Forum: Author Hangout

I keep talking about my posts on Quora—which always leads to protracted arguments here on the SOL Forum—so I decided to post a recent Quora post on improve, you guessed it, the flow of writing. There are likely to be quite a few typos and errors, as I rarely have my online posted edited—though I really should since I'm mildly dyslexic as I'm often unable to see my own errors.

But, here it is. You can discuss it if you want, yet I think I'll sit this one out, just so everyone else can decide whether my points are valid or just a crock of shit, as they say.

In general, you alter the pace, complexity and the depth of your 'prose' given the context of the story at that point. So when guns are blazing and people are keeping their heads down, trying to survive, no one is going to stop to have a long, protracted discussion of how they ended up in that situation. Yet too often, that's precisely how many authors detail such scenes.

I've always preferred the 'Fog of War' approach, based on my research of the 'children soldiers' in parts of Africa and other areas back in the day. Those kids hadn't a clue what they were doing, as they were only trained how to hold and fire a weapon, as they were, like most solders, were merely cannon fodder, with few expected to survive anyway.

Thus during ANY fight scenes, no one is going to wax lyrically over the details. This sentences will be short, simple and they won't waste a single word, because … the more you speak, the easier a target you become.

These issues also arose in Viet Nam and the Korean Wars too. In the jungle, when you come under fire, you don't stop of ponder who's firing at you, you just drop and start returning fire. Which was a common source of 'fragging' fatalities, as often, you'd mistakenly fire on your own people, rather than the actual enemy. As they've always said "War is hell"!

However, after the shit has official hit the proverbial fan, and everyone has a change to compare notes, the pacing, the sentence length and sentence complexity goes WAY up, since they have the time to discuss things in detail.

So when considering story pacing (the 'flow' of writing), treat each individual scene as a unique situation and modify the writing to set whatever the particular context is.

I've also just posted (again) another post where I discuss capturing 'found conversation'. Too many authors are overly focused on 'normal conversations' yet only consider the least interesting discussions to base their sense or 'normality' on.

People speak differently if they're actively engaged in something they each feel passionately about, so why pattern every piece of dialogue on formal conversations or 'everyday' chit chat. Instead, you have to learn to observe those who are actively engaged in such conversations. Only, you have to do it without engaging in the conversation yourself. I refer to these as 'found conversations' where you just sit quietly and quietly listen while others talk.

I had a benefit as I started out as a graphic artist, and I'd do live-sketches and as I did, I'd 'record' those found conversations

These issues also arose in Viet Nam and the Korean Wars too. In the jungle, when you come under fire, you don't stop of ponder who's firing at you, you just drop and start returning fire. Which was a common source of 'fragging' fatalities, as often, you'd mistakenly fire on your own people, rather than the actual enemy. As they've always said "War is hell"!

I've never heard of "fragging" used in connection with unintended injuries or death from friendly fire. Rather, I've heard it used exclusively to the practice of rolling a live grenade into the tent of an unpopular or incompetent lieutenant or other junior officer.

Your screed opens with

In general, you alter the pace, complexity and the depth of your 'prose' given the context of the story at that point.

but then you proceed to give a bunch of examples about dialogue, saying "no one is going to stop to have a long, protracted discussion of how they ended up in that situation" and "the more you speak, the easier a target you become".

But there's a difference between prose and conversation - they're two completely different things. The way prose is structured doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the way dialogue flows in a particular situation. An author could very easily describe specific details of a combat scene in hyper-focused prose, and not necessarily include a single word of dialogue.

So, uh, this whole thing reads like you don't know what you're talking about, and like you're trying to pretend that you do know what you're talking about, but you don't know enough about what you're talking about to effectively fake knowing what you're talking about.

If you want, you can go ahead and tell me about how many books you've published and how many stories you've written (and feel free to mention that I'm personally attacking you here and this always happens when you post so you don't know why you do it, gotta keep those classics in there too) but none of that is going to change the fact that you confused prose and dialogue and wrote a big meaningless diatribe that doesn't make sense.

To be fair, you did say that there may be errors and typos on account of your dyslexia (another classic!) but that's not really the sort of error that will stem from dyslexia; it stems from something else.

Why did you bother saying that you would sit this one out if your immediate response to somebody disagreeing with you is to post your normal canned response about how actually you're just so much smarter than everybody else?

Edit: Crumbly Writer has a habit of deleting posts if they don't get the reception they want, and replies to those posts get kicked up to the main thread. This post was originally responding to CW replying to Bondi Beach, despite CW's assertion that they were going to stay out of the thread.

lol...see you "sat this one out" for 3 hours and 9 minutes!

SunSeeker