General Writer's Block thread

Xenomorph: Oh, er, sorry, I don't mean to intrude, I just need to implant this larva inside your body cavity. Damn, please don't scream, oh gosh this is so embarrassing. Here, let's just get this over with. Ith youth thould thstop viggling thith thould be thots eathsier...

... He's not a facehugger, dude.

The term is mainly associated with H. R. Giger and the Aliens film franchise, regardless. If you don't want people to picture facehuggers or these things◊, you might want to go with a different name. Because when I heard you describe them as 'Xenomorphs', I pictured those shiny black aliens in the picture I linked.

But I did mean the shiny black adult forms. O_o Where did you get the impression that I meant otherwise?

Have a couple of questions regarding a story I'm working on, it's a sci-fi military adventure/drama.

My first question is regarding action sequences. I'm not very confident in my ability, I want them to have a sense of kinetic rhythm and they just seem to be laconic description of events. Anyone have any general advice for writing action sequences? Or, have examples of well-written action sequences you can recommend?

Secondly, my main character is a street orphan who worked her way up from the streets to the military. In her teen years she became a drug addict which she kicked by hitting rock bottom and enlisting. During the course of the story, she will develop insomnia (due to stress, tragic events and something to do with the ending). She will start taking stimulant drugs to keep her alert and become addicted to them, leading to some not so pleasant consequences. Now, her justification for taking these is because she wants to stay alert, sleeping medication would make her drowsy, etc. Now, does someone taking stimulants to stay alert despite insomnia seem logical? I'm not sure if it does or I'm just developing tunnel vision with regards to a specific plot thread.

edited 24th May '16 5:54:33 PM by Wabbawabbajack

Action is the only type of writing I have confidence in. Unfortunately, my advice would be that it should be a laconic description of events. There must be a separation between action and emotion. The reader must feel that events are happening too fast for the viewpoint character to process them. To feel anything about them. To properly register or analyse sensation. To properly see anything. The reader must get the sense that not everything that is happening is being seen.

And then you must have all this stuff catch up with the viewpoint character at every point where the action slows.

As to the second question, the answer is simple. It is not only logical, it is common for people that have trouble sleeping when they are supposed to sleep to have trouble being alert when they are supposed to be alert. This is particularly common with stress-related disorders.

I want to write, but I suck at prose. Dialogue is okay when I have a good grip of how the character talks, and plot is fine when I have an idea, but my prose tends to be just straightforward descriptions of events.

edited 24th May '16 7:21:53 PM by SmartGirl333

Practice, practice, practice. Also read widely—find what you like and use it, find what bugs you and avoid it.

Prose is a special kind of dialogue. Give the narrator a voice as you would any other character.

I know, there is more to it than that. Like when to go into internal thoughts, and when to describe scenery, and how to avoid exposition.

I try to avoid overly beige prose, but I have trouble parsing prose that's been worded to sound more 'fantastic' and don't want to push that onto readers either.

double post

edited 24th May '16 8:20:44 PM by hellomoto

@SmartGirl: First of all, I don't claim to speak with authority here, so please take my thoughts with a grain of salt.

That said, it might be worth having others read your prose and give you feedback on it, and especially on what you tend to leave out or gloss over. That might give you specific elements of your prose on which you can work, and thus, hopefully, improve.

edited 25th May '16 6:42:05 AM by ArsThaumaturgis

I made a thing for OC generation. Should it get its own thread, is there a more relevant thread I could post it on, or should it stay here?

That's pretty neat.

I've just been hit with another one of those "radical character alteration" situations that have been the subject of my last post in this thread: Having one or more characters be adopted as infants by smart apes that do not speak human language (even if they have their own), Tarzan-style. How does one go about naming the characters in question? It wouldn't make sense to give have them use their canonical names if they have no way of knowing what those are, after all¹. Should one just invent names that are appropiate for the made-up language of their adoptive family, and make a point of including notes in each chapter that remind people which names refer to which character (unless they're obviously descriptive, e.g. a Fiery Redhead gets caled "Red Hair" for his/her appearance or "Fire-Heart" for his/her fiery personality)?

1. Notwithstanding, of course, a possible reunion with humans who either know/can identify who they really are and thus tell them their human birth name, or simply can teach them how to speak human language, and it just so happens to be the one they would've natively spoken if they weren't separated from their human parents (by death or otherwise) and their self-given human name just so happens to at least phonetically match-up with their canonical name... which is a highly implausible coincidence, mind you.

edited 10th Jun '16 6:47:31 PM by MarqFJA

The only reason I can really imagine writing a story like that (instead of just an original story) is to explore the effect it would have on the characters you're not altering so radically, so I'm not sure why the name really matters.

Actually, it's more about exploring the idea of "nature vs. nurture" — or, in other words, how much of a Fiery Redhead's "fire" is an innate trait, and how much of it was caused/amplified/changed by his/her life experiences.

Anyone know how to break through Writer's Block?

In a story I'm writing, a character is having an panic attack and two other characters are supposed to be talking about something before he snaps out of it.

I'm afraid to just drop exposition all over the readers, especially since one of the complaints about anime/manga (especially DBZ) is how things just don't seem to move forward fast enough.

Ignore all the rules, and start freewriting.

1. It is more important to get your stuff out there than it conform to any standard. It is more important to get your stuff there than to hold it back because you think it is low quality. The more times you read something over, the harder it will be to accurately measure its quality. It is more important to get your stuff out there than to write the perfect story. No plot wraps up perfectly. No story is fully realistic. Feelings of epicness and genius are illusions practised writers work into their stories. Attempting to put the real thing into a work will always lead to endless delays.
2. Get into the habit of freewriting, as an aide to forming the habit of writing a little bit every day. It is important to find a way to work through writer's block. That is how you break it.

Well, I've decided to write Chapter 3 of "24 DS" despite my doubts.

I know this isn't the Constructive Criticism Thread, but I'm too impatient to wait my turn to post it there.

I tried my best to keep the exposition as simple, quick and least confusing as possible, but I don't think I pulled it off.

Here's what I have so far.

(I helped Eve take Ren home to her place; a big, fancy mansion in Upstate New York.

We placed him on the bed in his room, but the poor guy wouldn’t stop panicking all the way, even though I tried to give him his mask back.

“Aren’t there some pills he can take or something?” I ask.

“Not now. He’ll choke.” Eve says. “He’ll be fine in 5 minutes.”

5 minutes? I can’t wait that long for him to tell me what’s going on! Maybe she can tell me.

“He’s your friend, right?”

“Yeah.”

“While we were fighting, he said something about me not being ‘the only one’. What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Well, what was he referring to?”

“My powers, I guess. He figured out I can control lightning.”

“You mean you don’t know?”

“Would I be asking if I did?”

She sighs. “Fine. Follow me.”

She leads me to the living room and sits on the couch. I sit on the couch across from her. “But let me ask you something first.”

“Okay.”

“Were you raised by a dragon named Inazuma?”

My heart skips a beat.

“Yeah.” I answer nervously. “How did you know that?” “Because, just like Ren said, you’re not the only one. He was raised by the dragon Tetsu. And his exposure to the environment of her Iron Dimension gave him the ability to control metal.”

“Whoa, slow down! You already lost me.”

“Here. Let me start from the beginning. This may be long and hard to follow, so please bear with me.” She takes a deep breath and begins. “Have you ever heard of ‘Dragon Children’?”

“No.”

“They’re humans that’ve been raised by dragons and have powers; just like you and Ren. Including you two, there are twenty-five in total. One for every dragon.”

Twenty-five? Why so many?

“These dragons live in alternate dimensions and exposure to the environment of these dimensions gives humans powers. The type of power you get depends on the dimension you were raised in. You’re from the Lightning Dimension and Ren’s from the Iron Dimension.”

That explains my lightning and Ren’s metal.

“As you’ve probably guessed, this also means there’s different kinds of dragons for each dimension. Each kind of dragon is lead by a Dragon Lord. And every Dragon Child was personally raised by one.” Inazuma is a Dragon Lord then. Makes sense. Everyone and Denkō always took orders from her.

“Do you understand so far?”

“Twenty-five dragon leaders raised one human each and they have powers because of it.”

“Okay. And I’m assuming you know what they have in store for humankind, right?”

Before I can answer…

“Eve? Is that you?” Ren comes walking down the stairs, looking nice and calm again.)

You switched paragraphs, but kept the speaker the same. That is rare enough that you need to reintroduce the speaker if you do that. But I would remove the paragraph break instead.

You wedged two speakers into the same paragraph. That should only rarely be done, and this does not seem like one of those times.

This mind thought is too obvious. I would cut it.

You should probably not put his thoughts in her dialogue paragraph unless he is directly observing her.

I would replace the ellipsis with an em dash (—) and delete the paragraph break after it.

I think it is pretty good so far. After you write a few more chapters, I think you should come back and cut out what you can. But you won't be able to tell what you can cut out until then.

If you are going for serial publishing, then it is probably fine to go with this.

When writing a piece of work, do I have to write it all in order, or can I skip over certain scenes so I can write them later? I feel like if I do it all in order, I would be hit with road blocks and I would try to find my way out of it.

Try both, and figure out what works for you. There's no right or wrong way to write a story as long as it produces a product both you and your audiences are happy with.

I have to write in order because I keep very loose, mostly mental outlines and fill in a lot of detail as I go along. When I start a chapter, I may know, at most, the absolute biggest events surrounding the 'point' of the chapter and a general idea I want to convey. I have to build those events in order, detail by detail, enough for me to feel like I at least touched upon everything I want, and so I can keep track of the development of all of my subplots and sub-ideas. I do get stalled a lot, sometimes for weeks at a time, but I don't even think about writing some other part of the story while I'm stalled because my brain just can't switch gears like that.

There are some writers who will write the scenes they're most excited about, regardless of the order, and then stitch them together as they write more stuff that goes in between. If you stall yourself on stories a lot because you're really looking forward to some scene that takes place later on, why not give this tactic a shot? It's not cheating, and unless it produces a disjointed-feeling story, who cares?

Hit Writer's Block again. I want to introduce a new character around the time the below passage ends (he doesn't appear; he just makes himself known), but I'm afraid it might end up becoming an Ass Pull considering there's no foreshadowing beforehand (the original manuscript did, but I don't feel like I have room for it here).

(Eve cheered up. “Ren! Are you okay?”

“Better than before. What happened?” He looked over at me and scowled. “And what’s he doing here?”

“He helped me take you home.” She said. “I don’t think he knew you have anxiety.”

“Doesn’t matter. I’ve told you before; you can’t just let anybody into your home. Get him out of here.”

My face heated up and I stood up. “Talk about ungrateful! I get it; you're upset. But how was I supposed to know you’d panic?”

“That’s not the point. The damage you caused to the trees, you flipping out over immature insults and the way you taunted me with my mask shows how dangerous you are. I’m sorry, but you can’t stay here.”

“It’s not my fault you don’t know how to fight.”

“Don’t give me that! What’s that got to do with anything?!”

Eve breaks us up. “Stop! Ren, if this guy couldn’t be trusted he would have just killed you right then and there.”

“Thank you!” I shout.

She turned to me. “But he does have a point about you being dangerous.”

“What?”

“We saw your lightning from 600 yards away. How could Ren not be concerned?”

“Whose side are you on?” I realized that Ren and I said that at the same time.

“Everyone’s and no one’s.” She answered. “I don’t want to see anyone fight.”

Ren shook his head. “Never change, Eve. But is he gonna stay here or not?”

“Do you have anywhere to go?” She asked me.

“I don’t know. Does an abandoned school count?”

She looked shocked. “Of course not! Ren, we have to let him stay!”

His eyebrows scrunched up. “How do you know he’s not lying?”

“Oh, come on!”

“I didn’t know if you were lying when I first found you.” Eve had a very motherly tone that sounded all too familiar. “You could’ve been faking that anxiety attack. But I still took you in. Why should I deny the same to someone else who may need it?”

“Fine.” Ren sighs. He turned to me, still scowling. “But don’t think I trust you. Powers like yours are better off contained.”

‘Contained’. That word alone made me short circuit again. Eve sensed my anger. “What’s wrong?” She asked.

“Nothing.” I told her. “It’s just that he basically told me I should be locked up somewhere.”

“No.” He said defensively. “I said you’re too strong for own good.”

“Huh. Never heard that bullshit before.”

Eve speaks again. “That’s enough, you two.”)

If anyone wants to read "24 DS" for themselves, here it is.

I would like to ask you to not cross post to the various pinned writer's block threads.