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SF's "Write Your Butt Off" II - Return of Writer's Block


Rapier
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SF's Write Your Butt Off! II Votals  

11 members have voted

  1. 1. Which submission will you vote for?

    • "The Heart of Dedication"
      0
    • "The Strength Within"
      5
    • "Simply a Hunter"
      0
    • "One More Time"
      3
    • "Perfected"
      2
    • "No One Is Iredeemable"
      0
    • "Going Forward"
      1

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  • Poll closed on 03/09/2019 at 10:00 PM

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8 hours ago, Dragoncat said:

I found that site because people were talking about ranked voting, but I do think I'd prefer just using multiple choice polls here. We can try that, and if we get ties too often, then we try something different or go back to one vote.

Yeah, I agree with this.

Oh yeah, I forgot to address one more piece of critique I got from a couple people on my entry. The PoV jumping. I did that to establish a family dynamic. I thought my Frederick x Robin family would be more deep and interesting if I added personal interactions between multiples of them, rather than just between Morgan and the other three. Well, mostly, since I never went to Antoinette's PoV alone, she was with her mother.

Edited by Anacybele
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Well, this round's over and Anacybele won as expected. Congratulations! I'll leave @AnonymousSpeed to decide what he's going to do with this "contest" from now on, be it through making another topic and linking here, or something else.

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Yup, thanks! I still didn't expect such an outcome, but yeah. :P

Anyway, here's your prompt!

Your character has a deep, perhaps dark secret, and it gets exposed. How does he or she face the results and consequences of this? Maybe it ends well for them? Or maybe...it doesn't.

Basically, take a character with a big crazy secret, have it get exposed, and make the character and the characters around them react and stuff. This sounds cool, I hope? But I can come up with something else if others want. :) There should always be a backup plan or two!

There's also an idea I've wanted to do with this prompt though, and it would use Winfrey, one of the Awakening OCs I mentioned earlier that did not appear in my winning piece. He's a wealthy family friend of my Frederick clan ever since Freddy and Kelli first got married, as they met on the honeymoon. Winfrey doesn't live in Ylisstol, or even all too close to the city, for that matter. He runs a festival dedicated to heroes of legend in a port town on the coast. But that's not all he does... Since for him to be eligible for this story theme, he has to have a deep secret. And he does indeed have one, and it could be considered pretty dark.

Fun fact: He's named after Oprah Winfrey, the richest black lady in the world. Winfrey's not black or a woman, but there's the wealth connection. And Oprah is cool to me. She had Crayola and Dove chocolate on her show and voiced Tiana's mom in my favorite Disney princess movie!

Yes, I'm aware I can't actually enter, this'll just be for fun like Chloey did. :P

Edited by Anacybele
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Oooh I can be funny with this one. Need to practice writing more comedy and slice of lifey stuff. Though now I’m thinking of research I’ll have to do and it’s going to be interesting to say the least.

Edited by Ottservia
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2 hours ago, Anacybele said:

There's a new thread, Chloey, you have to post there instead.

With all due respect, you don't need to be an ass about it. Chloey doesn't have to do anything. There is no rule that states we all have to immediately transition to a new post. Plus with all the notifications coming from this post as opposed to Anon's, making this the more active thread, it would make sense for a quick post about whether you have an idea to write about to be made here. She should obviously post her entry in the new post as opposed to this one, but again, no one is required to do anything. 

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1 minute ago, DarthR0xas said:

With all due respect, you don't need to be an ass about it. Chloey doesn't have to do anything. There is no rule that states we all have to immediately transition to a new post. Plus with all the notifications coming from this post as opposed to Anon's, making this the more active thread, it would make sense for a quick post about whether you have an idea to write about to be made here. She should obviously post her entry in the new post as opposed to this one, but again, no one is required to do anything. 

...Where was I being an ass? I was just directing her to the new thread. Jesus Christ.

Also, the new thread is needed because Anonymous is now running the contest. He cannot edit someone else's post, so he can't do anything with Rapier's OP here. So we kind of DO have to transition to Anon's thread.

Edited by Anacybele
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2 minutes ago, DarthR0xas said:

With all due respect, you don't need to be an ass about it. Chloey doesn't have to do anything. There is no rule that states we all have to immediately transition to a new post. Plus with all the notifications coming from this post as opposed to Anon's, making this the more active thread, it would make sense for a quick post about whether you have an idea to write about to be made here. She should obviously post her entry in the new post as opposed to this one, but again, no one is required to do anything. 

I kinda figured that to be the case lol.

2 minutes ago, Anacybele said:

...Where was I being an ass? I was just directing her to the new thread. Jesus Christ.

Also, the new thread is needed because Anonymous is now running the contest. He cannot edit someone else's post, so he can't do anything with Rapier's OP here. So we kind of DO have to transition to Anon's thread.

Yeah that is true, however being rude about it doesn't help matters.  Though I feel you might be over reacting just a tad here.  Not that I minded of course.

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Just now, TheSilentChloey said:

Yeah that is true, however being rude about it doesn't help matters.  Though I feel you might be over reacting just a tad here.  Not that I minded of course.

But again, I have no idea where I was being rude in my post towards you. It wasn't my intent to be rude regardless though, just to point out.

Thanks, Dcat. And yeah, we don't need to be getting into any arguments or name calling anyway...

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6 minutes ago, Anacybele said:

...Where was I being an ass? I was just directing her to the new thread. Jesus Christ

It was your wording. Using words like "have" over such an inconsequential post is kinda an ass move.

6 minutes ago, Anacybele said:

Also, the new thread is needed because Anonymous is now running the contest. He cannot edit someone else's post, so he can't do anything with Rapier's OP here. So we kind of DO have to transition to Anon's thread

I'm well aware of that fact, which is why I said at the end that she should post her entry there, but said transition doesn't have to be immediate, and there's no need to be rude over it.

3 minutes ago, Dragoncat said:

She wasn't being forceful, I didn't take it that way.

You didn't, but the wording Ana used seems very forceful to me.

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Just now, DarthR0xas said:

It was your wording. Using words like "have" over such an inconsequential post is kinda an ass move.

"Have" is a horrible word? What?

1 minute ago, DarthR0xas said:

I'm well aware of that fact, which is why I said at the end that she should post her entry there, but said transition doesn't have to be immediate, and there's no need to be rude over it.

We don't need two writing contest threads though. There's no reason for it when only one thread worked fine before. And it's also only one contest, not two. So I'm going to ask a mod to lock this to prevent confusion and so people can see there's a new thread.

I also kind of thought Chloey may not have seen the new thread right away, and if that's not the case, that's my bad.

2 minutes ago, DarthR0xas said:

You didn't, but the wording Ana used seems very forceful to me.

You didn't need to call me an ass. Even if I was a bit forceful/rude, you didn't need to be so rude right back. You're overreacting, imo.

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2 minutes ago, Dragoncat said:

Yeah, I think there was a misunderstanding here. Let's drop it.

Actually, yeah, seems like it.

I don't want anymore trouble, and given my history here, I really can't afford any. So I'm just going to apologize for whatever I did even if I still don't get what I did wrong. I'm sorry. Really, I meant no harm to anyone.

Edited by Anacybele
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1 hour ago, Anacybele said:

I don't want anymore trouble, and given my history here, I really can't afford any. So I'm just going to apologize for whatever I did even if I still don't get what I did wrong. I'm sorry. Really, I meant no harm to anyone.

No harm, no foul. Sorry for the overreaction, 

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1 hour ago, Anacybele said:

Actually, yeah, seems like it.

I don't want anymore trouble, and given my history here, I really can't afford any. So I'm just going to apologize for whatever I did even if I still don't get what I did wrong. I'm sorry. Really, I meant no harm to anyone.

Maybe I'm stirring the pot here, but ftr I'm totally on Ana's side here. She wasn't rude at all imao.

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On 3/6/2019 at 8:14 PM, Ottservia said:

Also I hope people understood why I titled this story “One More Time” no one seems to have mentioned my little motif.

...You frickin...somehow I did not notice this. I wish I had, now.

Anyways, thanks for the critiques my dudes. I'll try and address some of them before moving over to the new thread.

On 3/5/2019 at 7:56 PM, Jotari said:
  Reveal hidden contents

Major issue with this one is that it's just one scene from a larger story. Now that's not necessarily a problem in itself, the issue is that it feels like a larger piece of a different story. The notes you have before the story are basically required to have any sort of grasp as to what's going on (and even with them, I have questions, if they're nobility, how could they not find someone to marry them? If they were commoners with the mafia after them it'd make sense, but that really shouldn't be an issue for rich people). The end result is a story of two people talking about things that I don't really have any emotional attachment to with little else happening.

 

Spoiler

This is in part due to my attempt to also see if I could hit the in medias res prompt to make up for missing it. It seems the narrative suffered somewhat both times I tried to do so(here and in Heart VS Soul), so I'll probably try to be more careful in future rounds. As for the nobility issue, this is again part of me not putting together the proper explanation to begin the piece with - if you're familiar with the Mistborn series, the societal function is very similar, with the different houses making alliances behind the scenes. House Fu'uren ended up making some decisions that angered one of the more powerful houses, resulting in them using their influence to basically make life a lot harder for House Fu'uren, including a series of 'accidents' that resulted in several of the serving staff of House Fu'uren meeting an untimely demise(most of the servants are actually homeless or beggars picked up off the streets to replace the lost staff, another fact the narrative unfortunately lost due to my attempted double-prompt), and of course the mentioned difficulty Darren and Meredith found in attempting to find someone to marry them - curiously enough, the local priests have an aversion to having their chapels burned down/desecrated.

 

On 3/5/2019 at 8:10 PM, AnonymousSpeed said:

@SoulWeaver

I did enjoy this one, not the most of all of them but I really liked some of the ideas here. Namely, it sort of has this question of what "is" marriage, beyond the legal sense, and what officiates it, and though it's mostly just brought up I think it's interesting that it is. It does have too many ellipses and stuff though. Aside from using other things like dashes to break up dialogue, you can also use:

Line breaks, which convey a longer pause than a period.

Placing non-dialogue between dialogue, because the "pause" to read the non-dialogue will affect the pacing of the dialogue in the reader's head. Compare:

  Reveal hidden contents

"It's been too long. We can't go on," they said, staring into the distance.

To

  Reveal hidden contents

"It's been too long," they said, staring into the distance. "We can't go on."

Sorry not to use an example from your story but it was a little easier for me to just make something up real quick.

Spoiler

Meredith is actually one of my favorite characters to write about because her slightly darker story often brings some of these things to question, forcing(hopefully) a more pondery approach to pieces featuring her. Line breaks are something I'm trying to work on as well, you should see my older stuff from before I learned about such intricate complicated writing tools as paragraph breaks - not a pretty picture.

 

On 3/6/2019 at 9:34 AM, Shoblongoo said:

@SoulWeaver

As for your concerns of crossing into M-rated territory: definitely don't think that was a problem here, and if you really wanted to you could have pushed the envelope alot further.

Spoiler

I don't actually like pushing the envelope - Meredith is the only one of the group of eight half-siblings she is a part of whose story pushes things even this far for a reason, though there is another one who arguably goes into similarly questionable territory on a very different pathway. I mostly chose to do something from her story because she fit the prompt the best out of any of the characters I have, and I wanted to try my hand at putting a full-OC piece out for others to view.

 

On 3/6/2019 at 11:44 AM, Rapier said:

SoulWeaver's relies on a separate eight line paragraph info dump to work, and it didn't really seem belieavable that the main conflict was around how a character felt for... having premarital sex. It also relies a lot on past events that it handwaves as the story progresses. Overall, my impression was that it's very wordy while managing to tell very little, but Master Bedroom is my favorite character.

Spoiler

Whoops, I hadn't intended to capitalize that. I do use capitalizations a bit more than most, but I didn't realize I'd done that, haha.
Part of the problem I ran into is that the background info I have built for these particular characters is IMMENSE - I mean I've got most of their entire journeyings mapped out, potential alternate timelines put together, even a short piece idea for Meredith's future daughter, Ellith. As a result, I tend to forget how much of my writing depends on someone knowing such and such other piece of info from here or there in the story, resulting in those giant infodumps. For example, if you check my response to DarthRoxas, I went into detail about why the main conflict is so intense for Meredith and Chell - it stems from the teaching they received from their own father. That's a prime example of something I as a writer take for granted without realizing that readers don't actually have that info available through the piece - I just go of course this would be huge for them, that's how they were raised, but other people don't have that knowledge, which is something I need to work on.

So yeah, thanks for the stuff, I'll see you all in the new thread!

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2 hours ago, SoulWeaver said:

You frickin...somehow I did not notice this. I wish I had, now.

Hey I’ve said before that song fits Severa like a glove and by god am I going to show that. Frankly I’m shocked you didn’t notice considering how many allusions I stuffed in there

Edited by Ottservia
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