Forum: Author Hangout

Those 40,000 word chapters are way too long for me :-(

Yeah, I agree. I noticed many places in the 1st chapter where I would have made a new chapter or at least a scene break. But that's not the focus of this thread. And I used this story simply as an example. I find the problem too often in many stories on SOL.

I encounter it too, though seemingly less than you. An instance I came across recently had a scene change in the middle of a paragraph that could only be discerned by going back and trying to work out what the author was trying to say.

AJ

that could only be discerned by going back and trying to work out what the author was trying to say.

That is the problem and why the reader is taken out of the story so why it is so bad.

Using the Advanced Search feature it appears to be 'Neuro Submission Transmitter' by SamSlam

It's not my story but I'm not sure it's good etiquette to fat-shame an author when a matter or principle is being discussed. As you discovered, the actual story is easy to find using Advanced Search, and if a free member really needs to know it can always be communicated by PM.

AJ

is it fair to criticize a story

The story wasn't being singled out, it just happened to be a handy example. Perhaps the excerpt could have been rewritten to make it unidentifiable - I've done that a few times.

Another concern is that I've seen authors delete all their stories and leave the site for less. I don't think that benefits the site.

AJ

Another concern is that I've seen authors delete all their stories and leave the site for less.

Wow. Those authors must not have received the thick skin recommended for anyone who posts a story.

~ JBB

On the other hand, is it fair to criticize a story without naming it, thus denying the author the opportunity to defend themselves.

I wasn't criticizing the story. I was pointing out a common writing problem I've encountered in many stories. I just happened to use what was done in this story as an example.

I didn't identify the story. And I don't suspect any authors would be upset by an observation about long chapters.

AJ

So what story are you talking about?

Yeah, it's 'Neuro Submission Transmitter' by SamSlam. (I read it years ago so I'm re-reading it after it was mentioned in a thread on this forum.)

But I'm not singling out this story or author. Although he does it a lot in this story, it's something I see often when reading stories. It's such an annoying thing yet so easy to avoid so I brought it up.

See how it jumps to a new time and location? All it would take to fix that is to put some transitional words like "After we woke up, Mom went to work. She works late on Thursday night and…"

Isn't that a good place to put the handy-dandy divider?

~ JBB

Isn't that a good place to put the handy-dandy divider?

You can, but you don't always need a scene change to do it.

And even when starting a new scene/chapter, you need to orient the reader to the place, time, and POV character.

including at a Writers' Meetup I attend weekly,

That is great. Ages ago, I used to participate in an online writers group where, if you reviewed 5 other works, someone would review yours. That was when I was told I had done what I'm bringing up here. I had characters approach the front door of a haunted house and the next paragraph had them inside the house looking around. The reviewer pointed out, "How'd they get inside the house?" or something like that.

Yes, I've seen it (here and other places), and yes it bothers me. As you say, takes me out of the story.

Takes me out of the story big time. I go back to the point where the scene began and go through the scene to find something related to the out of context passage that I may have missed.

My question is can AI help authors learn to see and correct these kind of structural mistakes?

I doubt it. The author needs to see and recognize the error in order to correct it without outside assistance. When you rely on something like AI to find the error, then YOU don't improve your proofreading skills.

The author needs to learn to look for continuity from one sentence and paragraph to the next.

This type of error is made by an author thinking ahead and then writing passages to support the point in the plot they are focusing on. Then, assuming that they proofread the chapter/story they wrote, they need to look for continuity. Relying on AI doesn't create that habit.

Just adding a couple of transitional lines would have helped

Exactly.

And as you experienced, it's a common writing error with SOL stories. And one that is easy to fix. You don't need to take a writing class or learn grammar or anything like that. That's why I brought it up.

when it was pointed out in example 2 the author just ignored it

How do you know the author was told?

You also have to consider that to some of our authors, English is not their primary language. There was one author I was reading where I thought his grammar was stilted. Turns out he was German.

But that has nothing to do with this type of problem. It's not a grammar problem. It's a flow problem.

And it's a common problem. I've done it myself. I simply want authors to be aware of it, to look out for it in their stories.

I write in Scrivener, which 'thinks' in terms of 'scenes'. Scene changes are thus fundamental to the writing process - if there is a scene change, start a new scene.

While that's only relevant to Scrivener users (or other more structured tools), what's relevant is the output process. I output to Word. When Scrivener outputs to Word, scene changes render as a centered '+++'. SoL's input turns '+++' into a centered horizontal line (horizontal rule), which is a pretty obvious scene change.

In fact, SoL's formatting guide says that, for plain text:

The last thing is Horizontal rules, any combination of '-' (dash), '=' (equal), '*' (asterisk), '_' (underscore), '@', '#', '~' (tilde), '+', '•' (bullet), 'x' and '—' (m-dash) — without the quotes) —On a line of their own— will be converted to a horizontal rule.

I believe that carries through to Word, even though it's not mentioned. The Word description says that {hr} (also supported in HTML) will convert to a horizontal rule, but '+++' is not {hr} (internally or as rendered).

Which means your '*********' example should probably render as a horizontal rule on SoL (and, if it doesn't, it might be interesting to figure out why).

As far as I'm concerned, scene changes by horizontal rule separation are often superior to word-based changes, because one immediately knows (with no reading effort at all) that the scene has changed. They are also 'worse' if one is using a text-to-speech engine that does not properly flag the horizontal rule, but that's a bug in one's text-to-speech engine (in my opinion, anyway).