Oct
13th
2020
Wednesday · 9:20am Oct 13th, 2020
Wednesday evening will see a new chapter. Life has been quite cruel to me as of late, so apologies for the (extended) delay.
I can give no promises of future release dates, but the chapter after this one should, hopefully, be between one and two weeks. Again, no promises.
I'm considering devoting time to other writing projects than this one. In fact, I've currently got a second short story about half done. I'm thinking of doing it to manage burnout on a single project. We'll see what happens. I'm interested in hearing input on this idea. Please do let me know.
Life's been cruel to every one man, but its good to see yer still kickin'!
Your writing captured my attention and drew me into a dark and gritty blood stained world tinted with corouption from a franchise that I was unfamiliar with and inspired me to write a few works of fiction myself, I'd realy love to read anything that you write.
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Thank you, that actually means a lot to me. I'll try to be on time :)
Life has, hasn't it? I figured I'd have more time thanks to COVID but no, it's only made things worse haha. I suppose I should just feel lucky I haven't caught it yet.
Where else have you published your work? I only see the one you posted in January.
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Yeah.... that one back in January is the only story I've ever published. It was kinda bad. My writing process is a nightmare, I write silly little snippets that aren't quite enough to turn into a whole story by themselves but to good to just throw away.
When I wrote 'Storming the castle' I took four or five of those snippets, lumped them together into a messy combo, roughly shaped it into a somewhat coherent pseudo story and then polished it up a little untill it was mostly readable. Once I was done it bore no resemblance to the original snippets but I guess it all worked out in the end.
Since then I've been practicing my writing, asking other writers for advice and finding out what works best for me. I think I've improved, and I hope to publish more stories in the future.
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That's fair. Most of what I write these days goes through ~3 iterations, but most things don't change much. I'm just rolling this ball along as it is. It's funny, I'm kind of eager to get out of this story. The way I have it mapped out, everything is limited within a certain confine of development. It's tiring having to work within that, but what's even more tiring is that I cannot develop things as fully as I want to yet.
Moreover, going back over it again, I'm not entirely sure I've done my girl Astral justice. She almost feels… flat, to me, like I haven't fleshed out her personality enough in action. Maybe I'm just too self-critical, maybe I'm just expecting myself to be able to insert the detail and nuance you can create in visual formats inside a written work. Actually, that might be it. I tend to act out the things I write to get pacing and as much detail as possible...
\rant. Tldr: I'm insecure
My next story, I'm debating following in the same perspective as this, with one or two main focus characters or having it be a series of short stories that tell a much larger tale. It's a difficult call to make, but I'm sure I'll make the right one.
If you have any questions, feel free to ask! I'm in no way a good writer, but I'd be happy to answer anything as well as I can.
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If finishing this story is putting you in a box that hampers your creativity then you should probably put it on the back burner for a while and work on a different project.
Don't get me wrong I love this story, but if you have to force yourself to write it it'll suck all of the fun out of it. Burning yourself out just to finish a project that you feel is over due rarely yields satisfying results.
If i were to ask you for any writing advice I'd definatly ask how you transition so smoothly between scenes, I always know what my characters are doing and what I want them to do next, but getting from point (a) to point (b) can be a bit of a challenge for me. But acting out the scenes sounds like realy good advice and i can definatly see where that would help with the pacing of a story.
Much to my surprise I received a lot of positive feedback for my character descriptions in 'storming the castle' and if you feel that Astral's character discription fallls flat then perhaps I can help, or at the very least share what it was that earned my tiny modicum of success, as a reader i always found that a huge paragraph of character discription was bothersome to read and I felt that it subtracted from the overall enjoyment of a story, so i intentionally left my initial character discriptions vague and just revealed more and more about them as the story went on, my readers seemed to really enjoy it, I think it could work for you too, fleshing out Astral's character is as easy as feeding us (the audience) more details about her as the story goes on.
I didn't expect to give someone so much more talented than me advice, so i hope you found it helpfull, and even if you didn't it was still nice chatting with you.
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Hmm, that's a good question. The way I look at it is a bit metaphorical. Think of your story as a river, and the reader a person at leisure in a boat, drifting down your river. Every twist and transition in your story is reflected in your river as turns and turbulence. The reader wants a smooth experience, naturally, and as the benevolent river god you are, you want to deliver.
The way I do it is by reading it again, and saying to myself, "if I were a reader, would I like that?" Another method of mine is to draw a mental map between where your character is, and where they will be. This isn't nearly as taxing as actually writing it out, since you need only the broad generalities. Here's an example:
Let's say I have a character, Fluid Demure. She is in the library, checking out books. Next, I want her to go to the market, but I don't want to have to write the journey there - nothing happens during that time anyways. I have 2 options:
1. Cut out the journey there
2. Write it in
Naturally we're going to cut it out. No one likes filler. But how do I do that?
Well, simple enough. I draw a mental map. I trace her path, from the library, down two small streets and an alleyway, and out into the market. Next, I imagine what the exit of the alleyway is like, keeping in mind where she came from, and then imagine the atmosphere of the market. Is it busy, or quiet?
Here's what my brain came up with writing that out:
Fluid quickly exited the alleyway, cramped and littered with bins of rotting food from the restaurant some ways back. "I'll never take that way again," she thought, as she looked away from the alley in disgust. Now, instead, she looked around the market. 16 stalls, all flying colorful banners and advertisements laid in rows before her, but she looked for only one. Ponies of all sizes and shapes crowded her view, and the din of their chatter drowned out even the loudest of the salesponies. Stretching her neck as far as she could, she spotted her stall, and, more importantly, the specific stallion she'd come to see."
The above sets the tone for where she came from briefly, how she feels about it, and where she is. It then sets the scene, giving cues to the reader as to what is in the immediate vicinity, and sets an objective for the MC to move towards, drawing the reader away from the transition. In order to really demonstrate it, I'd need to write a before and after transition, but this is generally the basic composition I use when doing them. I hope this helps! If you have any other questions, go ahead and ask and I'll answer as best I can. As an aside, you should totally check in to the FimFic discord. Lots of great writers in there, but it's not active all the time. Sometimes you gotta ask more than once if you need help.
Oh please, I'm not at all talented. I've just been writing shitty fanfiction in my head for the past decade, without writing any of it down. Funny enough, that actually translates to a lot of practice, and the acting it out definitely helps in making things believable and "good".
And, actually, yeah. I decided to try that recently, upon noticing that my descriptions tend to be, uh, paragraphs long. Cough. Whoops. Also realized that giving all the cards in the deck to the reader right away closed off lots of avenues for me to move around in regarding the character. I'm afraid it'll be a bad habit to shake, I'm inordinately concerned with rulesets and providing myself with a framework. Additionally I'm now worried I provided too much detail, too dryly, and will wind up making my character inconsistent. Although, I'm starting to figure out that I can basically go "haha author retcon go brrr" and re do the things I don't like. As such, don't take anything in this story for gospel yet :P
Actually, I can probably just not publish rulesets. Huh.
Funny enough, that box is a bit of a double edged sword. One one side, I'm eager to finish it to free myself from its confines, and on the other I'm loathe to begin on it again. Yet, at the same time, I'm completely unwilling to let the quality dip. It's weird, I'm simultaneously galvanized, depressed, and focussed on quality all at the same time. Moreover, it's sort of a weird love hate relationship with this box, because it lets me play around and get my bearings. I think I just made the story that's in that box too long :/
But you're right. If I'm not having fun writing it I should work on something else. Which, god willing, you might see something of soon.
Considering my action packed and overall goofy approach to writing, that riverboat ride made a terrible analogy. I can see it now... A nice couple looking for a relaxing vacation, whitewater rapids, an insane riverboat captain, a waterfall and of course the rebellious teenage daughter that didn't even want to go on this trip is having the time of her life.
Hmmm.... I need to make this a story!
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Oh your style is fine, what the analogy is meant to represent is the "following together"ness of a story. Goofy and action packed can still flow well :P
And yeah, go for it. The only limit is your imagination.