Writing Bug

I’m more and more tempt­ed to write some fic­tion again. It’s been years since I did that. I’m good with char­ac­ters and envi­ron­ment, but not so good with plot. I don’t like to write about neg­a­tive things, or nasty peo­ple, which is rather prob­lem­at­ic when you need to have conflict.

I know part of it is read­ing books and think­ing, “Damn, I could do bet­ter than that.” But to be real­is­tic, any­body who has fin­ished a book is doing bet­ter than I actu­al­ly have done.

One thing that’s real­ly get­ting to me is the num­ber of anti-fat state­ments that get thrown into so many sto­ries. They have noth­ing to do with the story–they just hap­pen because of the authors’ prej­u­dice. Describ­ing a minor char­ac­ter as fat is a cheap short­cut because most read­ers will assume the per­son is lazy, slop­py, and not ter­ri­bly intel­li­gent (or a hyper­fo­cused geek with no social skills if he is smart).

I know that start­ing out with a “mes­sage” is a crap­py way to write fic­tion, though. Mes­sages are bet­ter expressed in essays, not stories.

Still, I have this itch. Bah.

Cyn is Rick's wife, Katie's Mom, and Esther & Oliver's Mémé. She's also a professional geek, avid reader, fledgling coder, enthusiastic gamer (TTRPGs), occasional singer, and devoted stitcher.
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5 thoughts on “Writing Bug

  1. I was won­der­ing if I was just being over-sen­si­tive to the fre­quen­cy of the anti-fat stereo­type. Seems like I run across it an awful lot. I’m glad it’s not just me being finicky.

    I’ve want­ed to do the same thing, work­ing size-accep­tance into a sto­ry, but I’m afraid I’d take it too far. I tend to be a bit heavy hand­ed when I start out with a mes­sage. I get prosy fast. 🙂

    If you scratch that itch and you like how it turns out, I’d sure­ly love to read it.

  2. No, you’re not being over-sen­si­tive at all. I read two books by a new author today, and one of them had so much fat-hate in it that I decid­ed not to even men­tion the author’s name anywhere–I don’t want to give him any Google hap­pies. Sam called it right, though–I saw a pho­to of the author, and he’s chub­by. Prob­a­bly has a lot of self-hatred.

    I vis­it­ed your site, but could­n’t fig­ure out how to leave a com­ment. I’ve seen that “south­ern­er” test, too. I am a life­long southerner–from Alaba­ma, for good­ness’ sake!–and I did­n’t score very high on that thing when I took it at some point in the past. I don’t think it was writ­ten by a south­ern­er, and a lot of that stuff is more about social status/class (the one I took, any­way) than any­thing else.

  3. I’m tempt­ed to write drag­on smut, entire­ly because the first TCM book I read was real­ly ter­ri­ble drag­on smut.

    I’m still not sure how to write that review! I think I’ll write the best review I can with­out actu­al­ly lying, and send it to the coor­di­na­tor and see if it’s con­struc­tive enough to be used.

  4. The first one I got (the only Adult title I’ve asked for so far) was so bad that I just could­n’t go on after the first chap­ter. I was prac­ti­cal­ly scream­ing, “SHOW, don’t TELL!” So I wrote to the coor­di­na­tor and explained that there’s no way I could write even a halfway pos­i­tive review, and she said that was cool. Some books, they just don’t review.

  5. Any­one can write. Mak­ing mon­ey from it, that’s the trick. If you get famous enough, you can sub that out, ‘though! [grin]

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