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Luminosophy
Aug '22
1

My favourite go-to example for this is action related. When you have a protagonist who is taking on a massive gang of bad guys and even though the protag is just absolutely face rolling the gang with little to no effort, the gang never has any sense of life preservation or comraderie. It's very weird that they never seem to care that their friends/ family are going down horrifically right in front of them, and it also never registers for them that they're outmatched, even down to the last man when numbers are no longer on their side. Granted this is both a hollywood and anime problem.

ratscout
Aug '22

As someone who has done a lot of read-for-reads on this site in the past, I would agree that the more prevalent advice I was giving people was:
1. Slow down! Let the characters and stories breathe before you start throwing them into wild situations!
and
2. use descriptions of the environment to tell us about the characters. I was noticing that a lot of the environmental descriptions were rather short, which isn't always bad, but a bit more detail is always nice.

I do think some of this is done on purpose as writing for Tapas encourages this type of storytelling since you only 15,000 characters for each episode and Tapas markets itself as "small story bites." or something like that. It's not exactly great if you want to tell an in-depth story a lot of the time.

I do think a lot of authors on here write their stories more in the style of a comic book/TV show, which is not why people come to books, too.

Ordinaryaverageguy
Aug '22

I decided to turn a series of VA scripts into a short story so I really do have a pile of dialog and almost nothing else. Sometimes, it's just a discouraging slog to edit it and flesh it all out. It's not been as much fun as writing with nothing but white space in front of me.

TheLemmaLlama
Aug '22

Ah yes, describing setting/body language etc is hard :'D This is why I'll always be a comic writer :rofl:

RobertBMarks
Aug '22
Ordinaryaverageguy

You have my sympathy, sir.

RobertBMarks
Aug '22

That's absolutely true. They are not - they are constructs we create for the purpose of telling the story. If we do the job right, they come alive and surprise us.

However, for the reader to buy into our fantasy, they must appear to be human beings, and have the form and aspect of human beings. If we fail there, the reader will walk away from our fiction and find the work of somebody who succeeds.

DasIstWunderblyat
Aug '22

I don't expect you to answer seriously (that was a joke), but yeah. The characters are probably aliens pretending to be human. Hell, check if the writer is an actual human

Though it kind of put me off when sapient non-human creatures behaves exactly like modern humans do, especially those non-humanoid and/or should not have any human influence in their civilization.

RobertBMarks
Aug '22

In fairness, I am talking about characters who are supposed to be human. You are absolutely right about getting it wrong going in the other direction.

YS_og
Aug '22

I have been one to fully agree with the point of not rushing things (and I still pretty much do stick to it), but MAN have I been reviewed by a lot saying my story takes too long to get going (3 chapters are spent setting things up). These were done through DM review swaps and said the story got boring after 2 chapters and no action or plot upstarts, saying they lost interest without seeing anything major going down to kick the story off.

Is it the blind leading the blind conundrum or is there something else to the issue?

IndigoShirtProd
Aug '22

This was a worry for me when I started writing my novella. I had planned it as a short story so I knew going into it that I wasn't going to spend much time on extraneous subplot' everything is pretty self contained. I think my story is pretty well paced, but in a situation like that, where the story would be a quick read anyway, how would you keep from speeding through it, hitting plot points one after the other since there's nothing else for the story to do?

Was it a situation where plot points were introduced but not weaved together? Like point A happens followed by point B then point C but the connecting tissue isn't apparent? And did the inciting incident, or at least one of them, happen within the first 2 chapters, or did it occur later on?

YS_og
Aug '22

It's a rather simple startup, not too much to weave as far as complexity goes. The complaint I got wasn't disjointedness but a lack of action. A lack of the big problem, a lack of the "oh wow! here we go!" kick-off.

IndigoShirtProd
Aug '22

So I can assume the inciting incident, or the thing that kicks off the plot, happened a little later in the story?

YS_og
Aug '22

Right, 4th and 5th chapter got that going. Was told that's too long, needs to be Chapter 1 or 2.

Now again these were DM review swaps. The discord I belong to has a majority of members who are in agreement with OP and so far I am yet to really change anything but those comments do linger

RobertBMarks
Aug '22

That sounds like that's your problem. What's generally a good idea is to have your inciting incident in the prologue or first chapter, and then develop your characters around their reactions to it.

So, for example, in Re:Apotheosis, there's a dual inciting incident in the prologue and first chapter, and then the next seven are character development leading to the first major confrontation (which starts in chapter 9). So, there's a lot of character moments, but they are happening in the shadow of the inciting incident, if that makes sense.

YS_og
Aug '22

There is a major incident but it's not involving the MC just yet as it would make no sense to have them involved without any clue as to how or why they get there. So. of course, there are initial reactions and developments that draw the MC to the issue. There is no action, though. That's what I am trying to point out. There are no fight scenes or chaos blasting directly through MC's world right off the bat.

RobertBMarks
Aug '22

I fear I may not have explained it well. It's not the lack of action that would be the problem - it's the lack of conflict (and conflict is nothing more than something standing in the way of the protagonist - it doesn't have to involve an action sequence). The inciting incident is what starts the main conflict by forcing the protagonist to react. So, you have to have an interaction as soon as possible. And, this interaction can literally be the MC receiving a text about it on his phone, scowling, and then ignoring it - but the ball has been set in motion, and tension has been created in the reader's mind as to how this reaction by the MC will cause things to play out.

Does that make more sense?

YS_og
Aug '22

You did, and I have that. I don't have action or anything that serves as an action genre's "hook"(?) was the critique I often received. I think I wasn't clear enough perhaps. Drama buildup with dialogue and characters headed toward conflict is boring in the eyes of action genre readers perhaps?

Again, I was told I need to kick things off with a bang sooner. I feel it's too much like a Hollywood B movie to just jump in guns blazing left and right just because. But perhaps I was wrong? That was what I was trying to convey initially.

RobertBMarks
Aug '22

Okay, I think I see.

I've subscribed to your story, and if I have time this weekend I'll take a closer look and see what I can make of it. No promises, though.

YS_og
Aug '22

Ah no worries, I appreciate the notion but it's still on the back burner for a some key edits and grammar fixes later on. I know of some things to fix that aren't related to the above concerns but rather cleaning up, enhancing, and refining what I already have going, so you won't be seeing anything polished as yours or other more versed authors here.

Again, I was only trying to agree with your take :sweat_smile: I still feel it's wrong to go flying full speed into everything from the get-go, and was only conflicted by said comments in the past.