Writer's Block Daily

I'll check the discord out, although I'll probably end up never actually posting there.

(A discord for this place doesn't sound bad, btw.)

I collect discord servers like a dragon, so I'd be interested in that.

same. Though if something is too active I'd probably shove it at the bottom of my pile and check once in a blue moon.

edited 3rd Dec '17 11:58:17 PM by Adannor

Owo We can share writing discord servers here?!

I'm part of this cool writer's discord and would love to share it. It's really helped me to write every day. They have weekly competitions and a writing sprints bot. The community is nice too and really encouraging. I just love it. I'll put a link down below because it's a good resource in my opinion.

https://discord.gg/FWmTDEz

Eh why the heck not check it out.

Random thought: what if you took all the stereotypical hero traits and stuck them on a villain? Single-minded determination to accomplish their goal, loyalty towards friends and allies, unswerving bravery and honor, willing to go to great lengths to rescue one of their own, capable of doing a lot with a little, able to easily kill mooks red shirts and maybe even a Dragon Lancer or two, willing to sacrifice themselves to buy their allies time to escape, a tendency to come up with plans that are so crazy they just might work... Not just once or twice, but persistently throughout the work. Basically, they're the underdog and the hero is the big force they're trying to take down. And not in a Villain Protagonist against Hero Antagonist sort of way; the villain is definitely evil, but still the antagonist.

That's fascinating, and something I'd definitely watch if done well!

Yea, it is pretty great concept.

Though, as a particular detail, trying to make a checklist of tropes to force into a thing isn't a great idea.

But overall yes, nice.

edited 7th Dec '17 11:10:58 PM by Adannor

For those of the Writing Guild in Discord...I'm sorry....

Dude, what?

Something of a question that caused a huge flame war that led to my expulsion of it...it was a simple question of speculation in which publisher would you like to see for your story....that's all.

The reason was because people had already said questions like that made them uncomfortable dude.

Also probs best not to import drama.

Christ alive, I wrote 5,500 words tonight. In ~six hours, granted, but that's still one of the better nights I've had in a long time.Finished the first draft of a chapter!

Now time to completely ignore the editing for a few days because I've been neglecting to clean my apartment and also video gaaaaames

That's impressive. I don't think I've ever pushed out 5,500 words in a day, save for that one time my thesis was about to go over deadline.

I recently got a new game for Christmas (we opened presents early because my brother's in the Marines, he had leave over Thanksgiving, and we decided to have presents while he was still around) and I had to force myself to not play it until my exams were done. Managed it.

Also, kudos for the big word count. Let's hope they're good words.

In other news, today I saw a tow truck towing a tow truck towing a tow truck towing a tow truck. Yes, really. No, I don't get it, either.

Well, my measure of how well I'm doing in moments like this, at least for a first draft, is the emotional response it gets out of me as I'm writing that. In that regard, it does fairly well.

Still, after a day to ruminate on it I'm realizing I should move some of the scenes around and there's a few spots I'd like to do another pass on, if not re-write entirely—but that's what editing is for. I think for now I just want to take a few days to get some distance, and see how I feel about it as I'm reading it.

Is it wrong to reimagine king Arthur as a younger and hipper teen in near future England with a sword that's actually a alien weapon?

Not if you write it well. Execution can make the coolest-sounding ideas look like shit, the dumbest-sounding ideas look so cool people will wonder why nobody thought to do it earlier, and everything in between.

The Arthurian legends were always driven more by theme and idea than subject matter and subject to updating and revision anyhow, so updating 'medieval knights' to 'plucky kids' is very much in keeping with them.

I'm trying to come up with a name for a male, carnivorous, sapient, dinosaur, engineered using science to be about the size of a human, that walks on two legs and has full use of his arms. I'm looking for a masculine name that denotes strength, kind of in the name of Apollo, or something, but I'd like the name to be historically significant, like he's named after a paleontologist who discovered the T. rex, or something.

Jack Horner is the real life inspiration of Dr. Grant from Jurassic Park, and he really wants to create a living non-avian dinosaur using genetic engineering. Although he's still alive (not sure if using the name of a living person would be weird to you or not), most other names in paleontology I've found are honestly pretty plain-sounding.

This should be in the "What's a good name for this?" thread.

As an actual suggestion, either Edward Drinker Cope or Othniel Charles Marsh, cause the bone wars is pretty significant.

edited 15th Dec '17 7:17:52 PM by DarkbloodCarnagefang

Recently, I've tried out a new writing technique that really helped me get writing done. Instead of writing scenes in my story in a linear fashion, I've started writing the scenes out of order. This has actually been a big help to me, since my biggest source of writers' block is trying to figure out how my next scene will play out before I get to the ones I have a clear vision of, so now I just write those scenes right away while I take the time to think about how the in-between scenes will go.

There's been some weirdness attached to this new technique, I'll admit. Because I'm not writing the scenes in order of where they'll go in the final story, there was this point where I was writing the scene where one of the central characters is introduced (the scene in question, for those interested), which was originally intended to be the middle of what was to be the story's first chapter, I realised, "this is actually a great place to end the first chapter, and this document is getting long enough even with a bunch of scenes missing anyway," so I cut and pasted all that I'd written afterwards into a new document. It was later when it hit me: at this point, I've actually written more of this story's second chapter than its first.

Interesting. That could certainly help me, as I've sometimes struggled to get into certain scenes just because I'm missing some scenes in between the ones I've already thought out.

I've written my novel entirely in a linear fashion, and all my rewrites have been done in a similar way. The one benefit it has is that it helps one to weed out continuity errors.

I will probably have to use the out-of-order method in the future, since I have some significant but localized changes in mind for the future. However, I will focus writing my webcomic fairly linearly for obvious reasons.

I really wanted to make a action cartoon based on the Chinese and Greek zodiacs duking it out in a faction war. Though, it sounded like saint seyia personally.