Random Questions Thread

Isn't it sort of a serious generalization to say that one can identify specific cultural answers for a lot of the things below the waterline in that graphic, though?

I'm embarking on my first big writing project that largely uses dialogue, and reaction to my first draft has been pretty consistent-narration and descriptions are pretty solid, but the dialogue and characterization need lots of work.

The issue here is that the dialogue is stiff, awkward, and unnatural, and the characters all kind of sound the same and are pretty personality-less, and are too similar to each other-too many Nice Guys. What's a good way to learn to break out of this and improve my dialogue and characterization?

Depending on the culture, yes—which is the whole point. The iceberg is far from exhaustive, not every one will apply differently to every culture, et cetera, et cetera. The point is still clear enough, I think.

Read good dialogue-heavy works and see how the author does it—what's emphasized onscreen and why that's important to the scene/story. (Like a television camera, the narration highlights what you want your reader to notice and keep in mind as they read the story; there is therefore a bias towards the important or the memorable.) Change your characters around so they react differently to each other and to different situations; shifting between different headspaces and finding the characters' voices is pretty vital for character work.

The advice is pretty general, but I don't think there's any real magic bullet. Just analysis and practice.

theoretically speaking, would the cartoon market accept the idea of a group of middle school boys becoming powerful nature warriors by harnessing elemental spirits? werid question i know.

edited 29th Sep '16 7:37:19 AM by ewolf2015

I have question, would you forgive a person for putting up a Jerkass facade for something he couldn't handle very much? It's making one of my characters with that trope a base-breaker for some people who read the story.

maybe but i'm not really sure.

Answer for the last two questions is the same: depends on execution.

now take for instance if the jackass develops over the series. if they slowly give up that jackass facade in a more beneath the mask sort of way, then maybe the audience could find themselves forgiving them. but again, execution. i'm sure if the market is open for action cartoons as of late.

How hot can gasoline fires get? Specifically, I'm wondering what kind of corpse would be left behind if someone burned to death with gasoline. It's in a concrete parking garage, so nothing else to catch on fire and confuse things. Are we talking scorched bones, or human steak?

Burnt steak probably. Human beings are actually remarkably hard to completely burn to the bone. Crematory ovens are ludicrously hot.

Apparently a funeral pyre takes 150-200kg of wood to burn a body, and that's a long, sustained, hot burn. So, I'm gonna guess that Garcon is right and that any reasonable amount of relatively quick-burning gasoline isn't going to reduce the subject to bone.

Ewolf: I never said to research the Philippines for ten years and I actively advised AGAINST that because all you seem to need right now are some pointers and basic cultural notes. You can find that on Google and then start writing your story. If you need to do more research in the process of writing, then that's okay. It's what I do with half my stories.

Plus, don't feel bad about accidentally having a tanned white kid come into fantasy-Asia and be part of a group that saves the world. I literally had no idea that was your plot. It's not your fault that a lot of people write the same imperialistic cliches over and over.

If you want to get rid of his whiteness completely, then make him Arab/Middle-Eastern and have someone comment on how he looks like the people from the Fantasy-Mindanao section of the islands. (Mindanao has a LOT of Filipino Muslims and people of Arab descent, and I was not lying when I said the islands are a melting pot.) As long as you make sure the older characters explicitly keep him OUT of danger as much as they can help it, because tanned-white-boy is THIRTEEN, nobody will read it as anything close the Mighty Whitey trope.

edited 29th Sep '16 8:43:29 PM by Sharysa

I was thinking of making him mixed race, maybe have his mom be Indian or Arabic and his dad being Italian or Greek. By they way, does such a combination exist in fiction?

Fyi, I do have such a character meant that, her name's chestnut.

edited 30th Sep '16 3:31:42 AM by ewolf2015

That sounds like a really interesting background. Maybe you should generate some short character sheets for the parents, just to flesh out his background.

sounds like a good idea, thanks

So does anyone have any tips for making time manipulation powers not OP as hell? I ask because one of the villains in my work has time magic as his power, and I keep trying to limit them in a way that he's a powerful opponent, his fight is a huge climax, but not so strong that the protagonist doesn't stand a chance.

The three things he uses with his time magic is reversing time, he rewinds everything back to where it was X amount of time ago while retaining memories of what happened in the rewound time, Time stop, he freezes time for a couple seconds, and finally he can materialize objects and people from alternate timelines out of sand, if they meet they combine and disintegrate almost instantly. Heavily inspired by various Jojo villains, but I've really wanted to use time powers in my writing for a long time now. The main things that limit him as a villain with these effects is endurance (He'll eventually run out of mana, and time stop especially burns through it quick, on top of him using time reversal constantly to avoid damage,) and his own steadily decreasing mental state.

do what jojo did i guess

Tranquilis: a good way would be to establish some rules for how the power is triggered, and limitations for the power will follow. I mean more the trigger than the techno/magicobabble rationale for how it works - although that level of explanation can also be plumbed for logical limitations. If they have to trigger their power using physical motions, or a physical device, or even conscious thought, if they can be surprised or ambushed in some way and prevented from triggering it, it becomes possible in the present to counter their ability to pause or rewind.

Time manipulation is only as overpowered as you want it to be. Can somebody put a bullet through their head, yet they can still rewind time and undo it? Or: standing in the present, can they see future events coming, and probably avoid them pretty easily? Choices like these can create an OP situation, but if you create a powerful time manipulator who nonetheless operates within defined limits, opponents who discover those limits can explore ways to exploit them, and beat the odds.

Combining two JoJo bigbads and then another hax power on top is a bit overkill

I was thinking about time-manipulation and I just limited it to a radius of about 20 feet. So a character could stop bullets, become an absolutely deadly melee fighter because they could take on a massive amount of fighters, and can never die from falling, but their scope is limited to close-quarters and maybe protecting five or ten people at a time.

Its creativity scales up with the imagination of the user: to wit. Spoilers for Madoka Magica by the way.

Yes. those are anti-tank rockets. By the dozen.

Yes, those were acquired through clever use of Time Stands Still: stop time, walk into a military armory, walk out with enough weapons to arm a regiment.

Yes, those are all being fired in time-stop mode.

Fun Things will happen when time resumes, and the rockets all streak towards their target at the exact same moment.

Munchkin-y as hell? Oh yeah. That's why we love Homura.

And that's just the opening volley. Someone needs to convince her to tell us where she got a goddamn truck-mounted anti-ship missile battery to put inside her subspace thingie. (A comprehensive list of her arsenal from the Final Battle exists here, though you'll have to scroll a bit past a few somewhat unrelated examples. Spoilers abound.)

edited 30th Sep '16 4:40:49 PM by MarqFJA

Storytelling note, though: the character in question doesn't come off as "overpowered" because the conflict she faces is not one that can be resolved by application of pure violence.

If the hero of a story is a sword-swinger, for instance, the climax generally shouldn't be solved by some variant of "I swing my sword at it harder". "Overpoweredness" is a game balance issue. It doesn't apply for stories. Someone's too powerful for a story? Take them out of the picture somehow, or throw them against a problem that requires guile and diplomacy rather than brute force.

Ultra random question here: Which medium would you like to see for your story to be adapted?

Mine could be first a manga and then an anime.

I think my would honestly be best adapted in a sort of Telltale sort of video game. My story is already broken down into several parts of the main character's life, and each part could be it's own episode really. Granted, in order to capture it all they would need to probably add more episodes than what their games normally have, but I could see it working very well. The other problem I could see is not giving the player choice in regards to some major things and events, which would cause some contestation amongst people.

edited 30th Sep '16 10:56:39 PM by randomdude4