General Writer's Block thread

Not that I know of, but I would suggest using sensory details (sight, taste, especially smell), and probably research certain dishes you want to describe. I would give an example but I think I'd get hungry.

Nero Wolf was an early expert at it.

What I need is mostly a dictionary of words to describe food and its taste.

I asked because I think it would be useful in various way.

Writing a food related story (such as cooking competition)

A chef cooking for other characters (Used to describe the dish and why that chief is really good).

Describing the meal that the characters eat because Food is important part of human culture after all.

The internet is your friend

Wish that it is a little more...descriptive but it's good enough. Thank you anyway.

Looking for a quick jolt of advice from you fine and clever individuals.

I've been trying (and trying, and trying) for years to write novels, or at least lengthy original fiction. And it comes out awful, clunky, full of cliches and telling-not-showing (although I fully support telling as an occasional story mechanism), and basically just pretty damned bad.

The thing is, though- I know I can write. I'm not Stephen King, sure, but set me down with some fanfiction and I can word-vomit something pretty decent, most of the time.

I read voraciously. I do practice-writing. I've done (probably excessive amounts of) research on the actual craft of writing. And it hasn't seemed to get better. I'm at my wit's end, tropers. Advise me. What's it gonna take to get my original fiction sounding like I've ever laid pen to paper before? Cult sacrifices? Daily health shakes? What must I do?

(For reference, some examples of my writing. Fic: http://archiveofourown.org/works/2827136, http://archiveofourown.org/works/2824796, http://archiveofourown.org/works/2824496. Original: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1iGiZQPzI_TnTxZn_R1qVZdja05EuX3J3aBmiyEJHE3Y/edit?usp=sharing <— this is snippets from four different original pieces.)

edited 10th Apr '15 4:52:31 PM by sparrowsnark

Is it bad?

Remember, the reader is not you, you are your worst critic and paradoxically sometimes it's better to simplify, everything can be done well even cliches, that's why they're cliches.

I've also taken a look at some of the links, I'm not enough of a minimalistic storyteller to really judge it, it seems fine to me but I admit i'm out of my element.

I guess I can't claim, 100%, that it's bad. You're right, I am not the reader. What I can say is that I don't feel like *I* would want to read the things I write for original fiction. And thus, it bothers me, and I feel like a failure.

edited 10th Apr '15 4:59:26 PM by sparrowsnark

Important question: Have you tried going back to rewrite your work? Because your first draft is only, like, 10% of the writing process. And that's a very generous estimate.

Or, to use another cliche: The best writers are rewriters.

Well, the very first thing I notice is that you dont seem to do dialogue. That can work for a very short piece of fiction, but in anything longer than a couple of pages, it starts to show. Perhaps that's the reason your original fiction seems inferior to your fanfic? Your fanfic is all micro-stories, but your original fiction seems intended for something more ambitious.

Regardless, I would say you need to practice writing dialogue.

Yes, but perhaps not as much as I should. I guess I spoil myself in a way; my first drafts of fics generally come out reasonably clean, so I don't often do much rewriting on them. I think that's why I get frustrated writing original— it's altogether my own, so it's messier at the start. Something I just have to get over, I know.

Very true. I've been told I write dialogue decently, but I definitely don't write much of it. I seem to tend towards a storyteller-around the fire style, and I think that's a lot of what's frustrating me.

:( honestly, I know the answer is "practice." The dialogue, the style, all of it. I'm just so frustrated, because I *have* and I don't see any changes. Sometimes I reread things I wrote ages ago and feel like I lost the knack, instead of learning and improving. I guess this is more a vent session that anything.

Le sigh.

Amazing how something like writing can simultaneously be what you love to do beyond anything else, and the most awful, hard, ridiculous thing in the world. *headdesk*

Heh. Sure is. If you could give us a sample of your dialogue, we might be able to provide some advice.

Hmm, I wonder if I have anything with much dialogue in it. I'll have to go looking through my files.

edited 10th Apr '15 10:43:22 PM by sparrowsnark

Write something.

Here's an exercise you could try: Write a short story that's completely dialogue. Try to imply the characters' actions through the way they speak. Here's one example that comes to mind.

@sparrow What I see going on with your original fic is that you need to cut down on the filler words by editing. The general rule is to word your sentences as concisely as possible without changing the meaning. I could probably edit your story, bring down the verbiage by 20%, and you'd see that clarity and mindful usage of language is the most powerful tool a writer has.

@Thelostcup: Are you, by any chance, an editor?

I need advice and I'm not really sure where to ask it so I figured I'd start here for anyone who's interested.

I'm going to be cutting down writing dramatically for a month (it's for a very good reason related to work and future schooling), although I know realistically my mind won't want to stop imagining altogether. Recently I've thought of a new idea which I've managed to shape more concretely these past few days; however I don't have a set plot and my mind won't rest until the plot comes together.

I've also happened to be working on two larger things, but in both cases the plots are generally worked out and it's really research or writing that I need to spend time on. But I'm not really sure what to do about this new idea: it's going to keep nagging me until I find some way of telling the basic beginning, middle, and end.

Are there any ways you can think of to set aside new ideas, or would it be worth to just "tire" the idea out as much as possible? Because I really don't want to start anything new.

What you described is my life as a writer. I always get new ideas and I struggle and juggle with new ideas and the ones I'm working on.

My advice is to keep your idea. Jot down notes about what it appeals to you, and set it aside. Ideas are always golden just in case you have time to write again and the story catches your attention again. It's also a good idea since if you're stuck on your WI Ps, you can work on the new idea so you can still make progress.

I usually give new ideas time to develop in my head before I put anything down or decide to work on them, but that's just me.

edited 1st May '15 11:46:56 AM by electronic-tragedy

Keep a bulleted outline to go back to later. But hold yourself to no more than one full page of outline, otherwise you'll wake up ten hours later realizing you just wasted a day on an idea you dont have time to write up.

How realistic is it to have a scientist who didn't go to college?

One of my characters is a guy who loves science but didn't go to college because he wanted to get into work for money as early as possible. He does a lot of home-based experiments as a part-time job/hobby, but the thing is that I'm not sure exactly how he gets funding for those "experiments" if he's not attached to a college. He eventually realizes he needs to collaborate with others in academia in order to get one of his discoveries into the public eye, but at the beginning he just does really secret stuff with a few of the people he works with in his part-time job.

Given this, how plausible would you think doing home-based experiments are if A) he's making an average salary (~$12-15 per hour for two-ish jobs) and B) he has materials from his part-time job?

Most scientists work through college. They're the only places that have the facilities needed to do some serious sciencing.

If you're talking about basic scientific research, it's really not plausible at all, sorry. It can work for some forms of technology development, esp. IT, obviously software, but discovering the secrets of the universe is something that can only really be done while collaborating with a community of like-minded individuals. Otherwise you end up re-inventing the wheel, or coming up with plausible sounding reasons that relativity is wrong. Self-educated individuals will make mistakes that better-connected people will be told to avoid.

Qualifier: it also depends on what field, how advanced that area of study is at the time of the story, and how large a contribution he's going to make. E.g.: mathematics only really needs a brain (computer modelling is a helpful extra) so the occasional homemade genius does turn up, like Srinivasa Ramanujan; Faraday had little formal education but attended public lectures and was hired as a lab assistant by Humphrey Davy; Michio Kaku built a particle accelerator for his high school project in the 60s; Vladimir Nabokov was a self-taught leipidopterist and taxonomist whose hypothesis on the evolution of a certain genus, though dismissed during his lifetime, is now supported by genetic evidence.

So it's possible, though not very likely, that a person could make a scientific discovery while working alone. It's extremely unlikely that this discovery would be significant, especially when you get close to the present day. All the examples I've cited were quickly sucked into the University circuit, which is where their real work began. Note also that most research is either buried in university libraries or behind a paywall online, so most "discoveries" made by homegrown scientists are redundant.

edited 13th May '15 8:37:28 AM by LongLiveHumour

It also depends on the science. Observational science allows for amateurs to have larger involvement since all you need is a camera really; this is why, for example, there are a lot of published amateur astronomers because they can do the kind of survey work that is either too unsexy (spectroscopic stuff on groups of stars that are otherwise totally normal) or too long-term to attract grants. There are guys out there with a 20-inch telescope and a dream doing five-year and ten-year studies of planetary atmospheres, for example, which is far too long a commitment for most professionals given the bias towards younger researchers in the field. It's actually quite valuable stuff.