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McAnally's (The Community Pub) => Author Craft => Topic started by: Uriel_spook on June 29, 2009, 10:21:15 PM
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Saw this on peter v. brett's site when checking out some stuff on his Painted Man/Warded Man series and thought I would share it. I am not an aspiring writer but found it interesting and thought I'd share it here for those who are. Hope some of you out there enjoy it!
http://www.sfwa.org/writing/turkeycity.html
(Apologize if its already been posted, searched the forum and found nothing)
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I haven't seen this before. It's great!
The actual workshop description is what my online courses follow. It's amazing how being forced to 'listen' one can actually 'hear' reality, especially if mentioned by several of the participants. Only once did I find myself in a situation where one author insisted on arguing and correcting every opinion. YIKES! If it takes an hour of pointing out where the readers went wrong---it's got a blow out problem of major proportions!
I'm going to print out the lexicon and start tagging things... Thank you for sharing.
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I love the "Dennis Hopper"...
"A story based on some arcane bit of science or folklore, which noodles around producing random weirdness. Then a loony character-actor (usually best played by Dennis Hopper) barges into the story and baldly tells the protagonist what’s going on by explaining the underlying mystery in a long bug-eyed rant. (Attr. Howard Waldrop)"
Solid gold!
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The Turkey Lexicon is really useful. I'd be lying if I said I didn't have just that page bookmarked.
Everything they say about words, sentences and prose is bang on. I do take some exception with the story types section, however. Growing up, some of my favorite stories came from those ideas. Grubby Apartment, God in a Box, and Jar of Tang especially. Also, the day they retire the Space Western, is the day I stop looking at Sci Fi as a marketable genre to the masses. "Firefly," anyone?
I remember writing a "Cozy Apocalypse" story for a writing group. "It was the end of the world. It was the time of her life." Or something very like that. I remember people thinking it was pretty original.
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I didn't want to start a whole new thread for this, and since it comes from the same source, this seems a likely place for it.
This is one of the most useful and complete checklists for world building concepts that I've ever seen, and I've looked at a few. ;)
http://www.sfwa.org/2009/08/fantasy-worldbuilding-questions/
There's quite a bit of repetition as you go through the various sections, but logically so, and it's very easy to spot the bits you've already read and skip them.
And to me, from my story's perspective, I don't necessarily have to answer each and every one of them, but its still great to be able to say "nope, that one's not important", rather than wonder if I'm missing anything.
If there's another good place for world building info, please feel free to point me, or to copy this in, or what have you.
I'd give this one four stars and call it highly recommended. ;D
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Thanks for the Link Uriel, very useful. Hopefully it will help my writing!
I have a complete file of Patricia Wrede's Article there buried on my computer somewhere.
I'll be happy to send it along to someone who cna turn it into a .pdf and Post it somewhere.
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Glad to be of assistance!