Writer's Block Daily

Noaqiyeum's survey about Dwarves got me thinking about Dwarves and the way I'm using them in my Fantasy world, and I just noticed that I've put more thought into my Dwarves than my Elves. On the one hand, I'm glad I have more variation than some people, but on the other hand, I kinda need to do more with my Elves because reasons.^note Thanks to In Media Res, the Dwarves are extinct for the first half of the series.

edited 22nd May '15 7:08:36 PM by AwSamWeston

I try to avoid using the standard fantasy races. I just feel like they're overused at this point.

I finished writing the fifth chapter of my book today - coming in at a moderately reasonable 3700 words. After two chapters that totally spiraled out of control (being 4500 and 5500 words each) it felt like a nice reprieve.

(if only I was writing something non-serialized so I wouldn't have to worry about how long they were and if I could finish them in time to revise them and post them weekly)

I wonder if I can post external links yet.

4,500-5,500 isn't really "out of control". In fact, most chapters in novels are that length! It roughly translates to around 20 pages.

"Spiraling out of control" is when you get to 7,500 words and you're only halfway through what you outlined for the chapter. (I wouldn't recommend it.)

edited 22nd May '15 8:32:27 PM by Collen

Definitely true, and I hope I've portioned out my story events so that they don't balloon to that level. 7500 words is six or seven days of writing or me, and when my process involves a round of revising and editing before I post something, that level of ballooning would mean serious panic and crunch time. I'm satisfied with the lead I've managed to build, though I hope to be efficient enough to lengthen it a bit.

And one can write without having chapters at all, á la Terry Pratchett.

I hate the fantasy races. So much. I am so sick of elves by this point it's not even funny. -_-

I've never found any of the classic fantasy races that compelling, but that may be because I found Limyaael before I even knew The Hobbit, the Lord of the Rings, or any Tolkien-inspired depictions of those races existed. And if you've read even a couple of her rants, she rails against them. Not to mention that some not-as-experienced/sensitive writers use humanoid races as cheap shorthand for real-world ethnicities.

I stick to humans with fictional cultures and ethnicities, and when I do have nonhumans, I make them really alien.

I'm actually okay with the "classical" fantasy races. I like to think of it as having a familiar, hearty meal - sure, you may not always feel like it, and if you have it all the time then you'll get sick of it fast, but it can be very comforting.

Elves and Dwarves work too well as metaphores for RL social and economic classes to ever go away. Nobility vs. Earthiness is a pretty core dichotomy, and fantasy will always have something interesting to say about that. But there are, of course, other dichotomies (Vulcans vs. Klingons, etc).

Posting from Palomar Observatory after the morning tour, although you'd swear standing around outside it was the Silent Hill Observatory, foggy, cold, wet, and quiet.

Kind of finding myself stuck on all writing right now. There's just too much to do.

Apparently there's an unintentional running theme for me this year: "Sabre will watch a film in theatres if it's set in the desert". (Mad Max: Fury Road, this time, and I am blown away by how they managed to make memorable characters, a working world, coherent storytelling, and brilliant pacing in what is essentially a two-hour action chase scene; before this it was Timbuktu.)

Both films rely heavily on masterful cinematography to exploit the sheer visual effect of the desert. It's something that doesn't translate directly to writing—but then I remembered that Cormac McCarthy did something very close with the stony desert in Blood Meridian: harsh, inhuman, and eternal.

(It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.)

It'll be very hard to do that with background settings, I think, but then again, elements in my current project may well benefit from it. I'm going to have to go creative with scene descriptions: cinematography in prose. Just an additional challenge.

That quote only makes me think of the intro of Fallout

edited 23rd May '15 9:24:35 PM by DarkbloodCarnagefang

I'm not that big on fantasy races, but if they can be done with some sort of interesting twist (or anything that distinguishes them from the countless other iterations out there), they can be fun. Like in Artemis Fowl.

I jumped through some hoops for my brother's wedding, and I am now certified to serve alcohol in my state.

(He wants to serve alcohol, but we need a certified bartender for that, so upon finding an online course, I volunteered to take it so we could save some money.)

Observation: We don't care about the actual text of Little Red Riding Hood. Not only because it was an oral story that had countless versions until American culture widely settled on one, but because few recount a single version. For the most part, we encounter it through countless adaptations or bedtime stories or whatever.

Really, we're less allured to a specific text, and more toward the ''concept of Little Red. That spans from the surface elements (the red hood) to the core themes and emotions (the entire human vs. Monster dynamic, and everything that relates to it).

This largely contrasts to most modern stories. Cor example, JK Rowlings' version of Harry Potter is the only one respected by larger culture, besides authorized adaptations like the movies.

But maybe in a few centuries, Harry Potter will become like Little Red Riding Hood. The details might switch around, but the actual abstract story will live on as an extension of cultures.

Point is, maybe an element of a spectacular story is that its audience turns it from a single version, into an experience that lasts centuries after the creator is forgotten. And through that, you can even argue that all stories in a culture is connected to all others.

Just a thought.

edited 24th May '15 6:45:32 PM by chihuahua0

I see where you're coming from, but it's not the best comparison — as you mentioned, Little Red Riding Hood was an oral tradition for a long time. We don't really have that in this day and age, with a few concious exceptions. That said, a lot of what you said could apply just as well to A Christmas Carol, which was never not formed as an oral tradition, so you're abso-fucking-lutely onto something.

edited 24th May '15 6:53:44 PM by KillerClowns

And you're right about A Christmas Carol. I bet more people have experienced an adaptation of it than the original Dickens book. Same with Shakespeare, whose manuscripts are more read than seen on the stage. And even after the original runs, every subsequent one is a significant deviation.

Maybe to phrase it better, many of our best-known stories are the ones that transcend the original, and are enjoyed from the film version, to the Grandma Wolf mask you bought for Halloween.

As a counterpoint, take Mobile Suit Gundam and its many descendants.

The existence of multiple retellings of the tale of the pilot who fell into the cockpit of the new prototype have not, in the main, resulted in a "generalized" story. Pretty much every one has been different. Amuro has some kind of ambiguous disorder that means he hates social activity, though he's not actually bad at it. Kou is...well I'm not sure what's wrong with him besides a lack of self-worth and immaturity, but he's barely withstandable. Kamille is a seething angerholic who hates all authority figures (which is his saving grace compared to the later Shinn Asuka, who didn't hate them enough and got lead by the nose) but manages to mellow out a bit. Judau is by far the youngest and yet probably the most well-adjusted Gundam pilot in the franchise. Banagher...isn't very smart in general. Seabook doesn't have enough room to characterize given how F91 got truncated into a movie. Usso is a far better Reality Ensues deconstruction of having kids pilot giant robots than anyone from Evangelion, at significant cost to the watchablity of his native series. Tobia is part a love letter to the concept (people in the Universal Century write Tobia Arronax Facts lists), and part a clue to some of the misguided fans that the Newtype Utopia is not now and has never been a realistic thing.

Those are just the ones from the same universe, and even that skips several minor and one major entry into the franchise that do not feel compelled to maintain that plot.

It's unlikely these stories will unify, as their differences are often inherent to their value. Zeta and SEED Destiny are reactions to each other of a sort; so are Wing and 00's first season. Some will probably fade into the collective unconscious; AGE is already well on its way. But we will never see the idealized concept of a Gundam story in the way you described result from these myriad of tellings.

Indeed, your notation that we have changed; that the Red Riding Hood story has been condensed, in a sense, to a single one now because we have the means to do so; that is a far more interesting thought. We want our stories to be unitary, but we lacked the means before. This is why, perhaps, many people who claim to be fans of a franchise seem to dislike most of the entries into it; they have chosen the story they want, and the others are just clutter to them.

edited 24th May '15 7:46:45 PM by Night

"Did you mean: Star Wars?"

edited 24th May '15 8:47:54 PM by AwSamWeston

I think a story has to be fairly short and simple to finally end up in legendary status. "A Christmas Carol" is pretty straightforward, Harry Potter a lot less so.

I have nothing to contribute to it at present, but I just wanted to say that I've always found this sort of discussion to be absolutely fascinating. As well as relevant to my own writing, since I'm into science fiction and have some interest in constructing a "realistic" future pop culture.

I partially agree. The straightforward and simple nature of the story gives room for adaptational changes. Whoever decides to retell the story can paint around the very few important plot points as they please, which is something that does simply not work for something like Harry Potter. That series is almost like clockwork in that it contains so many tiny details that completely change the story when just one of them is omitted, something unfortunately evidenced by the movies.

edited 24th May '15 11:15:43 PM by Xeroop

In my latest bout of research, I find that there's little Reddit discussion of Plutchik's Wheel of Emotion. It's probably a chart you've already seen, but some of the less circulated aspects of its original paper (The Nature of Emotions) are interesting. For example, this chart relating emotions to primal survival◊, and the paper's ten postulates.

In the end, I have to keep in mind that this is still an analysis of emotions, not the makings of emotions itself (the paper itself acknowledges that its primary categories are "idealized states"). It's probably disputed in the psychology community. Nevertheless, what I'm likely going to use with it is to use it as a jumpboard to categorize my story's monsters, and then make their specific natures more nuanced to the situation. Everything from phobias, to situational feelings.

edited 25th May '15 9:10:21 AM by chihuahua0