Who/where do you bounce ideas?

[shades of grey]

I leave it a week then read it back to myself.


So far most of what I've written ended up in the bin.  I'm a harsh critic.

[Snowleopard]

I leave it a week then read it back to myself.


So far most of what I've written ended up in the bin.  I'm a harsh critic.

Hmmm, perhaps you're being too hard on yourself SoG.

[shades of grey]

Or perhaps my day job is juuuust fine.   

I do occasionally keep what I write, it's a fine tuned process.

[Lord Rae]

I have one friend who loves everything I come up with... I tend not to bounce things off him much. And my sister who always looks at me sceptically and like I've lost my mind. I try not to bug her too much.

I really need more people to chat with but as it is I'm just not comfortable telling all my weirdness to my other friends.

That combined with laziness and lack of time to work is why the idea that I've been refining in my head for the last 5 years or so (I seriously can't stop thinking about it) only has about 60 pages written.

[shades of grey]

It creeps up on you doesn't it.

[Nickeris86]

it sure does, i only got about thirty pages written and i have been thinking about this idea for almost five years.

[shades of grey]

I have two so far, and a very detailed story arc.

[raljamcar]

i bounce them off myself on the bus ride to school while listening to music, often the same or similar ideas, thinking of how to make it flow better, remove overused or unneccesarry thoughts and spiffing them up

[Dragoon]

I have about a gazillon of chapter one's lying around. And just as many story ideas.

I've just recently discovered my mistake. While I had the characters and the story arc planned, I often neglected to flesh out the rest of the world in sufficient detail.

My solution, which I kinda stumbled upon, was PlayByPost roleplaying in online forums. I'm currently DMing a game and I quickly found that I had to work a lot more on the details of the world than in my regular fiction. With that and the constant feedback from my players I was able to write roughly 25000 words in one month. I almost fell off my chair when I did the word-count. (I'm SO signing up for NaNoWriMo this year.)



So to stay on topic; what I've found to work best is to select a few good critiquers on web forums and let them tear your work to shreds. Friends and family often have a misguided sense of loyalty, and tend to prioritise your feelings over giving you actionable feedback.

[Nickeris86]

i love fleshing out my worlds in excruciating detail, even if i don't include all of that in the actual story. my biggest problem is connecting my scenes togeather.

[Dragoon]

When I have problems connecting scenes, I always try to find out what is causing the disconnect.

Sometimes I find that there should be one or more scenes between the scenes I'm trying to tie together, other times it's because a character would have to behave out of character to get to the next scene.

The story I'm currently working on came to a screeching halt a few days ago, because of a disconnect that requires deus ex machina for it to work out, and now I'm agonising over which plot element to change or cut to get the story moving again.

[Nickeris86]

i hate it when my characters argue with me.

[Snowleopard]

Better than chasing after them after they've lit out in an entirely unexpected direction.

[the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh]

Better than chasing after them after they've lit out in an entirely unexpected direction.

I'm not sure I understand that; characters grow from stories for me such that the most absolutely core thing about any character is knowing they will do X and Y that the story needs, because that's who they are and where they started from.  Secondary characters may do this to me, but that's copable with.

[Snowleopard]

There are things I know my characters will or won't do but
sometimes the story and the characters go off in unexpected directions.
I have no problem with that.  For some people they know everything about their
characters for others it's sort of a journey of discovery.  You're the former, I'm the latter.
Both are valid and both work.