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Post by edmonddantes on Mar 9, 2019 3:07:20 GMT -5
As in people who have created or are dabbling in creating their own works of fiction, whether text, comic, video game, interpretive dance, etc.
Or people who draw. That works too.
I posted some of my work in a topic about Baldur's Gate (sincerest apologies to your eyes, by the way) and also write. So...
Here's a convo starter: What do you consider your strengths and weaknesses? What advice would you give to people who are weak in the areas you're strong?
My own answer:
Strength - For some reason, I never struggle with names. I hear a lot of people saying they have trouble titling their works or naming their characters, but for me often the name comes before anything else. Hell you can describe someone to me and I'll come up with a name for them (and if you seriously need help, go ahead and do so).
Weakness - Pilot episodes/first chapters. Here's a weird thing... if I write a story which takes place later in whatever continuity (even if its the second chapter), I find I can get to it easily... but the first chapter/story in a sequence is tough, which I think is largely due to those being the parts where I have to set up everything so I can knock it down.
So... what are your strengths and weaknesses?
What kinda stuff do ya'll do, anyway?
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Post by edmonddantes on Mar 28, 2019 7:42:51 GMT -5
Some advice for creatives:
1. Try to give your work titles which are easy to Google. It astonishes me that so many people still use things like one-word titles, which are very likely to get confused with something else. Like, say you want to do a story about the end of the world... don't call it "Armageddon." There are already tons of things called that. Call it something like "The Armageddon of Planet Fantasia" or whatever.
2. Read books from before the 1980s. I mention this because there are a lot of "bits of wisdom" floating around which are actually BAD ideas, and the quickest way to see the BS is to see what the field was like before those bits of "wisdom" became things. For example, "Show, Don't Tell"--there's lots of lit, good and bad, which flagrantly breaks this rule (look at anything by H.P. Lovecraft... altho Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is also a good example and that's post-1980 so...). Very often, trying to follow "show don't tell" just makes writing (and reading) your work a pain.
3. Don't get into fanfiction. Fanfiction can be a training ground, but it can also get you into a lot of bad habits. Also, what people who read fanfics are looking for isn't necessarily what people who do other things are looking for (the worst thing is basically fanfics live and die by whether or not they support popular pairings. If you're not even interested in writing romance, you're screwed no matter how good you are).
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Post by surnshurn on Apr 1, 2019 1:59:01 GMT -5
how true are you to your avatar?
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Post by edmonddantes on Apr 3, 2019 10:12:57 GMT -5
Well, I don't literally live in a trash can...
It's kind of a mood thing actually. Sometimes I'm really grumpy but most of the time the Oscar the Grouch avatar is just me being self-effacing since I tend to be the guy who doesn't see the big deal.
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Post by surnshurn on Apr 4, 2019 19:23:51 GMT -5
Well, from a classic point of view - oscar there has a halo symbol, which does fit with your character. i was more interested in the status as trash demon, which would say a lot about one's identity.
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Post by edmonddantes on Apr 5, 2019 13:30:34 GMT -5
I... never thought about it that way, actually. Mostly I just one day happened to watch an old episode of Sesame Street... I believe it was this one--and wound up kinda just liking Oscar. Since this was shortly after having gotten gruffy about Zelda: Ocarina of Time, I also felt like the image fit me. I'm not sure how I could make the "trash demon" part analogous to myself, except that my real home kinda sucks (but its not literally a trash can). When it comes to something like reviewing... I actually tend to be overly forgiving of work that isn't by a big company. I'll rake Zelda thru the coals, but if you show me a game made by a little kid or one guy at a computer, I'm gonna try to find something positive about it. |
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Post by Apollo Chungus on Apr 6, 2019 8:34:37 GMT -5
When it comes to something like reviewing... I actually tend to be overly forgiving of work that isn't by a big company. I'll rake Zelda thru the coals, but if you show me a game made by a little kid or one guy at a computer, I'm gonna try to find something positive about it. I don't think that's such a bad thing. You're trying to be more understanding of the developer's circumstances, which tend to be more difficult when it's a small-scale or solo effort. While it's always going to be tricky figuring out how much those circumstances should excuse the end result, I think it's always worth trying to better understand them regardless - if nothing else, it allows you to consider perspectives you might not have thought about before, and you can learn something from that. For example, I'm currently playing through the Sonic the Hedgehog fan-games by LakeFeperd (Before the Sequel, After the Sequel, and Sonic Chrono Adventure). I have issues with the first two games in terms of their level design, especially Before the Sequel, but I do acknowledge that they are very impressive for what they are - particular in terms of their size and scope. Most Sonic fan games tend to have only a few levels or take years and years to complete, but both BTS and ATS have at least 10 Zones with three acts each - and each game was developed in less than a year! While that does explain a lack of polish and coherency in places, it's worth celebrating how insane and kinda incredible it is that one guy managed to create 30+ levels in a game over the span of several months; something you'd normally expect from a larger team, and they'd take a couple of years to do a single game - whereas this madman did THREE BIG GAMES in that span of time. --- On another topic, I have to disagree with your stance of not getting into fanfiction. I understand where you're coming from, but I don't think that people's occasionally shallow expectations invalidates the worth that fanfiction has. Writing "original fiction" can also result in developing bad habits specific to that particular area of fiction and being creatively dishonest for the sake of satisfying an audience's desires, but that's only if you choose to be similarly negative about it. I think fanfiction, and indeed any fanmade works like artwork, games, music, cosplay, and what-have-you, can be a great starting point in exploring your creativity. It can help you to discover what you enjoy doing, why you enjoy doing it, what you do well, what you don't do well and more, just as well, if not more so than creating original works - and that's because you're working entirely from your passion and enthusiasm for the things you love. While it's true that you can develop bad traits specific to writing fanfiction, the same applies to creators in all kinds of mediums. The important thing is to be self-aware and vigilant enough to pick up on these traits, consider their implications, and figure out how to move forward. A bad or poor creator is one who remains complacent about their work, and never attempts to improve themselves (for a non-fanfic example to prove my point, I'd heavily argue that Joss Whedon - of Buffy, Firefly, and Avengers fame - is a shining example of a complacent creator, since he never moves outside his comfort zone in terms of dialogue, storytelling, or characterization, and has barely changed how he operates production-wise over the years). It doesn't matter how you get into creating stuff; if you're always trying your best, striving to improve, and care about what you're doing, that's what matters. |
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Post by edmonddantes on Apr 11, 2019 15:59:41 GMT -5
Admittedly I was biased because I had bad experiences with fanfiction, but you're right, any creator can fall when they start putting audience-pleasing ahead of doing what's in their heart. Metal Gear Solid probably being the most tragic example of this... I personally would have been happy if MGS2 or 3 had been the last game in the series.
Admittedly this can be kind of tough to stick to, because of course we live in capitalism, but then again... Tolkien always wrote what he wanted to write and it worked out fine for him. These days you have options like Patreon, but then you're literally handing your balls to your audience and hoping they just happen to like your work.
Maybe the answer is to just always think of yourself as a hobbyist who does creative stuff on the side, as opposed to it being your livelihood?
.... Here's another idea I had: If you're gonna have a pre-reader or beta-reader, have more than one. Also you might want to openly discuss your work on the internet, blogs and stuff. I say that because there is the unfortunate truth of people who steal other people's work, and it becomes a lot easier to prove you came up with a thing if you can produce a blog post where you were discussing it two years ago.
On that note, never delete anything or throw away drafts or concept drawings or what have you. Besides the afformentioned protection, there will come a time when you might run low on ideas, and sometimes the kick you need is looking at your past ideas and saying "Oh holy sh--, I actually had a part where they climbed a glass tower to heaven to get a magic tuning fork?" Then suddenly you start to think about why there's a tower made of glass, and maybe come up with a mythology for it, and suddenly you're running again...
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Post by Weasel on Apr 11, 2019 23:24:30 GMT -5
Maybe the answer is to just always think of yourself as a hobbyist who does creative stuff on the side, as opposed to it being your livelihood? But then there's the question of what is your livelihood, and would said livelihood grant you enough free time to realistically engage in your hobby? This is a struggle I grapple with a lot these days, because the answer tends to be "a full-time job" and "no." |
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Post by edmonddantes on Apr 12, 2019 13:37:31 GMT -5
Here's something I thought of last night:
Advice: Don't take what you hear on Youtube/the internet too seriously about story structure etc.
I came to this conclusion after watching this video where someone analyzed the Buu saga of DBZ... and how it doesn't fit well into a 3-act structure.
I'm like "No sh-- you doofus, 3-Act only applies to film, not TV Series or comic books."
Its sad people are gonna see crap like that and think that even books have to apply to film structures--a problem that already exists (and why most books since the 1990s are basically unreadable).
It's not just this tho. The review culture is very often made up of opinionated nerds who think they're experts because they watched a lot of television, and they think they know why and how things work, but very often they have no practical experience. It's also telling that a lot of these reviewers, whenever they make the leap to trying to be creatives themselves, their work tends to be either horrible, or else "you have to be a fan to appreciate it."
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Post by Apollo Chungus on Apr 12, 2019 15:18:12 GMT -5
Advice: Don't take what you hear on Youtube/the internet too seriously about story structure etc. I came to this conclusion after watching this video where someone analyzed the Buu saga of DBZ... and how it doesn't fit well into a 3-act structure. I'm like "No sh-- you doofus, 3-Act only applies to film, not TV Series or comic books." To slightly defend that person, I can see where they're coming from. The Boo arc is pretty infamous for having an incredibly scattershot narrative that introduces and drops ideas on a whim*, even for a series made by a man who made nearly everything up as he went along, and that general sloppiness in terms of narrative efficiency is something that folks can have an issue with. I think the problem in this case is more of language and trying to explain those ideas with simple, easy-to-understand terms. They wanted to find a concise way of criticizing a story for going all over the place and "wasting people's time" with flights of fancy that it immediately forgets, and they felt that saying it doesn't fit within the 3-act structure was the best way of trying to explain that. However, using the term of "3-act structure" doesn't really work as well as they intended in this case - mainly because that largely applies to films, and isn't a one-size-fits-all term to be used for every work in every medium. While I believe the term can be used in other mediums, I don't feel it should be seen as a golden standard that must always be used. (I was gonna write more on my recent beliefs on the topic of "narrative efficiency" but I can't seem to get the words out properly right now. Bugger. Maybe I'll try it tomorrow.) *I'm gonna quote a member from a different forum on the matter, since they put it ridiculously well:
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Post by edmonddantes on Apr 14, 2019 22:10:45 GMT -5
The main thing that bothered me (well, besides trying to explain a TV series in film terms) tho was, films are "efficient" because they have to be. When reading a comic or a novel or something tho, the whole idea is that you get more deets, a closer look at everything. Or as I explain it in a response video I'm working on, the point of a serialized manga or weekly TV series is that each ep is a look into what's going on in the lives of your animated buddies today. So it makes sense that there would be needless fluff, the same way you might wind up getting a lot of useless crap you never need on the way to fixing your NES.
....
One more bit of advice I have, tho this is less serious than the others:
If your outlet for creativity involves the internet, don't live in places known for frequent power outages or where you're dependent on satellite internet... if you can help it.
Not that I just described why I'm often absent for days at the time or anything...
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