First and foremost I'd like to thank terrorcandy for being so wonderful and brave and articulate and just. A truly good person. One day I hope we can hang out.
Agreed, it's truly a shame T__T That's a really interesting take on art in terms of communist society, I never thought of it that way!
Oh neat, that's quite the undertaking! I don't know what I could tell you that you haven't heard before or that someone else has already said here, since I haven't written anything aside from academic papers, emails and comments on LJ in a really long time;;; but uh I find building up slowly from an outline in list form really helps. I start with the basic idea and block out the main points of the argument (or in your case, the plot). From there I decide what I want to say in each section, and make a separate bullet point for each sentence. Then, once I've looked at the detailed outline for a while and I'm happy with the way it's progressing, I can string those bullet points together into a somewhat cohesive whole, and polish it up to my heart's content. It helps me avoid the block where you know what you want to say in a certain sentence, or you know how you want things to progress, but can't really express it the way you want to the first time.
And sometimes you have to distance yourself to get ahead. Whenever I get really frustrated and it's not coming out the way I expected, it's useful to go outside, take a walk and get my mind away from it for a while. Once I come back and read it again, I usually find that it isn't as bad as I thought it was.
Other than that, the things I try to focus on are varied vocab (hello thesaurus.com), keeping my sentences from being awkward, etc... pretty much everything to do with clarity and conciseness, properties which I'm sure you're well versed in already. I hope at least part of that helps you in some way; good luck! ♥
"Distancing" works really well for me. Otherwise my brain starts going in circles. I even lose sleep over stories and puzzles and projects. It's pretty lame haha. Distancing helps distill all that head-junk into workable material, magically somehow in the unconscious. I think there's a term for this phenomenon that Arthur Conan Doyle might have coined (?).
I actually try my very very best to stay away from the thesaurus. Which is not always effective since I end up using too many words anyway but. Sometimes the perfect one is just like. "house" or "ran"
Oh neat, that's quite the undertaking! I don't know what I could tell you that you haven't heard before or that someone else has already said here, since I haven't written anything aside from academic papers, emails and comments on LJ in a really long time;;; but uh I find building up slowly from an outline in list form really helps. I start with the basic idea and block out the main points of the argument (or in your case, the plot). From there I decide what I want to say in each section, and make a separate bullet point for each sentence. Then, once I've looked at the detailed outline for a while and I'm happy with the way it's progressing, I can string those bullet points together into a somewhat cohesive whole, and polish it up to my heart's content. It helps me avoid the block where you know what you want to say in a certain sentence, or you know how you want things to progress, but can't really express it the way you want to the first time.
And sometimes you have to distance yourself to get ahead. Whenever I get really frustrated and it's not coming out the way I expected, it's useful to go outside, take a walk and get my mind away from it for a while. Once I come back and read it again, I usually find that it isn't as bad as I thought it was.
Other than that, the things I try to focus on are varied vocab (hello thesaurus.com), keeping my sentences from being awkward, etc... pretty much everything to do with clarity and conciseness, properties which I'm sure you're well versed in already. I hope at least part of that helps you in some way; good luck! ♥
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I actually try my very very best to stay away from the thesaurus. Which is not always effective since I end up using too many words anyway but. Sometimes the perfect one is just like. "house" or "ran"
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