Writer's Block Daily

The weapon they were going to steal was actually a bomb loaded up with hundreds of different plagues ranging from prion based diseases to viruses to bacteria. It was designed to be detonated in the atmosphere and then spread to the alien planet in question. The idea is that, being an alien world, you don't know what diseases are going to stick and which ones won't affect the native inhabitants, so the military decided to make a weapon that would deliver as many as possible.

So...does anyone remember my proposed backstory of a character's handling of bigotry before that involved the alt-right?

What about it?

Well, I got an alternative for it thanks from a fellow writer friend who told me that it gives the anti-bigotry message I'm trying to write in my story a bit too much "in your face."

It goes like this: The man has been bullied in his childhood for a long while for his race and his deeds, yet with his parents' upbringing, he mends most of his violent impulses and gains the admiration of people of many kinds for his good deeds and gentle demeanor.

This all came to a drastic turn, however, when in high school at 18 years old, when he and his group of friends came under fire from a Latino gang who, from various circumstances, start targeting the hero's group. And as usual, the hero tries his best to stop them, but this only makes the bullying gang to step up with their abuse and resort to doxxing, cyber-bullying and gas-lighting most of his friends who are people of many colors and religions. With this, combined with the hero's reluctance of doing more and believing they can take care of themselves, culminated in most of the friends committing suicide.

Consumed by rage and the fact that the political climate at the time had minorities portrayed as victims, led the hero to the deep end and gave the bullies a near fatal beatdown for what they did.

In spite of this, he feels guilt for abandoning his pacifist ways and the fact he didn't think enough of protecting his friend from other groups of people, as well as getting assault charges against from the bullies' families who weren't aware of their behaviors. This led him to practice both Kendo and Fencing to mend his violent tendencies.

And as said before, this gives him a reason to protect the Alien girl in the main story, he doesn't want her to suffer the same as he and his friends did.

Damn, I had an idea for a very good plot point (or so I thought), but I don't think I should write it by virtue of not being Afro-Mexican.

So now I've got to go back and rewrite everything before the part where the plot points become relevant so the story makes sense again.

Research, ask, there must be some Afro-Mexicans in your social circle who could provide useful feedback on whether what you're trying to write is problematic or not.

It's like saying that I shouldn't write female characters because I'm a guy.

So in my story, a superweapon just exploded in New York Bay, and now I'm wondering what kind of forces would be necessary for a tsunami, even a small one, to hit Brooklyn.

Probably a force that equals to the Tsar Bomba?

A quick Google search didnt uncover a tsunami energy calculator (hint: cool project), but I did find this article, which provides enough math and data (derived from the tsunami that damaged the Fukushima power plant in Japan) to allow someone with sufficient math skills to estimate what you want.

This, for example: "...This means that the power of the tsunami along that shoreline was about 1.3 *10^12, or 1.3 petawatts. To get energy, we need to know the duration of the tsunami. Let's estimate 100-1000 seconds. This means that the total energy was at least 1.3 * 10^14 joules, or 31 kilotons, almost equivalent to the 36 (15+21) kt that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, combined. If the duration was on the long end of these estimates, or the waves higher, this number could easily be 310 or even 3100 kilotons, equal to 10 or 100 Hiroshima's and Nagasaki's. My "gut feeling" from looking at the number of completely devastated cities is that these higher numbers are very likely."

If this is accurate, then even a small tsunami probably requires the equivalent of an atomic bomb.

Hmm. Maybe if I had the weapon submerged first to prevent the blast from doing more damage than the actual tsunami... Well, this isn't really that important. I was just looking for ways to send the situation from bad to worse. The tsunami originally wasn't intended.

There is a bit easier way to get those estimates. Fukushima disaster was triggered by this earthquake. It's energy release was 1.9×10^17 joules. Yes, a thousand times bigger than what you've got.

Edited by Adannor on Aug 1st 2018 at 8:41:11 PM

I wish I hadn't looked up how long a memoir is suppose to be, because I've gone from "This will be fun and easy to put down on paper" to "I can't reach 60,000 words".

I'm having trouble figuring out how to construct big plots. I have a general idea of where everything is going but getting their is proving to be a problem. Right now I just focus on writing 750 words a day to keep up my skills.

I do it by taking it piece by piece- as my software professor said, you don't eat an elephant in one bite. I'll keep a broad mental outline of the big events, but I'll only start thinking about the smaller events no more than a chapter ahead of whatever part I'm currently working on, so I'm only working with one event at a time instead of all of them. This way, I can hit the sweet spot of having space to decide exactly how I want to get from point A to B and to expand parts of the story as I build their predecessors, but the broad outline gives me discernible events to work towards so I'm not flying totally blind.

Personally, I think word count is over-rated if you dont intend on submitting to a traditional print publisher. Online, you can charge what you want per page, so just make shorter works cheaper and it should all be good.

"Per page" is vague though, because it changes by view medium and does not actually relate to amount of content in any way. Sure, wordcount still varies between short and curt actions and flourishing passages, but it is still direct measure of things going on in the writing, rather than what font size and page margins you chose.

Edited by Adannor on Aug 6th 2018 at 10:20:17 PM

Yeah, it can get complicated, but the point is you dont have arbitrary page requirements to fulfill.

What does it mean to fail faster?

No comprende. I would think it has something to do with failing at a task earlier rather than later so you can learn from the failure, but what's the context?

I confused it with just giving up an idea or a project. I've been cancelling a lot of ideas either for not living up to expectations or just not working out.

Edited by ewolf2015 on Aug 12th 2018 at 11:10:00 AM

Okay... are you saying that you now know the answer to the original question, or is there still something you need help with?

shrug

I guess.

I think that I've seen the phrase in the context of game development. I think that there it refers to using methods that allow one to discover early on whether an idea works or doesn't, rather than putting a great deal of time into it only to find out later that it doesn't work.

For example, a developer might have an idea for a new gameplay mechanic. To determine whether it's fun, they might build a simple, rough, limited-scale prototype that only (or primarily) tests that mechanic.

Thus they can go through a number of ideas at a relatively high rate, discarding the ones that don't work and keeping the ones that do.

I'm not sure of how well it applies to writing. I suppose that one might write an outline of a story in order to determine whether it's interesting—if that approach is congenial to one's method. But even then, I'm not sure that an outline is sufficient to "test" a story...

I could see it applied to writing if you have some sort of regular beta readers. You chuck a draft in their direction and see whether the concept is something that sticks of if its rejected outright.

Hmm... I think that you have a good idea there; specifically, two ideas come to mind that might work as interpretations of "fail faster":

First, give beta readers early drafts, even if the writing is rough. This might allow one to uncover broad-scale problems in the story.

Second, give beta readers rolling drafts—that is, send out sections as they're written, rather than waiting until the thing is done. This might allow one to uncover issues before too much more writing has been done, and thus reduce the amount of re-writing incurred by such issues.

There is the concern that much of how well a concept works is in its implementation—in this case, how it's written. A gameplay mechanic might in many cases be prototyped in a simplistic, rough-and-ready way, with basic graphics. However, a hastily-written draft of a story might not work, while the same concept well-written might work rather better.

Thus the advice perhaps wouldn't be to write terribly-rough drafts, but to get feedback on drafts earlier.