If swear words are used to excess, it can seem like the writer isn't skilled enough to get the point across without them.  However, the writer also has a responsibility to keep the character consistent and believable. 

I have a major problem with readers default assuming "the writer is not skilled enough to get the point across without them" rather than "the writer is portraying a character who is not very verbally original".

It depends on the character background, and the background culture's attitude to swearing.  Prissier language would actively misrepresent a setting like Reservoir Dogs or The Commitments or Trainspotting, and would to my mind therefore be wrong in writing about it.

It can also depend on your genre; "Damn you to hell" may offend people less than the f-word in a contemporary realistic USAn setting [ it will be a great deal more offensive in mid-1990s Germany, from my experience. ], but it should have a lot more impact if it comes from a heavyweight exorcist getting really cross in an urban fantasy setting where she might well be capable of causing it to be literally true.

Personally, I've had co-workers note about me that when I was using elaborate invective, it was worth trying to calm me down, but when I said "Oh dear" in a particular tone of voice they cleared the lab.  SFAIK, ten years later that lab was still using my voice saying "oh, dear" as an error message on several of their computers.

Hello all.

I was wondering how many writers (pro or otherwise) used a test audience to gauge the story as it's being written.

I do.

People reading as you go along and wanting more are helpful for motivation. People reading the whole thing for flow are also useful, and I do prefer that to be separate people, good alpha-reading and good beta-reading are quite different skills.  And the only way to tell whether someone will actually be good at it for you is to test them on your stuff., sfaict.

I try to avoid using friends and family as test audience, because of the bias.

I'm not sure I'd want someone looking over my stuff whom I did not consider a friend, but on the other hand, I have a strong preference for brutal honesty over niceness in my close friends.  And it is possible to find yourself marrying to your best test-reader, years down the line.

The best example I can come up with the Fade/Adrick fight at the end of CF.  It wasn't all "Adrick back stepped after Fade parried his blow. Fade renewed his attack and Adrick barely dodged the next attack. "  It was a general description of the tone of the fight.  How Fade's attacks were very fluid next to Adrick.  How Adrick was basically freaking out by the fact that Fade was there. 

Oh yes. And the other advantage to sticking with the general tone of the fight is that if you don't happen to actually know the technical details of swordplay well, you're less likely to do something that will cause someone who does to throw the book across the room.  Mind you, that fits a lot better with the viewpoint of someone watching who also has no idea than from the viewpoint of one of the actual fighters,

Another use for white space is to make the piece less intimidating to the reader.  I think the reason I'm still only half way through LOTR is because of the daunting solid bricks of text. 

To each their own, and all, but. seeing solid briocks of text as daunting rather than inviting is a new one to me.

Sometimes Alexandre Dumas was paid by the page, and you can really identify those ones because you get lots and lots of dialogue with really short sentences, so some pages have really astoundingly much whitespace.

My take on why vampires stick around in contemporary fantasy; it's a combination of a pile of sex-related stuff*, plus the fascination of the outsider - in its more annoying forms, the outsider who angsts on for pages and pages and pages about never seeing the sun again - and the sort of repulsive fascination of disease imagery [ see also, nineteenth-century romanticisation of consumption. ]

Having just watched A Bridge Too Far on DVD last night, the title of this thread is making think of more practical uses like "if we swim over and chain a bunch of vampires to this bridge tonight, they'll all go boom at dawn and burn it down." That's probably not hemplful.

*As Gregory von Bayern says in The Dragon Waiting, vampires persuade their paramours as young men maidens; there's a little pain and a little blood but not as much as you think of either, and of course nothing's going to happen to you. And then one day you wake up... ill.

I'm sort of at odds with outlining and structure.  I'm afraid to fall into a formula and risk being unoriginal.  I know everything is stolen from everything else, but if everyone's using the same structure, then it REALLY sounds like the same story.

"everything is stolen from everyone else" seems perilous close to post-modernism, and I succeeded in my saving throw against that some time ago.

Life doesn't really happen according to a structure, and a story is about a character's or a group of characters' and a certain point in their life.

Life may not have narrative flow, but the way people talk about it and think about it does. And not all fiction has to be true to life in that way.  Not every novel wants to get as much of the normally left out bits and bobs of everyday life as Ulysses in, frex.  At least in my not-notably-humble opinion.

Anyone else stray from the formula at all, or do you think it's better/more productive to stick with the 3 or 5 act structure?

I don't think these are the only options at all, really.  Structure seems to be something that my own stories will usually reliably give me as they go along, be that three "acts" or eight or something else entirely.  I think there's more really good advice out there about structure in writing for screenplays, in particular - William Goldman's two Adventures in the Screen Trade book are wonderful - where thinking in terms of acts is the standard for the form - than for novels.

Have you read Iain M. Banks' Use of Weapons ? I'd recommend it, if you're thinking heavily about structure.  Probably the best example of doing two threads converging on a climactic event  in recent fiction.

Erm...so anyway, about writing...

Got a thousand words done last night, in the course of which I realised a) that I was writing the protagonist worrisomely young for his actual age, b) that something I thought went in this bit actually goes in the next bit, which unfortunately means c) that this bit will be pretty much unmitigated adolescent doom and gloom. Which is necessary for the story but is going to be bloody depressing to write. Think that counts as having been working against myself enough to bring this back to pretty tightly on topic.

Okay, what this thread is for, is to ask how everyone handles bad reviews, from informal readers all the way up the scale to... "official" reviewrs. I ask because recently, I got my first bad review, off my mother of all people, and it shook my worse than any criticism I ever got from anyone else. There was no constructiveness about it, it was just flat out, "I don't think it's very good."

It depends on the sort of bad review. "I don't think it's very good" tells you pretty much nothing about what the reviewer thinks is wrong with it.

A nice informative review that says "this person doing X in chapter 15 doesn't make sense given how she reacts to Y in chapter 7", I'll think about, and either change or put in the information to make it make sense; when I've been living closely with characters for as long as it takes to write anything of note, I can easily forget what about them is so bloody obvious that I never get round to putting it in the text.

A review that says "I hate the scene with the pineapples" but that turns out on querying to be because the reviewer had a traumatic experience with a pineapple as a child rather than anything about the scene itself, counts as "oh, OK, not going to get an objective opinion here".  So does anything that's critiquing the book for not being what I don't actually want it to be in the first place.  [ Ye gods, Amazon is full of people doing the equivalent of criticising Psycho for all the ways in which it fails to be Watership Down.]

Find readers who are likely to understand what you're doing and be sympathetic to it.  Don't expect someone who never reads SF to get the details of an SF novel you write in a specific tradition within SF.  Know what you're likely to be compared to, whether you want it or not - for example, if you're working on a colonising-Mars novel, it's worth having at some point read Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars and sequels, being the big award-winning and highly regarded colonising-Mars novels of recentish times, because any reviewer who knows the field will have those books in their mind.

IMO, the most useful first-readers are writers about as good as you are or a little better. Writers who are a lot better are liable to either give you advice that goes over your head, or have to put so much work into making it clear what they think would be helpful that it's hard to get them to stick to it; writers who aren't as good as you are liable to give unhelpful  advice even though well-meaning.  [ There's definitely a place for first-readers who go "Wow, this is wonderful, keep going" without any more details than that; that place is in motivating you to keep writing, and not to be mistaken for critical feedback. ]