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Post by Stacy on Jun 10, 2010 21:56:43 GMT -5
I wanted to talk about more concrete everyday where the fingers hit the keyboard stuff, and I am currently dealing with this in the 10.03 draft. This line is bothering me because I'm trying to contrast the cement with the shoes, and I need the colors white and black in the sentence and I want it to be parallel but at the moment I have "The cement was white and glittering and the shoes were black and sucked souls into themselves." I want the verbs to match endings. And "into themselves" just seems so clunky and it messes up the structure of the sentence. Although hmm...*rolls sentence off mental tongue* - the sudden change from the expected structure could actually work, if I can get the words right. I might just start over and try a whole new structure. I thought about using the shoelaces for the white, but no - no, it has to be the cement. And I thought about changing that to concrete, but the sound of cement fits the sentence better. No doubt because the c has an s sound and that's Seth's sound. SSSSSS, Seth is a snake, SSSSSS. So, while I stare off into space and listen to the ultraviolence playlist and rearrange words... How do you guys handle sentence structure and other nuts and bolts things like that? I just realized that we talk a lot about abstract stuff on here, but not so much the actual writing process.
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Post by Stacy on Jun 10, 2010 22:06:40 GMT -5
Progress! It is now "The cement was white and the shoes were black." and then I can elaborate in another sentence. I think I will probably change it a few more times before I'm happy though. I love you, delete key. *smoochies* More progress! It may actually work with just that sentence. Oh, and I reread the first post and realized it was really sort of open-ended. I posted this because I was talking to a friend on IM and wondered if anyone else obsessed over sentences like this and he said lots of people did and I realized that I had never really talked to other Sims writers about sentence structure and word choice and just the real basics of writing, you know? So I wanted to know if anyone else obsessed like this.
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Post by mdpthatsme on Jun 11, 2010 11:12:46 GMT -5
Sentence structure oh yes. ;D I don't know from what angle you were going on with that sentence, but if it was me writing that sentence I would probably do the following: The cement was white and glittering and the shoes were black as night invading the bright delight of the cement one step at a time. That's just the first thing I thought. [shrug]
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tesseracta
Full Member
5th Dimensional Spaz
Posts: 122
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Post by tesseracta on Jun 11, 2010 13:56:14 GMT -5
I struggle with sentence structure just to write merely coherent sentences, and someday hope to struggle with writing lovely ones. : P
BUT for what it is worth, I always first try to determine exactly why the sentence seems wrong to me. Then I play around around with where my adverbs and adjectives, etc. are located in the sentence. My grammar is terrible, and I've forgotten all the names of the terminology, so I hope what follows makes sense:
So, there are two subjects in "The cement was white and glittering and the shoes were black and sucked souls into themselves."
The cement, is being an adjective ("white") and is also being an um, participle? (whatever the term for "glittering" is). The shoes are being an adjective ("black"), and then they are doing a verb ("sucking souls")
So if you wanted to play around, you could do things like change "glittering" into "glittered" making it match "sucked". Conversely you could also change "sucked souls" into "sucking souls". Or you could balance the adjectives around and say "the white cement glittered, and the black shoes sucked souls". The other thing I noticed was that "souls" is a homonym of "soles", and you are describing shoes.
/brainfry
And if all else fails, I let it go and find another way. And this is what you've already done, and have found your solution to your problem, hooray!
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Post by dbloveshermac on Jun 11, 2010 16:19:01 GMT -5
I bet that delete key is stunned! I imagine delete keys rarely get smoochies.
I am a great fan of parallel structure. A fast way to set my subdermal layers crawling is to give me a list made up of four nouns and one verb phrase. Ahckque!
There is, of course, a little room for exceptions when prose is dressing up like poetry for Halloween. :-)
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Post by Stacy on Jun 11, 2010 20:43:36 GMT -5
mdp - So you obsess about it too and I'm not a crazed weird loner person? That is a beautiful sentence! I really like it and it would be perfect in a different context. I think stripping the sentence down to the essentials works best with the scene though. I don't want to spoil too much, but well - here's the bit. Put in spoiler space since it seems we don't have a spoiler tag here. S p o i l e r s p a c e Steven Badgett and Dustin York. Counting all the way one two three four and he got to eight before the foot came."So little Sethiekins has a protector now, huh?" He stared down at Steven's shoes. "You don't have a chance in hell with her, boy." The cement was white and the shoes were black. "I wouldn't break up with my right hand just yet if I were you." Black. White. Black. White. ------ Yep - reading over it now, I really think that's the right way to go. Woot, now I can move on to the next bit! And hopefully not get stuck on one sentence for that long again now that I know not to try to go all flowery here. tess - I hope it's okay to shorten your name to that - I'm shortening everyone's name today apparently. We had six weeks of grammar in English in ninth grade and that was the extent of my education in grammar, lol. And of course I've forgotten pretty much all of that. So I don't know any of the terminology either - I guess I showed some of that ignorance by calling "glittering" a verb, eh? But in my defense I did think of it as something that the cement was doing. I liked your suggestions. Also, whatever, you do write lovely sentences. I noticed the souls/soles thing too, after like an hour of staring at the original sentence - well, okay the second version. The first version had a black sky instead of black shoes. And I may have googled some trying to find a word that meant sucking in light and then looked up thesaurus entries for "opaque". Haha - so much work and worry and sweat and time behind "The cement was white and the shoes were black." Does anyone else remember how to spell thesaurus by thinking "It's like a type of dinosaur"? DB - Haha! My delete key gets smoochied all the time. Well - when I'm writing a story. It's dreadfully neglected when I'm writing posts and blog entries. *tries to think of an example of a list of four nouns and a verb phrase* I give up. But I will certainly try to write something like that for you if the opportunity presents itself. A friend on Boolprop referred to Valley as a "graphic mystery poem". I thought that was totally awesome and I hope she doesn't mind that I'm telling other people about it even if it was in a PM. I did tell her in the reply that I was going to be using the phrase to describe Valley in the future. Yay you all rock! But now I feel bad, because I didn't mean for you guys to focus on my poor little sentence. So - anyone else got any sentences? Or obsessions? Or both?
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Post by dbloveshermac on Jun 12, 2010 19:55:39 GMT -5
nononono please don't write a list like that! LOL! Crawling subdermal layers = bad
It's not a poor little sentence. It was a sentence caught at the moment of transformation from caterpillar to butterfly! Hmmm, Seth probably wouldn't appreciate having butterflies used to describe his teen years, huh? ;-)
I obsess over level of emotion. What's too much? I also obsess over when it is appropriate to deliberately break a grammar rule.
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Post by Stacy on Jun 12, 2010 21:23:25 GMT -5
nononono please don't write a list like that! LOL! Crawling subdermal layers = bad It's not a poor little sentence. It was a sentence caught at the moment of transformation from caterpillar to butterfly! Hmmm, Seth probably wouldn't appreciate having butterflies used to describe his teen years, huh? ;-) I obsess over level of emotion. What's too much? I also obsess over when it is appropriate to deliberately break a grammar rule. Ah - I did sort of wonder if you meant that in a good or bad way, lol. After all, in my genre crawling subdermal layers can be a good thing. Oh man - John laughed when I told him the original version of the sentence and then tonight at dinner he said it was overwrought and I have been asking if he thinks I suck at writing all evening. He's all "No, you should take it as a compliment of your editing skills and hey, you fixed it without any external prompting." I'm trying to look at it that way, but man - perfectionism can be a bitch sometimes. LOL @ butterfly. And yeah - like Rachel I think I'm going to have to stop advertising 10 on Boolprop. It is supposed to be a somewhat realistic portrayal of a 15 year old boy - and on top of that a 15 year old boy who grows up to be a psychopathic killer. It really can't be PG-13, lol. Those are interesting obsessions! Hmm - what do you think is too much emotion? I tend to think that there's no such thing as too much emotion, lol. Hmm, grammar rules - like what sort of grammar rules? I think anything goes in dialogue, and outside of dialogue - depends.
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Post by raquelaroden on Jun 15, 2010 6:15:16 GMT -5
Stacy: I like your revision--it keeps it simple. If by having the sentence match you meant this:
The cement was white and glittering and the shoes were black and soul-sucking.
....then that might have come across a little too...something.
I would have written something like:
The cement was white and glittering and the shoes were a soul-sucking black.
I don't know why I like the way that sounds, but I do. But once again--I like your revision even better. It keeps it simple, and makes it more apparent why he'd get fixated on that detail.
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Post by thelunarfox on Jun 15, 2010 11:35:35 GMT -5
With regards to sentences, the best advice is to read it out loud. Actually hold it up and read it in your voice and see how it sounds.
Yeah, I obsess instead over details of the story. I have pages and pages of notes where I connect bits of story, write out motivation for a character to have said something that seems innocuous to most and will probably be noticed by no one ever but me, or takes a point in the story and then expand on the background behind that point. I come up with some weird things that way.
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