Amazing, the incredibly high standards us Lit writers...

[Setanta84]

Hollywood would have us believe Rocky went from being a near imbecile, to a well educated, smart man, then going back to being the same imbecile he was originally by suffering from brain damage received in a fight.

Let's see judge Judy explain that one!

The brain injury only applies to Rocky V. Stallone retcons it as a bad diagnosis in Rocky Balboa.

So, perhaps, Rocky V is an unintentional ode to the power of suggestion?

 

[JasminePierce]

are held to. A while back I wrote a story about a married couple who had drifted apart, but before their divorce was finalized, they found their way back to each other. The catalyst for the reconciliation was a classic car they both worked on when they were happily married.

I was astonished by the last comment I received, stating the entire premise for the story was, "impossible."

Ever watch TV? Hollywood would have us believe one of Charlie's Angels can shoot the gun out of guy's hand at 100 yards with a snub nose 38; or that, even though he was a living legend in the west, no one ever knew who The Lone Ranger was until the end of the show; or that a pair of glasses was a sufficient disguise for Superman.

Usually when someone calls me on something that seems to them to be implausible, it has to do with the actions or feelings of a character while under stress. People comment saying he/she wouldn't do that. Usually, from there on out, they pick at everything else in the story.

I wish I could talk to some of these people in person and say, " It wasn't written as a fact based documentary. Just enjoy the story for what it was meant to be, an entertaining piece of fiction."

Quite some time ago, my parents were both in the middle of a pretty bad break up. My father had taken on a French mistress, my Mother spent six months railing against him as he packed and made plans to take off for a trip to meet up with her in her homeland. Let's just say it was a rocky six months in our household, but because of certain Native American traditions they are not allowed to divorce and similarly couldn't stand to be anywhere near each other. It was a true no win situation.

Somehow, in all of the heat of their arguing and spitting poison at each other, they just started to click. Until the day before Christmas my father informs the household that he had ripped up his ticket to France (which was scheduled to leave December 26) and that Mom and him were going to stay together and work it out. (Much to the chagrin of his lover, I would imagine.) Against all odds, they are completely happy now.

What I'm trying to say is... is it implausible? Sure. But impossible? Not at all. Miracles in love happen all of the time. As my Mom likes to say "What a long, strange journey it has been."

Forget what anyone else tells you. Write what comes and have faith in it.

 

[Hypoxia]

What I'm trying to say is... is it implausible? Sure. But impossible? Not at all. Miracles in love happen all of the time.

The basic rule of reality is that every individual space-time event (particle interactions, etc) is, by itself, extremely unlikely -- but stuff happens anyway. Most coin flips are mixtures of heads and tails. A few have long sequences of one or the other. A few land on their edge. Those are the interesting events, those we would bother to write about.

A fiction-writing rule I'm gradually adopting is to pick the most unlikely outcome and run with it. The ordinary is boring. The surprising is... interesting.

 

[JasminePierce]

The basic rule of reality is that every individual space-time event (particle interactions, etc) is, by itself, extremely unlikely -- but stuff happens anyway. Most coin flips are mixtures of heads and tails. A few have long sequences of one or the other. A few land on their edge. Those are the interesting events, those we would bother to write about.

A fiction-writing rule I'm gradually adopting is to pick the most unlikely outcome and run with it. The ordinary is boring. The surprising is... interesting.

In trying to keep it "real" I believe in a mixture of ordinary events and random unlikely outcomes... because that is life. The real challenge comes with taking those ordinary events and making them seem interesting, which is the fun part of the job, in my humble opinion.

 

[Zeb_Carter]

Geography: In THE BOOK OF RUTH: BEFORE RUTH the narrator relates a driveaway. He announces the route: "...we left our little family bungalow in Santa Monica, near the Pacific Ocean. We drove east to EL Paso, then south to our destination: Taxco, Guerrero, Mexico."

He then describes the drive: fighting commute traffic out of the L.A. basin, driving past Palm Springs and through Indio, and on through Phoenix and beyond.

The comment received: "WTF! Santa Monica to El Paso and back to Indio? You had to pass Indio to get to El Paso!. I quit right there. Get a map out!"

Maybe I should have included a TripTik.

Blind_Justice and I went to great lengths to get the geography correct along with the timing of the trip. A complete section had to be rewritten to accommodate a short drive that was originally an overnight drive.

I could see the comments about traveling 100 miles in eight hours. We had them stop to rest and refresh instead.

 

[redzinger]

Blind_Justice and I went to great lengths to get the geography correct along with the timing of the trip. A complete section had to be rewritten to accommodate a short drive that was originally an overnight drive.

I could see the comments about traveling 100 miles in eight hours. We had them stop to rest and refresh instead.

About 25 years ago, as a piece of GCSE school coursework, I wrote a story based on a similarly long drive.

I wanted it to be overnight, and long enough. Unfortunately, this discounted the UK as it wasn't big enough, city-to-city, for the story length.

Having watching too many episodes of California-based soaps, and having consulted an atlas, I decided to base it in America. And got highly criticised for it not being realistic enough with US slang, etc. 'Cos I really didn't know enough about the locations. I think I got my worst English mark ever for that story.

It was a painful lesson to learn, as I was the year swot at the time and everyone took the piss out of me getting a C+ (I had always, always, received As in English until that point.) That was the last time, until I started writing again 5 years ago, that I had written something I enjoyed or even recalled.

I look back and realise it was the teacher himself who took a lot of the joy of writing out of English for me. Mr Francis was the 'trendy' sort - relatively young with a snazzy tash and dress sense. I didn't really 'get' him; I always got on better with the more traditional type of teacher. He also managed to kill my enjoyment of Thomas Hardy novels (among others) and any poetry. One time, after I had heard part of Robert Frost's poem 'Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening' and I wanted to know who wrote it. I quoted him the lines:
'I have promises to keep, / And miles to go before I sleep, / And miles to go before I sleep.'
He didn't know (HOW? He was an English teacher, FFS!) and was so utterly disparaging, he totally put me off.

I hate regretting things or blaming others for my misfortunes, but I wonder how different my life would have been had I been assigned the more-traditional Mr Chadwick. Had I scored better in English, I probably would have studied different A-levels, done a totally different degree at uni, maybe begun writing even earlier...

Wow. Please excuse the trip down memory lane.

N.B. Just remembered there was something else I wrote that I enjoyed. About 3-4 years after, and following the death of my grandma, I had an A-level General Studies exam. It was essentially all multiple choice, apart from the English section, which was a short story based on a true event. I wrote about the funeral, about the grandma I hadn't seen in a couple of years and didn't particularly like, about how I hadn't cried until I saw my granddad standing by himself at the front of the church. It remains to this day, the most enjoyable and cathartic exam I've ever had. I still remember the last line, 'Finally, I cried.' My former English teacher would have hated it.
For that however, I received an A.

Yeah, sorry again about the tangent. Hmmm.

 

[sr71plt]

Maybe you should have set it in Australia. I took the train from Melbourne to Sydney, wanting to see the landscape. The landscape was nearly the same the whole way (boring) and it took forever.

 

[TxRad]

I failed geography with one of my stories Christmas on Duty.

I had started with the protagonists going to a caravan site in the New Forest, but changed their destination to a hotel near Tunbridge Wells because I thought it would be too cold in a caravan at Christmas (or the site would be shut).

I didn't change all the references and the readers picked it up quickly.

It has now been edited. They ARE going to the hotel.

I needed some towns where there weren't any so i pulled names out of my ass. Well partially anyway. I needed a town with the family name for one. Then a hometown with the grandmothers name. It was all fiction so....

No one ever believes that though. We only write true stories right?

 

[redzinger]

Maybe you should have set it in Australia. I took the train from Melbourne to Sydney, wanting to see the landscape. The landscape was nearly the same the whole way (boring) and it took forever.

Yeah, that probably would have been more logical, and not have so many of the language inaccuracies.

 

[Handley_Page]

One time, after I had heard part of Robert Frost's poem 'Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening' and I wanted to know who wrote it. I quoted him the lines:
'I have promises to keep, / And miles to go before I sleep, / And miles to go before I sleep.'

Yeah, sorry again about the tangent. Hmmm.

Which is a very good book.

 

[JKendallDane]

Maybe you should have set it in Australia. I took the train from Melbourne to Sydney, wanting to see the landscape. The landscape was nearly the same the whole way (boring) and it took forever.

Still sounds more interesting, view wise anyway, than the overnighter I took from Budapest to Berlin back in 2002. The most exciting scenery I got to see during that twelve hour plus marathon ride, was during the dashing across the gravel and tracks to make the very short layover train switch in the Vienna terminal at about 2am.

But at least we didn't have a hotel bill that night.

 

[sr71plt]

Yes, night trains. But I'd purposely taken the day train (an allllllll day train) to see the scenery. Scrub and shacks.

 

[Zeb_Carter]

Maybe you should have set it in Australia. I took the train from Melbourne to Sydney, wanting to see the landscape. The landscape was nearly the same the whole way (boring) and it took forever.

The story BJ and I collaborated on was a trip cross country, from New York City to San Francisco. We took trains and drove cross country. Google Earth was our friend, although I had been to most of the places on our route over my life time. It was a lot of fun to write.

 

[JKendallDane]

Yes, night trains. But I'd purposely taken the day train (an allllllll day train) to see the scenery. Scrub and shacks.

I grew up in SE Ohio and that pretty much describes every mile of I-77 between the Ohio River and Charleston, WV.

But I'll take even that over the trip across I-10 from the Blackwater Bay Bridge near Pensacola to Tallahassee. One mile after another, after another, after another, after another, after yet another of pancake flat land populated almost solely by billboards and pine trees gets real old, real quick!

 

[Hypoxia]

Keep your wimpy-ass long, boring train rides. Take a long, pounding ferry ride instead, like the night boat from Digby NS to St John NB across the Bay of Fundy. Three-plus hours of industrial-level shaking and racket. There is no respite in sleep, only in death.

Meanwhile, I make few geographic errors in my writing. That might be because I'm a map freak. My workstation is a recliner couch with a ThinkPad on my lap. The side table holds a lamp, phone, cup coaster, and reference books, which at the moment include (let me check) ah, eight (8) atlases: topos of a couple states; road atlases of California, USA, Mexico, and Europe; and two little thematic world atlases. And those aren't enough for a tale I'm plotting that will force me to dig out my aeronautical charts. Let's see, could a FlyMobil autogyro make it from El Paso TX to Chihuahua city in one hop?

Direction -- and misdirection -- are very important to me. Knowing when to lie and distort is important, too. To me, landscape can be a character in the story, and it need not be a reliable narrator. I have invented suburbs of Los Angeles, even though the area has no shortage, because I wanted to evoke setting without naming them. And hey, with so many actual suburbs, readers probably won't notice the ringers.

I have become leery of receiving inaccuracy comments, so I'm including a new line in my standard prefatory disclaimer:

Author's note: The following incidents are probably mostly fictional. All sex involves living humans aged 18+. The story contains [tags] elements; if you object, stop reading. Views expressed are not necessarily the author's. Information may not be totally accurate. It's just a story, folks.​

Not that it will discourage anyone, but fuck, I tried...

 

[sr71plt]

Keep your wimpy-ass long, boring train rides. Take a long, pounding ferry ride instead, like the night boat from Digby NS to St John NB across the Bay of Fundy. Three-plus hours of industrial-level shaking and racket. There is no respite in sleep, only in death.

Well, I did take a seven-day cruise around New Zealand from Sydney on that trip.

Sydney, by the way, was a delight. I've just put it in another story.

 

[JKendallDane]

Keep your wimpy-ass long, boring train rides. Take a long, pounding ferry ride instead, like the night boat from Digby NS to St John NB across the Bay of Fundy. Three-plus hours of industrial-level shaking and racket. There is no respite in sleep, only in death.

Please! Take your ferry whining and dry dock it.

Until you have been through an English Channel crossing from Ramsgate to Calais on a Hovercraft when the chop in the channel is running at four foot or better, then you don't need to be complaining about a rough ride.

 

[Zeb_Carter]

Keep your wimpy-ass long, boring train rides. Take a long, pounding ferry ride instead, like the night boat from Digby NS to St John NB across the Bay of Fundy. Three-plus hours of industrial-level shaking and racket. There is no respite in sleep, only in death.

Meanwhile, I make few geographic errors in my writing. That might be because I'm a map freak. My workstation is a recliner couch with a ThinkPad on my lap. The side table holds a lamp, phone, cup coaster, and reference books, which at the moment include (let me check) ah, eight (8) atlases: topos of a couple states; road atlases of California, USA, Mexico, and Europe; and two little thematic world atlases. And those aren't enough for a tale I'm plotting that will force me to dig out my aeronautical charts. Let's see, could a FlyMobil autogyro make it from El Paso TX to Chihuahua city in one hop?

Direction -- and misdirection -- are very important to me. Knowing when to lie and distort is important, too. To me, landscape can be a character in the story, and it need not be a reliable narrator. I have invented suburbs of Los Angeles, even though the area has no shortage, because I wanted to evoke setting without naming them. And hey, with so many actual suburbs, readers probably won't notice the ringers.

I have become leery of receiving inaccuracy comments, so I'm including a new line in my standard prefatory disclaimer:

Author's note: The following incidents are probably mostly fictional. All sex involves living humans aged 18+. The story contains [tags] elements; if you object, stop reading. Views expressed are not necessarily the author's. Information may not be totally accurate. It's just a story, folks.​

Not that it will discourage anyone, but fuck, I tried...

The best sleep I ever got was on a 12 hour flight in a C130 flying through some of the worst storms I had ever seen. I love rough air in an airplane...puts me right to sleep.

So your bone rattling ferry ride would have been heaven for me.

 

[redzinger]

Please! Take your ferry whining and dry dock it.

Until you have been through an English Channel crossing from Ramsgate to Calais on a Hovercraft when the chop in the channel is running at four foot or better, then you don't need to be complaining about a rough ride.

My stomach just heaved at the thought of this.

 

[oggbashan]

Maybe you should have set it in Australia. I took the train from Melbourne to Sydney, wanting to see the landscape. The landscape was nearly the same the whole way (boring) and it took forever.

Not as long as it used to do, when the railway gauge changed at the border between Victoria and New South Wales.

Everybody had to get off the Victoria State Railways wide-gauge train and walk the longest railway platform in the world to board the New South Wales standard gauge train.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_gauge_in_Australia

 

[JKendallDane]

My stomach just heaved at the thought of this.

Ah, someone that has either lived through the same experience or understands the constant up and down, up and down, UP and DOWN gyrations those old SR N4 Hoverlloyds went through when the channel was being evil with chop and swells. But that was the nature of the beast and at the time (1971) it was the fastest way across the channel short of another airline ticket.

http://www.simplonpc.co.uk/Hoverlloyd/Sir_Christopher-01_HS.jpg

I was all of 15 and in a tour group of 250 or so...232 kids ranging from 13 to 19 and about 20 adult chaperons...and for almost all of us, it was our first experience with international travel. The Hovercraft channel crossing was after 3 days in London which is where we had started the tour so we were still uber excited over anything new. By the time we dragged ourselves and the passed out kids and adults off that damn flying boat, our tour buses were the most exciting thing we wanted to ride for the next two weeks!

And I would do it all over again in a heartbeat!

 

[Handley_Page]

For matter of planes, I find the Flight Simulator a very handy source of gen.

 

[DeYaKen]

Ah, someone that has either lived through the same experience or understands the constant up and down, up and down, UP and DOWN gyrations those old SR N4 Hoverlloyds went through when the channel was being evil with chop and swells. But that was the nature of the beast and at the time (1971) it was the fastest way across the channel short of another airline ticket.

http://www.simplonpc.co.uk/Hoverlloyd/Sir_Christopher-01_HS.jpg

I was all of 15 and in a tour group of 250 or so...232 kids ranging from 13 to 19 and about 20 adult chaperons...and for almost all of us, it was our first experience with international travel. The Hovercraft channel crossing was after 3 days in London which is where we had started the tour so we were still uber excited over anything new. By the time we dragged ourselves and the passed out kids and adults off that damn flying boat, our tour buses were the most exciting thing we wanted to ride for the next two weeks!

And I would do it all over again in a heartbeat!

You should try the so called Fastcraft ( a catamaran with a car deck between the two hulls commonly known as the vomit comet) I've been on both and the cat was the only time I've ever been seasick.

 

[sr71plt]

Not as long as it used to do, when the railway gauge changed at the border between Victoria and New South Wales.

I'd actually been told that would be the case by a stateside travel agent, who couldn't fathom why we wouldn't be going by air. As it was, they forgot to ascertain that there are baggage weight limits on the train that, for some reason, are more stringent then air. Happily the train agents just shrugged and passed the luggage through after telling us it was overweight.

 

[DeYaKen]

Going back to the complaints about geography. Why not set you story in a mythical town. That way no one can say you got it wrong. It worked for me. There is no such place a Braunceston.
No one could tell me that I wouldn't go past Birmingham (being non-muslim I couldn't go through it ha ha fox news) on the way to London. It was on the motorway because I said it was. They couldn't dispute how long it took to get to Falmouth.