clotpoleofthelord replied to your post
Nov. 15th, 2018 02:34 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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clotpoleofthelord replied to your post “clotpoleofthelord replied to your post “clotpoleofthelord replied…”
I also have been trying to figure out the right balance for worldbuilding depth: I think that’s where your radio issue falls? Like, do you need to know that for the story? I’m never sure where I get to stop building the universe!
I have, I think, a decent handle on the worldbuilding thing: you stop building the universe when you’ve got enough that everything the characters would encounter that drives the plot has been worked out. It can be hard to do in practice, but it’s kind of like set-building; you get a feel for what’s gonna actually show, and what you can just sort of sketch out on a backdrop that nobody’s gonna look too closely at, and what you can just omit entirely. (At least… I presume you get a feel for it, eventually. I’m still. Working on that.)
The thing is, though. That means you have to know a whole lot more than you show in the story. You do have a lot of work you’re going to have to do, that’s never going to show. (Like how in props, if you want there to be a stack of paper to represent documents you can’t use blank paper, it has to have something printed on it, even if only the margins are showing, because paper that’s been printed on stacks differently than blank paper, and is super obvious, even if the blank faces never show.)
So I feel like that’s the thing with the broadcast media etc. in my story: the characters would absolutely know that, it would affect how they live their lives and how they think about things. I’ve got a girl from way out in the boonies and a boy from the city: if there’s a radio show they’ve both heard, then they’ll both get references to it. if there’s not, well. Then I need to know what the hell else people do for fun, and if it’s something that they’d both have encountered, or if one of them is going to be, like, singing pop songs and the other one just staring at them like they’re nuts because they don’t get the reference.
(Is there in-person theatre? Would the boy in the city go to plays a lot? Would the girl way out in the wilds see travelling troupes, or is the idea of public performance completely weird to her? Or would they just get, like, the printed plays, so they put them on themselves when they’re bored in the winters, and so she knows the plays he talks about but is totally weirded out that he’d have just… sat there and watched them, instead of putting a mop on his head and reading it out with his mom and sisters, like she’s always done.) (Or do they get recordings, and she just gets the recordings of what he’s seen as live performances, and so he’s used to watching them when she’s only heard them so there’s a whole dimension she wasn’t aware of?)
So I need to know it. But my brain just. Clearly, I’m missing the underpinnings here, and i just don’t have a hook with which to pull it into imagining. I need to get inspired and I’m just not sure how to do that.
clotpoleofthelord replied to your post “clotpoleofthelord replied to your post “clotpoleofthelord replied…”
Oh, that’s such a great way of breaking down WHY CAN’T I WRITE THIS! I’ve mostly written stuff in the 10k-30k range, so I might also just get confused and intimidated when I get past that point. And I also am incapable of outlining most of the time. I wish I could do it more! I wonder if it’s a strange-brain issue (I’m autistic and under evaluation for ADHD)?
oh man if i knew how to get evaluated for ADHD I’d be there in a minute. But so far all I know is either “you’d know if you had it” or a doctor I was angrier at said “oh sure you should call this guy he’ll something something something” and gave me a phone number, so that’s literally never going to happen and also I didn’t understand what the doctor was trying to tell me so he might as well have simply told me I was silly like the first doctor had. OH WELL.
Martha Wells had been talking about structural problems with writing, a few years back, and it kind of stuck with me; I know exactly the problem she was describing, which is that sometimes you’re writing and writing and writing and the thing you need to happen isn’t happening, and what always ends up being the case is that you broke something a long ways back and there’s nothing for it but to take chunks out, back until the thing works again. It’s always that you set something up that was unearned, or tried to force a conclusion that doesn’t fit the structure, and the solution is always, always farther back than you think. And how you know this is happening is that you’re writing around and around and around and around the thing you need to happen and it’s just not happening.
Which, alas, is mostly what I’ve done this entire year. I have written so many words this year. So many. And every one of them has been written around an unresolved structural issue that means not a one of them is usable.
I mean, I can carrion-pick out good bits here and there, but I have structurally achieved nothing usable since sometime in November of last year, I think.
Unless the current thing works. So. I’m currently circling back around to the first scene I wrote in the first week of November, and rewriting it entirely from scratch only it works this time. maybe.
(Your picture was not posted)
clotpoleofthelord replied to your post “clotpoleofthelord replied to your post “clotpoleofthelord replied…”
I also have been trying to figure out the right balance for worldbuilding depth: I think that’s where your radio issue falls? Like, do you need to know that for the story? I’m never sure where I get to stop building the universe!
I have, I think, a decent handle on the worldbuilding thing: you stop building the universe when you’ve got enough that everything the characters would encounter that drives the plot has been worked out. It can be hard to do in practice, but it’s kind of like set-building; you get a feel for what’s gonna actually show, and what you can just sort of sketch out on a backdrop that nobody’s gonna look too closely at, and what you can just omit entirely. (At least… I presume you get a feel for it, eventually. I’m still. Working on that.)
The thing is, though. That means you have to know a whole lot more than you show in the story. You do have a lot of work you’re going to have to do, that’s never going to show. (Like how in props, if you want there to be a stack of paper to represent documents you can’t use blank paper, it has to have something printed on it, even if only the margins are showing, because paper that’s been printed on stacks differently than blank paper, and is super obvious, even if the blank faces never show.)
So I feel like that’s the thing with the broadcast media etc. in my story: the characters would absolutely know that, it would affect how they live their lives and how they think about things. I’ve got a girl from way out in the boonies and a boy from the city: if there’s a radio show they’ve both heard, then they’ll both get references to it. if there’s not, well. Then I need to know what the hell else people do for fun, and if it’s something that they’d both have encountered, or if one of them is going to be, like, singing pop songs and the other one just staring at them like they’re nuts because they don’t get the reference.
(Is there in-person theatre? Would the boy in the city go to plays a lot? Would the girl way out in the wilds see travelling troupes, or is the idea of public performance completely weird to her? Or would they just get, like, the printed plays, so they put them on themselves when they’re bored in the winters, and so she knows the plays he talks about but is totally weirded out that he’d have just… sat there and watched them, instead of putting a mop on his head and reading it out with his mom and sisters, like she’s always done.) (Or do they get recordings, and she just gets the recordings of what he’s seen as live performances, and so he’s used to watching them when she’s only heard them so there’s a whole dimension she wasn’t aware of?)
So I need to know it. But my brain just. Clearly, I’m missing the underpinnings here, and i just don’t have a hook with which to pull it into imagining. I need to get inspired and I’m just not sure how to do that.
clotpoleofthelord replied to your post “clotpoleofthelord replied to your post “clotpoleofthelord replied…”
Oh, that’s such a great way of breaking down WHY CAN’T I WRITE THIS! I’ve mostly written stuff in the 10k-30k range, so I might also just get confused and intimidated when I get past that point. And I also am incapable of outlining most of the time. I wish I could do it more! I wonder if it’s a strange-brain issue (I’m autistic and under evaluation for ADHD)?
oh man if i knew how to get evaluated for ADHD I’d be there in a minute. But so far all I know is either “you’d know if you had it” or a doctor I was angrier at said “oh sure you should call this guy he’ll something something something” and gave me a phone number, so that’s literally never going to happen and also I didn’t understand what the doctor was trying to tell me so he might as well have simply told me I was silly like the first doctor had. OH WELL.
Martha Wells had been talking about structural problems with writing, a few years back, and it kind of stuck with me; I know exactly the problem she was describing, which is that sometimes you’re writing and writing and writing and the thing you need to happen isn’t happening, and what always ends up being the case is that you broke something a long ways back and there’s nothing for it but to take chunks out, back until the thing works again. It’s always that you set something up that was unearned, or tried to force a conclusion that doesn’t fit the structure, and the solution is always, always farther back than you think. And how you know this is happening is that you’re writing around and around and around and around the thing you need to happen and it’s just not happening.
Which, alas, is mostly what I’ve done this entire year. I have written so many words this year. So many. And every one of them has been written around an unresolved structural issue that means not a one of them is usable.
I mean, I can carrion-pick out good bits here and there, but I have structurally achieved nothing usable since sometime in November of last year, I think.
Unless the current thing works. So. I’m currently circling back around to the first scene I wrote in the first week of November, and rewriting it entirely from scratch only it works this time. maybe.
(Your picture was not posted)
