Writers' Workshop General Chat Thread

[AceTrainer14]

I didn't actually change much 8ES wise - the story is pretty much the same, just tidied up and with some new scenes. However, early Galactic and Kris vs Gold are almost unbearable to read. I read over Galactic as I begun contemplating rewriting it and god, it's such poo. Does anyone care that Xavier fell off his Ponyta? No, no they do not. If I saw that the story was 400,000 words and read those first chapters, I would give up there and then.

 

[Beth Pavell]

I just wanted to announce something momentous:
I finally got around to changing all of the

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fragments in srbs (RIP old BMG) to proper linebreaks. Also, I finally fixed the fucking table of contents as well. All is right in the world.

In other news, new chapter tomorrow. Probably will start plowing through the review backlog as well.
some of its hearts what's that

Oh hurrah, {some rise by sin} again. And we all feel your pain. Myself more than you. Ace more than anybody

Can we talk about how cringy it is to go back and look over the stuff we wrote five years ago? It was physically painful to me to read the original chapters of Unpredictable I've fixed, and I never look forward to reading the next. Especially when you think about the fact that some people have read the story recently. They read this stuff. And it factors into their opinion of you now. They had to consider this shit when reviewing. That's part of the reason I'm only five chapters in. My edits quickly became full rewrites.

Why do you think I'm so picky when it comes to re-editing and rewriting my old chapters? I think Chapter One must have gone through about four versions by now. Mind you, my original teenage dreck was allegedly teenage fiction that never got posted online. I think only about half of it was ever typed, for that matter. No, it will never see the light of day

 

[Misfit Angel]

I've been considering going back to work on the first 10 or so chapters of Storm Island, to bring the quality up to a similar level as some of the later chapters, buuuuuut... I spend so little time writing as it is, I'd never move forward. At the rate I'm going, it's going to take five, maybe six years to finish the story, which is annoying because I already have a small six-chapter sequel already fully written. Posting that would involve major spoilers for what's to come, though. :|

 

[kintsugi]

Oh hurrah, {some rise by sin} again. And we all feel your pain. Myself more than you. Ace more than anybody

No but actually, at first it was a pretty simple find/replace (the old bmgf.bulbagarden/forums/somethingsomethingpostdirectory stuff with the new forums.bulbagarden.net/directory/stuff/numbers), but then they index pages differently in this new forums and it's like hyuggnnnnn why do I have to put in page numbers for what page this post was made on y u do dis.

 

[AetherX]

I just went through and c/p-ed the links again. Only took about ten minutes. Waaaay easier than changing the links manually.

 

[Misfit Angel]

View: https://twitter.com/RealGDT/status/678470728958783488

The Mary Sue controversy is like encountering an Orgasm Sheriff halfway through an Orgy, rating our joy on a 1-10 scale for our "own good"

As someone who's been critical of Mary Sue characters (or rather, taking great care to avoid characters being called that), I never really felt this. But recently, I've had two of my characters called that, and now I understand what it means. They're our characters, damn it, not yours.

Edit: I think the links for twitter are broken. I can not get rid of all of those empty lines. :|

 

[Beth Pavell]

Mary Sue looms much larger in the writing about writing than she ever did in writing. So to speak. I still maintain that the concept has its uses, devalued though it has been as a kind of vague buzzword

 

[AceTrainer14]

A. I agree with Aether, it was so much easier to update links by just copying and pasting. I just haven't finished updating cause I'm really lazy.

B. Mary Sue is a very interesting concept. I think it has become one of those things that people on the internet just throw out willy-nilly, which has rather devalued it as an insult and as a critical term. I don't think anyone has ever accused me of writing Mary Sues before though, so I might feel differently had that happened.

 

[Jersey Jimmy]

I used to be horrible about writing Mary Sues, but I feel that I've gotten better over time. Maybe my characters still win a little too easily, but at least I try to make it harder for them to.

Also, remember when the world was supposed to end three years ago? Haha, people are delusional.

 

[Legacy]

Meh, every main character I write has some aspects that some people might categorize as Mary-Sue-ish. Not that bothered by it as I at least try to not do it too severely.

 

[AceTrainer14]

You have twelve and a half hours left to finish voting and to update your stories (new chapters and old chapter edits) before the voting round ends. Please nominate people for the User Voted categories if you have not done so already.

 

[Life]

On the topic of Mary Sues, I have to agree that I find the term heavily overused in most online communities. As Ace has said I think that the term is used so much now that it's more of a hollow insult if anything else. Frankly though, I find that as long as the character is enjoyable to read about it's fine to be whatever.

In other news I've been doing some writing recently. I can't really seem to keep a project going for too long without wanting to start a new one, but that's fine with me. (Though I would like to say I've completed something someday.) I'm trying to leave out any angst with this story because I find my writing has a lot of it, so we'll see how well I do with that later I suppose.

Also got around to catching up with most of the stories on here, which is exciting. A little disappointed though that some of my favorites didn't have as many chapters (or any at all), but I guess that gives me a reason to come back and check more often now!

 

[Flaze]

I do think the term Mary Sue has been overused, but if only in the sense that people pretty much use it for any character that is too perfect in their mind. Like I think it's not so much that the character is hard to believe or is perfect and has no flaws as much as how well the character is done that people don't care. I mean look at Superman which people do claim is a mary sue due to all his powers but he sure wasn't called out on that for a long while, and then there's Batman (yes Batman can be considered a mary sue regardless of how many dead parents he has ) or James Bond. In th ecase of th elatter people have pointed out that he's too perfect but that's mostly nowadays, before (and by that I mean for a long time) no one batted at eye at James Bond and a lot of people still don't. I'm not saying they're bad characters but they would technically classify as mary sues if you wanna look at them through a lens.

 

[AetherX]

The problem with the term Mary Sue is that everyone seems to think there is one accepted definition, but no one can seem to agree on what it is. Some people say it's an idealized author avatar, some people say it's any author avatar, some people say it's any character that doesn't have a lot of flaws or challenges, some people say it's any character that all of the other characters like (except for the bad guys), and so on. The real meaning is a vague mishmash of all of the above, but it's basically useless. If you want to critique a character, state outright what their good and bad qualities are rather than trying to pigeonhole them into a poorly defined category.

 

[kintsugi]

The word Mary Sue is an overused term that gets thrown around whenever one person doesn't like another character. That's not to say it doesn't have any merit, but I honestly think just flat out saying "X is a bad character because of Y" is far more effective than just tirading about how "X is a Mary Sue." There's already enough jargon in writing that inventing another broad, vaguely defined category for a class of character that really doesn't have any clear guidelines is like having a redundancy department of redundancy.

In other news, I discovered the quick and easy way to convert all of my MS Word documents from single-spacing (what I originally used when writing chapters so they came out properly in the old-school forum formatting/what I do when I'm typing this post right now) to whatever the new forum formatting is, which apparently just takes straight c/p from MS Word? Eyyyyyy. 1,665 line breaks deleted.

 

[AetherX]

In other news, I discovered the quick and easy way to convert all of my MS Word documents from single-spacing (what I originally used when writing chapters so they came out properly in the old-school forum formatting/what I do when I'm typing this post right now) to whatever the new forum formatting is, which apparently just takes straight c/p from MS Word? Eyyyyyy. 1,665 line breaks deleted.

Please share. At first I was like "Oh it's no biggy, just another reason to look over the chapter one more time before posting" but then I had to get a chapter up five minutes before the award deadline and now I'm more like "FFFFFFUCK".

 

[kintsugi]

Please share. At first I was like "Oh it's no biggy, just another reason to look over the chapter one more time before posting" but then I had to get a chapter up five minutes before the award deadline and now I'm more like "FFFFFFUCK".

Varies depending on what version you have, but step 2 is the important one and I think it holds across all years.

1. Go to MS Word
2. Press CTRL/SHIFT/8
2b. suddenly there are weird little p's/paragraph symbols at every line break
3. CTRL/F to open up the Find menu, go to Find/Replace. For Find, enter "^p", and for Replace, put nothing.
4. Bask in my awesomeness.

 

[AetherX]

We must have done breaks differently, because it took a little more finangling than that (^p^p to ^p), but I shall bask in your awesomeness anyway. You have hastened the finishing of Unpredictable by tens of minutes.

*basks*

Time to get back in the habit of doing proper formatting.

 

[Misfit Angel]

I don't understand how you guys use a word processor for writing. Notepad (or more specifically, EditPlus) works wonders for hobbyist writing, looks nice, and you don't have to worry about fiddly formatting that only Microsoft word can figure out. It's just a straight copy and paste, especially if you're in the habit of manually typing out formatting tags.

A word processor is only really needed for professional writers looking to submit their work for publishing. As far as I'm aware, only one of us is doing that.

 

[Beth Pavell]

I do the bulk of my writing in an A4 notebook. For some reason I find it hard to really get words out unless I can see the rejected previous drafts and can write little speculative sentences in the margins. When I come to type it up most of the work there is just ironing out the kinks