Writer's Block Daily

Interestingly workable, and the man has a point about people being mythologized when they're "disappeared", but one thing he might be overlooking is that a similar mythology builds up around the dreaded secret police who perform the "disappearances". The NKVD is the example that comes immediately to mind, and I suspect the heroes are very, very fortunate in that their opponent presumably does not have the institution of terror that Iron Feliks built. If something like that is known to be operating, a disappearance doesn't lead to myths about Robin Hood.

Of course, to support a terrifyingly efficient secret police apparatus like the Cheka and its various successors requires certain things of the country and its political structure; it can't exist in a vacuum.

In that case, this extra bit of context is also important: the villain's in the middle of consolidating his power shortly after a coup, and the previous administration definitely didn't have any sort of secret police. He's got plans for it, but nothing concrete.

I don't know how much good that's going to do, just because I feel like I've seen that sort of speech before - and while that's mainly a meta objection and it makes sense as an in-universe rationale, the problem is that the "just shoot him" thing is in a lot of ways the result of meta thinking already.

My main motivation for the villain keeping the main character alive is that the are the same person; the villain is the main character from future where things went horribly wrong. The villain doesn't off him since he doesn't want to risk creating a time paradox by offing himself before he can actually become the villain.

However, when the main character eventually learns that, he consciously decides to take other path in life so that the villain would not ever come to be. For a moment they both wait the villain to disappear Back To The Future style the instant this decision is uttered, but they just end up standing around in awkward silence. Then they come to conclusion that the timeline apparently forks, as the villain exists without the main character deciding to follow his footsteps. So then he's not afraid to lay a finger to his past self anymore.

edited 23rd Jan '15 12:51:56 AM by Xeroop

I tried to take the more thrilling, positive and to-my-style approach to why the villain can't kill the protagonist(s). They are too badass.

edited 23rd Jan '15 1:29:10 AM by DarkbloodCarnagefang

Okay, I'm aware that's really not enough information for me to make any sort of reasoned judgment, but my immediate emotional reaction is that it sounds like a very weak excuse. A hero falls to an executioner's bullet or a headman's axe just like anyone else; what makes them a hero is their skill in avoiding it, or else their courage in facing it.

(Granted, my reaction may have been influenced by my recent reading of The Price of Glory, about Verdun, but it's a mindset I've had for much longer. The machine gun, the shellburst, the dysentery and the gangrene—say as much as you like about being a hero; they don't care.)

Me going on and rambling about what makes my characters able to push past the limitations they are given and escape death on combat prowess alone is not all that interesting.

I've thought about doing something like that, but it always ends up getting meta. Exercise caution.

So...I'm writing, and then I realize, 'crap, this is liberal propaganda!' And then I realize that that's what a large portion of literature is anyway. So...one of the villains is a full-out conservatist, who, after a large terrorist attack, has convinced a large portion of the country that liberals are evil, so has them exiled. I just want to make sure I portray conservatives in a fair manner that doesn't show that they're all evil.

So, what would be some upsides to conservatism? Other than safety.

Ideally, the advantage of taking a "conservative" approach to politics would be avoiding making rash decisions.

You could point out that what you described your villain doing is actually very rash and can't really called conservative by anyone reasonable.

Conservatism in the broadest sense is a recognition that the existing ways of doing things, the traditions and rituals and technologies and social mores that exist already, do not exist merely "because" but had some kind of reason to exist, and as such are due some level of respect and have some level of validity...at least until proven otherwise (things that outlive their usefulness are never welcome among thinking humans, no matter their political allegiance). It is not precisely against change, nor is it precisely for the status quo, though it can often manifest itself in both those positions. Change can be necessary; but when necessary it should be managed and controlled to minimize upheaval.

Conservatism in modern political circles is something very different from what it would have been even circa 1990; the modern strain tends to be a kind of malignant nostalgia, attaching itself to some "magic era" where things were better it seeks to return to.

edited 24th Jan '15 9:09:31 PM by Night

Working on the next chapters of Moonflowers and Hunting the Unicorn.

They're going pretty well, just a bit slowly thanks to the first week of school.

So then modern conservatives look at the past the same way as every fantasy writer.

(Also: Hello! I figured I should get involved with these small-questions threads, and that was the best I could come up with.)

I did some writing, and I realized that one character would start talking in run-on sentences if she got really nervous and connecting her thoughts with "and" and "so" and "because" and stuff like that and it worked best if there was as little punctuation as possible and it's because if she keeps talking it takes her mind off of what's making her nervous so if she runs out of stuff to say she'll start going off on tangents and following those on and on and on and she generally only stops talking like that when she gets cut off by other characters.

You had fun with that.

If you play the character like you wrote that post then yeah, I think the effect's gonna sell.

Hmmm. I've a mind to experiment with a way of revealing a character's backstory. Isolde is a radio technician in Wroclaw, Poland, when she's first introduced; in the story, she takes on something of a mentor role. Over the course of two or three scenes with her, we see some aspects of her past that should—to an observant reader—reveal who she is.

The first scene or so with her, it's shown that she has a distinct foreign accent to her Polish, and a hint or two that she picked up much of her proficiency with esoteric radio equipment—especially the vagaries of radiolocation and sound recording—while working for a past employer.

Later, it's revealed that Isolde turns out to be personally familiar with the concept of pledging one's soul to a beautiful ideal for the greater good, only for that ideal to conceal a squalid and ugly truth with no way to escape; also around this time, it'd be hinted that her skills were, in the past, used for surveillance and eavesdropping.

Finally, Isolde reveals that salvation came to her one November evening in 1989, when an impossible miracle occurred. On that evening she walked away from her office on the Normannenstrasse for the last time, returned to her flat in Potsdam, gathered up her belongings and destroyed some papers that she'd taken from her workplace, then joined the crowd heading across the Glienicke Bridge to freedom; she never looked back since.

What I want to try to do is never to mention the name or the nature of her former employer, and let the reader figure out from the clues dropped in the third scene the nature of Isolde's past life.

edited 1st Feb '15 7:00:32 PM by SabresEdge

Sounds good to me.

Heh. That moment you realize your backstory is better than the actual story you're working on, so switch your focus to that.

Also I've now realized that I will not be able to successfully write a story until I 'come of age', though I can try.

There are times when I've actually switched gears to tell the backstory instead. Works out so well.

So I have this problem where, whenever I hit a bump of writer's block, I always find myself wanting to work on something else.

Thing is: I'm working on a rough draft for a story, and I know that I can't work on other ideas until the draft is done because otherwise I'll never finish it. Which means that my brain keeps wandering, but I can't channel it because I need to finish this one first.

How might you guys break through this kind of block? Any tips?

For some reason, I've decided that all deity-level characters I write will be aware of the fourth wall, even if they never show it in-story.

Because they're deities, perhaps?

...Trying to think too much about that makes my head hurt.

edited 2nd Feb '15 11:14:07 PM by nrjxll

You become a god when you realize the truth about the reality that you're in...

*dons hankie* MY BRAIN HURTS!

@TeraChimera I've had some luck with writing things I see. Forget about stories, just little details from everyday life - e.g. yesterday I was walking by the sea and the waves had so many little crenellations they seemed pixellated, like I was still staring at the screen. That was cool, if a little frightening. Or watching people in coffee shops, with bonus coffee. My bar is set very low, mind you ("today I wrote two lines I AM GOD").

I'm kind of curious to what everyone here does about writer's block. I know the question crops up quite often, but even so.

...I need to write a good dream for a RWBY fanfic, and I need to finish it soon. Unfortunately, with Monty Oum's death, I keep thinking of melancholic stuff instead... (-__-')

Oddly enough, I find that I make more progress on a project when I take time out and think about something else occassionally.