Our dauntless Hosts/Authors Steve Diamond and Larry Correia return this week to once again discuss an irresponsible tweet and explain how character growth & development SHOULD go (spoiler alert: it’s not by running down a checklist)
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Dumb question, is there a quick and dirty reference for how to write good fight sequences?
I know there’s a longer one coming later, but it has occurred to me, once one has set up a sequence to include both the grim reaper and a rabbit with a bazooka launcher, one has also set expectations that one needs to at least attempt to meet.
Thank you,
Harry Voyager
There’s a lot of writing advice posts on the “Best of MHN” link above.
https://monsterhunternation.com/2010/06/25/ask-correia-6-writing-action/
Ah, thank you. I will definitely give that a listen!
Only started listening with the Writer Dojo, so wasn’t aware of his earlier podcasts yet.
I mean read, because apparently I am an idiot who cannot…
How soon until your parole hearing? By my calculations, you should be out of FecesBook Gulag today.
I’ve been thinking of that stupid “advice” from Twitter. I can think of only a handful of example where a character actually does a 180 like that, and they’re ALL a video game where the player defined main character learns a plot twist and learns the claim they’re just a viewpoint character was wrong. Of course, this is a change from from “blank slate viewpoint character” to literally anything else. Like the random soldier was secretly a villain brainwashed by the “heroes” to lead them to the super weapon he was using, or that the hero You, the person on the other side of the TV series, have been advising is actually a villain who is responsible for you not knowing anything about the game’s world (or the prequel to that, where you think you’re being addressed directly like that again but are actually playing as the eldritch abomination imprinted in the main character’s head from the super soldier experiments he was used for as a kid). All of them have plenty of foreshadowing (though I’d argue the first doesn’t really change the plot unless you go the evil route).
As for The Clone Wars on Anakin: The ending really redeems RotS’s scene where he whines about not being given the title of “Jedi Master”. With the 3D Clone Wars you learn he essentially DID qualify as Master (have a Padawan graduate to Knight) and only because of the same Council’s mistake, wrongfully blaming his nearly graduated Padawan of a crime, did he not actually get the title.
Larry’s “Bad Writer Advice Voice” cribbed from Bobcat Goldthwait? Very appropriate.
I actually admit, I once -was- the indignant recipient of corrective criticism, where a person who had purchased an anthology I submitted a story for tracked me down on Facecult and DM’d me to correct me on a line in my story where the protagonist, an Air Force Colonel, says he’d like to avoid “an involuntary vacation to central Kansas” (alluding to a prison stay at Fort Leavenworth, though I never mentioned the actual place name). This person DM’d me, in a rather obnoxious fashion, to inform me that Fort Leavenworth is actually in “Kansas, not Central Kansas”.
At the time, I was driving from Montana to Arizona, with a pit stop in eastern Oregon to pick up my dad and his box trailer, to pick up my newlywed wife’s household goods and move her up to my place up north. I had been on the road for 22 straight hours at that point, had been driving for all but three hours of that (Dad took over to let me sleep), and when he woke me up to get fuel in Las Vegas, I’d noticed the message notification on my phone.
To be fair, this person was right, but as I was feeling somewhat irritable at that moment, and the response itself was written rather rudely, I responded in kind, saying something to the effect of, “Okay, whatever. It’s my editor’s job to point out goofs like that, not yours, but I’ll take it under advisement.”
She then responded with the gem of a line, “If you are asking me as a reader to buy your product, it is your -job- to be factually correct.”
This was really funny to me, as we were discussing a fiction story, in a fictional alternate history anthology, but I digress.
Between that, the fact that I really wasn’t in the mood to put up with attitude from anybody, the fact that I had another six hours of driving ahead of me, and the comically perfect setup provided by this stranger saying, “If you are asking me……”, I did the right thing and responded with a Pulp Fiction-era Samuel L. Jackson meme, captioned, “I don’t remember asking you a -goddamn- thing!”
While I thought this was pretty funny, this person apparently didn’t agree. The words “Vulgar little asshole” were thrown out, and she swore to never, ever buy any of my books again.
I really didn’t care at the time, but in hindsight, as a fledgling writer just getting his career off the ground, probably not a good business move. I’ve tried to use that incident as a learning experience ever since.
Finally getting around to listening to the episode, and the Twitter’s advice sort of sounds like a perversion of a different piece of advice I’d seen to make sure that the characyer’s core dilemma was about things that were fundamentally opposed to eachother.
Basically find the thing where they have to pick between A or B, where A precluded B and B precluded A.
The choices are opposites, and choosing it changes the character, and the character who chose A may well not recognize the character who chose B, but neither of them are opposites from the character before making the choice.
That said, I’ve barely even started, so just because it seems like a good idea, doesn’t mean the readers will actually like it. We shall see.
Yeah. When I saw it on twitter I thought I could probably see where she’d come up with that or felt it particularly useful way to think about it for her but as stated it made no sense at all. And writing advice people do this sort of thing all the time. One fellow I actually find useful goes on and on about how the stakes of the story have to be death, but then he goes on to define “death” to mean just about any irretrievable loss no matter how normal and non-lethal. Losing a relationship or a career or self-respect, etc.
Without the long explanation of “not the *complete* opposite, just some tiny personality quirk or opinion that the person is going to have to come to terms with and change” people who are looking for advice, particularly newbies, are literally going to take the advice literally.
Would there happen to be a transcript of these episodes? If not it’s cool. I do way better reading than listening now days.
There’s not. Sorry
YouTube has automated speech to text transcript you can access by clicking the three dot icon to the right of save (at least if you’re on a desktop). Has a few issues though, the big one being total inability to distinguish between multiple speakers (which is, naturally, not great for a two person back to back thing)
Get it while you can though. It’s an actually useful feature for a lot of things (for example, finding particular parts of a long video), which means Susan is eventually going to axe it with little to no notice and even less reason.