Writer's Block Daily

If you include the Sy Fy channel as a legitimate part of geek culture, then you can include wrestling.

Heh, that's pretty much exactly what I was going to say... except way more polite.

Serving as a groomsman at my brother's wedding has made me think about coming up with wedding traditions for my own cultures. (As well as weird reasons for those traditions. Did you know that the best man was originally the groom's backup if he had to kidnap his bride from disapproving parents? The "best" referred to his combat skills. He also stands next to the groom in case someone tries to attack the groom.)

I actually thought that was fairly "common knowledge" historical trivia.

I hit 50k. Whooh. Story's not done yet, but I've hit the third act.

So I watched Kung Fury.

It was everything I've ever dreamed of in a film.

I guess that explains why my writing is universally bad, cause I relish in watching this kinda stuff.

I decided I did enough world building for my Space Opera so I started writing. I'm starting to get used to writing out-of-sequence but for some reason I wanted to write the (first) Big Damn Kiss scene first.

Just finished Outlast: Whistleblower. Given the bad fates most horror protagonists experience, having one escape their ordeal largely intact, with no "...Or is it?" tacked on, is surprisingly triumphant.

Are there any tips you guys can give me on tone? I'm trying to write Magitekish story that, while it has plenty of serous moments, is for the most part pretty light. Is there an easy way to just ease into something more serious?

...To cite an example, Homestuck. One of my biggest gripes with it is the sheer speed at which it goes from being all bubbly to extremely serious, or vice versa. How can I avoid this?

If you like Homestuck, that's okay, this is my opinion.

A programmer made a website that's advertised as a free online Scrivener. It's a bit feature-light at the moment, but I'm gonna try it out.

http://www.truenovelist.com

I have similar problems. One minute, it's all laughter and jokes and lighthearted character building moments, and the next three people are dead.

I've also always been concerned about how to smoothly transition from comedy to drama (or vice-versa), though I don't know if I'd call it Mood Whiplash because it's usually not that abrupt.

Sat down and got five pages of a comic script done. And I'm wanting to keep going to see how much I can do tonight. Not sure where this sudden inspiration came from (maybe because my job allows me to let my mind wander and brainstorm ideas, and thus I already had some stuff to work on when I sat down tonight?), but it's great.

Hopefully I can make this happen again when I write the next chapter.

Hi, TV Tropes.

I'm still alive, but I'm writing full-time professionally (although most of it is sales and service emails, I'm also doing a lot of design articles), starting a relationship, so I haven't had any time for fiction stuff lately. However, I will be back soon. Just an update.

Bye, TV Tropes.

My worldbuilding's going weird places again. I came up with a torture specific to lizard folk: pull off their scales one by one with pliers until they talk.

Ooh, that sounds like an interesting torture method indeed! I imagine it would also work with any other reptile (including dragons), as well as some fish (or merpeople).

Actually, I find this topic rather fascinating myself. I especially like to think of torture methods that don't involve removing or disabling body parts that can't grow back... because, you know, if an important character in a story is tortured, it would be quite inconvenient if they could no longer walk or talk or use an ability that would be required later on. Obviously the easiest way to do this would be using an Agony Beam (I think that's another reason why that trope exists), or to do a Fade to Black during the torture to conveniently leave out any details and just assume that no permanent damage was done. (They also help maintain a PG rating.) But there's also whips and belts, needles, red-hot metal, and my favourite - acid (As in the corrosive kind, not LSD - though something like the latter would be interesting too).

Additionally, one story I plan on writing features what is essentially a Torture Porn website. There's this masked person called Silent Sadie who kind of acts like Jigsaw without the games and backstory, subjecting people (including children and babies) and animals to various torture methods and capturing it on film - the website showcases those videos. Otherwise it's pretty much a horror story, revolving around two young women who have opposing views on the website and find themselves in the middle of an attempt to find its owner and bring them to justice. Admittedly, this is kind of an artistic manifestation of my darkest thoughts, but what can I do?

edited 8th Jun '15 11:53:17 PM by ladytanuki

Strange side-effects of reading history: an urge to base characters off of historical figures. In this case, I'm looking at William Tecumseh Sherman, because holy shit that there is a fascinating, complex, and fucking badass human being.

Nathan Bedford Forrest. Yes, the first Grand Wizard of the KKK. His life is quite a bit more complicated than his reputation would suggest. To start, he was a cavalry leader in the Confederacy, largely self-taught, and one of the best they had. A large chunk of his regiment was made up of his own slaves, who he promised freedom to if they fought with him. And he freed them two years before the war was over.

Or Shaka Zulu. Some of his reign sounds a lot like that of the usual evil overlord. For instance, after defeating the rival Ndwandwe in battle, he marched on their capital (well, royal cattle-enclosure-and-village, but close enough). When they were still too far away to be clearly seen, he had his men start singing Ndwandwe victory songs to lure the people out where they could be slaughtered. The Ndwandwe leader, Zwide, escaped, but his mother was captured, so Shaka locked her in a house with hungry jackals overnight, and burned it to the ground when the sun rose.

And then there are events, like the South Sea Bubble, where a single English company grew to be worth more then all the money that existed in England solely through selling stock, then crashed so hard it would've bankrupted pretty much everyone in the country had a savvy politician not forgiven most of the debts as part of his maneuvering to get in power.

My world's been shaken up lately and that's a writing opportunity, that's inspiration. The traditional awakening: now I know what a Problem is and I should be able to take authorial advantage. What's worse, then - to think At last my ticket to true meaning, like some kind of literary Munchausen's, or to think this, look for a story, and find nothing?

Beyond the ritual angsty grumblings, I'd be interested to know what you do as writers when things go wrong. It's silly to think too hard on this, I know. You end up going, Yes, but I have family. Yes, but I've never known war. Yes, but I've never survived a concentration camp and so what could I possibly know about life? Sheer nonsense but it cycles around my head on a little hamster wheel, and when I start to write I don't know what it is I need to say.

Hugs for whatever you're going through.

As for using life events as story-fuel, writing what you know is only an element of writing. The rest of it is 1) imagination, 2) writing it down, and 3) editing it so that it matches the stuff in your head.

If I just wrote what I knew, I wouldn't have written an urban-fantasy where the Fair Folk torment a random American family and then start up a serial-killing spree. The protagonist Alima physically looks like me, but it's because I want more people of color and more women in literature, and I happen to be an Asian-American woman. I didn't consciously put my personality into Alima—her story is that The Everyman can get tons of help from higher powers because they just don't want people to suffer needlessly, and it's NOT because she's some sort of Chosen One.

Alternately, writing what I know means that my crime-drama fanfiction about two gay guys and their best friends dealing with a kidnapping is a borderline example, since I have a lot of gay friends, but none of them got kidnapped or stalked. Well, I HOPE they weren't.

I didn't write these because of any particular life-events, but life-events have happened in the middle of writing them and I just... deal with it.

I let myself process the life-events sufficiently before I think of using them as story fodder, but I just put them in my mental hard-drive and save them for later to let them germinate.

edited 10th Jun '15 1:41:39 PM by Sharysa

My mom is friends with a woman who is friends with a YA author. There's a release day thing for her new book and I'm going to meet her there.

There was an article about her and what resonated with me most was that she has anxiety attacks too, which she put in her protagonist in her new book.

I'd love to meet a local writer who's published (and try to get some advice, maybe).

There are a few writers here at TVT who are published.

I guess I'm just excited to meet an author in-person who lives in my general area, so I don't mean to discredit fellow tropers who are also published.

And also coupled with the fact that I think I've only seen two tropers who got published and I don't know who they are.

edited 10th Jun '15 7:23:04 PM by electronic-tragedy

Hopefully, with luck, within the year, you'll see another one (beams).

Yeah, maybe.

No really, good luck on that.