write highly embellished prose can practice this at times to incite tension and even suspense in their audience. It can also be used if you feel like you’re getting too far up in your own head as a writer, there’s too much sweeping description of emotion, and not enough writing that is grounded in action and environment. It can be like a palate cleanser for you and the audience.
In the end, it helps to remember that sometimes, when it comes to showing emotion in writing, language isn’t good enough. Writing isn’t film. The answer to this is not to try and force it through a labyrinth of flowery prose and metaphors. Sometimes, it is just to tell emotion very simply, and in this, to withhold.
[I.D. A GIF in the shape of a domino mask shaped cut out, with moving footage of the Hargreeves siblings inside. By @circumstellarsEnd ID]
Season 3: 3MA!
Full details will be given later, but to help you get your gleeful scheming off to a good start, here the basics:
The event will take place in July - circa 9th-31st but the exact dates to be confirmed closer to the time!
3MA will have an optional season 3 theme. We will do our best to accommodate keeping the build up spoiler free for those avoiding spoilers! [Read the spoiler policy here]
Based on the feedback we received on previous rounds, we have decided to keep the gen requirement for 3MA. Most respondents to our survey found that keeping the event gen allowed them to read and enjoy more fics than if shipping had been included, and a few authors said they enjoyed challenging themselves to write non-ship fics. [If you want to know more about what a genfic is, check out the tvTropes page]
3MA will be keeping the wordcount cap set at 10,000 words maximum that was implemented for shocktober, with the addition of a caveat: only one fic submitted per author may be under 500 words. You can still submit up to two fics, which can be up to 10,000 words each, and you are allowed to update fics during the event providing the 10,000 cap is not exceeded prior to the un-masking. After the authors are revealed, you are free to make your fic as long as you please! However, only one of your two fics may be under 500 words. We have made this change based on feedback from Shocktober due to the difficulty of guessing authors of drabbles, but also that being able to write a drabble was what allowed some authors to participate. We hope this is a good compromise!
We will once again be taking community prompt submissions, and you can submit your prompt [here]. Prompt submissions will close late June/early July, date TBC. You can view prompts that have been submitted [here] (although the list will be updated periodically). You can also view the prompts submitted for Gen June and Shocktober [here]and[here] for even more inspiration.Once again, the prompt list is optional and is intended as inspiration for the authors. You do not have to write a fic based on a prompt if you don’t want to.
We look forward to seeing you all at the next masquerade!
Oh god, I think I’m going to do this. I already have my theme and cast. But writing something else while still trying to write an ongoing series is like really really hard! And one-offs? How do you guys do this?
i know it’s been said before, but it bears repeating: a big, big part of maintaining your confidence & self esteem as a creator is fully embracing the concept of “you don’t have to be good like them. you can be good like you.”
for example, i’m not someone who’s particularly good at coming up with complex, elaborate plots or incredibly unique ideas. it’s just not how i choose to write. and it would be easy for me to look at someone with an elaborate, super unique plot & decide that because i don’t write like that, i’m not a good writer. after all, unique plots are good, and my writing lacks those, so my writing must not be good, right? well, no, actually. i just have different strengths, like taking a simple premise & digging super deep into its emotional depths. that’s what i do well & it isn’t any better or worse than people who do elaborate world building or come up with really creative and unexpected plots.
your writing is never going to be all things to all people. it just isn’t. inevitably, you’ll have to make creative choices that favor certain aspects of writing over others. there is truly no getting around that & it’s honestly a good thing, because it means you’ve developed your own style. but you’ll always encounter other creators who posses strengths that you don’t. it doesn’t mean one is better than the other or that your writing isn’t good enough.
comparing yourself like that would be like taking a piece of pizza & a cupcake & going “oh no, that cupcake is so sweet & my pizza isn’t sweet at all.” or “gosh, the garlic crust on that pizza is delicious and my cupcake doesn’t have ANY garlic.” obviously your pizza isn’t sweet. obviously your cupcake doesn’t have garlic. a food can’t have every single delicious flavor at once. the cupcake is good like a cupcake. the pizza is good like a pizza. so you don’t have to be good like them. you can be good like you.
for real, if you see a fic that seems abandoned but you really want to see if it might be completed
i would genuinely suggest not mentioning the fact its abandoned at all. instead, just leave the most effusive comment you can. tell the author specifically what you liked. if they are in a position they might continue it, you might remind them what they liked about the story, and thus maybe revive it.
that is probably your best bet to get a story finished, much more than asking “hey is this abandoned” or asking for it to be continued.
It’s been years since I had optics at school, but how the hell can Alina see all of this? How do distances work in this world?! How do angles, visibility and human eyes?
So Os Kervo is stone’s throw from Novokribirsk AND the Shadow Fold? Crossing in the widest part is even more stupid, because the narrower parts should be a km or two…?
If Alina claims they’re close enough to see people’s faces, either she’s lying again, or the editor didn’t do their job and didn’t point out obvious nonsense. If they’re less than fifty meters, why did no one run towards the skiff? World record holder would reach it in six seconds. Am I supposed to believe no one got the same idea?
Book one of the Grishaverse contains the softest worldbuilding. It is cotton candy soft, and just as delicate and ephemeral as that spun candy. Which is absolutely fine when the reader treats this novel as a fairy tale. Many of the elements within the narrative work far better as a fairy story that runs on the logic of dreams.
However, once the series continues, the worldbuilding hardens like cooling sugar. In a way, this ruins book one. It changes what was absurdist into glaring innacuries. Clearly, I was never meant to question the scale of Os Kervo’s towers or the limitations of human eyesight in Shadow and Bone. This scene is meant to be atmospheric, something soft worldbuilding relies on,but then these impossible observationsare usedin book two to justify claims of the Darkling’s madness. Not to mention Novokribisk is retconned into a city.
Once Bardugo changed the tone of the series, book one begins to unravel at a faster and faster pace.
thinking again about TvTropes and how it’s genuinely such an amazing resource for learning the mechanics of storytelling, honestly more so than a lot of formally taught literature classes
reasons for this:
basically TvTropes breaks down stories mechanically, using a perspective that’s not…ABOUT mechanics. Another way I like to put it, is that it’s an inductive, instead of deductive, approach to analyzing storytelling.
like in a literature or writing class you’re learning the elements that are part of the basic functioning of a story, so, character, plot, setting, et cetera. You’re learning the things that make a story a story, and why.Like, you learn what setting is, what defines it, and work from there to what makes it effective, and the range of ways it can be effective.
here’s the thing, though: everyone has some intuitive understanding of how stories work. if we didn’t, we couldn’t…understand stories.
TvTropes’s approach is bottom-up instead of top-down: instead of trying to exhaustively explore the broad, general elements of story, it identifies very small, specific elements, and explores the absolute shit out of how they fit, what they do, where they go, how they work.
Every TvTropes article is basically, “Here is a piece of a story that is part of many different stories. You have probably seen it before, but if not, here is a list of stories that use it, where it is, and what it’s doing in those stories. Here are some things it does. Here is why it is functionally different than other, similar story pieces. Here is some background on its origins and how audiences respond to it.”
all of this is BRILLIANT for a lot of reasons. one of the major ones is that the site has long lists of media that utilizes any given trope, ranging from classic literature to cartoons to video games to advertisements. the Iliad and Adventure Time ARE different things, but they are MADE OF the same stuff. And being able to study dozens of examples of a trope in action teaches you to see the common thread in what the trope doesand why its specific characteristics let it do that
I love TvTropes because a great, renowned work of literature and a shitty, derivative YA novel will appear on the same list, because they’re Made Of The Same Stuff. And breaking down that mental barrier between them is good on its own for developing a mechanical understanding of storytelling.
But also? I think one of the biggest blessings of TvTropes’s commitment to cataloguing examples of tropes regardless of their “merit” or literary value or whatever…is that we get to see the full range of effectiveness or ineffectiveness of storytelling tools. Like, this is how you see what makes one book good and another book crappy. Tropes are Tools, and when you observe how a master craftsman uses a tool vs. a novice, you can break down not only what the tool is most effective for but how it is best used.
In fact? There are trope pages devoted to what happens when storytelling tools just unilaterally fail. e.g. Narm is when creators intend something to be frightening, but audiences find it hilarious instead.
On that note, TvTropes is also great in that its analysis of stories is very grounded in authors, audiences, and culture; it’s not solely focused on in-story elements. A lot of the trope pages are categories for audience responses to tropes, or for real-world occurrences that affected the storytelling, or just the human failings that creep into storytelling and affect it, like Early Installment Weirdness. There are categories for censorship-driven storytelling decisions. There are “lineages” of tropes that show how storytelling has changed over time, and how audience responses change as culture changes. Tropes like Draco in Leather Pants or Narm are catalogued because the audience reaction to a story is as much a part of that story—the story of that story?—as the “canon.”
like, storytelling is inextricable from context. it’s inextricable from how big the writers’ budget was, and how accepting of homophobia the audience was, and what was acceptable to be shown on film at the time. Tropes beget other tropes, one trope is exchanged for another, they are all linked. A Dead Horse Trope becomes an Undead Horse Trope, and sometimes it was a Dead Unicorn Trope all along. What was this work responding to? And all works are responding to something, whether they know it or not
Unironically this.
I discovered TvTropes in the… mid 2000s? I happened to be working at a job that afforded me a lot of down time, and I remember surfing TvTropes on my work computer, and whenever I saw an interesting-looking hyperlink, pulling it up in a new tab. …I had about twenty tabs open at any given time.
And yeah, back then I was still kind of conditioned to hear “trope” as a dirty word, and so frequently when I was reading a trope page I would be actively brainstorming “okay so how to NOT do this??” Which is sometimes useful; it’s how sexist/racist tropes get recognized and dismantled. Sometimes it’s not – because other tropes are just storytelling patterns, and oftentimes the whole reason those patterns become tropes is because they are viscerally, almost universally satisfying to their story-listening audiences. They work, and so it’s not surprising to see them reiterated elsewhere.
Which is why I wholeheartedly recommend that everyaspiring writer spends a few months on TvTropes reading every single hyperlink that catches your eye. It will make you a better writer.
Tropes are not a template, not a paint-by-numbers kit, not a list of cliches to avoid. They are the building blocks of stories, and they can be used badly or transcendentally, but you will be a better writer if you understand what tropes are, how they’ve been used, and how they can be employed to serve yourstory.
Ok so the thing about reading like books which are “predictable” is that I, a story enjoyer, go completely bonkers about it bc its like Enrichment in my Enclosure. A scene parallels another earlier scene between different characters thus serving to highlight the differences in their views and priorities???? A line makes me think “hmmm I bet that’s gonna be relevant later” ends up being relevant later????? I am a tiger chewing ice cubes out of a pumpkin. I’m so so happy. Please foreshadow more things. Throw the completely anticipateable plot beats at me like catnip mousies!!!!!
