Writer's Block Daily

And that's a valid counterpoint. However a different point remains that good writing will on its own draw readers. Thus if you focus on good writing with what you like you'll end up with readers given time.

Only if the appeal stuff is quite niche, risque or possibly controversial/offensive.

For example, I write Author Appeal. The appeal being things like tanks, katanas, Badass-motherfuckery, Action Girls and mecha. Nothing overly offensive or niche or risque.

Niche is in the eye of the beholder. Of what you list, for instance, I can very easily see "tanks" turning into Military Equipment Porn.

(I also just plain dislike mecha, but that's a different issue entirely and just means I'm not your target audience).

edited 1st Aug '12 6:13:21 PM by nrjxll

Why?

Even if all I'm writing them doing is their job? I don't go into excruciating Technology Porn saying one model has 167 links that comprise one track while rolling along 9 road wheels. I didn't design the stuff that far despite the fact I have drummed up some stats on size and stuff as an aid for world building.

Author Appeal, as I see it, tends to involve dwelling on a subject. If you're including tanks in a story because you think tanks are cool, but not dwelling in lengthy detail on their technical specifications, I'm not sure I'd call that Author Appeal in the first place.

I just don't. The closest I've come to an explanation is that they're basically only acceptable if you think they're cool; I don't think they're cool, so they just seem silly and unrealistic. But that might just be me; ultimately it's a matter of taste.

I understand. It's just not your thing.

By the way, I'm in a Twitter chat (#yalitchat) again. We're discussing diversity.

^ Bring up the issue that a token cast for the sake of political correctness is unacceptable. It's one thing to celebrate diversity, it's quite another to force it.

That's a topic that has came up more than once.

I avoid using mecha as a plot device because I have trouble reconciling them with physics, even my own loose adherence thereto.

When it comes to them in other things, I am usually pretty neutral to them as a prop. (I love the more realistic portrayals more than others, but looking down the list on my page shows that is hardly a hard-and-fast rule.) It probably helps that the guys who first got me into anime were all a bunch of /m/aniacs.

Total agreement.

edited 1st Aug '12 7:02:27 PM by fishsicles

The best mecha are written by people who can't stand them. <_<

I think we should make a topic about this.

I love having diversity in my stories. Not because of political correctness, but because I love exploring different cultures.

It turns out that all the chaters have a lot of diversity between all of us.

Also, these Twitter chat hashtags always get parsed by me as IRC channels.

I feel old.

Hm. My cast is not very diverse.

My cast in TC is very diverse.

So far, in my cast, I have an African-American protagonist (Nick), a Nigerian woman (Abeyiuwa Richman; first name translates to "I have wealth"), a Japanese teen,(Akari, his first name I'm probably changing), a British teen (Jackson Ruth), and a half-scottish Deuteragonist (Adam Maroon).

edited 1st Aug '12 7:34:37 PM by Masterofchaos

Mine is but it was a planned move and not for political correctness sake. I have a few black guys, an Israeli, a couple of Japanese descent, at least one Chinese lady, a few Hispanics, men, women, and Russians.

My characters for my current story had been diverse, because that's how I'd first conceived them, but then I realized that they're living in a semi-isolated area about half the size of Europe with high levels of intermarriage between countries. So now they're not so diverse.

Half of my cast are immortals who change form more often than most people change their underwear, so...

My cast is very diverse! I have a neoclassical utilitarian, a reactionary individualist, an emotional stoic, a poetic pragmatist, a misanthropic romantic, and a pragmatic idealist.

My main cast has a legally-blind albino (sans Disability Superpower, unless you count being clever), a law student, a Dutch industrialist, an agoraphobe, a gay Italian, a (hopefully) sympathetic extraterrestrial sociopath, and a functionally omniscient cloud of self-replicating and self-modifying computers and sensors.

Now I just need to get all of them to walk into a bar...

edited 1st Aug '12 8:36:58 PM by fishsicles

Remember to make the bar hard to see.

My two current works have varying levels of diversity.

Shakura's Sunset is not very diverse, though they're are a couple of in-universe justifications of that.

Recurrence is somewhat diverse but not heavily diverse. Granted I only have one book of two outlined and I plan to add more characters in book 2.

On diversity, My main character is Caribbean, mainly because I am black and have never really seen a black Chosen One before. It's always a white/pale person unless they're in a world made up of Fantasy Counterpart Cultures (and even then, they're usually pale anyway). The other main character is Asian/Afro-American. They travel with an Middle Eastern girl, a Brazilian boy, and an Irish guy.

This is mostly set in New York, so all is forgiven, right?

edited 1st Aug '12 9:31:31 PM by SalFishFin

My primary approach to diversity in stories is not to tailor each character to create a sufficiently diverse cast - as has been noted, that doesn't end well - or, indeed, to create any sort of enumerated "list" of characters by ethnicity (or whatever).

Instead, what I've focused on doing is training myself to abolish any idea of a "default" protagonist (or any other sort of cast role). As long as you're doing that, creating a diverse cast doesn't take much effort at all. There's nothing wrong with the SWMHP so long as he's not automatically coming to mind for each story.

I have designed a couple of secondary characters in order to demonstrate something about the setting, but that's as far as it goes.

edited 1st Aug '12 9:38:17 PM by nrjxll

SWMHP = Standard White Male ...?