Spring RTS Engine

So I'm setting myself up for public abuse by letting you all know that I am planning to undertake a laughably late attempt at writing a 50,000 word novel in the month of November... given my propensity for excessive verbosity and my ability to write without a specific goal in mind it's plausible to believe I can still succeed... providing the part of my brain that seems to switch out hobbies (obsessions) on a daily to bi-monthly basis happens to remain on task long enough.

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its funny because you wont

/lock

Have fun! I'll stick to my normal writing schedule.

SinbadEV wrote:my ability to write without a specific goal in mind

Also known as babbling ^_^

Oh and once something becomes a task instead of a free choice, you'll find it a lot less easy to get on with it. Good luck.

What for?

Panda wrote:What for?

I have all these ideas in my head and figure if I pull them out and put them in a story I could potentially earn some money/fame while also giving myself that "creative outlet" I've constantly felt I lacked... also I like bandwagons and excuses.

the site is overburdened so I couldn't update my word count but if you care I wrote 2304 words today. at that rate I could won't reach 50,000 words by the end of the month... and this is my first day so I doubt I'll even hit that many... oh well... I'll write what I can and see what comes out.

Eh, just spam "no ideas" 25,000 times, and then declare it's a Dadaist work, lol.

A 50K novel/novella in a month is just going to end up being terrible; if it must be a joke, at least make an ironic one.

The idea is that it gets you writing at all. Nobody expects the result to be ready for publication.

SinbadEV wrote:

Panda wrote:What for?

I have all these ideas in my head and figure if I pull them out and put them in a story I could potentially earn some money/fame while also giving myself that "creative outlet" I've constantly felt I lacked... also I like bandwagons and excuses.

the site is overburdened so I couldn't update my word count but if you care I wrote 2304 words today. at that rate I could won't reach 50,000 words by the end of the month... and this is my first day so I doubt I'll even hit that many... oh well... I'll write what I can and see what comes out.

Neddie's right, if you want to be able to write anything that might possibly be able to be published, your writing needs to be more focused. Try writing as though you were giving voice to an inanimate object such as a cup. You could first create 5 lists of descriptive words or phrases that describe the cup and what it experiences. These lists should be labeled sight, smell, touch, taste, sound. Then go ahead and write using those descriptive words and phrases. Be sure to include both disgusting and pretty descriptions in your list and adjectives and adverbs. For example, did you know that the word angel could be used as a verb?

I tried the giving voice to another thing writing exercise in a 30 minute writing exercise once for school and picked a dung beetle. It came out ok. I also tried coming up with some descriptions for knives and came up with some interesting stuff, probably because I watch a lot of Kung Fu movies. Therefore, I think that it would most likely be a good idea to pick something simple that you find to be interesting if you wanted to try that.

Is it fiction? There was a University paper I did, 10,000 words, in 2 days (granted I didn't sleep alot). I guess 50,000 just doesn't seem like that much to me. The problem with fiction I find is less getting words on the page and more getting ideas into the words.

First off to address a number of your concerns all at once... I've never really had trouble getting ideas into words or being descriptive or whatever... writing comes naturally to me, and it's fiction so the fact that coming up with and populating worlds and developing characters isn't my problem either... namely my problem is that I often get stuck in a rut... for example my novel about a world where coffee was illegal and everyone had a chip in their head that let them communicate on a worldwide network and within this network the collective unconsciousness of humanity spontaneously developed into an alternate reality which those who were able to override the safeties of their brain chip could consciously live in... and then there was this guy who was working at a University as a janitor because he could do the job on automatic while mind-hacking and then there was this chick who had been born unable to be jacked in to the network and had created a computer complex enough to interact with the network which had developed into an AI personality... and then there was this other chick who was new to the whole mind-hacking thing and had not yet been initiated into the alternate world and was going to act as the readers avatar (like Alice in wonderland) as someone I could use to explain the world to... but then the characters go hungry and went out for breakfast and it got into this painful discussion about sports bars and relationships and pancakes and orange juice and I lost track of everything....

anyways... the new strategy is to write the story in chunks from different peoples perspectives... that way when I get bored with what one of the characters doing I can switch to another one who is doing something more interesting...

Don't address concerns; write a story with the time instead!

I have a chunk of time set aside for writing each day... writing outside of this chunk may... why the heck am I still both awake and responding to posts... I'm obviously a broken person... g'night

Don't say that about yourself!

But sleep well, best of luck writing tomorrow!

SinbadEV wrote:for example my novel about a world where coffee was illegal and everyone had a chip in their head that let them communicate on a worldwide network and within this network the collective unconsciousness of humanity spontaneously developed into an alternate reality which those who were able to override the safeties of their brain chip could consciously live in... and then there was this guy who was working at a University as a janitor because he could do the job on automatic while mind-hacking and then there was this chick who had been born unable to be jacked in to the network and had created a computer complex enough to interact with the network which had developed into an AI personality... and then there was this other chick who was new to the whole mind-hacking thing and had not yet been initiated into the alternate world and was going to act as the readers avatar (like Alice in wonderland) as someone I could use to explain the world to... but then the characters go hungry and went out for breakfast and it got into this painful discussion about sports bars and relationships and pancakes and orange juice and I lost track of everything....

What about decaf?

SinbadEV wrote:First off to address a number of your concerns all at once... I've never really had trouble getting ideas into words or being descriptive or whatever... writing comes naturally to me, and it's fiction so the fact that coming up with and populating worlds and developing characters isn't my problem either... namely my problem is that I often get stuck in a rut... for example my novel about a world where coffee was illegal and everyone had a chip in their head that let them communicate on a worldwide network and within this network the collective unconsciousness of humanity spontaneously developed into an alternate reality which those who were able to override the safeties of their brain chip could consciously live in... and then there was this guy who was working at a University as a janitor because he could do the job on automatic while mind-hacking and then there was this chick who had been born unable to be jacked in to the network and had created a computer complex enough to interact with the network which had developed into an AI personality... and then there was this other chick who was new to the whole mind-hacking thing and had not yet been initiated into the alternate world and was going to act as the readers avatar (like Alice in wonderland) as someone I could use to explain the world to... but then the characters go hungry and went out for breakfast and it got into this painful discussion about sports bars and relationships and pancakes and orange juice and I lost track of everything....

anyways... the new strategy is to write the story in chunks from different peoples perspectives... that way when I get bored with what one of the characters doing I can switch to another one who is doing something more interesting...

I'm the same way, that doesn't solve the problem. The "idea" I talk about is "why is it significant that X character does Y action" "What emotion do I want the reader to feel?" "How is this story pacing?"

Having a cool character that runs around doing cool things makes for a weak story unless many more of those ideas are in place. Making X character be in Y place and do Z thing in writing is trivial, making it mean something to the reader is the real difficulty. That "idea" is hard to communicate.

If the idea isn't well developed early on the story won't be good. It might have all the story ingredients, but it won't be compelling or interesting.

[edit] idea isn't character or universe either. Boring things happen in the most interesting universes ever dreamed up. The idea is what keeps the reader focused on the most interesting parts of whatever character and universe you are expounding.

the basic idea is a antidistopian social allegory set in an industrial revolution era high magic fantasy setting... also, there will be wizards who play pinball.

I'll read it, if Pinball Wizards are the centerpiece. With that kind of blenderized setting, it's either going to be really good, or really good, in a bad kind of way:

"Doublegood day to ye, my dear Muggle, but do ye realize you've just Tilted the Devil's Island and released the Terribibulis Bumperick Curse upon us all?"

SinbadEV wrote:the basic idea is a antidistopian social allegory set in an industrial revolution era high magic fantasy setting... also, there will be wizards who play pinball.

The description of your story kind of reminds me of Tron.

SwiftSpear wrote:Is it fiction? There was a University paper I did, 10,000 words, in 2 days (granted I didn't sleep alot). I guess 50,000 just doesn't seem like that much to me. The problem with fiction I find is less getting words on the page and more getting ideas into the words.

I've heard that you can think of historical events or character traits to help you get your ideas down on paper. Perhaps making something like a time line, a concept map, and creating a character sketch could help. You would have to give examples of how a certain character's trait causes them to act the way that they do and do a good job of describing the character's way of expressing themselves. For example, do they fidget or, if you wanted two try to writing from another thing's perspective exercise, your story could be fact based. I wrote both about a beetle and virus in two different writing exercises like that. They were both fact based and were interesting to read.