Writer's Block Daily

@Slysheen. Don't try to form time constraints. If you don't force yourself, you'll find yourself thinking about the story more often. Then, take a notebook with you, and write the ideas down in their simplest form. All of them.

That way, when you look at them, you can free-associate them every time and come up with different stories based on those ideas in different combinations. That's just what worked for me, at least.

edited 30th May '16 4:35:31 PM by Wheezy

Idk what's happening, but I think everyone should chill maybe?

And so I can bring things back on topic or whatever, I'm trying to write a story set in a post apocalyptic future about a kid who is growing up in the post apocalyptic world

Which type of apocalypse?

Zombies apocalypse. Story takes place roughly 30 years after the apocalypse began. It mainly centers around a family and their kid who find a small community in a zombie infested city and how the kid's life is affected because of the apocalypse.

or at least that's how I'll interpret it and it's just a soap opera with filler or something. I never go into these plans well.

My knowledge of the zombie genre is surface level, so if someone else says differently, listen to them rather than me. But to my knowledge, it's fairly rare for zombie works to ask what happens a few decades down the road, when there's an entire generation for whom an uninfected world is a fairy tale. Seems like something to be explored, though the question of why there hasn't been a decisive victory one way or the other will need answering.

I think The Last of Us dealt with human society/civilization long after the initial apocalypse, but not too long after.

My mom and I also watch The Walking Dead, and she pointed out that certain zombies should have fully decomposed to a certain point in time. Sure new zombies crop up from dead survivors or the infected, but a large portion should just not be walking anymore.

So.

Your basic guidelines were fine and dandy. I understood and could get behind all of them, even if I didn't personally think that some of them were applicable to how I tell the stories that I tell or entirely congruent with my personality. And I can accept that: Nobody writes precisely the same way to precisely the same ends.

But what I can't accept is pretension. I think you're a reasonably intelligent individual, but you overreach with your metaphors, and as soon as someone questions this, you attempt to defend yourself through a barrage of mangled rhetoric which you all but explicitly state is meant to stall and confuse those stupid enough to get lost trying to pick it apart, which is the very definition of arguing in bad faith. It is also textbook pretension: Putting on a show of greater knowledge and sophistication than one can reasonably back up.

But to what end? You weren't being assailed by screeching plebeians; if anything, you were experiencing the mild incredulity of your peers over a matter of semantics. And yet you rushed to shut down any suggestion that other people might feel differently about how stories work by trying to either shout them down or confuse them into "agreeing."

Also, pulling the "I am very smart and therefore right" thing is really not a great idea, let alone on a writing forum on an enthusiast-culture media discussion/analysis website, because even if people don't openly roll their eyes at you for trying to make them feel stupid with numbers, you're very likely to run into at least one person who is smarter than you who will, at best, quietly resent the hubris of the statement, if not openly chew you out for thinking it actually means anything in the real world.

Had a delightful chat with a friend of mine about what a generation that grew up never knowing a pre-zombie-apocalypse world would look like. Details are debatable, but I'm sure there'd be a lot of mild-to-severe Deliberate Values Dissonance going on in that bloodstained generation. Grow up in a grim world like that, and a lot of Genre Savvy Shoot the Dog actions become morally expected. For just one possibility, keeping quiet on a loved one's infection might be considered not just stupid, but possibly crossing the Moral Event Horizon, with the expectation that if someone you love gets infected, you'll be the one to deliver the Mercy Kill so it's done clean and proper.

That's not to say it'd be all Grimdark Crapsack World, though. The simple existence of a generation that's handled all this while remaining basically sane is room enough for optimism, and one can display humanity's fall while still leaving room for it to rise again.

edited 1st Jun '16 5:08:31 PM by KillerClowns

"Zombie baiting" is bound to become a teen right of passage.

edited 1st Jun '16 7:39:39 PM by DeMarquis

The psychological profile of someone under environmental factors like that would be interesting to say the least.

You'd probably also be crazy resourceful. When I was younger, my dad taught me how to do stuff like change a flat tire and grill steak. In that generation, you'd probably get more lessons on improvising things to survive. Depending on how much civilization has or hasn't recovered, this could result in a massive array of survival skills that would make a soldier envious. ("Now, remember, as appealing as it looks, do not drink clear water. If it's clear, nothing's living in it, which means something in there's killing all the life. That'll include you." "In a pinch, licking the inside of willow bark works as a painkiller. It's where aspirin came from, you know." "If you find any long-but-thin rags that are also strong somehow, take them along. They can serve as makeshift slings, and the nice thing about slings is that you can just pick up ammo from the ground.")

I... think you are using Gray-and-Gray Morality and Black-and-White Morality way too loosely.

I understand. I'm just saying that I find stories where one character isn't portrayed as "HERO" and the other isn't "VILLAIN," like Death Note before L died, are inherently more interesting to me because you get to have two likable characters in an interesting contest, instead of one good and one horrible one in a battle with a Foregone Conclusion.

That's boring: I understand complication so well, I'd rather know "which of these interesting people will win," than "how will the side who always wins, win again?" That's how an emperor thinks, not a writer.

See, mods? Please don't thump my posts: I'm very well-medicated now, I can preserve my own dignity.

edited 3rd Jun '16 1:00:01 PM by Wheezy

I was refering more to your earlier posts, like the one that got thumped or the one you talked about genders. Specially the later, as the former operated on a logic that was too alien for me to even identify what bothered me.

But that doens't matter. I was merely trying to steer the discussion towards something other than the meta-discussion about the merits of your methods of discussion, and I actually also prefer Gray-and-Gray Morality, even if for different reasons than you, more philosophical than narrativistic.

But I am curious about what you think about tropes like A Lighter Shade of Gray: is making one side more morally right than the other, even if by a small margin, little better than Black-and-White Morality in your opinion? Or as valid as "regular" Gray-and-Gray Morality? Somewhere in between? Another matter entirely?

For me, it is sometimes preferable to normal Gray-and-Gray Morality, as it has the potential to be either more optimistic, as one side appears ti have the right answer, or more tragic because even if there are no "villains", there are still factions in conflict, which means that if the "right" side wins, which is not as certain as in works with Black-and-White Morality, there will still besympathetic people on the losing side that certainly didn't deserve what they got. That is, if there are clear winners.

Sorry about the misunderstanding. I'd actually never seen that trope, since I don't remember if it even existed as of the last time I was a TVT regular. (About 5 years ago.)

But yeah, I just agree black on white and white on black is interesting, and I wanted to talk about why I think that, since everyone up there was psychoanalyzing me.

I usually prefer stories with a clear protagonist and antagonist. For three reasons.

I don't like it when things go wrong. Knowing which side is going to win is not a misfeature. It is a feature.

I don't watch media like a spectator sport. I am not interested it who will win. I am interested in the world and the characters and the philosophy and the psychology.

I want to like the good guys and hate the bad guys. Because that is fun.

Somewhat bizarrely, I feel that the real world has White-and-Grey Morality.

edited 3rd Jun '16 11:18:06 PM by war877

I hope my next submission to this anthology makes it through. I feel confident that my latest round of revisions will make my story as good as it's going to be. I could use $500 for college anyways.

See, I like bad people as characters, so I don't mind a little black (or fuligin) in the grey and white, but I don't see the "good guys" winning as a necessary conclusion. But by the same token, I like knowing why people do what they do and how they justify what they do to themselves, even if that justification is just a thin veneer over a whole lot of "fuck y'all, got mine" or "hurting people is awesome."

Which is not to say that truly good people can't be interesting. But it helps if they're at least a little conflicted or flawed, or put in situations where being moral is inherently difficult or tricky. People driven by more or less than good conscience and positive virtues tempered by it are inherently less predictable, because most people have a sense of right and wrong and at least try to live by it. People who ignore their better judgement more often than not, or have a very different set of ethical priorities from most people, force you to think and feel at a skew to inhabit them, and I like taking those sorts of strange angles.

, As a minor addendum, it needn't be clear from the outset what would constitute "winning", and I feel that discovering that could make for an interesting story.

Of late, most of my writing has gone towards my current game, primarily in writing bits of (collectible) lore and character responses.

I'm not entirely sure that I'm getting my protagonist's voice quite right, perhaps in part hindered by the slightly fragmentary nature of the writing, both in terms of its structure and how I've been approaching it.

Yes, Pure black and white morality is great. As part of a balanced diet of other types of works.

Most of the time, although I like a clear protagonist and antagonist, having it be not quite so simple makes it better.

Yes, that can make for an interesting story. There are a few I've seen/heard of where the protagonists discover the antagonist was right all along near the end.

edited 6th Jun '16 5:51:38 AM by war877

I have a question not about the story I'm writing itself, but the process of getting it out there. Can anyone here name any websites they would recommend for posting original fiction?

And if this is not the right thread for that question, could someone direct me to said thread?

I've been posting vignettes on Tumblr, but that's kind of a crapshoot unless you have another way of pulling people in. So I will second this question, actually.

Random thoughts of the day:

I was watching an advertisement for the Cardfight!! Vanguard anime. When the characters play the card game, they turn into the forms of whatever hero card they're playing at that time. One of the characters is female, and plays a female hero card... who is dressed in a sexualised outfit, so she's essentially forced to wear the same sexualised outfit. In a public card game with a huge audience. Because the artists of the cards decided a lot of the female cards had to be sexualised. None of the cards have any sort of backstory or personality, so many female cards are not expressing their sexuality, but merely made into sex objects. And now a female character got pushed into the nonsense.

So I thought: perhaps, I should make a sort of pledge?

I promise to be sex-positive in whatever work I make. Anything sexual will have consent from the involved characters. There will be no playboy bunny waitresses, Hood Ornament Hottie, or other forms of Fan Service With A Smile, for the characters are forbidden agency in their 'sexiness'. I will not come up with excuses to include them, for even when the story is trying to say "she's being harassed and you should not find her sexy", the art is still telling the audience "stare at this sex object".

In a similar vein, I will not design sexy clothing and then attempt to justify the clothes. The reason should come before the sexiness - when characters wear sexy clothing, it's because they want to display sexiness, and the rest of their personality will have the attitudes that tie in and make sense with wanting to display sexiness. I will not put someone in a Chainmail Bikini, toss in a line of "she chose to dress this way", and then have the narrative completely forget about anything remotely related to sexuality. Especially when the art is still telling the audience "stare at this sex object".

I will not insert 'sexiness' in a manner that leaves the audience staring at a sex object long after the sexy context is over.

edited 8th Jun '16 1:15:04 AM by hellomoto