Welcome! I had a little pause here, but I am back for now.. I think... Would love to see your fic, good luck with it! Worldbuilding instead of writing? Relatable.
As for advice, write characters. Try writing out a conversation between two people and getting a feel for their personalities. Something as boring as yard work can be made interesting if you have a proper conversation between two three dimensional characters. Inversely even the most exciting scene will lose all impact if no one involved is interesting enough for the audience to get invested.
The audience will forgive a lot if they enjoy watching your characters interact.
I have put a lot of thought into Vanora's character. The difficult thing about writing her is that I want her to come across as "understandably bitter," and that's a tough sweet spot to hit. A little too much angst or despair, and I'll end up with "whiny"; a little too little, and actions driven by her deep-seated resentment will seem to come out of left field. Somehow, Paolini managed to do both; here's hoping I do neither.
Welcome! It's nice to see the community growing with new members. Since it's my first time hearing of spitefic, I'm really curious to see how it turns out esp regarding character development. If you don't mind, can you explain what a spitefic is?
but in truth, a great deal of my writing time is spent on worldbuilding and side projects.
Same here. Sometimes it's frustrating when the story gets nowhere due to time spent on worldbuilding.
A spitefic is basically a fic fueled by spite. The term was coined by the Das-Sporking community during Das Mervin's recap of Twilight to describe the small fics Mervin would occasionally insert. This eventually grew into another, related community, TwiSpiteFic, which gave us a list of spitefic genres: Canon Twisting, Death From Above, How It Should Have Gone, Logical Extreme, POV Switch, Reality Enema, Rewrite, Self-Insert, and Take That. A lot of these can overlap, e.g. Death From Above spitefics often intersect with Take Thats, and Rewrite is basically a subset of How It Should Have Gone.
As for what I'm doing here, I suppose it's a good combination of Canon Twisting, Logical Extreme, and Take That, with a trace of Self-Insert and Death From Above. And maybe some Reality Enema.
Switching to the worldbudling note... six conlangs. I have six conlangs for the world of my novel, and I pretty much started doing them so that I would know how to name things. Then it spiraled and I ended up having fun with an invented use of the vocative
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Are you making these for Alaglag or for a separate universe? And if they are, are they completely new or maybe some of them are AL and dwarfish with actual grammar? Now I'm getting excited!
But if you are thinking of including them I recommend only using a few phrases and placenames, and especially not go full dictionary-at-end-of-book like Paolini does. But if you are aware of clicks and vocative case you have definitely way more experience than poor old CP.
I'm also a huge conlanger, though I admit my conlangs are not very original and far from complete.
I'm making them for the setting of my original novel, which I intend to publish once it's finished, rewritten a few times, and polished as close to perfection as I can get it. The languages are mainly used for names, and I'll only be putting in actual phrases when rendering speech in a language the main character doesn't know. If the book gets attention, I might end up publishing my language notes as bonus material
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I spend a great deal of time figuring out whether to translate particular place names that come from the main character's native language. Ilsevand is a particularly tricky one. I translated "Osvand" and "Rinnausva" into "Lakemouth" and "Rivermeet," but "Ilsevand" sounds so much better than its literal translation, "Clearlake." (The culture that named these has a thing for naming settlements after the local water features.)
As for the spitefic, a lot of my effort is going into portraying Vanora correctly as a survivor of some Pretty Awful ShitTM and making sure she reacts realistically to everything she learns in the course of the story. She starts off as an incredibly bitter character who has basically whitewashed Galbatorix as a comparison point to the Varden. Coming to see Galby's dark side is a big point of Character Development, and it's going to force her to develop a less black-and-white view of morality. I hope that the way I've written her is going to put her in a good position to see that the Varden (particularly Nasuada)
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I do! The most complete one at this point is the one those names came from. Most of the vocabulary so far is nouns and adjectives, though I've got a few verb roots in. Other features of the language include a special use of the vocative and separate words for inclusive and exclusive "or."
You are making it very tempting to make a livejournal account and say hello proper. This is my second Anon comment on antishurtugal ever.
World building is fun. I like to start with either topology, physical or magical rules, or a sentient species. Depending on whatever idea shows up first. Once or twice I've started with alternate base biological processes. But, that place was hella weird.
Ooooh, sounds fun! I've kind of stuck mostly to Earth species in my novel, but I have had a ton of fun with the languages, which I promise are actual conlangs and not English ciphers using Old Norse. The most complete one resembles Latin grammatically and some hybrid of Finnish and Old English phonetically. I could probably go on about all my linguistic influences for hours.
See, that's the kind of stuff I find fascinating but wouldn't dare attempt. I have all of one first year course in linguistics 7 years ago to fall back on for that. Compared to 8 years of nonstop physics and math. So I tend to stick to that end of the playground. Conlang is such a great way to flesh out a world. If you know what you are doing. Or can fake it well enough to fool an expert. Best to be an expert before you try that. It isn't something that works in half measures.
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I had a little pause here, but I am back for now.. I think...
Would love to see your fic, good luck with it!
Worldbuilding instead of writing? Relatable.
Thats it from me.
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As for advice, write characters. Try writing out a conversation between two people and getting a feel for their personalities. Something as boring as yard work can be made interesting if you have a proper conversation between two three dimensional characters. Inversely even the most exciting scene will lose all impact if no one involved is interesting enough for the audience to get invested.
The audience will forgive a lot if they enjoy watching your characters interact.
Reply
I have put a lot of thought into Vanora's character. The difficult thing about writing her is that I want her to come across as "understandably bitter," and that's a tough sweet spot to hit. A little too much angst or despair, and I'll end up with "whiny"; a little too little, and actions driven by her deep-seated resentment will seem to come out of left field. Somehow, Paolini managed to do both; here's hoping I do neither.
Reply
but in truth, a great deal of my writing time is spent on worldbuilding and side projects.
Same here. Sometimes it's frustrating when the story gets nowhere due to time spent on worldbuilding.
Reply
As for what I'm doing here, I suppose it's a good combination of Canon Twisting, Logical Extreme, and Take That, with a trace of Self-Insert and Death From Above. And maybe some Reality Enema.
Switching to the worldbudling note... six conlangs. I have six conlangs for the world of my novel, and I pretty much started doing them so that I would know how to name things. Then it spiraled and I ended up having fun with an invented use of the vocative ( ... )
Reply
But if you are thinking of including them I recommend only using a few phrases and placenames, and especially not go full dictionary-at-end-of-book
like Paolini does. But if you are aware of clicks and vocative case you have definitely way more experience than poor old CP.
I'm also a huge conlanger, though I admit my conlangs are not very original and far from complete.
Reply
Reply
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As for the spitefic, a lot of my effort is going into portraying Vanora correctly as a survivor of some Pretty Awful ShitTM and making sure she reacts realistically to everything she learns in the course of the story. She starts off as an incredibly bitter character who has basically whitewashed Galbatorix as a comparison point to the Varden. Coming to see Galby's dark side is a big point of Character Development, and it's going to force her to develop a less black-and-white view of morality. I hope that the way I've written her is going to put her in a good position to see that the Varden (particularly Nasuada) ( ... )
Reply
(The comment has been removed)
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World building is fun. I like to start with either topology, physical or magical rules, or a sentient species. Depending on whatever idea shows up first. Once or twice I've started with alternate base biological processes. But, that place was hella weird.
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