Writer's Block Daily

I want it to be fairly serious as what Twin Peaks did, but yeah, those can be good ideas. Now I'm not sure if the town deals with several weird things happening, or just one.

I know there's going to be Magical Realism as there's a ghost of a punk prowling around and acting as the local urban legend.

Interesting things you learn from being in a bad car accident: you might not feel the airbags deploy, as it all happens so fast you don't have time to process it. There's the brief "oh shit" moment right before the impact, and then you're sitting in a stationary car filled with smoke and wondering what that big white thing on the steering wheel is before it dawns on you. (No injuries for anyone involved, BTW; when airbags work, they fucking work.)

Glad you're ok. Too bad about the car.

Feeling a great temptation to engage in some Author on Board lately. (No, I won't go into details; too likely to get messy.) Trying to figure out how to best handle it.

...alright, got the cure. Take the two subcultures I almost flanderized. Jot down, one by one, their points of agreement, disagreement and semi-agreement. Make sure that every viewpoint I find them with is justified by their particular histories and concerns, independently of what I think. Ensure the result does not neatly map to either "my views" and "views I despise", or to any particular American political faction. And now for the hardest part: sticking with the results, even when it means sympathetic, intelligent characters I like refuse to play by my rules.

Now I find myself in the less stressful situation of trying to decide which of two former friends declared Joss Whedon "overrated", beginning a chain of events that resulted in their current epic vendetta.

Has anyone had a case of Writer on Board without realizing it until later?

Genuine question, because I've begun to question why I'm writing the main character the way I do.

edited 29th Sep '15 8:57:59 PM by DarkbloodCarnagefang

I think we need more information than that to make a judgment either way.

How are you writing your main character?

Looking back on my writing, the main character has some of my personal views. I mean, I always project just a little too much on my characters, but I thought my main character was a little too intense with them.

Ever wonder if your plot's too complicated for people to follow, but you don't recognize that because you're so familiar with it?

This first came to mind when I saw the first Mission: Impossible movie. Apparently, it could get hard to follow at times, but I thought it was relatively easy to understand. And when I look at some of my stories, I see things like two or three plotlines running simultaneously, characters getting shuffled between plots, plots splitting or merging as characters split up or meet each other, and the actions of one plot affecting the development of another. Granted, when looked at individually, each plotline seems simple to me, but at the moment I'm just wondering if it could be a bit overwhelming to readers.

I'm used to Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

If le Carre could tell Smiley's stories coherently and out of chronological order (as Smiley digs through the clues), and they're bestsellers, well, complexity isn't an issue. (The fact that I've not a hundredth of le Carre's skill as a writer may be, but not plot complexity in and of itself.)

Deciding where in the general vicinity of New York City I want to set my next chapter. Want to set it outside of the city proper, but aside from Staten Island or Newark I'm not quite sure where.

Oh well, more geography research. Google Maps, away!

So I finally manage to write down a plot outline for what I'm hoping is going to become my main story...only to have a plot bunny for something completely unrelated get me.

Brain, why do you do this?

I know, right? I literally just got two updates done a month late, and then suddenly I get this idea for an entirely different story!

Plot-bunnies breed as fast as normal bunnies, don't they?

Certainly. Just during the time it took me to draw two panels of a comic I also managed to plot a whole Space Western Cosmic Horror Story.

Had a scene where a villain was almost doing something recommended by the Evil Overlord List. Tweaked it a bit so he was doing the actual thing.

For context, he's about to execute a traitorous underling pleading for a second chance. Originally, the villain simply said, "No," and killed him. Now, he kills him and then says, "No."

Subversion, double subversion, or inversion?

In the editing world: my word count is TERRIBLE. On the bright side I eliminated one unnecessary scene. But that was a smidgen of the total storm in the way. Otherwise...progress?

EDIT FOR BELOW: FIXED because realized one of the ethnic characters is completely justified in her behavior. Her "unreliability" comes from the fact that she's a close friend of the other character and believes that she has shady motives (which she does, but discovering why is part of the story).

Original:

Wondering if I could get some quick feedback on something to get a reader standpoint. Started plotting a story where out of three important characters, two have ties to a certain ethnic group. Both of these characters have somewhat of a story bias in that one is an unreliable narrator (sort of) and other had kind of shady motives in the past. And while the third character also has secrets, I'm worried that he'd be seen as the "superior" in comparison to the other two.

Of course, all this shouldn't be a problem if I never outright mention ethnicity at all, but it's got me thinking about ethnic presentation in fiction. In the story the ethnicity of the two characters would become clear due to relevant mythology. Because I really don't want any unfortunate implications, would it be appropriate to make the ethnicity of these two characters known this way? I'd like to see how others view it because to me it's fine, but I can also see the problems with overthinking it (like what I'm doing now, gahh...).

edited 23rd Oct '15 9:09:52 PM by Coujagkin

It's a little bit fuzzy for me, but are there other characters of different/minority ethnicities that are non-shady? If there aren't, maybe you should swap the non-ethnic character to their ethnicity or add a couple of other prominent ethnic characters.

As for my own potentially problematic question: I've got a bisexual Chinese guy who has an open relationship with his boyfriend. I hate the whole "asexual/dorky/socially-neutered Asian guy" stereotype, so I made him a very charming and playful guy who happens to sleep with people besides his boyfriend... and then I realized that I was getting close to the "bisexuals are promiscuous" stereotype.

So I established that it's mostly out of necessity since 1) the Chinese guy's sex drive is WAY higher than his boyfriend's and having sex most of the week seems fun until the one with less stamina accidentally passes out, so they worked out an open relationship pretty quickly after that. And 2) he likes having sex with girls now and then, but his boyfriend's not a girl.

The third reason is because he's still traumatized in a few ways from his PREVIOUS boyfriend's death and he unconsciously uses sex as an outlet. So then my protagonist drags him into therapy and as he starts processing his emotions in a healthier manner, he cuts down on the extra sex. Does that seem like realistic character development?

edited 8th Oct '15 11:41:30 PM by Sharysa

I'm not in a position to comment on how realistic it is (it seems plausible to my layman's eye). However, I'd like to note some Unfortunate Implications that I see in the idea that an open relationship is necessary in this case:

Even given a very large discrepancy between the pairs' sex-drives, is the character in question incapable of refusing the urge? If so, is it impossible for him to gain relief by himself?

As to having sex with women, is it impossible for him to be happy without it? Note that I'm not arguing that he should give it up, but rather against the suggestion that he can't, and thus must have an open relationship. Aside from the implication (as above) that "he's a man, he can't help it", it seems to me to reinforce the idea that "bisexuals are promiscuous", as any bisexual man would then presumably require at least two sexual partners (one male, one female) in order to be satisfied.

If the relationship were open because of the character's beliefs—if, for example, he simply believed that sex shouldn't be exclusive, and his partner were okay with that—then that would be another matter.

edited 9th Oct '15 4:33:31 PM by ArsThaumaturgis

Thanks for answering!

On bisexuals literally needing sex with both genders: Yeeeeah, that does sound off when you put it that way. It's a single sentence in the script, so I've cut it. So now he has sex with random girls and guys, and that's it.

Also, I went hunting through my other notebook in case I missed something. Apparently he's gotten his wires crossed because he thinks he has a ridiculous sex-drive, but what he's really going for is the all the warm-and-fuzzy stuff that comes WITH sex. (Which would also explain why he can't shut it off or just masturbate—it's not actually sex he's craving, but he's confused general affection/intimacy with it.)

So when he starts developing a strong platonic relationship with my protagonist, he gets a lot more of his affection needs met and so his libido starts balancing out. That, plus therapy to deal with the emotional side of things.

edited 9th Oct '15 8:45:09 PM by Sharysa

Aah, that makes a lot of sense, I think! Thank you for elaborating. ^_^

That moment when you lose several hundred words to your internet failing.

My sincerest condolences. That's seriously annoying.

Considering having characters in a constructed world freely use both American and British slang. Maybe Canadian and Australian, too.

Speaking of slang, I realized a while back some of my worldbuilding created a slang term, or at least a colloquialism. Very shortly after the masquerade broke, Las Vegas quickly began implementing laws to prevent arcane cheating in casinos, collectively referred to as the Vegas Acts. However, thanks to humans not knowing how magic worked, a lot of these laws were unbreakable simply because magic couldn't be used like that. A "Vegas Act" eventually entered the vernacular as a term for "a quick, shoddy solution that does very little to address the actual problem", followed by "Vegas actor" for "someone who really doesn't know what he's talking about". (The second also ought to be "Vegas acter" or "Vegas act-er", but as it entered use, people spelled the last word "actor" out of habit, and it stuck.)

Ars: Technically, he throws parties and figures out whoever's in a sexy-time mood. Still pretty random, but in my head he has a loose stable of people who show up semi-regularly.

I try to implement a small amount of Future Slang in my story. My story takes place roughly 500 years in the future, so realistically all the dialogue should be nigh-impossible to understand, but that would obviously make the book unreadable, so I just go with a few terms here and there. I mostly apply this to swear words, so I can keep the book more kid friendly and not resort to Gosh Dang It to Heck! despite the main characters being space pirates with appropriately foul mouths.