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#WritersCoffeeClub Jan 13. Are you actively building your working vocabulary?

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#WritersCoffeeClub Jan 13. Are you actively building your working vocabulary?

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  • cstross@wandering.shopundefined

    #WritersCoffeeClub 11th Dec 2025. - How do you keep track of plots and subplots?

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    cstross@wandering.shopundefined
    #WritersCoffeeClub 11th Dec 2025. - How do you keep track of plots and subplots?Mostly by writing in @scrivenerapp these days (since 2008) which makes it ridiculously easy to edit individual scenes in a subplot as a continuous scrolling text—and to resequence scenes and edit the deep structure of a book.Seriously, Scrivener is as revolutionary a tool for writing books as the first word processors were for writing any kind of unstructured document.
  • 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 17 Nov. What role does race play in your work?

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    cstross@wandering.shopundefined
    #WritersCoffeeClub 17 Nov. What role does race play in your work?The concept of "race" is a vile 19th century shibboleth invented to support colonialism and to justify so-called "scientific racism". Human races are far less distinct than cultivars of broccoli or breeds of dog: we're all one hominin species.So I generally only use it in my fiction as a handy tag for "the character talking about this shit is misguided and/or has an evil agenda".
  • 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.