Aspiring writers thread

[AxlsFavoriteRose]

Just now, wasted said:

No, I've read a few of his though. The Stand is the one with some political angle? I read the synopsis and it could relate to US politics today?

spoilers:

 

The Stand starts out with a soldier desperately fleeing a secret military facility in California where they are making a bio toxin that is a super flu with a very high mortality rate. he gets his wife and daughter and by they time they get to Texas the super flu has killed said wife and daughter and he dies shortly after. the super flu spreads like wildfire and causes over 99% of mankind. the book then continues to tell the story of the few remaining people who have a resistance to the flu. some follow a good path drawn to Mother Abagail's goodness, others go with the Dark Man.

have i given too much away?

[wasted]

1 hour ago, AxlsFavoriteRose said:

spoilers:

 

The Stand starts out with a soldier desperately fleeing a secret military facility in California where they are making a bio toxin that is a super flu with a very high mortality rate. he gets his wife and daughter and by they time they get to Texas the super flu has killed said wife and daughter and he dies shortly after. the super flu spreads like wildfire and causes over 99% of mankind. the book then continues to tell the story of the few remaining people who have a resistance to the flu. some follow a good path drawn to Mother Abagail's goodness, others go with the Dark Man.

have i given too much away?

Don't think so, I probably won't read it. I started reading his from Pet Semetary, Skeleton Crew. I've read Cell and the Hodges Trilogy starting with Mr Mercedes - a crime series, could see it being a movie. Dark Tower book 1. So many I want to read. Duma Key is one. He seems to be rewriting some of his earlier books now? Cell isn't unlike The Stand in someways? Had a The Road vibe to. 

[AxlsFavoriteRose]

Just now, wasted said:

Don't think so, I probably won't read it. I started reading his from Pet Semetary, Skeleton Crew. I've read Cell and the Hodges Trilogy starting with Mr Mercedes - a crime series, could see it being a movie. Dark Tower book 1. So many I want to read. Duma Key is one. He seems to be rewriting some of his earlier books now? Cell isn't unlike The Stand in someways? Had a The Road vibe to. 

i have never read Cell. read Pet Semetary but the first book of his i read was Carrie when i was too young to quite understand it. when i was like 17 i read it and went ahhhh that's what he meant! love Misery, Needful Things ( if you have read that you'll know what i mean about the two women and Elvis  ) It, oh a lot of his older stuff. i kind of got turned by his newer books. i read of one that he wrote using the pseudonym Richard Bachman... Thinner. quite turned me off strawberry pie! oh and Misery! and The Shining. probably forgetting a lot of them i've read.

[wasted]

4 hours ago, AxlsFavoriteRose said:

i have never read Cell. read Pet Semetary but the first book of his i read was Carrie when i was too young to quite understand it. when i was like 17 i read it and went ahhhh that's what he meant! love Misery, Needful Things ( if you have read that you'll know what i mean about the two women and Elvis  ) It, oh a lot of his older stuff. i kind of got turned by his newer books. i read of one that he wrote using the pseudonym Richard Bachman... Thinner. quite turned me off strawberry pie! oh and Misery! and The Shining. probably forgetting a lot of them i've read.

Yeah I'm forgetting some like Dead Zone, Shining, Misery, something Clybourne. I think some I haven't but I saw the movie. Also got into Deaver and almost read all of them. I think there's more to King somehow though. Mr Mecedes is like King doing Deaver. 

Cormac McCarthy is more satisfying though. Blood Meridian and The Road were so real. Like Eastwood movies or something. 

[AxlsFavoriteRose]

Dolores Claiborne? i read that, was kind of meh on it. i just got to one of my favorite parts in The Stand where King does a few pages of how some of those who survived the super flu end up dying. my tow favorites are the woman who was mega paranoid about getting raped by this hippie survivor so she gets her dad's very old gun "with mossy bullets". the hippie guy is all happy to see her, she tries to shoot him but the gun explodes and kills her.

the other was a junkie in Detroit who find this giant stash of heroin at one of his dealer's house. he load the needle and doesn't even think that the stuff he normally had been getting was cut. this stuff was almost pure and he OD's.

Dead Zone was a political one where the man who was badly hurt in an a car wreck and in a coma for years wakes up with the ability to read people's mind by touching them. he shook the hand of a man who would have become President, saw he'd turn out like a Hitler. he goes to kill him but he gets shot. but the bad politican guy grabs a kid to shield himself with and apparently lows his chance to become President.

[wasted]

4 minutes ago, AxlsFavoriteRose said:

Dolores Claiborne? i read that, was kind of meh on it. i just got to one of my favorite parts in The Stand where King does a few pages of how some of those who survived the super flu end up dying. my tow favorites are the woman who was mega paranoid about getting raped by this hippie survivor so she gets her dad's very old gun "with mossy bullets". the hippie guy is all happy to see her, she tries to shoot him but the gun explodes and kills her.

the other was a junkie in Detroit who find this giant stash of heroin at one of his dealer's house. he load the needle and doesn't even think that the stuff he normally had been getting was cut. this stuff was almost pure and he OD's.

Dead Zone was a political one where the man who was badly hurt in an a car wreck and in a coma for years wakes up with the ability to read people's mind by touching them. he shook the hand of a man who would have become President, saw he'd turn out like a Hitler. he goes to kill him but he gets shot. but the bad politican guy grabs a kid to shield himself with and apparently lows his chance to become President.

Also 1402 or was it Everything's Eventual? A short story collection. 

Man in the High Castle by P K Dick is also good. 

[AxlsFavoriteRose]

Just now, wasted said:

Also 1402 or was it Everything's Eventual? A short story collection. 

Man in the High Castle by P K Dick is also good. 

don't know P K Dick... is that a joke?

have read a couple of King's short story books. the creepy one with the giant blind rats freaked me out.

[wasted]

23 minutes ago, AxlsFavoriteRose said:

don't know P K Dick... is that a joke?

have read a couple of King's short story books. the creepy one with the giant blind rats freaked me out.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/B008DM2MGW/ref=mp_s_a_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1496481540&sr=8-3&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_QL65&keywords=man+in+high+castle&dpPl=1&dpID=51joLxOgQtL&ref=plSrch

no joke he wrote every book Tom cruise makes into a movie. 

[AxlsFavoriteRose]

5 hours ago, wasted said:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/B008DM2MGW/ref=mp_s_a_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1496481540&sr=8-3&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_QL65&keywords=man+in+high+castle&dpPl=1&dpID=51joLxOgQtL&ref=plSrch

no joke he wrote every book Tom cruise makes into a movie. 

oh i didn't know. not a big fan of Tom's sorry  or his kind of movies

[wasted]

8 hours ago, AxlsFavoriteRose said:

oh i didn't know. not a big fan of Tom's sorry  or his kind of movies

Not really a fan and not actually true either, I think only Minority Report is Philip K. Dick. Vanilla Sky has this Dick vibe though. I guess Tom and Spielberg were just on this sci fi run that just gave the impression that Dick was in fashion. Minority report, AI, Vanilla Sky, Scanner Darkly was around then so it just felt like Dick was big. The writers who did Oblivion and Edge of Tomorrow were probably influenced by Dick. I guess Bladerunner and Total Recall made this niche in the industry maybe so everything seems Dickesque. 

There was Blade Runner early on but recently Adjustment Bureau was Dick too I think. And there's that series of Man in the High Castle. So for a bit there Dick was everywhere without real credit. Based on PK Dick. 

Blade Runner (1982), Total Recall(1990), Minority Report (2002), A Scanner Darkly (2006), Paycheck (2003), Next (2007), and The Adjustment Bureau (2011). In 2005. 

Dick's influence is wide. 

the Wachowskis' The Matrix,^[78] David Cronenberg's Videodrome,^[79]eXistenZ,^[78] and Spider,^[79] Spike Jonze's Being John Malkovich,^[79]Adaptation,^[79] Michel Gondry's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,^[80][81]Alex Proyas's Dark City,^[78] Peter Weir's The Truman Show,^[78] Andrew Niccol's Gattaca,^[79] In Time,^[82] Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys,^[79] Wes Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street,^[83] David Lynch's Mulholland Drive,^[83] Alejandro Amenábar's Open Your Eyes,^[84] David Fincher's Fight Club,^[79] Cameron Crowe's Vanilla Sky,^[78] Darren Aronofsky's Pi,^[85] Richard Kelly's Donnie Darko^[86] and Southland Tales,^[87] Rian Johnson's Looper,^[88] and Christopher Nolan's Memento^[89] and Inception.^[90]

I hope they make the 3 Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch and Dr Bloodmoney. That would be huge for Dick. Dick is dead though, so wonder if the studios bought up all the rights to his books cheap after Bladerunner and Total Recall. 

Edited June 3, 2017 by wasted

[AxlsFavoriteRose]

so THIS guy? http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001140/

i actually have watched Vanilla Sky a few times. i like Cameron Crowe plus the movie is creepy and weird. and i like Penelope Cruz.

Edited June 4, 2017 by AxlsFavoriteRose

[wasted]

8 hours ago, AxlsFavoriteRose said:

so THIS guy? http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001140/

i actually have watched Vanilla Sky a few times. i like Cameron Crowe plus the movie is creepy and weird. and i like Penelope Cruz.

He looks radically healthy there, dog food must agree with him. 

I may be off on a tangent. I just went King, the Dick as I got more...but yeah King has his readability too. It's just after you read Dick, you feel like you saw a UFO. King is a bag of cheesy puffs covered in blood. 

[AxlsFavoriteRose]

7 hours ago, wasted said:

He looks radically healthy there, dog food must agree with him. 

I may be off on a tangent. I just went King, the Dick as I got more...but yeah King has his readability too. It's just after you read Dick, you feel like you saw a UFO. King is a bag of cheesy puffs covered in blood. 

dear Lord i already have been blowing chunks for real and now you write a bag of cheesy puffs ( which is barf worthy enough ) and add they are covered in blood!

 

[rocknroll41]

I read something interesting the other day that fantasy novels have had a bit of an uptick in popularity recently amongst young adult readers...I almost feel like changing my project to something other than fantasy now, to kinda go against the trends and do more of my own thing instead.

having watched alien and aliens both for the first time recently, I've been having a bit of a sci-fi kick. So I might try that (morals and themes and characters will still be the same though).

has anyone noticed this supposed "uptick" in fantasy recently? Does anyone think sci-fi novels will ever make a similar comeback someday?

[rocknroll41]

5 minutes ago, Oldest Goat said:

I never ever concern myself with trends. Doing or not doing something because of trends is not doing your own thing. Just do what inspires you and what you enjoy.

Yeah I get what u mean. One of the reasons why I have trouble finishing a draft though is cause I can never make up my mind on what I wanna do. One moment im like "I wanna write fantasy" and then several weeks into it im like "never mind, I wanna write sci-fi."

i guess I should just keep going until I find the setting/genre that I enjoy writing enough to the point where I have the will power to finish a draft.

[rocknroll41]

1 hour ago, Oldest Goat said:

You're allowed to use that fickleness and mash things up. Figure out what you like about this and that(fantasy vs SciFi for example) then combine it.

Good idea!

[J Dog]

From what I've seen sci-fi/fantasy both seem to have a fairly loyal reader base. Like how some people just read romance or horror.

Goat made a good point to, you don't have to follow any rules. Take what you like from each and combine. Or for that matter, forget trends and genre for a minute and just really concentrate on the story you want to write. Worry about where it fits on the bookshelf later.

[wasted]

Age of Plutocracy coming soon. 

[AxlsFavoriteRose]

i have been practicing the lost art of letter writing. it's actually rather exhilirating! and thinking about writing in a journal again. it upset me because i lost the last one i had during my move to where i am now. i do have journals from when i was a preteen to the age of 20. i read them from time to time, it's very interesting. it's good to keep track of certain things because people often forget what really happened in certain situations.

[wasted]

Seeing as the IRS are blocking my books on amazon I'm think of just posting in the thread. You know for more maximum exposure. Flushing 5 years of work down the toilet to spite the IRS just seems like a good PR move. 

[Apollo]

Just tell the (your) story. Don't try and force it into a specific category.  The genre should flush itself out while you are writing the story. 

I also don't think you should worry about specific formulas or writing rules while you write your first draft.

I've taken writing classes before and they can really suck the fun out of the story telling process. There are so many self help guides and books/websites telling you what to do....I suggest spending 99% of your time putting your story down on paper (or the screen). 

Once finished with that first draft then you can go try and implement all the proper "rules" we are supposed to use. 

[wasted]

A good story is definitely a good starting point. Even if it's like Game of Thrones he must have mapped out the trajectory of the story and where it's going even

if it's not character driven first person. That is the daunting element of writing fantasy stuff. Just the size of the narrative. With all the different characters where does the drive come from. I think use a device like the Ring in the Hobbit or whatever. That's what drives the story and the characters are put in positions. I wonder if they fully plot out the story or fate of each character or do they just kind of act it out as they go. 

I think they tell you not to base stuff off your life because it has a limited scope as writer. Learning how to write stories for different characters is really going to give you more of a chance. Unless you're just like a bad ass genius who can turn the mundane into profound like Bukowski. You literally don't need to go to classes to write like that but you need to live an extraordinary life.  Basically like art movies, where the character is more important than the story. That's why if you live in your moms basement you end up writing genre fiction. 

But to write thrillers you basically have to learn the conventions. But still you need stories, that's why ex-cops or lawyers make good thriller writers, they have a ton of stories and cases and can just bang them out with a character who is basically them. Give them a love interest, a pet and trailer on the beach. 

[Apollo]

My process. 

Idea pops in my head. Spend about a week thinking about it. Working through ideas in the shower. 

After about a week I've got the main characters, basic plot, main key events and the ending in my head  

Then I sit down and write. That's the fun part. I've got nothing mapped out in the middle. Just the basic plot and how it ends. 

The daily writing part is where the story starts to write itself. 

The fun part is to see where the story goes. How things progress. Which characters start to shine. What plot points are created. How 50 pages into it you might end up changing the entire core of the story. 

For me personally, I could never plot a story out. I've got friends who totally map it all out.  Before starting on the book they will write down character descriptions of 12 different characters. And map out 10 main ideas they want to touch on. And even page number holds - "first 20 pages do this" and "by page 35 introduce Joe, and make sure Bill's wife leaves him by page 46." Step by step by step. Then they write/create by filling in the gaps between all their points. 

I like to sit down with a basic idea....and just start writing and see where the story takes me. 

[wasted]

7 hours ago, Apollo said:

My process. 

Idea pops in my head. Spend about a week thinking about it. Working through ideas in the shower. 

After about a week I've got the main characters, basic plot, main key events and the ending in my head  

Then I sit down and write. That's the fun part. I've got nothing mapped out in the middle. Just the basic plot and how it ends. 

The daily writing part is where the story starts to write itself. 

The fun part is to see where the story goes. How things progress. Which characters start to shine. What plot points are created. How 50 pages into it you might end up changing the entire core of the story. 

For me personally, I could never plot a story out. I've got friends who totally map it all out.  Before starting on the book they will write down character descriptions of 12 different characters. And map out 10 main ideas they want to touch on. And even page number holds - "first 20 pages do this" and "by page 35 introduce Joe, and make sure Bill's wife leaves him by page 46." Step by step by step. Then they write/create by filling in the gaps between all their points. 

I like to sit down with a basic idea....and just start writing and see where the story takes me. 

I've only compete three books but I did it differently each time. First one I wrote from personal experiences and then re-wrote them over and over, I'm not sure if I really got really good stories, the last few I wrote I was getting more of a knack for it. I was thinking about the characters a plot before I started. 

The second one was more like three pieces tied together loosely by a theme. Not really a strong story really. Turned out an interesting disaster. It has a Cloud Atlas vibe and predicts the Trump Russia scenario years prior. Maybe Charlie Sheen gave Trump hiv and my book. 

Then the last one I planned out and was more fun to write but is a bit formulaic. It's more about characters and action. But it has more of a narrative drive. It also has some of the characters from the first two books, so I know more what I'm doing. There's a clear hero, a villian. 

There seemed more of a point to the first two for me because there was a veiled personal element to them even though some ended up disguised as sci fi. But the third is just for fun. I can, so I did. It's more like a comicbook. 

Edited July 10, 2017 by wasted

[wasted]

56 minutes ago, Oldest Goat said:

There's something very amusing and endearing/almost cute about the way you write @wasted  I bet your books are fucking off the wall lol.

It tastes (see) me 4 hours to write 1 sentence that is grammatically correct. It's been a long road of self denial and weeping. 

In the current book I changed tense in the last third by accident so I just made it part of it. Typos are part of my style. I'm looking for a literally retarded audience. If you are still working out your favorite color I write books specifically for you. 

Edited July 10, 2017 by wasted