I really never understood how it was that Twilight got SO big and SO popular. :( A lot of my friends at work - adult women that are older than me, and I'm 30 - LOVE it, and I'd rather... stick a fork in my eye. ¬_¬ It's like someone downloaded a badly written fanfiction and went WHOA WE COULD MAKE MEGABUCKS OFF THIS, KIDS WILL LOVE IT.
I think they'd been editing ff.net, recently, as my profile spontaneously lost ALL its links (quite frustrating as I'd linked a bit of fanart on it, bah!) and the frontpage said they'd done it to stop spammers abusing the site. So I wouldn't be surprised if it had been related. XD
One thing I've been trying to bear in mind for helping me let the reader "experience" things is a little tip I picked up off a writing workshop email: You've heard of "show not tell", right? (I never really understood this myself, for the longest time.) I never found that a very helpful phrase, until I picked up a tip off a writing newsletter. A way of making it easier to ACHIEVE "show not tell" is to delete the word "was" (and its synonyms) from your vocabulary. Avoid it at all costs!
As in: if you can't just say "she was hungry", you kind of force yourself to find more inventive ways of showing it, and they'll usually tend to be more sensory descriptions. (It's weird, but it does seem to work.)
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Re: Future Tense
Date: 30 Jan 2012 03:52 pm (UTC)I think they'd been editing ff.net, recently, as my profile spontaneously lost ALL its links (quite frustrating as I'd linked a bit of fanart on it, bah!) and the frontpage said they'd done it to stop spammers abusing the site. So I wouldn't be surprised if it had been related. XD
One thing I've been trying to bear in mind for helping me let the reader "experience" things is a little tip I picked up off a writing workshop email: You've heard of "show not tell", right? (I never really understood this myself, for the longest time.) I never found that a very helpful phrase, until I picked up a tip off a writing newsletter. A way of making it easier to ACHIEVE "show not tell" is to delete the word "was" (and its synonyms) from your vocabulary. Avoid it at all costs!
As in: if you can't just say "she was hungry", you kind of force yourself to find more inventive ways of showing it, and they'll usually tend to be more sensory descriptions. (It's weird, but it does seem to work.)