User talk:Bringer Of The Light

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WhyAmIReadingThis (talk) 07:54, March 16, 2016 (UTC)

Advice
Hey what seems to the problem? Is there a specific story up on the WW you'd like me to review or are you looking for more general advice? ChristianWallis (talk) 09:20, October 1, 2016 (UTC)

1) How long should my stories be written? Like how do I tell when the story starts to get too boring or it's too short?

Some good benchmarks are 1500, 3000, 6000 and 10000 words. Aim for one of these but be flexible. What’s most important is the amount of content that goes into each story.

Characters - Creepypastas typically fall around the 1500 word mark and for this reason they keep a low number of moving parts. This usually leaves room for one main character with a threat/monster and some ‘set dressing’. This could mean a wife, a kid, a random passer-by etc. For example Abandoned by Disney has a main character, and a setting. To be fair though, none of your stories suffer from character overload, but I still thought I’d mention it. (In other words limit a 1500 word story to, at most, two characters. You can start to get a bit more adventurous with longer stories).

Mood/atmosphere – this is critical. Again, to refer to, Abandoned by Disney there’s a lot of work to build up the overall tone of the setting. For more on this I have a blog by here that goes into detail on how you can achieve this using descriptions and language. You should take every opportunity to build up mood/atmosphere but without getting silly. Try to infuse it in every aspect of your story. It can be as simple as a well placed word, or a three hundred word descriptive passage. It can be in the plot, it can be in the way a character talks. Again though, I didn’t think you suffered in this area but it’s always important to read and acquire a large vocabulary. In my blog you’ll see that Lovecraft has a stupidly large vocabulary and it’s one of the reasons he’s strongly praised for his atmospheric stories.

Plot – When you talk about a story getting boring I think this is what you’re referring to. Aside from characters and a setting a story needs a plot. You need a sequence of events. A good place to look for inspiration can be TVTropes because it goes into detail about the distinct and specific repeating trends/patterns of storytelling in narratives. This can give you a really helpful sense of storytelling conventions. Let’s look at your WW story “Think Before you Speak.”

This story contains a plot of “kid pisses off woman, gets spooked, has nightmare.”

There’s a few reason this falls flat. First there’s no real payoff. A story should make its characters suffer no matter what genre, but damn this counts double for horror. When a kid trespasses against an old wise woman in a story the audience will be expecting severe consequences. Insanity, murder, pain, mutilation, loss, grief, maybe even just mindless terror. But the threat needs to be palpable and legitimate. You invoke a classic story setup, but don’t pay it off. In contrast Abandoned by Disney has the character go to an abandoned theme park only to come across some Mickey Mouse monster. (Trope: abandoned places have terrible things in them). It invokes the story setup perfectly and pays it off. Guy goes to abandoned place (Disney) finds something terrible (Monster Mickey).

Your story invokes kid doing something bad (pisses off old woman) and suffers with… nothing really. On one hand you end this story with a warning—that’s perfectly fine—but there are more fun ways to leave a warning. Dead horse’s head, dead family, real threat of death etc. You seem closest to invoking that last one (terror is his punishment) but the threat never feels real. Abandoned by Disney’s protagonist survives as well, but the threat is made real with the way the setting is abandoned (it was so serious people just gave up on the theme park) and a mascot outfit filled with a dead body (so it can and will kill).

2) How do I write a story in present-tense? I mean each time I tried to write a story in first perspective, the only tense that I always found suitable has been past-tense.

Present tense can work for some people. I actually stay well away from it. I think past tense is a good way to write because it grounds the story in a determined timeline and works with some basic assumptions. First the narrator must still be alive, second they must be telling the story for a reason, and third they can only tell people about things they personally saw/experienced. They can relay things they’ve overheard but they can’t magically know everything that’s happening. This puts you and the audience on the same footing with clear cut expectations and gives you a good reason for hiding certain things to create tension.

Beyond that I typically see present tense used in third person narratives because it avoids the question of, “Why the hell is someone narrating their life?” but still takes advantage of the way that the present tense feels quick and immersive. Nonetheless it can work in first person, it’s just genuinely difficult (there are fifteen tenses in the English language and it’s stupidly easy to mix them up). For this reason I usually see the first person present tense combo in shorter micropastas where the short length favours a risky/difficult style.

3) Should I write explanation or give subtle hints? For instance, I was writing the werewolf story. The one you saw about 3 days ago.

Is it relevant to the plot? People don’t need to know why someone moved unless it’s important to either the characters, setting, plot, themes or plot. If it’s not then don’t bother. I can’t actually remember the specific story you’ve mentioned (feel free to post it to the WW and I’ll review it if you like) so I can only be vague. Let’s say she is saved by her abusive husband then yeah we need to see that established because the reason she moved is integral to explaining the story’s sequence of event. If it’s just to explain why she’s moved to a stupidly dangerous place (like a dangerous neighbourhood) then it can help give but it’s not as necessary as in the first example I mentioned. A hint in this situation will do.

As another example the reason for her moving might be used to create a specific mood. Again, if she moved because of domestic abuse, then the woman might be paranoid that her husband will find her. If it’s because of financial troubles then it might create an atmosphere of desperation and despair.

Here you will find Kurt Vonnegut’s rules of writing; I’ve found them extremely helpful and they basically cover the idea of writing economically where each word must serve a specific purpose and the more purposes it serves the better.

As a really brief example I’d like to refer to the scene in Alien where Ripley tries to stop the infected astronaut from boarding the ship. The dangerous situation feels tense and creates an atmosphere of urgency. Ripley’s decision to enforce quarantine and put her crewmember’s life at risk lets us know she’s a tough pragmatic character who values safety. The decision of the other crewmembers to let him in anyway lets us know why a dangerous hostile lifeform is allowed onto the ship. It builds up tension and mood, creates character, and moves the action forward.

<p class="MsoNormal">4) (Related to question 1) How do I detail something without making it too long? Each time I tried to detail something, it seems like I'm overdoing. But other times if I don't do it, it seems like lazy writing.

<p class="MsoNormal">This is hard to answer. Try to build up at least three of following with each sentence; characters, setting, mood, plot, themes. Nothing but experience with writing and reading will help you find a better balance between the need for brevity and the need for explanation. Still a good rule to follow is to avoid redundancy between sentences and words. Orwell’s rule for writing can be helpful here: If there’s a shorter way to write something then write that instead.

<p class="MsoNormal">For example,

<p class="MsoNormal">You ran to your window to open it in a desperate attempt to call for help, but you found that window have frozen shut and that temperature in your own room was getting more and more colder by the minute.

<p class="MsoNormal">First let’s reorganize a little. The reason the window can’t be opened is because it’s frozen shut. You need to start with that because it’s important to the sequence of events. You need to go cause then effect. The room is frozen (cause) so the window is unable to be opened (effect). Reorganizing it also lets us cut a lot of words. Similarly the phrase “in a desperate attempt” is trying to tell us how something is being done, but the adverb “desperately” does the same thing. You don’t need “more and more” combined with “colder” because they both let us know that the same thing is changing  (it’s redundant). You don’t need to say “but you found” because “but find” does the same thing with fewer words. Putting all this together we have,

<p class="MsoNormal">You found that your room was getting colder by the minute. You desperately run to your window to open it to call for help but find it frozen shut.

<p class="MsoNormal">That’s a 25% reduction – one in four words have been removed. The result is smoother and faster. You’ll find the more you re-read your work the more you see opportunities to streamline your wording. No-one writes with %100 efficiency but this will help you make each sentence achieve more with fewer words.

<p class="MsoNormal">Hope this helps. ChristianWallis (talk) 18:15, October 1, 2016 (UTC)

Please Be Careful
Hey just to let you know I reversed the edits you made to Please Be Careful. Not only are they justified by the context (the start of the story is actually a story within a story written by a young teenager) but it serves the specific purpose of acting as a red herring to subvert the reader's expectations. It's a fair mistake to make but I thought I'd reverse it anyway.

Edit - Wow the combination of my slow connection and terrible computer meant that Mr.Dupin beat me to it so bear that in mind if he leaves you a message too ChristianWallis (talk) 15:51, October 17, 2016 (UTC)


 * Somehow I beat Christian to the correction, but he beat me on the message. I think that's a first. MrDupin (talk) 15:54, October 17, 2016 (UTC)

Edit
Hi there. I'm afraid the most recent edit you made (on Please Be Careful) was incorrect. While it is true that the capitalization was wrong, the mistakes were intentional. That part of the pasta was actually a character reading a story from a paper, so the mistakes should not be changed.

That is all, have a good one. MrDupin (talk) 15:52, October 17, 2016 (UTC)


 * Don't worry about it. I almost fell for the same mistake when reading the story. It was a tricky one.


 * Take care. MrDupin (talk) 16:49, October 17, 2016 (UTC)

The Marked for Review Category
When adding the marked for review category, please add the categories to the bottom of the page in between brackets, like this:, as you left a category on Soni Mod.

TenebrousTorrent  12:57, November 1, 2016 (UTC)


 * NP


 * TenebrousTorrent  13:48, November 1, 2016 (UTC)

Big fish
Interestingly enough, I happened to catch parts of two episodes of River Monsters today. One talked about Wels catfish in Europe and the other talked about a mysterious fish that was attacking people in the Mekong River in Cambodia (He also mentioned searching the Mekong River in Thailand in a previous expedition, but that was another story). As much as I've read about animals over the years, I was just astounded. He talked about wanting to catch a 150lb catfish and I thought, "No, get out of there! You can't have everything you want!" I turned into an antagonist from the anime One Piece ("Forget your stupid dream!"). It was really fascinating to watch, so I'll have to watch more episodes sometime.

I also re-read those urban legends about humongous catfish. There's one claiming that divers in a murky body of water saw what they thought was a VW Beetle with an open hood bobbing up and down, but when they got closer, they saw it was a gigantic catfish with its mouth moving up and down. Any thoughts? Raidra (talk) 00:42, November 14, 2016 (UTC)