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Writing

Started by bgmnts, May 13, 2021, 04:32:25 PM

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bgmnts

I assume, as a forum mostly made up of failed comedy writers, that a lot of folks here write in some capacity, either professionally or as  hobby. When writing, do you draw on real life experiences for things like dialogue and story ideas or is it artistic influences or what?

I have to write a piece of creative writing for my module and to be honest, I am so uninterested by anything that isn't in some way fantastical or science fiction or magical or dark and disturbing or whatever, that I dont really know if its possible for me to write realistically, if that makes sense. As a bit of a misanthrope I have no interest in any of that really. Is it possible to write something decent that comes purely from inspiration of others' work and your own imagination rather than something in real life?

How do you do it?

buttgammon

I started something last year that's rooted in the real world, but is not drawn from my own experiences, but by an absurd imagining of conspiracy theorists. It's hard to place exactly where these ideas came from, but I'm editing it at the moment with the hope of submitting it somewhere as a short story and I think it works as dark humour. One thing I'm nervous about is that anyone reading it will think I believe in the (deliberately ridiculous) theories espoused by the characters. I'm also tentatively working on something that's about a man who obsessively collects animals, the seed of which came from an article I read.

It's hard to give you any genuinely helpful advice but what I would say is that if that's how you feel, then there's no reason to try too hard to make anything 'realistic' (unless the module specifically calls for this of course). The translation of lived experience into writing is a way a lot of people work, but it's by no means the only way to write. For what it's worth, misanthropic perspectives can be really interesting for literature - one of my favourite writers Thomas Bernhard almost always wrote in that way, albeit in ways that probably were derived from experience to some extent.

bgmnts

Do you write people how they woulf accurately speak, act and think?

buttgammon

Quote from: bgmnts on May 14, 2021, 08:11:47 AM
Do you write people how they woulf accurately speak, act and think?

I'm not sure. I'm terrible at dialogue and have virtually none of it in this piece, but in terms of how they act and think, I think I do, but with the caveat that these people are meant to be weird.

PlanktonSideburns

Have you read any thomas ligotti bgmts? His stuff often starts from a point of nihilism but has something less cold going on under the surface. Some of his short stories might inspire you, I don't know

What's your module?

bgmnts

Quote from: buttgammon on May 14, 2021, 08:57:11 AM
I'm not sure. I'm terrible at dialogue and have virtually none of it in this piece, but in terms of how they act and think, I think I do, but with the caveat that these people are meant to be weird.

Yeah I suppose that's the way. Could you just make your protagonist/narrator weird and unrelatable and get away with it?

Quote from: PlanktonSideburns on May 14, 2021, 09:09:14 AM
Have you read any thomas ligotti bgmts? His stuff often starts from a point of nihilism but has something less cold going on under the surface. Some of his short stories might inspire you, I don't know

What's your module?

I dont read much anymore which is a problem but short stories are my favourite form I shall check it out.

The module is Arts and the humanities as part of a BA Hons in History and this is the brief for this option (it was either this, analysing greek and roman sculpture, poetry or jazz):

QuoteOption 3 Writing stories
Use one of the prompts below to write a section of a short story of no more than 800 words. When you have done so, write a reflective commentary of no more than 400 words about how you crafted your story.

The short story is worth 50 marks of this assignment and the reflective piece is worth 30 marks.

Choose one of the following prompts:

A wrong turning
A discovery
The box in the attic
The beach
Behind the mask
The light at the end of the tunnel
Please remember that the module materials do not teach writing for children. Your piece should be aimed at an adult reader.

Guidance for Option 3
There are three parts to this task. You will need to submit the plan for your writing, along with the creative writing and your reflective commentary.
You will need to show that you have explored 'how some of the techniques that writers use can be used in your own writing', as well as demonstrating, through your writing, the way 'literary works are conceived, drafted, revised and edited' (Block 2, Unit 3, Aims).
In planning and writing, you should think about how stories are shaped and what you can do to entice a reader into your narrative. You should show how you are using the techniques that you have been introduced to in the unit. For example, as you plan and write your work, you will want to think about character, setting, imagery, narrative viewpoint and tense. Your tutor will be able to see how well you have drafted and redrafted your work from the way the final piece has developed from your original plan.
In your reflective commentary, you should try to show how your piece fits into the tradition of story writing as discussed in the chapter. You should consider the process of your composition and include reference to the key elements of Creative Writing, as taught in the chapter, which you have applied to this. For example, you might comment on your reasons for your choice about:
narrative viewpoint
characters, setting and imagery
the point at which your story begins.
You might also want to discuss the ways in which your reading of other writers (those you have met in the chapter, or through your own reading) has informed your own process.
You should also refer to drafts of your work and comment on any decisions you made in the process of redrafting the section of your short story. For example, because you are not being asked to write a complete story, you might want to comment on why you chose to tell this part of the story or how it fits into your idea for a longer piece of writing which you might have shown in your plan.

oustropique

Quote from: bgmnts on May 13, 2021, 04:32:25 PM
I am so uninterested by anything that isn't in some way fantastical or science fiction or magical or dark and disturbing or whatever, that I dont really know if its possible for me to write realistically, if that makes sense. [...] Is it possible to write something decent that comes purely from inspiration of others' work and your own imagination rather than something in real life?

How do you do it?

I think it's useful to think of 'fantastical' and 'real' as single, potentially interchangeable elements of a story, rather than exclusive modes. The same, I think, goes for whatever artistic influence has taken your interest at the time. Sometimes fusing these things together really benefits an idea. Like buttgammon, sometimes I'll read a news story and that will get me imagining things, sometimes I'll just think of a story and characters and go from there. Again, it's never one or the other in terms of what the influences are.

Quote from: bgmnts on May 14, 2021, 08:11:47 AM
Do you write people how they would accurately speak, act and think?

I do, not always because I'm trying to lean into kitchen-sink realism, but because it's very easy to write boring dialogue full of exposition. 'acting' is harder to quantify, but the way I write people tends to go down well. There's no right or wrong answer to this, though, except, unhelpfully, 'don't do it badly'.

buttgammon is also right to say you can use that accurate dialogue and the way people act to put your misanthropy into some creative project that becomes characterised by it. What you've noticed about people can make believable, three-dimensional characters. That doesn't box you into real life, or realism.

Quote from: bgmnts
Yeah I suppose that's the way. Could you just make your protagonist/narrator weird and unrelatable and get away with it?

Absolutely. My recommendations here are The Collector by John Fowles, Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata, and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon.

The fact you've decided to do a history degree shows you are interested in people in a certain way, and it might be just a matter of dragging that part of your mind, your historical imagination, into the creative side of things.

I am , yeah, a failed novelist and poet, but pretty much everything good I've managed to come up with was related to history in some way. Get a history book off your shelf, find an event in it, think about what it was like, how it felt for the people involved,  change some of the minor details in it, change some of the major details in it- what would it be like if it happened now? what would be the modern equivalent? What would the same events be like if you chucked genre elements from sci-fi, horror, crime fiction at them? What if you used those events, unrelated to your life, and used them to write a piece that exorcised painful emotions? What if you rewrite the story as if a person who was really horny/forgetful/pedantic/unreliable was trying to explain those events?


For example- random page opening of random history book:
Page 249-250 of Fernand Braudel's "Capitalism and Civilisation Vol.1 :The Structures of Everyday Life":
https://archive.org/details/BraudelFernandCivilizationAndCapitalism/Braudel%2C%20Fernand%20-%20Civilization%20and%20Capitalism%2C%20Vol.%201/page/n249/mode/2up

See on the bottom right hand of the second page, the paragraph beginning "In France.." you've got the start of a story there: a bunch of doctors burning a medical student's thesis on tea. Was he in the room? How did he feel seeing his work being burned like that? What were these doctors saying to him. If something like that was going to happen today, why would it happen? What sort of research would annoy people that much? How would they destroy electronically stored information?

And there are other potential stories across that double-page spread alone.

bgmnts

Just walloped it out in 20 minutes. Probably going to fail this one as I just dont feel creative writing can be graded in such a way. Plus I just didnt even feel like reading the materials on this.

Thanks for the advice though everyone, will definitely check out the stuff you all linked and mentioned.

PlanktonSideburns

Can we read your story?

Icehaven

Quote from: bgmnts on May 17, 2021, 03:12:12 PM
I just dont feel creative writing can be graded in such a way.

I'd largely agree. I've never tried to write seriously or anything but I used to enjoy writing short stories sometimes and when I was doing an English degree I did the creative writing module because it looked like fun and, frankly, easier than studying more bloody Chaucer. The lecturer that took the course was a playwright himself, and at the start of each weekly 3 hour seminar he'd set us a task (write a poem/short story/monologue etc. based on various criteria, my favourite being when he told us all to go outside for 10 minutes and find 3 things we could bring back in with us, then write a story incorporating all of them. One guy found a debit card so he was well away) then he'd bugger off to his office to do his own work for 2 hours, returning for the last half hour or so where we'd each have to read out what we wrote then he'd offer a few words of criticism and that was it, job done. He was noticeably critical of anything genre, so fantasy and sci-fi got short shrift (he eviscerated some poor bloke's Tolkien rip-off once) and action and thriller (which rarely got a look in anyway) didn't go down well either. It basically boiled down to his personal taste, which from what we could tell from his plays was modern interpretations of Greek tragedies, which obviously none of us ever wrote or even tried to. I think he regarded the whole course as a necessary inconvenience to allow him to claim a salary and an office on campus and assumed most of his students were just doing it as a relatively undemanding option, which was partly true. I can't even remember how it was graded in the end, he probably just gave us all a 2:1 and hoped no one higher up looked into it too much.

bgmnts

Quote from: PlanktonSideburns on May 18, 2021, 07:12:53 AM
Can we read your story?

If you like yeah:

   
QuoteThe enormous rattling of the number 4 bus into the village almost shattered his skull as he leaned his head against the window. "Every time." John muttered to himself as he reeled his shaken brain from the pane, the vibration still oscillating inside him. He had been on the bus for six or seven minutes now and the driver still had not returned. He could not remember if the driver, a large, jolly looking fat man with a balding head, announced that he was going to the toilet or if there was a change of drivers for the next shift. It would take a megaphone to be clearly heard over this racket; the shuddering of the chassis and the cacophony of the other passengers made it nigh on impossible to even hear yourself think, let alone an important announcement by the operator of your only way home.
    John hated his job anyway, but he especially hated it when his shift finished at 3pm, having to share the bus with rowdy and energetic pre-teens and teenagers drove him to near breaking point every time. They talked and shouted and screamed and he was sure they made fun of him and called him all sorts in hushed whispers, but not too hushed to not grab his attention. Then you had the old biddies who thought everyone owed them everything, the mothers with babies who cry and scream and take up two seats at a time and half the bus with their mammoth prams. This ranting of thoughts made him extremely irritable. The driver, or whoever was to take his place, had still not arrived.
    A text message on his phone buzzed in his trouser pocket, to which he angrily opened it up. It was from Sarah, a woman at work he had just started seeing, a bright spark in his otherwise miserable day.
SORRY JOHN, I DON'T THINK THIS WILL WORK OUT.
I HOPE YOU UNDERSTAND. xo
   John stared at his phone in a state of catatonic shock. Something snapped inside him that led him to get up out of seat, almost on autopilot, walk to the front of the bus, hit the emergency close button on the doors and get into the driver's seat. The rest of the bus watched in silent amazement as this happened. John noticed the jolly fat driver walking towards the bus in the rear-view mirror. "Shit." he startled, snapping out of his fugue state and realising where he was and what he was doing. "Oh well, I've gone this far." he said to himself, with a mixture of resignation and excitement. He tried the key in the ignition - forgetting briefly that the bus was already started - and shut it off. The driver was closer now, and he noticed John in the seat, and began to waddle faster towards him shouting obscenities, to which the passengers started to laugh loudly at. He turned the key: nothing.
    The driver reached the door and banged on it loudly, like a chimpanzee. "Get off that chair and open this door, dickhead!" he shouted.
    With another twist of the key, the bus started back up again, and John pulled away from the station to the loud cheers and applause of the passengers, and the red-faced fury of the former driver.
   What to do now, John thought to himself, adrenaline surging through his body as if he had just been zapped by an electric generator. He drove down through the traffic lights, concentrating on the road and wondering where to go with his new bus when he heard a shrill ding! He looked in the mirror and saw the tiny, old white-haired lady who he always saw on the bus in her trademark anorak and headscarf. He smiled to himself, forgetting why he was even there and stopped at the next bus stop.
   The old lady took an age but finally walked past him and thanked him for getting her home, smiling at him as she got off. Not bad for an OAP, he thought.
   John realised he had instinctively driven along the bus route; he had dropped down onto Tudor Road, past the civic centre and all the way round his village. Several dings, an hour and a dozen dropped off passengers later, he concluded that he would drive back to the depot and walk to Sarah's place to hash it out with her. However, pulling into the station, he felt a strange sensation on his head and in his stomach, as if the former were lighter and the latter were heavier.
   As he parked, he glanced in the mirror and saw something that made his blood run cold. It was him, but it was not him. His hairline had receded two inches, his gut had expanded 6 inches and his clothes had changed. He was no longer in his work clothes but was wearing a blue buttoned shirt with the sleeves rolled up, jet black polyester trousers and black brogues. He was the driver.
   At first, he stared in horror, but as he saw the queue outside, he shrugged and opened the door, accepting them onto the bus. He then pulled out of the station and began the route again, accepting his fate.

Quote from: icehaven on May 19, 2021, 01:38:16 PM
I'd largely agree. I've never tried to write seriously or anything but I used to enjoy writing short stories sometimes and when I was doing an English degree I did the creative writing module because it looked like fun and, frankly, easier than studying more bloody Chaucer. The lecturer that took the course was a playwright himself, and at the start of each weekly 3 hour seminar he'd set us a task (write a poem/short story/monologue etc. based on various criteria, my favourite being when he told us all to go outside for 10 minutes and find 3 things we could bring back in with us, then write a story incorporating all of them. One guy found a debit card so he was well away) then he'd bugger off to his office to do his own work for 2 hours, returning for the last half hour or so where we'd each have to read out what we wrote then he'd offer a few words of criticism and that was it, job done. He was noticeably critical of anything genre, so fantasy and sci-fi got short shrift (he eviscerated some poor bloke's Tolkien rip-off once) and action and thriller (which rarely got a look in anyway) didn't go down well either. It basically boiled down to his personal taste, which from what we could tell from his plays was modern interpretations of Greek tragedies, which obviously none of us ever wrote or even tried to. I think he regarded the whole course as a necessary inconvenience to allow him to claim a salary and an office on campus and assumed most of his students were just doing it as a relatively undemanding option, which was partly true. I can't even remember how it was graded in the end, he probably just gave us all a 2:1 and hoped no one higher up looked into it too much.

Yeah exactly! It all seems so subjective.

PlanktonSideburns

Kin ell bgmnts, that's really good! Enjoyed that muchly. The pure euphoria of taking the bus, and a proper uncanny turn at the end. Love it

PlanktonSideburns

I definatley think you will enjoy a bit of Thomas ligotti if you ever get hold of some

chveik

good stuff bgmnts, keep it up

bgmnts

Cheers lads. I'm not much of a writer but I was happy with that considering it was a 20 minute first draft. I cannot plan out a story to save my life though, I dont know how people do it.

I just saw Penguins Classic's cover for Lignotti's Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe and I am well into that! Definitely going to check see if they have that at the library when its open. Cheers Plankton!

buttgammon

Second the praise, keep up the good work!

Twit 2

Quote from: bgmnts on May 19, 2021, 10:19:45 PM
Cheers lads. I'm not much of a writer but I was happy with that considering it was a 20 minute first draft. I cannot plan out a story to save my life though, I dont know how people do it.

I just saw Penguins Classic's cover for Lignotti's Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe and I am well into that! Definitely going to check see if they have that at the library when its open. Cheers Plankton!

I 2nd the Ligotti recommendation. "Teatro Grottesco" is as good or even better than "Songs..."

Quote from: bgmnts on May 19, 2021, 10:19:45 PM
I cannot plan out a story to save my life though, I dont know how people do it.

This to me is the bit that I've never managed to crack. I can conjour up an atmosphere scenes and a bit of dialogue, but what I've never been able to get right is the way that novelists are able to structure a story so that details which didn't quite fit or were annoying earlier in a story suddenly become clear or are explained 200 pages later.

The other thing that always held me back was a bit was a sort of guilt about honesty/telling the truth. I got quite a bit of a way into writing a novel where the main character was a soldier who'd come back from Afghanistan with really serious injuries to his face, and as writing I was quite pleased with it, but at the same time I felt that, not having those kind of experiences, I didn't really have the right to talk about it. I KNOW that basically everyone who's written anything good has essentially got over this kind of guilt and gone ahead and sort-of-lied but I can't figure out how to do it.

Thomas

#21
Fair play bgmnts, being asked to knock out a story of a type that doesn't interest you is daunting.

Quote from: bgmnts on May 19, 2021, 10:19:45 PM
I cannot plan out a story to save my life though, I dont know how people do it.

I tend to employ the classic and simple model taught at primary school: nothing more complicated than beginning, middle, end. If I have an idea or a premise, I'll try to come up with a striking opening, and sometimes I'll imagine the ending early on, too, so that I have something to work towards. Then it's just a matter of filling up the middle with storystuff and achieving requisite wordcount (a lot of places have limits). Emotionally revealing themes and motifs emerge naturally. Then spend 99% of your time on the title.

The specifics of the ending can change as I come up with storystuff, though, so I keep any initial plans simple.

I'm always looking to learn more about planning and writing; my method is only what feels natural at the moment, which is hugely limited by lack of knowledge and experience. I bought Will Storr's The Science of Storytelling the other day (hopefully as good as his ghost one).

EDIT:

Some people don't plan their endings at all - there must be a few purists out there who think it's wrong to plan your ending, and thus restrict your storytelling; that a natural ending can only emerge organically as you write and develop the story. But stories aren't real life, and they don't often meander (unless it's good for the story, in which case it's not real meandering), so I think it's fine to plan a good ending.

Poirots BigGarlickyCorpse

Nah, you need an ending, even if it's only a vague outline of one. Otherwise you end up writing yourself into a hole and then you just quietly abandon that fanfiction and never return to it no matter how many anons beg for an update even years later.

bgmnts

Quote from: Poirots BigGarlickyCorpse on May 25, 2021, 12:28:46 AM
Nah, you need an ending, even if it's only a vague outline of one. Otherwise you end up writing yourself into a hole and then you just quietly abandon that fanfiction and never return to it no matter how many anons beg for an update even years later.

I'm currently writing a short story at the moment and I honestly don't have an ending. I don't know how people do endings!

earl_sleek

Fantasy author Brandon Sanderson is a lecturer in creative writing, you can watch a course of his lectures on YouTube for free. They're well worth watching if you have an interest in the process of writing, and as a fantasy author he doesn't have the snobbery towards genre fiction mentioned up thread. He broadly divides authors into 'planners' and 'discoverers' (not sure if those are the exact terms he uses), with discoverers tending towards less or little planning and working it all out as they go along. So not having your ending planned is definitely a valid approach. Isaac Asimov claimed he didn't plan out his stories, either.

13 schoolyards

From talking to other writers and having a couple of novels published, it does seem like the divide between "planners" and "make it up as you go along-ers" is a really central one. I reckon a lot of writers who say they discover their endings as they go once were writers who planned things out (even if only loosely in their head when they were making up stories as a kid) and as they gained experience they discarded the parts of planning they didn't need. Donald Westlake notoriously made his novels up as he went (which is insane if you've ever read any of his "Richard Stark" crime novels), but he wrote a hundred novels or more so he probably figured he knew what he was doing even when he was winging it.

I find planning is really essential, if only to have something to fall back on - you can always dump or change your plan if you have a better idea, and if you don't... there's the plan. But I really enjoy the plotting-out side of things and having the pieces of a story click into place, whereas more than one writer I know hates that side of things and thinks it totally kills the vibe of their writing. Whenever I've tried to write without a plan or knowing where things are going I just end up with a formless shapeless mess.

(The way I get an ending is that I plot out a story to somewhere past the half way mark so I have a decent idea of where things are going, then I decide how I want it all to end and work backwards from that until it all fits together)

Poirots BigGarlickyCorpse

Quote from: bgmnts on May 25, 2021, 10:11:43 AM
I'm currently writing a short story at the moment and I honestly don't have an ending. I don't know how people do endings!
An ending doesn't have to tie everything up in a neat little bow, an ending is just where the story finishes. Like the one you posted earlier. Your protagonist discovered he'd morphed into the bus driver through magical means and that's the ending. It's a fine ending. What I'm talking about is if you just went on for pages and pages of him being on the bus and had no idea why he was on the bus or if he'd get off the bus or maybe the fact that he just stays on the bus going round and round the town is the story? oh god what do I do he's been on the bus way too long why is he doing this this makes no sense abandon story.

When I'm writing a story, I just try to keep in mind where I want the story to finish up. What big thing happens in the story? Where does that leave the characters at the end? Do they deal with it or not? The story sometimes takes the long way round to get to the end and that's fine too.

bgmnts

Got 90% in the end. Lesson of the day is that hard work doesn't make much of a difference. Not bad for 20 minutes work though.

PlanktonSideburns

Do more stories and post them here

Mr Farenheit

Nice work, bgmnts.