Is there something you just have to write about? I love writing about poverty for some odd reason. I like putting in the nitty-gritty, but also writing about the strength of people struggling to overcome it. In additon, if we're talking setting, then I love to write it taking place on a rainy night. Also, I love writing naive, laid-back guys if I'm writing a romance. They always show up and tend to become the love interest, whether I want them to or not. No, no, I have total control over my writing world. Really, I do.
I'm one of those guys who just loves to capture brief moments and scenes. Things like sunrise and sunset, thunderstorms, The view from an air plane window. Wow, I guess I like things that have to do with the sky! But mostly anything that inspires awe or wonder, I like to try to capture. >_< I should probably take a poetry class, because it would serve me well! I don't know why I haven't yet-- oh yeah, because I've only recently begun to really appreciate poetry. As far as stories go, I am one of those odd guys who likes happy or triumphant endings in a way. I like to write about people becoming better or more than they were. Kinda the "rising hero" story or the character has to make a choice to do the right thing or become someone they aren't used to being. I'm an optimist who chooses to think that most people are redeemable. Ironically, I like to create non-redeemable villains. Whether they think they are doing the right thing or they just plain know thy're sick, there is just something about a villain that can't be reasoned with that just seem so impossible to overcome. I guess one other thing might be fantasy or sci-fi settings. Most of my stories cannot e set in the real world or the present one ha ha! I just hate the idea of exploring current problems realistically, I'd rather do it symbolically through characters who can do extraordinary thing in extraordinary places. (I like adventure )
I like writing about how ordinary people deal with extraordinary situations (with highly varying success depending on the characters). I'm also fascinated with experimenting with different ways to cause the reader to feel the emotions I want them to feel, whether it's fear, anxiety, arousal, sadness, or whatever I happen to be going for in a given scene. If I can't make the reader feel something, I don't think I'd see as much point in writing. It's just tricky sometimes if I haven't yet managed to dissect the exact things that trigger the emotion(s) I'm trying to convey.
oddballs and odd situations. I've lived with a lot of funky people and I played pretty much the straight 'man' to the chaos around me, so it's sort of natural when I'm writing that I create an equally strange world in which these bozos create trouble and then seem puzzled by it. My characters are mostly outsiders - the guys you don't make eye contact with on the street or the guy thrown out of a movie theater or some freak moaning and bleeding in a hospital room kicking up a fuss in the hopes a nurse will toss pain killers his way like peanuts to a caged monkey. I also like to discombobulate fantasy by sticking in something somewhat profound - well, I try to anyway.
Interesting, peachalulu, I've written (no... started writing, then abandoned!) exactly one story like that where I basically took a lot of real-life people I knew, combined and mixed their quirks and oddities, and ended up with a story that is both amazingly funny and stupifyingly silly, depending on what part. When writing it, I tend to think it's completely realistic. As far as obsessions go, there used to be a time when every story I started had to have a spectacular gunfight at some point, no matter how completely out of place this would seem from the initial setting (you can imagine the sort of homework I produced when the English teacher asked us to complete the story of the eight-year old boy coming to his new school or something). In more recent times, every story I start eventually contains sex scenes.
I love writing dialogue. There's nothing I like better than getting a bit of banter going back and forth. I get lots of excuses to do it as everything I write is primarily character driven. My collection of short stories are set in a brothel. I like exploring sexual motivations, issues involving sexuality, morality etc. but I like to do it with a light hand. Sex is inevitable, but it comes in many different flavours, and if I can work a bit of dialogue into the proceedings, so much the better. If I ever decide a character is mute and asexual, I'm in big trouble.
@Duchess-Yukine-Suoh I have the same. Not poverty in particular, but I tend to go with the downtrodden for characters. Most stories that I come up with (and never take the time to write down or finish) can be boiled down into the rags -> riches or, more interestingly, riches -> rags type of stories. (Child) abuse is also a recurring theme, not so much that I obsess over it, but it's (and I risk sounding like a loony here) a theme that I -for some reason- am eager to explore. I guess it has to do with the fact that I quite easily feel sorry for other people, and in my mind child abuse really is one of the most horrific things imaginable. I am aware that this might be different for others though... Last but not least, I -like you- tend to go dark and gritty. Reality is harsh in what little I have written down. My aim is always to create starkly contrasting moments of happiness, joy and -on the flipside- desolation, loneliness, solitary confinement etc...
Sorry I don't mean to derail this thread, I'm just wondering if that's the correct use of your hyphens - would the following be better? Last but not least, I, like you, tend to go dark and gritty. Reality is harsh in what little I have written down. My aim is always to create starkly contrasting moments of happiness, joy, on-the-flipside desolation, loneliness and solitary confinement etc... Getting back to the topic - I used to love writing erotica, and people who read my stuff felt it if you get my drift - by the way did we set up an erotica room? Now I don't have any specific writing obsessions but I do like to secretly include today's world politics into ancient settings.
hey what happened the format in my last post? I spaced out paragraphs and when I saw my post in full block I went back to edit with double spacing and it put it back in one block... and it's blue???
Weird one. On the subject of the Erotica section, I've been wondering the very same thing myself. The poll certainly seemed to indicate that many were in favour of setting one up, or at the very least had no hard objections. (No pun intended.)
I think we have to be real nice to @Wreybies and ask him for the key... (just testing for spacing) (just testing for spacing) (just testing for spacing)
There was a broken BB tag somewhere in the post. I discovered this little peculiarity myself just today. Unlike the old vBulliten platform that would just ignore BB tags if they were broken and leave them as plain text, XenForo will go back to the last correct open tag and create the appropriate close tag at the end of the text. I fixed it... I hope.
Trust me, I've been biding my time with that matter because there are still small technical issues that are being ironed out as regards the change to the new platform. I write a good bit of LGBT oriented erotic spec fic and would love nothing better than to foster an area of the forum where such work can be discussed, critiqued and bettered in a mature, intelligent atmosphere. Right now there is no "key" to be had because there is as of yet no "door" to open.
@Wreybies ... It's good to know we have a mod on our side. I would be very interested to read your stuff. I get the feeling it would amount to a great deal more than smut.
I never really considered it before a few weeks ago, but I find that a recurring theme for me is young heroes, or men who are trying to recapture their youth in some way. I respond positively to stories in which young characters accomplish a great deal, who take on adult responsibilities and succeed, and who achieve great happiness and satisfaction in their lives at an age when most people are still trying to figure out what they want to be when they grow up. This isn't because I had an unhappy childhood; quite the contrary, in fact. My childhood was, by most standards, idyllic. Maybe it's because my adult life has been full of more pressure than I like, and I wish I still felt the way I did when I was a kid. Even this doesn't always hold, though. My current work in progress (a novella) involves, in part, a fourteen-year-old boy whose illusions get shattered and he ends up committing suicide. Strong stuff, and I'm trying to figure out how to handle it. The story is not intended to be a tragedy. The other obsession I have is with voice and style. I love writing beautiful sentences and beautiful paragraphs. I write slowly, I edit as I go, and I like writing by hand because of this. More than anything else, I think that's why I write in the first place - I want to get beautiful language onto the page.
How the hell do you edit as-you-go when writing by hand? If I did that, my journal would be one huge scribble crossed out a hundred times I praise MS Word for the ability to cut and or delete.
I draw a line through text I don't want. I insert text in a different color. If there's too much to insert between lines or in margins, I just write an A with a circle around it, and write whatever goes where the A is on the reverse side of the page. (When I use a notebook, I only write the main text on the right-hand page; the left-hand page is for edits.) My first drafts wind up looking like mad works of art - multicolored scribbles, text at right angles in margins, etc. etc. They look marvelous. Some pages I want to frame and hang on my walls! Of course, the final draft has to be on the computer, but that's the draft that's no fun. Drafts written on computers, with their ultra-clean cuts, pastes, deletes, and so on, have no character. They look shallow - they don't show all the work that went into getting the scenes the way they are. Handwritten drafts look like they've been through the wars and emerged triumphant.
The novel I'm writing currently has several key conversations between my MC and his thus-far-unresponsive love interest. It's like a verbal tennis match; each character hits one over the net, and the other one tries to hit it back a little harder and off to the side. It's been my favorite part of the endeavor thus far. My two characters are also bright and at least have a pedestrian understanding of psychology. Using it on each other is their favorite pasttime. It's also building the romantic tension as things progress; I just hope they stay out of the sack and on my timeline for another few chapters.
I love writing humour - there's so much funniness to write how can I resist? Funny conversations, funny situations, funny characters, they're all up for grabs.
I like writing post apocalyptic stuff but with more focus on the character interaction in such a setting.
I particularly enjoy employing in humour the direst, or unlikeliest of situations. I sent a piece to another member, last week, to get a bit of feedback. In the opening paragraph, there was one line. I didn't point it out, but I wondered whether the humour might be lost on anyone but myself. How glad was I when she went out of her way to mention the line, and I realised she 'got it.'
I love writing stories to be as dark as I can reasonably make them, usually because I watched or read another story and thought to myself "That would have been perfect if everything went wrong somehow." Some of my favorites projects have been born of fairly innocuous sources. I had a story once where the main antagonist was a witch who made a deal with some demons to use their magic to make the world a better place, but found that she wasn't able to repay them their debt of souls, so after abandoning her initial goals and attempting to capture all the souls in a small town, she failed and thus was dragged off to another plan of existence full of endless agony and torment. The story was inspired by Dr. Facilier from The Princess and the Frog.
I'm obsessed with realism... and I'm supposed to write fiction. But I just really have to have all the facts straight (or intentionally wonky), whatever the subject. I also write a lot of warrior women with daddy problems. It's shameless, crappily veiled self-insert, to be honest, but who isn't self-inserting to a degree? (I know this military woman writer who constantly self-inserts herself to her stories about military women). I love everything combat-y, horse-back riding etc. I love learning neat skills and stuffing them into my characters. Writing is like a double escape. First I escape my "normal" life to activities that are fun and physically challenging, then I escape into the novel's world where I transfer those experiences into a written form and weave a fantasy world around it, tell a story that I think would be interesting and exciting. I might also be a little bit obsessed with portraying French people and their culture. And grumpy, snarky men and women with active sex lives.
This might sound a little eerie, but my literary mind is sometimes monopolized by cunning and deceit. I can't abstain from including both in my texts no matter what.
