Welcome to Gaia! :: Posts By User Unknown User | Forum

Not very good at reading the rules. stare

Aznroman - 10/10.

Gonna ditto that. I like it otherwise.

BlA5tFiRe - 8/10. Not sure how much I like that grey thing on your face. Also, maybe try a different dagger? Not sure WHICH, but might be worth seeing if another is better.

That would be their primary point of awesome, IMHO.

I think it can depend a lot on the story and characters involved. If a specific reference isn't necessary to some point you're trying to make, it's better to translate it into something generic or make something up. And even if the specific reference DOES say something about the character or story, it has to be a reference you can somehow be ABSOLUTELY SURE the majority of your target audience is likely to get.

Which of these do you think is likely to appeal to a broader audience and be seen as better writing:



Or:



Which one tells you more about the character in the scene?

The rest of you are tl;dr, so here's my thoughts, and sorry if someone else has said the same thing already:

The act of writing does not, in and of itself, make a person a better writer. In order to become a better writer, you have to TRY to become a better writer. This involves self-editing, paying attention to techniques used by other authors, and accepting concrit from your audience and betas... and then not only implementing them into your present work, but making an effort to remember them in future writing. And in doing that, it really doesn't matter whether you're writing original fiction or fanfic or nonfiction. Becoming a better writer is all about the technique, the subject is irrelivant.

Fanfic is often a bridge into better writing for authors interested in improving their work because fanfiction has a much broader audience and tends to attract people who WANT to read it and critique it, so it's a good way to get free feedback.

It depends. Sometimes, a character will pop into my head knowing EXACTLY what he (or she) is to be named and WILL NOT be written any other way (Ambrose Shirlee Dunharrow, Marnie Harris, Alexander Brunswicke...). Others, I have to spend time researching to find the names that best suit them (Xzavier Verdant Quertermous-Quibodeaux was one of those, and characters intended to have a particular cultural background often need a little researching, too...)

As soon as I have qa rhythm, the words fall into place. I've always been able to switch in and out of thinking in rhyming verse, though.

First of all, romance novels are usually not very realistic. They're like Disney movies for adults. They're all fluff and sex and idealism that almost NEVER exists in real relationships.

Second of all... Yes, there is a way to write gay fiction without it being cheesy. It's done the same way ANY literature is written without being cheesy. Just DON'T BE CHEESY.




A lot of what you're saying is essentially true, but IMHO you're being a little too extreme. Homosexuality has become increasingly acceptible and even popular in mainstream entertainment over the past 30 years or more. Some examples:

~Kiss of the Spider Woman, a musical about a gay windowdresser who sacrifices his life for a Marxist revolutionary he has fallen in love with in a Spanish prison, won the Tony award for best musical of 1993.

~RENT, whose cast of characters features not only gays, but also transexuals, won the Tony, Pulitzer, and several other awards in 1996.

~Falsettos, which is really just RENT with Jewish people instead of druggy bohemians, won several Tonys in 1992, including Best Book of a Musical.

~Songmaster by Orson Scott Card won the Hamilton-Brackett Memorial Award in 1981, and the short story upon which it is based won the Nebula Award in 1978.

~Walt Whitman, accomplishing an unimaginable feat, had an updated edition of Leaves of Grass -- a collection of verse with heavy bisexual themes and content that could qualify as pornographic -- sell out in ONE DAY. In 1882.

~The film Wilde, which features explicit homosexual sex scenes, won numerous awards and nominations in 1997.


And that's just a handful in no particular order I happened to think of off the top of my head. There are many, many, MANY other examples of widely accepted mainstream homosexual works -- Xena Warrior Princess, The Invention of Love by Tom Stoppard, the existance of Elton John...

Homosexuality barely qualifies as a taboo in entertainment these days. The trick is that you have to DO IT WELL. Tell a good story, and it doesn't matter whether your characters would rather boink men (Iron Council by China Mieveille, Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2005), women (wow this is a long list, isn't it?), or goats (Notre Dame de Paris by Victor Hugo, 1831), or whether the characters are transsexual (Biting the Sun by Tanith Lee), or androgynous (The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin)... people will buy it, read it, love it.

Oh trust me... not if you see them live.