Writer's Block Daily

My writing is Chick-lit, read by British women in 30s+,

Use of the F word in Chick Lit? Acceptable in a situation where lead male is incredible angry, and barely restraining himself against a Domestic Abuser? - in as much as he has already assaulted - in the legal sense - the abuser, but hasn't yet properly hurt him, he is right on the edge. Can I put lines like "So what the fuck you gonna do big man, call the fucking police so we can tell them all about how you hit women?" screamed into the weasel's face. Or is that too much for chick-lit?

First of all, "Chick Lit" is way too broad of a category, since it basically includes nearly every form of non-genre fiction. Some people regard the term as sexist. "Contemporary literature" the more formal term. Secondly, it's all in the presentation. You can get away with nearly anything if it's essential to the work's theme and you have the skill to pull it off.

Based on my own experiences, I've come up with an unusual method to show a character is clumsy: he cuts himself shaving with an electric razor.

What happened was, as I was shaving, my hand slipped and I pressed the razor hard into my lip. Some skin must've gotten squeezed into the gaps and nicked off by the blades. It barely hurt at all, but I definitely saw a droplet of blood.

De Marquis - -I didn't call it that to start, one of my female readers did! Its all star crossed lovers and romances not quite working. (I get told off for making them cry!)

Alex is a big bloke who keeps in shape, plays Rugby. His best friend is Izzy (female). We've watched him always look out for her. He's never used violence, but did go Alpha Male 3 years previously, as students, when she received unwelcome attention in a bar. Now she's called saying "her boyfriend has gone weird". He drives 2 1/2 hours to help.

Depends on what effect you want to have here. It sounds like Alex is going too far, which deprives the victim of some of her agency. If that's the impression you are going for, then jolly good.

Thanks for the reply - having trouble pitching it.. When you say 'some of her agency', do you mean it lessens her victim status

Hope you don't mind if I post most of the rest of the section. It shows more of the relationship between Izzy and Alex in this scene. I'm also trying to get over an idea that will be developing in earlier parts; that of Alex as an alpha male, except that he is a nice bloke so doesn't need to use it- he probably doesn't even realise it. This violence is completely out of character, showing his devotion to Izzy. Jack is Izzy's dad, who arrived fractionally after Alex.

An sentence just before refers to Alex's intelligence being "Buried under the caveman". The reason I posted this is it shows Izzy is the one who can get past that, his love for her gets past his Id's instinct.

No, I mean this strong man just solved Izzy's problem for her, which undermines her agency as a character. She's going to be taken less seriously by the readers because she hasn't done anything to earn this resolution (at least not that you have shown). She's just doing what she's been told, and letting the men deal with it, not unlike a child.

edited 30th Aug '16 4:34:53 PM by DeMarquis

I'm assuming, however, that there are other scenes before and after this that show Izzy as confident, outgoing, and with agency, or scenes (assuming Alex isn't the only POV) where she tries to fix the situation herself by threatening to call the police or trying to get out that should prevent this one instance of her being unable to solve a problem by herself from completely destroying her agency as a character. I mean, you can't have a useless doll who mopes around and hopes somebody will come and save her, but they can't exactly be fixing every single problem by themselves, either.

But, looking it over, you said that Alex drove two-and-a-half hours to help her, which is making the situation look kind of improbable to me. Situations with abusers can escalate very quickly from 'he's being weird' to 'oh God he's hitting me', and I'm struggling to figure out why she called Alex in the first place, what she did in the meantime, or how the situation would work temporally with him swooping in after Cal's only slapped her.

If she thought the situation was bad enough that she needed help but was still able to access a phone, she probably should have called the police at some point. The average police response time (in the US at least) is ten minutes, and that should at least buy her some time to get out of the situation, if nothing else. If the police genuinely suck in her area and she just called Alex first, hoping that he'd be close enough, and Cal is the type who could very well have gone further than just a slap (Alex's remarks imply that he stopped Cal from going further, or imply that there's a real chance he would have), more than a slap should have happened. And if Cal really did just slap her, either because that's all he intended to do or chickened out of going further, that still leaves time for her to get away to someplace safe, regardless of when the slap occurred during that two-and-a-half hour time frame.

I guess what I'm saying is that the situation doesn't add up. The scene you've shown us depicts Izzy coming out of the bathroom, presumably not very long after Cal slapped her, with her father and Alex present, which tells me that the situation between her and Cal took two-and-a-half hours to get physical, and Alex and John arrived on the scene in the nick of time. And yet with all that time, she still felt that she needed Alex, and not the police's help, and apparently doesn't seem to have done anything effectual during that time.

edited 31st Aug '16 2:49:01 AM by CrystalGlacia

Good point - I'll stick a little post incident exposition in it. The incident on which its based the response time was 24 hours! The fiction - basically got out of hand pretty quickly. Cal was being controlling, and lost it when he found out Alex was outside.

The whole book is basically a 'just a friend' situation waiting for the pair of them to realise.

I guess another way you could play the initial phone call is by having the call be just a friendly conversation, with Izzy and Alex just chatting about how their day has been going, Izzy just mentions offhand that "oh yeah, Cal's been acting kind of weird lately", and Alex flies into full-on Violently Protective Friend mode at the mere suggestion that things might be getting iffy between Izzy and Cal, and then drives over to find the situation's gotten violent since the call, despite Izzy's attempts in the meantime to protect herself or get Cal to calm down in whatever ways you feel work for your story.

But do whatever works for your story.

edited 31st Aug '16 11:24:47 AM by CrystalGlacia

Dreams make for interesting story ideas if you can remember them after waking up. The problem is that you rarely have a dream that serves as a follow up of the first dream. I guess some people can work with what we got, but I'm bad at everything I do and I need more material to work with. My subconscious mind is way more creative than my conscious mind.

Point is, I had an idea for a dream and I can remember the details, but I have no clue where to go from there. I've also kinda stopped writing in general, but that's not important.

i have a question, what do you call something that's a star that comes out of people's hearts when their happy or inspired?

Wouldn't that be better suited for the "what should I name this" thread? Because I don't think that's a thing that exists.

Wait, you mean that's not normal for other people? I should probably see a doctor

humans are the only one's who don't know this since stelladites are invisible to most people.

I am writing a short ghost-possession scene, where the ghost of a former-lover (Arydas) possesses a lady called Kotone in order to speak with a male called Zach. The problem is mainly with the Show, Don't Tell method, so how do I show Arydas is dramatically controlling Kotone and make the whole scene seem creepier - instead of describing everything that Kotone does during the paragraph?

edited 6th Sep '16 12:27:54 AM by sabrina_diamond

Well for starters, clipped motions, as if struggling against herself? That's Uncanny Valley right there.

I forgot to say, it also comes with a temporal personality-shift, as Arydas the succubus is more scornful and dramatic, than Kotone ever is (Kotone is more of the calmly Technical Pacifist nature).

edited 6th Sep '16 12:33:20 AM by sabrina_diamond

It's probably worth keeping in mind that show, don't tell is kind of a reductive rule to go by. Sometimes you do just need to tell. Try out a couple of different approaches to showing the mind control at work and see what's best? E.g. having both characters say the same lines or something

Changing the manner of speech is the first thing that occurs to me. Give the dead character a phrase they always use, then have the possessed character useit.

Ah, how characters change over the writing. A character I initially wrote as an Ax-Crazy Psycho for Hire Serial Killer has now gotten to the point where it's perfectly natural for her to give her friend shit about said friend's taste in bloodthirsty video games. (Granted, Alice doesn't like ultra-violent video games because leaving a body count feels unprofessional to a woman in her line of work, but still.)

I've figured out the source of my dislike for tropes like Humans Are Bastards and Humans Are the Real Monsters, which is less the tropes themselves and more how they're commonly used. In their most frequent usage, they're a subtrope of the utterly abhorrent Planet of Hats.

Too often, Humans Are Bastards is subtly changed to All Humans Are Always Bastards. I'm not denying humans have a massive potential for bastardry, but all of them? Dumb and uninteresting. It reduces humans to a collection of stereotypes, especially since a lot of the time, humans jump off the slippery slope to be bastards. And sometimes, the context can make things, although not necessarily justifiable, at least understandable. (One of the reasons I love Left 4 Dead: that bit of graffiti that says, "We are the real monsters." "No, that's the zombies.")

Also too often, particularly in more amateurish writing, works that use those tropes act like they're the first work to use the trope and are saying something deep and profound that's never been said before, when it's already been done to death. Once, I was reading a noir story where the jaded, cynical cop was telling his idealistic rookie partner about how the corrupt politicians are the real criminals. Having already read plenty of stuff with corrupt politicians that showed you they were bad instead of telling you, the following conversation immediately ran through my head:

And just once, I'd like to see a survivor camp in a zombie apocalypse where the survivors are pleasant and friendly not because they're luring you in to eat you or kill you and take your stuff, but because they're genuinely pleasant and friendly. And, okay, maybe Big Tom is a bit domineering and overprotective of his position as leader, but his meticulous planning and his genuine care for every individual is the primary reason they haven't lost a single survivor to the zombies in well over a year. And they offer to take the protagonists in, no strings attached, so long as they pull their weight, and are completely honest about that.

Not to mention, trying to backstab everyone and gaining a reputation for unreliability and unpleasantness places you at a competitive disadvantage.

RE: "Corrupt politicians are the real criminals". Obviously it's been done to death a dozen times, but the obvious answer is, in the appropriately guttural growl:

But then, that rejects Humans Are Bastards in its own way.

edited 7th Sep '16 8:54:42 PM by KillerClowns

And then an actually genuinely interest debate on the nature of crime and it's relation, or occasional lack thereof, to actual ethics?

Or just more romanticized alcoholism?