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Reading Excuses - 11-30-20 - Aspiring Writer - SotU The Vengeful, the Betrayed, and the Lost - Ch7-9 (4453) - (L,V,G,S?)


Aspiring Writer

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21 hours ago, Aspiring Writer said:

To Develop characters, which is another way of moving the plot, in a sense. You can have chapters that focus on different things, like character, world-building, that kind of stuff. It's not like it has no purpose.

I can see you point on this, but I would say not whole chapters, scenes though, okay. But we have to understand the context of the world and the characters for those scenes to be meaningful, and in this case they are not, not yet. The discussion between V and C, it's very basic in terms of the way married couple talk to each other, IMO. I don't want you to go, but I understand you have a duty. We've all read that or watched it a hundred times. These personal situations need to be more interesting, more surprising and unpredictable. They need to have depth, which is what I come back to again and again when I run in to problems with this story.

I really would encourage you to look at whatever adult shows you're watching, or books you're reading and look at how the big authors handle personal relationships; plot; openings; chapter arcs; all that stuff. I really would suggest going back to the start of Writing Excuses podcast, assuming you haven't already heard it. It's a bit rough in the beginning series, but they cover those big ticket items and how to approach them, different strategies for planning a book, writing a book, writing convincing and interesting characters.

I know you don't want to hear this but, from what I've read so far, I don't think you've got the tools to write the book you're trying to write here. My advice (do with it what you will), would be to do the learning. Seriously, buckle up and listen to those Brandon Sanderson lectures. Maybe the reason they make you uncomfortable is that, subconsciously, you realise that there is so much you don't know yet, or that you need to get your head around before you can write this story. I'd suggest writing some short stories with simple, self-contained plots and practice developing characters with depth and subtlety. Practice delivering a complete story arc in an intriguing and original way, whist building a colourful and wondrous setting at the same time, all in 5,000 words. That's how you learn, develop and hone the skills you need, IMO.

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I'm pretty late to the party, so most of the line by line stuff I caught has already been mentioned. 

A few notes I made while reading:

Chapter 9

The first few paragraphs have a repetitive sentence length and structure. It smooths out later on. 

"But BoLe isn't as replaceable" is BoLe supposed to be plural here? It seems like it should from context. 

V's voice seems to shift around from formal to informal mid conversation with the same person. 

 

Chapter 8

"She quickly wore her mask." Put on?

As a reader I'm a bit turned around about the terms for people's abilities. It seems like "The Pow" is a source of these abilities and also a sort of diety/Force like entity. At the same time the SH from chapter one seem to use 'space' as the implied source of their abilities, as does E and his SpaPow. So far, I'm assuming that the words Spa or Pow both stand in for the same source of abilities. 

Chapter 9

V's ability seems to have intermittent capitalization. Sometimes both words are, sometimes none and sometimes mixed. 

General:

I have to agree that I feel no concern for V's well being. While she is a more complicated character, she feels a bit like Superman. If she can endlessly heal and have powers so long as she can pull the souls out of enemies, the only real threat I could see her having would be forces of nature and machines. Even then, it seems like she has an internal soul bank of sorts to pull from. 

She has the attributes of a sympathetic villian that it will take all the heroes to defeat (Thanos, Dark Seid, Magnito). As a protagonist though, I'm 99% sure she's going to be fine. 

The effort and planning you've put into your world building really shows. I would love to see more of the brass tacks of how everything works. 

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