|
|
Post by southpaw on Apr 6, 2015 22:31:10 GMT
Vague title ftw!!
Anyway, Hi. I'm trying to get back into writing more. Its something I was told I was good at and should keep up so I did no such thing, but now I like the idea of doing a bit now and again. The problem is, while I'm a decent writer in the sense of actually writing and describing things and whatnot, I am horribly unimaginative.
So I need help fleshing out ideas. Or possible scrapping them altogether and using new ones. Basically I want you to do work that I will then steal, spit shine, and pass off as my own.
So far, I like the idea of doing something mildly dystopic and generally violent. I've been into post-apocalyptic stuff for a while and combined with an increased interest in sci-fi and rediscovering that 40k is a thing I want to do one IIIIIIIIN SPAAAAAAAACE.
Literally the only thing I have written down right now is to have it set on a world that's in a shitty state. Idea being that humans began expanding into colonising new worlds, but some catastrophe on Earth (war most likely. Of the world nuclear variety) left the supply and support networks in tatters and the new colonies were left to fend for themselves. Which now makes me think of a conflict based on a divide of the populace between trying to re-establish connections with Earth and the rest of humanity on one side, and the other side saying "fuck 'em, we'll make our own society with blackjack and hookers."
An that is all I have. So give me ideas! Feed me your brain thoughts!
As a minor niggle, I have a thing for late 19th - early 20th century weaponry and I'm struggling to come up with a reason for why a society that is capable of colonising other planets would still only have lever and bolt action rifles. I mean Firely just said "cos fuck you that's why" but, and this is one of the big reasons I gave up writing before, I really struggle with just taking something I like and stick it in. I have to have an actual explanation behind everything. And one for that has me stumped.
I'm also incredibly hyper. Hence the scatterburst nature of this post. But I like it. So its going up like this.
Help me! Please.
|
|
|
|
Post by thefishofdoom on Apr 7, 2015 1:39:13 GMT
read gibson's sprawl trilogy. also read pohl's the space merchants.
re: bolt action weapons: high-damage unstable ammunition that needs to be kept inert and primed one shot at a time. think if 40k plasma weapons had a failsafe. add an optional failsafe bypass to fire on either full on semi-auto, include onligatory self-blowing-up scene to illustrate why.
subvert herbert's spice melange by making a longevity drug that is actually a proper damaging hard drug, only that it lengthens your life rather than shortening it (while still making you into a withered husk for most of that prolonged lifespan).
no FTL of the coventional varieties, or none without nasty twists. example: a hyperspace tunnel that shortens travel time in realspace, but where the journey itself takes the full time span for those travelling (so no FTL travel of living or non-preserved organic matter). another example: jump gates that require such massive amounts of energy to operate that it has to tap into the planetary core, damaging the planet with each use (cue war/need for mass exodus/whatever that presents the potential necessity for multiple sendings in quick succession).
a culture that sent a robot fleet to colonize a planet and then built a jump gate to send a mass exodus through due to exodus-causing circumstances. only there is no way to know if the robots succeeded by the time they needed them to, and no way to know if the exit gate is functional (or even built), so a movement starts to send the 'expendable citizens' first just in case. explore what would happen if the cripples, the poor, the diseased, etc live and send word back, or what would happen if they don't. example: they live, but plan to lure the healthy ones to their deaths, or they stay quiet and plan for war ala helghast. explore the troubles in convincing and/or forcing said people in going through first.
explore religious themes. steal from dead space, fallout, shadowrun and real life.
read up on real life dictatorships and terrorist states. nazi germany, wartime soviet russia, african warlords, the argentine juntas and other south american military dictatorships, middle eastern despots, the current assholes, etc. mix n match to create the regime that the imperium of man is supposed to be but no one writes it as being.
body horror and identity horror based on therapeutic and labour-based cloning. ex: forced labour where clones are grown for parts and/or replacements, and where inevitably a worker finds himself working next to a clone of himself. add industrial accident, and loss of their gene line, cue the original's body parts being harvested to heal the clone.
|
|
|
|
Post by southpaw on Apr 7, 2015 11:27:31 GMT
It did take me a while of reading to realise the Imperium was meant to be some kind of roman-based dictatorship hell. There's a million and one fleshed out space marine chapters but not a huge amount of info on how the Imperium works on the wiki.
|
|
|
|
Post by southpaw on Apr 7, 2015 11:46:12 GMT
A further question: I've never tried to write anything that wasn't either realistic or low-fantasy based. If you have to introduce things that are new for your setting, how would you go about explaining them? Should they be summarised when they're mentioned, have a quick intro section explaining tech and whatnot, or accept readers wouldn't understand everything immediately and try to find a way to make things clearer as the story progresses?
Like take servitors in 40k. If someone didn't already know them, would you rather have a glossary thing explaining them, have their first mention be overt in saying they're a man/machine fuckstrosity, or since servitors are quite common just reveal them over time. So the first mention would simply say servitor, then the next time maybe its pointed out they have a face or whatever and so on. Or I guess depending on the story with servitors you could witness someone being condemned to becoming one I suppose.
|
|
|
|
Post by thefishofdoom on Apr 7, 2015 13:39:32 GMT
depends. some books use glossaries or appendices, but for in-narrative, it would likely depend on the length of the explanation. short ones are more amenable to explanation on the spot (ex: 'he beckoned forth a servitor, a lobotomized human, possibly a criminal or a heretic, partially reconstructed with machine parts to serve a specific role'), while longer ones may require their own paragraph (ex: 'as his fellow soldier vaporized in a cloud of expanding ionized gas and giblets of sizzling flesh, he briefly reflected on the decadent nature of the imperium, developed to the point where they couldn't even build plasma weapons that wouldn't potentially overheat in the middle of battle, and on how many an imperial infantryman had met an ignominious end, burnt to a crisp by the tool that was supposed to save his life and take the enemy's'). you can also make use of both at different times and so present an initial introduction and gradual furher tidbits that build upon it, in addition to whatever indirect explanation is provided by action sequences (ex: initially: 'he had seen what had happened when the commissar's prior squad tried to parley with the enemy. he would not make the same mistake.', then: 'commissars were the military arm of the imperial cult, part army chaplain, part disciplinarian, part executioner. especially part executioner. often hated almost as much as the enemy, it is a dark reality of the forty-first millenium that the nature of humankind's enemies requires wars of attrition, and it is the commissar's duty to ensure that this attrition happens.' and further on: 'the commissar lay face down, her entrails barely held inside of her body by one maimed hand, nearly blown off when her plasma pistol exploded, allowing the traitorous guardsman she was going to execute enough time to draw his combat knife and gut her. the one pious soldier in the squad had blown his head off in retaliation before the others killed him in turn and deserted. as she died, she smiled in the knowledge that at least one soldier under her command had demonstrated true faith, and she went to find him at the emperor's side.' leaving it as a mystery can also work, but can get slightly annoying if overdone or if action sequences don't give the reader info from which to draw one's own conclusions (one place where this is done very well is in banks' culture series). on the other hand, there are also books which are almost all exposition and explanations, which can also get very annoying, and even those which go to both extremes (i'm looking at you, gene wolfe!). do that and i will staple your nipples to your shoulder blades  |
|
|
|
Post by southpaw on Apr 7, 2015 16:05:50 GMT
Sounds fair. Now for another question. I've had two thoughts on how to split the 'Loyalist' 'Seperatist' divide:
1, The government is trying to re-establish links with Earth and that's their reason for essentially enslaving everyone else as they're desperate to fix a ship/wormhole/whatever to get the links back. Rebels want to be isolationist because life kinda sucks. With the added idea that the society is surviving off power left by the abandoned ships but they have a finite life. Basically I'd like it to be a thing about how the government has genuine good intentions, but has adopted dubious methods to achieve it.
2, The government is isolationist because they get to rule shit, with the rebels wanting to rejoin humanity because life sucks (probably wouldn't go slave society on this one since there's not a justification, but hard life and aristocracy would work still) and they're silly idealists. The twist I'd like to throw in this one is that the problem on Earth that caused them to be abandoned is vague and have it revealed to be an alien attack or some such and that the links with the colonies were severed because Earth was trying to save them from the same fate. The government know this, but don't want to cause panic so kept it secret (possibly inventing some religious bollocks about the chosen people on God's new Earth) and now its kind of been forgotten about. So in this one it would again be a government appearing despotic but actually trying to do something good.
I think the first is cleaner and easier to write, but I do like the second.
|
|
|
|
Post by thefishofdoom on Apr 7, 2015 16:20:29 GMT
you can have your cake and eat it too: start with 1, have the rebels win and become the government in 2, with the rebels trying to return to 1's arrangement  |
|
|
|
Post by Bozza on Apr 7, 2015 20:32:08 GMT
A further question: I've never tried to write anything that wasn't either realistic or low-fantasy based. If you have to introduce things that are new for your setting, how would you go about explaining them? Should they be summarised when they're mentioned, have a quick intro section explaining tech and whatnot, or accept readers wouldn't understand everything immediately and try to find a way to make things clearer as the story progresses? Like take servitors in 40k. If someone didn't already know them, would you rather have a glossary thing explaining them, have their first mention be overt in saying they're a man/machine fuckstrosity, or since servitors are quite common just reveal them over time. So the first mention would simply say servitor, then the next time maybe its pointed out they have a face or whatever and so on. Or I guess depending on the story with servitors you could witness someone being condemned to becoming one I suppose. How would you explain them? Don't! Basic rule: Show don't tell. Give snippets of info as you go along. But it's not a hard and fast rule as different readers like different styles, so it's really down to the writer and their style. I think you need to decide how you want to do it and stick with it. Have you come across fantasy-faction.com/category/writers ? They have all guides and advice for writing speculative fiction, could be worth checking. |
|
|
|
Post by Bozza on Apr 7, 2015 20:41:28 GMT
But as Fish said if you go the "show don't tell" way, you need some explanation or people will read it and go, "Whaaaaa'?". Tough to find the balance, I guess.
Discussions on Erikson, Fish's fave, spring to mind.
|
|
|
|
Post by thefishofdoom on Apr 7, 2015 21:37:39 GMT
erikson's malazan is a mindfuck both him and his coauthor are archaeologists, and the malazan series timeline spans literally hundreds of thousands of years, so the lore is intentionally vague in the same way ancient history and mythology is (to the point where some immortal characters even have multiple permutations to their names). doesn't help that the first novel was written like 10 years before the second one, so there are accidental inconsistencies as well |
|
