5.9 KiB
[RT] Practical Guide to Evil Chapter 35: Spur
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Author: u/ForgottenToupee *
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URL: https://practicalguidetoevil.wordpress.com/2016/08/17/chapter-35-spur/
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Score: 28
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Created: 2016-08-17T17:25:59
Post:
Comments:
u/Themnos [+7] (3 hours later)
The number one thing that bugs me about this story is the author's avoidance of the word 'said'. It feels awkward to write in, but if you're reading it just blends into the narrative. Whereas using 'graveled' and other synonyms over and over again feels really grating and amateurish. The author has been better about it lately, but it's still too much.
u/None [+8] (12 hours later)
Funny, I never noticed whether they were using it or not
u/gommm [+7] (13 hours later)
Yes, same here. It didn't bother me and I never really noticed. Same as the other person who had a problem with the multiple nicknames for each characters which I like... I guess we're all a bit different in things that bugs us...
For me, if the story is gripping enough, I rarely notice details of the text and just go with the flow in a state similar to dreaming. If however the story bores me or the text is unclear and pulls me out of this state, I become much less tolerant of issues and will focus on every single details.
u/Gauntlet [+6] (4 hours later)
I can't remember who said it (maybe Terry Pratchett?) but basically "an author should rarely use anything but 'said' when writing because the voice of a character should be clear from how they are written".
u/TexasJefferson [+7] (11 hours later)
I've never particularly cared for that bit of writing advice. Human communication is super subtle; I'm pretty bad at capturing all of it even in the very high-bandwidth real world. Artificially limiting the amount of context you're providing readers over a very low bandwidth medium like written dialogue because it "should" be clear from other context is a silly fad sustainable only by a mutual illusion of transparency—the author imagines the reader knows exactly what voice and intonation they intended because they don't get access to readers brains, and likewise the reader never knows when they guessed somewhat wrong.
I mean, sure, usually something like outright sarcasm vs literal intentions will be clear enough from context, but subtle changes in voice are much harder to express. When I hear other people read dialogue I know, for example, I'm often surprised by which words they choose to emphasize and where they place pauses. This indicates that the voice wasn't sufficiently clear to at least one of us.
u/DiscyD3rp [+2] Wannabe Shakespeare (a day later)
I think that's probably true, but I also think authors are more prone to fall into the trap of over-diversifying their use of language just for the sake of it. It's one of my personal golden rules to never say more than what needs to be said (because I find it very easy to do so). Extra words or unnecessarily precise words can distract from the important words if not used purposefully.
I've never really had the need for anything more than "said", "asked", "responded", and "remarked", for general dialogue. Things like "growled", "muttered", "whispered", "spat out", or "yelled" are very context specific. They can be used to great effect when their impact on the scene is an important literary detail - 'saying' something within earshot of the enemy is very different from whispering the same phrase, for one.
How dialogue is spoken, though, is often of minor importance, or clearly indicated by previous language or by the dialogue itself. Straying from the use of "said" can, IMO, come off as redundant or unnecessarily verbose.
u/None [+3] (12 hours later)
So we have a classic Malthusian trap here. Seems traditionally the Dread Empire solved it by war or famine, either reducing their own population or expanding territory. The capture of Callow should help with that a bit, as larger agricultural base can offset famines. But ti still delays the inevitable.
Is there any way they can fix the demographic problem by slowing population growth? Magical contraceptives? I assume there are no easy non-blood magic ways to expand the arable land, and there’s not much chance of an agricultural/industrial revolution anytime soon to increase their yields, given the tech level and fuedal structure.
Guess we have to find somewhere new to invade!
u/MultipartiteMind [+3] (20 hours later)
I find myself wondering what keeps them from dying back to the point where starvation isn't so much of an issue--how they're able to maintain such high population numbers despite the lack of resources to support them (and how they got that high in the first place, lacking those resources).
It was nice to go back to Book 2 Chapter 16 and review how the stories were described; this can now be seen as a sort of despair, where life sucks and it's going to suck worse no matter what you do, but the people who rage at it even momentarily are the closest things to heroes you've got.
u/SimonSim211 [+1] (18 hours later)
This is a magical world after all and being on the "evil" side makes life easy: just turn the humans into half-plants... Alternatively "figure out" how the dwarfs do it and copy that...
u/Escapement [+3] Ankh-Morpork City Watch (21 hours later)
"The green color that puzzles your people so much is only what you call pond scum. We have altered it until it can live in our blood, and by its intervention have at last made our peace in humankind's long struggle with the sun. In us, the tiny plants live and die, and our bodies feed from them and their dead and require no other nourishment. All the famines, and all the labor of growing food, are ended."