The Writing Thread

[AndSothisIsChristmas]

Incredibly rough sketch:

You know how they tell athletes to have a backup plan in case their sports career doesn’t work out? Well, for my protagonist, a college basketball player who doesn’t anticipate being drafted, his just so happens to be magical assassinations. Empowered by a thrall spirit with command over a chemical element (in this universe, secretly the foundational building blocks of magic- chemistry is just really slow, really unimpressive magic), he carries out contract killings for quick cash, while also participating in a ranked league of assassins- by killing one and advancing your rank, you can bind their thrall to yours like a molecular bond and enhance your powers. Our protagonist is initially pretty unambitious and just wants to keep alive and have steady income, but when the head of the league gives him a once-in-a-lifetime payday to kill the most enthralling, innocent girl he’s ever seen, he starts to question his place in the system, and starts to desire enough power to reshape it, soften it, and maybe kickstart his hoop dreams after all…

Again, VERY rough, will probably go through lots of revisions. Feedback is appreciated.

 

[Commissar Fuklaw]

Reads pretty good to me, the premise wouldn't be out of place as a manga.

 

[AndSothisIsChristmas]

Reads pretty good to me, the premise wouldn't be out of place as a manga.

It’s definitely inspired by No More Heroes lol

 

[Lovely Kin]

What genre do you guys consider is very hard to write well?

 

[Dick Johnson]

Incredibly rough sketch:

You know how they tell athletes to have a backup plan in case their sports career doesn’t work out? Well, for my protagonist, a college basketball player who doesn’t anticipate being drafted, his just so happens to be magical assassinations. Empowered by a thrall spirit with command over a chemical element (in this universe, secretly the foundational building blocks of magic- chemistry is just really slow, really unimpressive magic), he carries out contract killings for quick cash, while also participating in a ranked league of assassins- by killing one and advancing your rank, you can bind their thrall to yours like a molecular bond and enhance your powers. Our protagonist is initially pretty unambitious and just wants to keep alive and have steady income, but when the head of the league gives him a once-in-a-lifetime payday to kill the most enthralling, innocent girl he’s ever seen, he starts to question his place in the system, and starts to desire enough power to reshape it, soften it, and maybe kickstart his hoop dreams after all…

Again, VERY rough, will probably go through lots of revisions. Feedback is appreciated.

If this is what you havr right now, read over it and start asking questions - and then answer them. Why is it important/relevant that he's a college basketball player? How does he have the magical ability? HOw did he find out about it? How did he find the league of assassins and join them?

The more questions that you answer, the more you know about what you need to put into the story. All the things you need to communicate to the audience will have to be in the text, and the more questions you can think of and answer, the more scenes will suggest themselves to let the audience know the answers to these questions.

You're probably going to want to do a lot of infodumping, and there's room for infodumps but I'd say that pieces of information about the characters and world should flow naturally from the narrative, where the main character does or says something that reveals something about themselves, someone else or the world you've built. (Or other characters do this, or the way an event unfolds shows this, etc.)

 

[The handsome tard]

Wow, took a while for me to know this thread was a thing.

I'll work on something, I actually did have a "pitch" for a Half Life TV series.

 

[Humble Architect]

Wow, took a while for me to know this thread was a thing.

I'll work on something, I actually did have a "pitch" for a Half Life TV series.

As an exercise, me and a friend, both pissed off by how “our” favorite capeshit characters were being handled did “pitches” to get out creative drives going.

I’ll post it after work.

 

[Humble Architect]

So my pitch was for an Incredible Hulk reboot because Ruffalo and Disney are embarrassing and he was one of the top-dog characters back in the day. My friend’s was for Spider-Man because, like many, he finds Iron Boy jr embarrassing.

Spoiler: The pitch

No origin story, no repeat shit. Everything is told in a black and white montage (green being the only other colour), smart kid, abusive dad, a maladjusted young man and a gamma bomb, boom, you’re good. Bruce has been Hulk for six years.

It would open in a Las Vegas penthouse, think Tony Montana, “hookers and blow,” then, in a comically oversized bed, Bruce wakes up and screams. First third of the film is “The Hangover but superhero” as Bruce with a foggy mind, has been Hulk for over a year and disturbingly, this smaller, grey version of the Hulk has built a life for himself as “Joe Fixit” in Las Vegas as an enforcer for a casino boss. Complete cliche, suit and tie, Frank Sinatra-slick, even had a former hooker girlfriend. All while being a smaller Frankenstein-looking Hulk.

Eventually “Joe” emerges when, on instinct, Bruce takes a shotgun blast for Marlo, Joe’s ex. What follows is a bizarre buddy-cop movie with a cynical dead-inside scientist, his mafia-wannabe shadow self and the conspicuous absence of the green retard, dodging the mob and later, four supervillains hired to kill Joe.

What leads to the two halves finding common ground is the locked room in Joe’s penthouse, which is a very private side of the monument to excess, devoted to Rebecca Banner, Bruce’s mom, who Joe calls “ma” and Betty Ross, who is absent from the story, seeing Betty’s picture causes the fog affecting Bruce’ mind to fade and he breaks down, with only the voice in his head as his companion.

Betty miscarried and Bruce, rather than face the pain, surrendered to Hulk, specifically the part of his broken mind made to take pain. “Joe” is that, those beatings as a kid? Joe took over for those, he’s the perpetually edgy older brother who smokes and drinks and cracks-wise because Bruce stayed up late after his dad passed out and watched “Goodfellas,” seeing the man he wanted to be. Bruce’s three personalities are childhood, teenager and adult, all ruined and distorted by his shitty life. Hulk is the perpetually angry kid lashing out at a hostile world, Joe is fatherless behaviour personified in a Joe Pesci shape and Bruce is a cynical man with no drive or self-confidence.

With the truth, Green returns and bellow, on the Strip, the U-Foes, the central antagonists are calling out Joe, willing to kill to draw him out. On top of their hotel, Joe and Bruce step aside and let out the one, true Hulk, albeit “guided” by Joe’s cunning and Bruce’s intelligence. In this version, if Bruce’s head state is better, his personas work in-sync. Bruce jumps off the casino and Hulk lands.

Brutal fight, the typical destruction you expect in a Hulk movie is saved for the end.

Afterwards, Bruce is gifted a car by Joe’s boss/replacement father figure, Mike Berengetti, loaded with a duffle bag of Joe’s money and Joe briefly takes over Bruce’s form (no transformation) to say goodbye to his cast of characters and the life he had in Vegas.

Bruce, decked out like a Vegas tourist (quickest replacement clothes he could find) drives off, in a visual throwback to Fear and Loathing, he looks in the passenger seat and hallucinates a human version of Joe (himself but decked out like an extra from the Godfather) and Joe grins, in the entire back of the car, is a hallucination of Hulk, Bruce gives a manic grin, his eyes glow slightly and he drives off.

Bruce, throughout the film is susceptible to Joe’s influence and the ending shows that Bruce, while more confident now and “in-sync” with his altars, is much less sane and the horizon is full of potential, two Hulks, a Bruce free from crossover nonsense and while I’d have some dark humour in it, there wouldn’t be the fucking reddit humour that has ruined the character.

Obviously there was more but it was a good writing exercise because the ideas I came up with for this character, who I will never get to write, whose owners hate him, I can use for my own creations and helped me figure out the themes I gravitate towards in my own works.

 

[Great General Ri Shin]

I want to be a better writer; do you guys have any book recommendations specifically for aspiring fiction writers? I'd like to be a published author someday but right now I'm just familiarizing myself with the process and trying to develop my skills.

 

[Pomniman]

I want to be a better writer; do you guys have any book recommendations specifically for aspiring fiction writers? I'd like to be a published author someday but right now I'm just familiarizing myself with the process and trying to develop my skills.

I'll make an anti-recommendation and say never read any books that explicitly try to teach you how you should write especially not the Stephen King one. The kinds of writers who put these things out are so far up their own asses so as to be entirely useless.

 

[BrunoMattei]

I want to be a better writer; do you guys have any book recommendations specifically for aspiring fiction writers? I'd like to be a published author someday but right now I'm just familiarizing myself with the process and trying to develop my skills.

Try Industrial Society and Its Future.

 

[VeteranOfTheRetardWars]

I want to be a better writer; do you guys have any book recommendations specifically for aspiring fiction writers? I'd like to be a published author someday but right now I'm just familiarizing myself with the process and trying to develop my skills.

Genuinely, even though I am not a good writer, just read normal books. Find shit you think is cool, read that, and then write your own shit that you think is cool.
Aside from technical details, the best way to expand your mental library is just to be a reader and then use that mental library to write your own stuff.

 

[Commissar Fuklaw]

I'll make an anti-recommendation and say never read any books that explicitly try to teach you how you should write especially not the Stephen King one. The kinds of writers who put these things out are so far up their own asses so as to be entirely useless.

On Writing is good for the anecdote of King spending an hour or so 'trying to figure out how many chairs can fit on an X by Y deck' before he can continue writing. It's very relatable.

I want to be a better writer; do you guys have any book recommendations specifically for aspiring fiction writers? I'd like to be a published author someday but right now I'm just familiarizing myself with the process and trying to develop my skills.

Honestly just reading a ton of books and writing a lot will help the most. I'd also recommend listening to the Writing Excuses podcast up until Sanderson leaves. It's very helpful.

 

[Harman Smith]

Right now I'm working on my new project, The Cattle Have Fangs. In a lot of ways it's the bes tproject I've ever made, and yet I still feel it's not good enough. I feel as if I didn't have enough life experience to write something like it, honestly.

 

[BrunoMattei]

Right now I'm working on my new project, The Cattle Have Fangs. In a lot of ways it's the bes tproject I've ever made, and yet I still feel it's not good enough. I feel as if I didn't have enough life experience to write something like it, honestly.

Rob a bank and impregnate random women to gain life experience.

 

[Sexy Peach Emoji]

Kicking around an idea for quasi medieval era sword/sorcery dndish (mercanary adventures, ancient ruins, monsters, etc).

Spoiler: Intro

Young druid is essentially exiled from his village as the bad omens that have been read for each of his birthdays keep getting worse. They send him out into the world to either deal with the pending doom or not be doomed in village and drag them into it. The only thing going for him is that he's particularly loved by the trees / tree spirits. He wanders for a bit, doing minor healing and druid things, but gets told if he wants to find someone who can help him, his best bet is the adventures guild system. He manages to make it to a merchant town and registers. For once, his luck isn't bad (or so he thinks), and there's a relatively well known crew shopping for a healer. A steppe nomad warrior, an enchantress, and a bog witch are trying to hightail it to a newly discovered set of ruins in the mountains for an earl before anyone else gets there. They are tired of spending money one healing magics. The nomad thinks he's too young and untested, while the enchantress and the witch want to bring him along. Time is a factor, so they bring him along on a trial basis.

Spoiler: Part 1

. The team is fairly balanced and capable, and he doesn't get much of an opportunity to prove himself. As they travel, he starts to get infatuated with the enchantress and witch, dumb crush type stuff. The enchantress is a tease, and the witch is a half feral pervert who is empowered by perverting and corrupting things. Unfortunately for him, while both think he's cute, both are claimed women by the nomad. The enchantress because she's legit in love with him, the witch because it perverts his relationship with the other woman. So he has to deal with being an outsider and not desired or respected by this group. They make it up into the final pass before hitting the other side of the mountains and are asked by the ranger station to check on a farm village on the downslope, as no supplies have come through in a few weeks. It's on the way to the ruins so they agree.

Spoiler: Part 2

. Well, the ruins are a completely dead zone. People crops animals water and soil, all dead. So dead, nothing is even rotting. Turn out someone erected and opened a hellgate and some demons came through. They battle and kill a demon guard, and decide to high tail it to the nearest town to alert the kings troops because this is above their pay grade. Druid entreats the local tree spirits to hasten the reclaaimagion of the land, prompting the trees to move in and turn up everything (ala LoTR) this is the first thing he's done that impresses them. They hit the next town, only to find everything is blighted and dying- fallout from the hellgate. The village is beyond relived that a druid has come and beg him to fix things. He doesn't think he can as it's more than a single and junior druid should try, but he communes with the village tree and the dryad basically orders him to do it, but shell help him out. The party doesn't want to wait the four days it will take, but he basically has to do it once the tree tells him (druidic business). After deliberations, the nomad and enchantress will go on ahead, while the druid will stay to do the ritual, and the witch will stay to ensure no lurking demons merc their healer. He does the ritual, which includes him hanging from the tree for 3 days. The witch watches him suffer on the tree, and catches feelings. When the ritual is done the village and farmlands are cured. The rest of the party returns with a host of knights and a druid in tow. From the other druid they learn the boy really shouldn't have done that but the trees helped keep him alive. The other druid warns them the boy is doomed, his ill omens pretty apparent. But this the party likes him now, as he's shown a depth of power and reliability. They continue on. The witch is now infatuated with the druid and they hang out constantly, but because she's an evil witch that corrupts and perverts, she won't consummate anything with him and still fucks the nomad. This new arrangement also grants her massive amounts of power, which she loves. They reach their ruins, to find the slaughtered remains of two other mercanary groups.

Spoiler: Part 3

as it turns out, the ruins are home to a degenerate race of lizard men, working rituals to open hellgates in order to summon their destroyer God and reset their version of the Kali yuga to reclaim the places where they once ruled before the last cataclysm and the apes took over. The party needs to get the fang of the world serpent in order to stop the lizard men. Luckily dor them, the witch knows where it is- with one of her hated rivals. They go to her lair, and the druid wakes up the sleeping spirit of the rotted tree it's in to deal the final blow and save his pseudo sweetheart.

Spoiler: Final

they return to the ruins, have a showdown with the lizards and demons. The nomad warrior dies in a last charge, but they are victorious. The witch manages to enslave the druid to her will, and leaves with him to wander the wilds and feed off of him. The witch as it turns out is his doom and the ill omens that have shadowed his life. The enchantress, badly crippled but alive, and pregnant with the nomad's child, retires from mercanary work.

Spoiler: Possible followup

if I actually do anything with this, I want to write a sequel where the nomad/enchantress child has to find the witch and druid to defeat some thing (spirit quest from Father), in the course of which the druid is mortally wounded and the witch has to decide to either lose him, or declare wholesome love for him and consummate their marriage, but lose everything she has. She does, and he becomes a tree/tree spirt, she loses all her powers but will live as long as the tree does. She ends up acting as a psuedo-druidess tending her husband-tree eternally.

I've got a lot of stuff plotted out and a bunch of notes but haven't actually started putting words on paper.

 

[Greedy Fly]

I want to be a better writer; do you guys have any book recommendations specifically for aspiring fiction writers? I'd like to be a published author someday but right now I'm just familiarizing myself with the process and trying to develop my skills.

I don't think writing works the same way as learning, say, figure drawing, where you can study tutorials and learn anatomy step-by-step. Probably the only thing that works is reading a lot and writing a lot. I always make the most headway when I set a rule like "1 hour of writing after dinner every night" and just grind it out.

That said, I do like reading and listening to writers talk about writing to hype myself up. Brandon Sanderson did a bunch of lectures and puts them all on youtube for free; they make nice background listening while you're plotting and brainstorming. Murakami's Novelist as a Vocation is like the "draw the rest of the fucking owl" meme in literary form but I still find his attitude towards writing very motivating. (Also his advice to exercise is legit).

 

[Humble Architect]

Right now I'm working on my new project, The Cattle Have Fangs. In a lot of ways it's the bes tproject I've ever made, and yet I still feel it's not good enough. I feel as if I didn't have enough life experience to write something like it, honestly.

So get out there, see it, experience it, lose yourself to it if need be.

I literally found my writing voice through making the worst decisions possible while on vacation.

I want to be a better writer; do you guys have any book recommendations specifically for aspiring fiction writers? I'd like to be a published author someday but right now I'm just familiarizing myself with the process and trying to develop my skills.

Read your genre I guess, both to know the cliches, tropes and comparisons you’ll face. Each genre is it’s own unique beast.

But don’t let it intimidate you or worse, alter your course, thinking of it as sharpening a knife so that when you do make the cut, there’s no fight, it melts through, perfectly.

 

[Pomniman]

Right now I'm working on my new project, The Cattle Have Fangs. In a lot of ways it's the bes tproject I've ever made, and yet I still feel it's not good enough. I feel as if I didn't have enough life experience to write something like it, honestly.

I've gotta tell ya... the whole heccin' imposter syndrome thing is really fucking gay buddy. Pure 49 year old HR wine aunt cat lady on instagram energy. Unironically start doing meth if you just want "life experience" as some kind of retarded form of validation. It'll at least make you less of a bitch.

 

[Djinni Djohn]

I've gotta tell ya... the whole heccin' imposter syndrome thing is really fucking gay buddy. Pure 49 year old HR wine aunt cat lady on instagram energy. Unironically start doing meth if you just want "life experience" as some kind of retarded form of validation. It'll at least make you less of a bitch.

Nah, spending a decade attempting to troll /v/ and rant on Youtube about Nintendo supremacy is sufficient life experience for writing a clearly quantity-over-quality fantasy series with even less depth than Empress Theresa or Patrick's writing (Enjoy prison, stalker child!).


Clearly, that Imposter Syndrome is earned.