Week 2 of AtoTW Chapter 6 Delay. · 2:43am Aug 23rd, 2019
Good Morning from my Writing Chair (still a working title)! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I'm pushing off Chapter 6 again. Let's get Started!
My weekly schedule is not totally out the window. While I may have given up on a weekly chapter of 3000 words, I still want to maintain a weekly presence here. I've been lurking on the Discord servers for both Fimfiction in general and The Writers' Group. I've gotten some solid advice in each place, and I'm trying to really boost my writing quality.
Up to this point, I've been focusing primarily on proofreading and event consistency. Every word is read aloud. If I spot an error, I fix it about as soon as possible. This story is special to me, and I want it to be special to my readers too. I'd love to see an active comments section when I post new chapters, and it's a little discouraging when I have to go hunting for feedback.
Speaking of feedback, I've been getting a lot of it for Chapter 6. I accidentally broke from show canon on a small detail, and it contributed to a massive centerpiece in the chapter, and while I was soliciting assistance, Oroboro of the Fimfiction Discord pointed out that one of my most central paragraphs "reads like bullet points in a history textbook."
OUCH!
Oroboro also advised that I keep important details in either the first line of a paragraph or the last in case of people skimming. If I want to be sneaky, I can slip details into the middle of a paragraph. I was considering just saying you can just skip through this paragraph and post a bunch of stuff from Lorim Ibsim in here, but in the end I decided rambling for a while might properly demonstrate the point. MaxKodan added to Oroboro's skimming advice by enlightening me to sentence cadence, or syllable count. Constant cadence gets boring.
Just because the group advises that I do things one way doesn't mean I have to. A lot of vocal users said they didn't like the present tense or the racial name capitalization style choices I've made, but the best reason I got was that there was nothing gained by going present tense, a sentiment I do not share. I also had a discussion about interrobangs, or basically when you combine an exclamation mark with a question mark. They aren't talked about much, and at best are on a use-sparingly or not-at-all basis. The chat more or less didn't seem to like the one I put in, but what else can I say but Pinkie Pie!?
My closing advice is for anyone wishing to visit either of these Discord servers: If you are after feedback, not editing, on a scale several hours, go with The Writers' group. If you can keep up with the active chatter of two or three conversations going on at once, feel free to visit the writing help on the Fimfiction server. Just keep track of the profile picture of whomever is helping you and skim the rest of the comments.
Final Question: What concepts in writing have caught you by total surprise?
Short sentences make for slow pacing. I didn't believe it, so I went and experimented with various sentence lengths. It worked. The folks on Writing Excuses? They. Know. What. They're. Talking. About.
This has come up a couple times in the Discord since I found out. Both times I've mentioned this advice, someone doesn't believe me. It's counter-intuitive, although I don't know where this intuition came from in the first place. Maybe a writing myth that's propagated because it sounds logical?
I'm working on a blog post about it now. Along with metrical pacing. Because heck. Meter affects pacing too. That thing you do where you read a sentence aloud and something sounds off about the word sequence? Blame meter. Sometimes. Other times, there's a repeated word you didn't catch while reading silently or maybe unintended rhyming and alliteration. Sometimes, it's just the rhythm of the words that's off. Scansion can identify the problems, and using a consistent meter can drive the prose.
For the rest of it... present tense is super unpopular, as you found. There are certain styles of story suited to it, like hard boiled, but sci-fi/fantasy tends to avoid it. Notable exceptions include The Hunger Games. Tribe capitalization doesn't matter as long as you're consistent. Interrobangs are fine if you use them sparingly. I often hang out in the #nsfw-writing-help room when #writing-help is full, even though I don't write porn. It's just a quieter place to give or get help sometimes.
5110256
I remember hearing the short sentences advice from the server, but the example you've given is new to me. I have a seemingly contradictory counterexample from Pigs Aplenty, Pigs Galore! My parents would always speed up for the following passage:
And now is the part where I look up the actual punctuation to find a bunch of commas and a dash. As a good researcher, I am unhappy to report that both recordings I listened to did not have the readers speed up for that passage.
Nevertheless, the constant I observed is that short sentences signal that every bit of information is just as important as all the other bits. It's equivalent to using slow motion during action scenes or panning around to take in a large set.
5110272
You've found a great example of the intersection between meter and punctuation. This is written in iambic. The punctuation falls with the stressed syllables, which masks the pause from the punctuation, because you're already kinda pausing to put the stress on the syllable. Except on the third line, where the punctuation helps the odd syllable count from interrupting the beat.
I slipped / on some / thing, then/ I fell. I've highlighted the stressed syllables to illustrate. I think you can push these stresses a round a bit with the punctuation, and have multiple syllables per beat with pauses to fill the empty beats, but I'm still figuring out how that works.
I think iambic is pretty loose with allowing punctuation anywhere without breaking the flow because every other syllable is stressed. I'm eager to play with it more and find out, as well as explore how anapestic meter interacts with punctuation in each position.
I've got an example like this from The Jabberwocky for my upcoming blog. Stresses and punctuation can slow things down as much as speed them up.
5110283
I've heard of this Iambic before, but not outside the context of Iambic Pentameter. Shakespeare. That was NOT a fun chapter in Freshmen English for me.
My parents still probably can probably still recite the whole book on request. It was a favorite when I was little. I still think short sentences/clauses mean the narrator is dealing with lots of information... Ug, the more I think about it, the less I'm convinced. I still don't think frequent punctuation necessarily implies extra real time is passing.
Fun fact: There was an experiment done to test if you really do experience time more slowly when excited. Test subjects were fitted with watches flashing numbers just faster than they could make out. They were then dropped. The results: Subjects weren't able to make out individual numbers, but still reported the slow motion effect. Conclusion: Subjects' brains saved more information when excited and the memory takes more time to get through.
5110293
I thought they were making words up when they tried teaching me in school about iambs and scansion and caesura. Sentences describing poems and grammar sounded almost like English to me, but not quite. They probably did make up the words, but hundreds of years before I would have guessed, and I'm only now, uncountable years later, coming to understand how useful this stuff really was. I just wasn't ready for it in school.
Iambs are a rhythmic pattern of two syllables. The first is stressed, the second not. Trochee is reversed. Anapests are three syllables with two short followed by one long.
I used to think poetry was rhyming and syllable counts. I'm learning how little I know. These new concepts are rather useful for understanding why a particular sentence works or doesn't, as opposed to some other sentence with a similar meaning but different rhythm and structure.
I have a long path towards understanding, practicing, and internalizing the poetry of prose. At least I know that it's there.
5110294
Trochee: XKCD taught me that one.
Scansion, caesura, anapest: these are all new terms to me.
Iambs are the only one I remember from school.
Education is about stuffing your head full of stuff you will find useful. Around high school, they're running out of stuff you will find useful, so they grab an assortment of next level stuff. There, you pick up a few wonderfully useful nuggets and leave the rest around to
rotcollect dust. ... Now I get it. They called that literature class English because they're giving you tools for writing new books by dissecting perfectly good classics to the point of nausea for students who don't already enjoy it. I wish they had said something.I'm relating so much with Rainbow Dash about that Wonderbolt history course right now!
That still doesn't change the fact I have a hard time determining if a syllable is hard or soft if I'm unfamiliar with it. That's why I didn't enjoy learning about their superstructures.
5110301
Such mood. I'm constantly talking myself in and out of stresses still. I read a poem fifty times figuring out how it works. Then it turns to mush in my brain and I lose all sense of how words work, so every word looks odd, even simple ones.
5113161
At least I'm not totally alone.