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#WritersCoffeeClub for November 21:

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#WritersCoffeeClub for November 21:

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  • cstross@wandering.shopundefined

    #WritersCoffeeClub 25 NovWhat are some tips you can share to avoid 'clunky' phrasing?

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    cstross@wandering.shopundefined
    #WritersCoffeeClub 25 NovWhat are some tips you can share to avoid 'clunky' phrasing?Everybody's suggesting reading your work aloud, but I disagree: prose fiction should not focus on replicating speech, but on conveying meaning. It's a separate art form from the spoken word and should be treated as such. Splitting long sentences so that they're readable aloud is a shibboleth of modern editorial fashion that focuses on accessibility and market share, meeting the needs of "young adult" readers.
  • cstross@wandering.shopundefined

    #WritersCoffeeClub Nov 13: Name the oldest work to have inspired you

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    cstross@wandering.shopundefined
    #WritersCoffeeClub Nov 13: Name the oldest work to have inspired youAs a kid I read the Odyssey in translation, and binged on for-kids-retellings of Ancient Egyptian mythology—mostly the later dynastic versions (some of the translations were old and hazy on the actual chronology), but with roots going back to c. 3000BCE.Nothing much got written down before then because writing either hadn't been invented or wasn't widely used for purposes other than temple accounting, AIUI.
  • cstross@wandering.shopundefined

    #WritersCoffeeClub Nov 12th.

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    cppguy@infosec.spaceundefined
    @SteveClough @cstross I write nothing more creative than documentation for the software I produce, but people misunderstand that, too.The experience of people misunderstanding my docs, or simply failing to read them, was one of the things that turned me away from evangelicalism. (I bet you didn't see that coming.) I wasn't using parables to hint at ineffable spiritual truths in the face of religious persecution: I was just explaining how software worked, how to see its current state, and how to configure and maintain systems. People who were paid to read and understand this material would not or could not do so: their repeated questions made it obvious. Within a very few years, instead of reading TFM, people developed folk stories of commands they could type that usually did something that could be mistaken for success. They veered constantly off-course, and I kept having to drag them back. They consulted each other, rather than the docs, and developed their own mythology about how the software worked. They intuitively felt they knew the software better than I did, because my approach to problem-solving was careful and methodical but they knew a golden shortcut.If concrete, human-level explanations, written out literally, landed so badly, there's no chance that people will have remembered the figurative and unfathomable teachings of Jesus seventy years after his death, written them down accurately and fully, and built from them a useful picture of worlds seen and unseen and the will of God. I'm sorry; it just doesn't ring true.
  • cstross@wandering.shopundefined

    #WritersCoffeeClub Oct 20 - What role does death (or undeath!) play in your work?

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    cstross@wandering.shopundefined
    #WritersCoffeeClub Oct 20 - What role does death (or undeath!) play in your work?I write genre fiction and it is *surprisingly hard* to write a novel in which nobody dies; death tends to be trivialized or used to advance the plot and seldom traumatizes the survivors.To which I say, to hell with that!(Current WIP massacres with gleeful abandon, but it's SF set in a future with lossy mind uploading and replay, so they've effectively got mechanised reincarnation. Societal whackiness ensues.)