Search results

How about you try removing your lips from your friend's (idol's?) bottom long enough to take your own advice, moderator? I know what I'm reading, and what I'm addressing. Do you know what you're reading?

Ernest Hemingway (In Conversations With Hemingway) spoke of a strict schedule and goal of producing 500 - 1,000 words per day. Stephen King (In On Writing) suggests similar, but emphasizes a 1,000 word goal. Almost every writer who bothers to comment on the topic of working the craft suggests...

Here, you're explaining two of the points I've been trying to make myself. First: "I suppose the trick is for each of us to find out how to open the door." Which we learn by doing, not by blowing it off. Second: "I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have found that if I hadn't spent the day...

Which simply means it works for you. The worst thing that can happen by writing when not inspired is that the work needs to be redone or discarded when it's time to edit. The worst thing that can happen by waiting for inspiration before writing is that nothing gets written at all. It's not...

Although Xenocide isn't one of the best in the bunch, the whole series is pretty good, if (and this is a big if) you can accept the premise of Ender saving the whole of humanity in the first book, then spending the rest of his life regretting having done so. I have trouble with that. I enjoyed...

re: Discussing the Writing Challenges -- August & September Truth. It's a lot easier to edit an unpolished, or uninspired, work into something good than it is to edit a great idea which was never written. The words are the thing and the whole of the thing.

The way to write is to write. The world is filled with writers who rarely put words to paper. From what you said about those notes, you know what your story contains so pick a scene and have at it. It doesn't matter if it's in sequence, you already know what the story is and why things are...

re: Discussing the Writing Challenges -- August & September Actually, my only concern is about ideas I've seen posted on the board. Some are original enough to, ahem, inspire others to write them (I'm thinking of guest viewers, not other members). I hope most contributing members realize how...

That would be none. I know some people who think they're SF fans because they like certain movies or television shows, but since the visual media presentations are usually just mindless action, I consider most of them to be closer to Die Hard in space (or with robots) than to real SF.

Regrettably, yes. I'm at the point where, if I know the author's work and generally like it, I don't read those things anymore. The worst that I remember was from a book whose title evades me at the moment, quasi-historical treatment about some startling archeological discoveries. IIRC, the...

re: Discussing the Writing Challenges -- August & September If you don't mind some input from a newbie, especially a newbie who tends to not share non-copyrighted ideas on boards which don't restrict viewers, there's just one thing I wanted to bring up based on the statements quoted above...

Your comments are very close to way I felt about those series'. I could have almost have written them myself. Only part I sort-of disagree with is that it was And Eternity which broke the series. I think it was breaking already, under the weight of the forced bawdy/romantic comedy style...

The character was a disappointment even for a YA series. Harry wasn't so much inferior as he was an underachiever. If it didn't involve solving a mystery he had no business being involved in, his motto seemed to be: if at first you don't succeed, find Ron and do something else. I think he...

Agreed. There was a time when it would have been very difficult for me to choose between the two, but then fantasy suffered from a glut of FRPG players who decided to write stories based on their gaming characters. In some cases it worked out. In most, it really didn't. SF suffered from the...

A truly inferior hero is problematic, rarely seen, and generally only fits into a specific story type where the stakes are very low and purely personal. The characters you discuss are situationally inferior characters, which are common and can be seen in most stories where they save the day...

I don't think I'd consider those characters to be unfinished arcs. It's not uncommon for Pratchett to introduce a character for the sake of the story he's writing, then never use him again. Pyramids, The Truth, and Going Postal have main characters who only existed in the Discworld universe...

Then perhaps that's something I read into it. Only he can say what he had in mind. Call it my perception of his work if you wish. I haven't read more than around half of his stories, and the first story of his I read was I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream which has to have influenced my...

I'm probably at around a three to two ratio of SF versus fantasy books read. That's excluding some writers from your list that I've read but don't consider to be fantasy writers; Ellison and Serling for example. I brought it up because I interpreted the question asked, and discussed, in this...

I think mid 70s to early 80s is off by a few decades, but overall yes, compared to a form which has been around since roughly the dawn of man, science fiction would be considered late to the party. Understandable since there was little widely applied science to base fiction on before the 20th...

Quite a list you have there :) Most, of course, died before the advent of contemporary science fiction, many of them wrote horror or horror-fantasy, and others wrote both SF and fantasy. I'm afraid I'll have to stand by my original statement. While it's certainly possible for a strict...