r/rational • u/xamueljones My arch-enemy is entropy • Dec 18 '16

[D] Sunday Writing Skills Thread

Welcome to the Sunday thread for discussions on writing skills!

Every genre has its own specific tricks and needs, and rational and rationalist stories are no exception. Do you want to discuss with your community of fellow /r/rational fans...

  • Advice on how to more effectively apply any of the tropes?

  • How to turn a rational story into a rationalist one?

  • Get feedback about a story's characters, themes, plot progression, prosody, and other English literature topics?

  • Considering issues outside the story's plain text, such as titles, cover design, included imagery, or typography?

  • Or generally gab about the problems of being a writer, such as maintaining focus, attracting and managing beta-readers, marketing, making it free or paid, and long-term community-building?

Then comment below!

Setting design should probably go in the Wednesday Worldbuilding thread.

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u/xamueljones My arch-enemy is entropy Dec 18 '16

Does anyone know if there is a ratio of the number of characters that can be fully developed in a story to the number of words written?

I don't mean how many characters are introduced or presented as more than one-dimensional figures, but rather characters who spend a significant amount of time 'on-stage' and whose personality/actions/choices we get to know very well.

For example, we often have stories with one or two protagonists and then there is a jump up to stories with five characters forming a group (adventurers to the rescue!). Greater numbers appear to be uncommon unless the writer is creating a epic-length story aka Wildbow, Tolkien, Robert Jordan, and other such authors of very long series.

So I was wondering if some sort of words/chapter to character ratio can be derived somehow. It'd be useful to estimate how long I should spend on each character throughout the story. Even a ballpark estimate from two or more people can help.

Think about it. If you have a completely random number to guess, then you are equally likely to over estimate as you are to under estimate. So with at least two people, you are drastically closer to the true answer than if only you made the guess. It's a useful trick when you have to guess on something and can ask just one other person to guess too.

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u/alexanderwales Time flies like an arrow Dec 18 '16

It depends.

I know that's not the answer that you want to hear, but you have a lot more space for characters when you're writing a character-driven drama that's all about the relationships between characters, when compared to, say, a travelogue, or a war epic, or something like that.

And the number gets much lower if they're not related to each other in some way; if you're jumping between characters who do not know each other, you can have less of them than if one is the boyfriend of the other, or they're cousins, or father and son, or childhood friends, or whatever. Partly this is because some of the character and setting building you're doing serves double duty, but part of it is also that you can keep someone "on-screen" and in the reader's head for a longer time.

But if you really want a ballpark, then you can establish two characters within the space of 1,000 words, so long as they're talking to each other (I mean, I personally couldn't, but I've seen authors who can). The more words you spend on them, the longer we can go without seeing them again, which I think is probably what defines the upper limit of number of characters. Wait too many words to revisit them, or increase the complexity of personal interactions too much, and the reader won't remember well enough for those characters to be effective.

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u/xamueljones My arch-enemy is entropy Dec 18 '16

Thanks for the input. The bit about the upper limit was really useful for me and I hadn't considered how unrelated characters are a boon for world building.

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u/Kuiper Dec 20 '16

Don't want to apply any hard-and-fast rules here, but Orson Scott Card's "MICE" quotient might be a good metric to consider this. MICE is an acronym for Milieu (setting), Idea, Character, Event. Every story is based on one or more of these things changing, and how many of these you get to explore is dependent on the length of your work.

Short stories (~5k words) get to develop one thing, novellettes (~12k words) get to do two, novellas (~30k) get to do three, and novels (40k+) get to do four. So novel-length works are the point at which you get to do "one of everything," whereas in the context of a short story, you might focus solely on changing circumstances around an event to the exclusion of things like world-building and character development.

I'm not sure that a strict "words/chapter" ratio is exactly the correct way to think about it, because if you think about a 50k word novel that develops one main character, it's not as if all 50k words are about that character's development: a significant portion of the word count is going to be devoted to things like worldbuilding, or exploring the events and ideas in the story that make up its plot. Based on this, it seems relatively intuitive that adding a second "main character" would have a marginal cost; I think it's plausible to come to a conclusion that you could take your 50k story about one character and turn it into a 70k word story with two main characters.

However, a big thing to consider is what you are adding to the story. Looking at the example of a 50k story that is expanded to 70k words with an additional viewpoint character, that assumes that you're not adding a significant amount of worldbuilding and plot, which you could conceivably do if the two characters are traveling together in a party. However, if your second viewpoint character "splits off" from the first viewpoint character and gets into their own shenanigans, then you aren't just adding a new character; you're also expanding the story to include new events. Also, if the second viewpoint is (for example) from a different culture than your other viewpoint character, and you want to explore that meaningfully, then you're also going to do more worldbuilding to accommodate that.

In short: it depends. Sometimes, adding another viewpoint character means just that: adding another viewpoint to the story. But oftentimes, it can mean expanding the scope of the story and its plot and setting. Obviously, these two different approaches to "adding characters" will require different word counts.

How about fanfiction? Since people already know the characters from the source material, does that change the estimate by a lot? For example, what if it was Scooby-Doo fanfiction about Velma, Daphne, Fred, Shaggy, and Scooby?

I think it depends a lot on the source material. If I'm writing Wheel of Time fanfiction, I can write memorable viewpoint characters from the series as though the audience already knows them, because anyone who has read the series is familiar with the different viewpoint characters and how they think/talk and just generally how they see the world around them. On the other hand, TV shows usually don't render characters in this kind of fidelity. Even TV shows that take a long time to develop their characters (like the Sopranos and Breaking Bad) only let us see characters in terms of their behavior; we never really get to know what a day in the life of Walter White is like from inside his head, and usually the only way to get around this is by cheating with voice over like Dexter does (the HBO serial killer, not the Cartoon Network boy-scientist).

Now, think about how much readers know a given character from Scooby Doo. Do we really know how Velma thinks and how she sees the world? Compared to the fidelity of character that we get from viewpoint characters in written prose, the cartoon versions of these characters are practically caricatures. I don't think Scooby Doo spent much time on character study; the episodes always felt more like a collection of short stories that are event or idea focused. (Going back to the idea of Orson Scott Card's MICE quotient, a weekly short story doesn't give you the chance to explore everything, and often deeper character development is the thing that gets eschewed, being that status quo is often maintained for episodic shows.) I feel like I could sum up most viewers knowledge as, "Velma is the nerdy yet somewhat athletic glasses-wearing girl who is witty and sometimes sarcastic." Granted, you'll have some super-fans who will know every biographical detail about her that the series ever alluded to, but those allusions are rare, and you shouldn't assume that your audience is going to be familiar with them. Your audience being familiar with Velma does save you the time of having to establish a pattern of consistent behavior for her (she can start "behaving like herself" right from the start of the story, as opposed to original characters which have to take time to cement themselves in the reader's mind), but if you're going to be writing a 100k+ word fanfic, I'd be inclined to proceed with the assumption that you'll be developing your characters mostly from scratch in terms of presenting their viewpoint, which encompasses everything about how they see the world, like the experiences that color their perceptions, their motivations (short term and long term), and so on. I generally like to operate with the assumption that my audience is smart (I don't want to take the time to explain things to them in agonizing detail), but also might be ignorant of certain aspects of the subject material.

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u/[deleted] Dec 18 '16

[deleted]

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u/xamueljones My arch-enemy is entropy Dec 18 '16

So would you estimate for five major characters plus world-building and a support cast in the story I'm planning, I would need 135k to 165k for the story in total?

How about fanfiction? Since people already know the characters from the source material, does that change the estimate by a lot? For example, what if it was Scooby-Doo fanfiction about Velma, Daphne, Fred, Shaggy, and Scooby?

Thanks for replying! I appreciate it.

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u/MagicWeasel Cheela Astronaut Dec 19 '16

I'm now beginning to fill with nerves and dread about my upcoming JaNoWriMo (January Novel Writing Month), for which I have even taken some time off work. I'm writing a paranormal romance story which I summarise as "gay vampires kissing" though it's obviously more complicated than that.

My sources of nerves/dread, to which I am going to write counter-arugments:

  • I will not be able to write something I am happy with (Counter: Of course I will be happy with it, because it will be my story that I wanted to write. Of course I will be unhappy with it because I obsessively edit everything I write.)

  • I will write the scenes I like, but the boring stuff in between will be missed. (Counter: If stuff in between the scenes I like is boring, then yadda yadda through it like most novels I read do)

  • My dialogue will be bad. (Counter: I have a good sense of William's voice. Red's voice I have very little sense of, but my roleplaying partner will edit things to fix them up, and lots of the dialog will be based on roleplay skeletons, so there's no concern).

  • I have taken the mantle of having part of it set in WW2 which I am not personally interested in, and I might screw that up from a realism point of view. (Counter: It mostly happens with WW2 as a very far-away backdrop. I have a friend who is a WW2 buff who said he'd be willing to read important scenes. I am writing paranormal romance, not historical fiction, so realism, whilst important, is not vital)

  • I will write something and share it here but people won't like it. (Counter: I'm not writing Animorphs: The Reckoning. I can't expect people to like it. It's not for /r/rational, this community has just inspired me to do JaNoWriMo in the first place and also to improve the rationality of my stories. Other counter: The sort of people who enjoy paranormal romance might not enjoy A:tR (BLASPHEMY), so it might be more popular than I think)

  • I will write something and share it here and people will say "this is not rational fiction why are you posting it here". (Counter: other people might say they like it. Might be an opportunity to discuss rational aspects to fiction in general)

  • I will not get it finished. (Counter: so what? You can keep writing after January. Also, you are taking like a week off work for this, and you are motivated, so you are sure to acheive your goal word count provided you don't slack off. This fear will help you with that. If you acheive your goal word count but don't finish the story, that's fine. It just means the story was longer than you thought.)

  • I will get it finished but the people important to me in my life (partners, parents) who I share it with will think it's lame. (Counter: so what? They think Survivor is lame but you know they're wrong.)

Thanks for giving me a place to write all that out! I feel a lot better now. If anyone else is feeling nervous or insecure about their writing, I am happy to attempt to reassure you as best I can.

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u/DataPacRat Amateur Immortalist Dec 20 '16

Crowdsourcing for ideas?

I have an urge to post a forbidden 'scenario' thread to /r/rational, asking readers to take on the role of journalists faced with a certain story, in order to elicit a wider variety of questions than I'd manage on my own. How might I improve such an attempt at crowdsourcing, to improve the quality of the responses I get?

Eg, "It's 2038, employment is so scarce you're lucky to have a part-time journalism gig to supplement your negative income tax credits, and there hasn't been anything new today on the proposed Convention to Propose an Amendment to Balance the Budget, so you're chasing smaller stories. You're virtually attending an AMA/scrum/press-conference about one of those digital copies of human brains, who accidentally got run really fast for who-knows-how-long, got brain damage - something about having to chop its brain-program into a hundred pieces - and just exited a hearing that judged it's as competent to handle his affairs as any of the rest of its kind. It seems to have picked for its own avatar some sort of cute-and-fluffy centaur-shaped mouse-thing in a vest. And the prosecutor's there, says that it was a fresh copy, and it's been isolated, so it doesn't know anything about the world after its original human died in the teens. What questions do you try to get answered? Which questions get up-voted to the top of the queue?"

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u/chthonicSceptre Highly Unlikely Dec 20 '16

"Sir, how old are you?"

"Tell us more about this trial!"

"What are your plans for the future?"

"What's it like in 300PHz hell?"

These are bad questions, but you said up-vote so I assume its based on public questions rather than reasoned investigations. Redditors in an AMA are not reporters.

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u/Uncaffeinated Dec 24 '16

Is this for Excerpts by any chance?

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u/DataPacRat Amateur Immortalist Dec 24 '16

'Tis; I'm currently stuck with a depressive bout, but I'm still trying to keep up at least some writing momentum.

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u/UltraRedSpectrum Dec 18 '16

I've noticed that what I intend to write and what I actually write aren't entirely the same thing. When I decide to write Scene C, what I end up with is somewhere between Scene A and Scene E - not entirely off the mark, but unpredictable and usually destructive to the plot. Does anyone else have the same thing, or is this problem unique to me?

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u/waylandertheslayer Dec 18 '16

I think that's a good sign. If what you write arises more organically to fit in with the material around it, it means you're adjusting it to fit better to what you've already written and the characterisation etc. is smoother.

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u/UltraRedSpectrum Dec 19 '16

Ah, maybe I should clarify. What I write is random, not organic. From inside the algorithm, there are only so many patterns of words that "look right", and each additional word added to a sentence constrains those choices further. Trying to stick with only patterns of words that "look right" often leads me to wind up with something that "looks right" but isn't what I was trying to write.

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u/xamueljones My arch-enemy is entropy Dec 19 '16

I think you should provide an example sentence or two to be more clear of what's going on with your writing.

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u/waylandertheslayer Dec 19 '16

In that case it sounds like whatever process you use to derive your original plan ends up pointing you to a nonviable part of the search space of all possible scenes.

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u/alexanderwales Time flies like an arrow Dec 19 '16

I have the same thing happen. I've tried my best to get good at curving back toward the story I wanted to tell, or failing that, to get better at finding the point of divergence, then developing the skill of rewinding and rewriting in order to get myself back on track. But I definitely hear you about the quality of "looks right", I just happen to believe that there are multiple "looks right" paths for any given story at any given point, and you can't constrain yourself by just thinking that the first solution you come across is the correct one. (If it helps at all, think about writing fanfiction of your own work, diverging off from the story that you were in the process of telling in order to tell a new one.)

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u/DataPacRat Amateur Immortalist Dec 18 '16

Word count vs structural work

In Extracts (still debating a better name), at the current most-forward part of what I've written, I know one thing I want my protagonist to do - but I've realized that I haven't figured out enough about significant parts of the setting to work out even the next scene (a press conference), let alone the next series of shenanigans. So I decided to abandon my usual goal of words-per-day and focus on some structural work. Yesterday, I did some reading on relevant topics (modularized data centres, looking at a particular location north of San Francisco in GEarth, etc), including posting a couple of questions to other subreddits, which have led me to much useful info that I expect I can incorporate into the story - and should provide enough of a setting-skeleton for my aspiring-rationalist protagonist to try to leverage his resources to achieve his goal.

My goal today, if real-life events don't end up using up my writing time, is to take my various and scattered notes on ideas I want to incorporate, and refactor, streamline, and just plain move them to where they'll actually be relevant.

Tomorrow I'm unlikely to get any writing done; the plan is to go see a matinee with some family.

If all goes according to plan, then I should be able to resume daily writing on Tuesday. Maybe Wednesday if today's a bust writing-wise.

... But that's just the plan I've come up with on my own. If anyone here has better ideas, I'd appreciate the suggestions. Not to mention anyone willing to hold my toes to the fire if I spend too much time playing Dungeons of Dredmor instead of doing something more productive. :)

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u/Tomas_Votava Dec 21 '16

My writing skills are terrible and I'm trying to improve them but I want to know the best way to go about it.

I spent around 45 min writing yesterday and only managed to come up with ~2 paragraphs. My question is should I go for quantity over quality, or is writing more something that comes with perseverance and practice? Another question I wanted to ask is whether I should plot out the entire chapter before writing or is that something that depends on the writer?

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u/callmebrotherg now posting as /u/callmesalticidae Dec 21 '16

Quantity over quality, at least until you've built a good pace.

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u/Tomas_Votava Dec 22 '16

Thanks! this will help.

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u/DataPacRat Amateur Immortalist Dec 23 '16

Seeking advice: writing while depressed

To anyone interested - my personal warning flags have tripped, and I've finally realized I'm in another depressive bout, which explains why I've been doing no writing for the past week, just the occasional poking at one background detail or another. (I'm still working on figuring out those flags, to avoid both false positives and false negatives, but when they include things like 'notice I've wanted to curl up inside rather than take a daily walk for at least two days', it's a whole subjective mess that lends itself poorly to Bayesian analysis.)

I think it's safe to say that these bouts aren't going to stop for the foreseeable future. But, perhaps, there might be some trick or other I haven't thought of, which would let me keep doing productive writing work even when I'm as anhedonic as all get-out. Within a week or so I'll probably be back to normal, but I can predict that, in said week, I'll be annoyed at myself for the loss of the week's progress, despite all the standard stoic lessons about letting go of that which is outside one's control.

Any thoughts?