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SF's "Write Your Butt Off" II - Return of Writer's Block


Rapier
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SF's Write Your Butt Off! II Votals  

11 members have voted

  1. 1. Which submission will you vote for?

    • "The Heart of Dedication"
      0
    • "The Strength Within"
      5
    • "Simply a Hunter"
      0
    • "One More Time"
      3
    • "Perfected"
      2
    • "No One Is Iredeemable"
      0
    • "Going Forward"
      1

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  • Poll closed on 03/09/2019 at 10:00 PM

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31 minutes ago, TheSilentChloey said:

Oh dear...I don't know how we'd tie break that :O

There's another five days left. I'm sure at least one more person will vote between now and then.

Edited by Jotari
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19 minutes ago, TheSilentChloey said:

We hope so :XD: otherwise it's a deadlock lol!

Well if it comes to it, I'll withdraw and let who ever voted for me to choose someone else. As nice as the ego boost winning provides, I see it more as a penalty as I can't participate in the next round.

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So I've read through all of them. Normally I would give feedback but I haven't the brain capacity right because finals are coming up. Seriously physics is just mind numbing. Anyway I'll cast my vote and be on my way.

Edited by Otts486
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12 hours ago, Otts486 said:

So I've read through all of them. Normally I would give feedback but I haven't the brain capacity right because finals are coming up. Seriously physics is just mind numbing. Anyway I'll cast my vote and be on my way.

Gotta love finals/mid-terms getting in the way of this.

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I have read all the entries and made a tiebreaker vote. I have some comments:

@TheSilentChloey This is probably the strongest work we've seen you put out so far. What you wrote was good--but there's a missing element.

We have that Chrom and Sumia started out happily married. 

We have that there's been a breakdown of marital relations and that the marriage has become an unhappy one. 

What we don't have is any sense of what went wrong and how we got to that point, where things have frayed so badly that if Chrom stays late for work the first place Sumia's mind goes is he must be having an affair. How did we get here? What in this relationship went wrong? That's the missing element.  

I've noticed you have a habit of putting your stories out right away when no one else has even come close to finishing, and there's still days left to hit the deadline.

I would recommend in future installments maybe taking a little extra time to go back, revisit what you wrote, and fill in those extra details to make it pop. 

@Jotari

Perfection. I'm in awe and at a loss for words. This is beautiful.

The choice to format this as a series of support chains was a risky run--but wow--you masterfully made it work.  

The thing about formatting a story as a support chain is that the only thing you're putting out is character dialogue--you have nothing else to fallback upon or hide behind--so your ability to get into character and understand how the characters you're working with think and speak and write dialogue that comes across as organic to the way they would hold a conversation has to be absolutely perfect. Or you've got nothing, and the entire premise fails. (relating back to the issues I had with Nyx and Leo's dialogue in Roxas's submission last round)

You understood your characters and nailed their mannerisms perfectly.  And at the end of the day, that's what made this work.

Your love of the fandom and investment in the Jugdral setting really shone through here. Bravo.

A+

@SoulWeaver

You know what went wrong here and said it yourself--I don't have to tell ya. Poor time managment; you got hit with the deadline crunch and wrote the whole thing in 4 hours. 

The premise is fine and its an impressive work for the time you put into it, but its not as thought out or polished as it could have been. (It's also unfortunate that its a Jugdral piece in the same round where Jotari also wrote a Jugdral piece and hit a home-run) 

Even on a timer though--at least space out your paragraphs.

Everything being smushed together like that makes for a difficult rread.


@DarthR0xas

Much better than last round. I really, really, really liked this one. You did something artful and clever here that I want to draw attention to.

"But Saizo’s mind wasn’t on the mission, it was something else far more important. His relationship with Kagero."

" Yet, her mind couldn’t focus on this important task, and instead it kept coming back to Saizo."

^^^
The juxtaposition between these two lines tells us so much with so little, and without any further elaboration lets the reader know why the relationship failed:

-In Saizo's PoV, the mission is distracting him from the importance of his relationship with Kagero.

-In Kagero's PoV, the relationship with Saizo is distracting her from the importance of the mission.


That just tells us everything we need to know--the disconnect. The different priorities. These are two individuals who obviously care deeply about each other, but who are operating on two entirely separate wavelengths.

Its entirely believable the way you framed this that there was a romantic spark and a relationship here--but that it all fell apart because they couldn't make it work.

I like it. You noticeably showed more attention and finesse  to your characterizations after last round's critique.

I don't have anything bad to say about this one or any reason why I wouldn't vote for it, other than that Jotari just hit it out-of-the-park and out-wrote you by a hair. (the extra attention to dialogue and perfect use of his characters is what earns him in the win, imo)  

____________

Not a whole lot submissions this round, but great work from everybody.

i feel like the longer this goes on, the more comfortable people are getting with their writing and the more we're seeing the quality of the work presented take off.

Looking forward to Round #5.
  



 

Edited by Shoblongoo
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1 hour ago, Shoblongoo said:

I have read all the entries and made a tiebreaker vote. I have some comments:

@TheSilentChloey This is probably the strongest work we've seen you put out so far. What you wrote was good--but there's a missing element.

We have that Chrom and Sumia started out happily married. 

We have that there's been a breakdown of marital relations and that the marriage has become an unhappy one. 

What we don't have is any sense of what went wrong and how we got to that point, where things have frayed so badly that if Chrom stays late for work the first place Sumia's mind goes is he must be having an affair. How did we get here? What in this relationship went wrong? That's the missing element.  

I've noticed you have a habit of putting your stories out right away when no one else has even come close to finishing, and there's still days left to hit the deadline.

I would recommend in future installments maybe taking a little extra time to go back, revisit what you wrote, and fill in those extra details to make it pop. 


 

I actually think that worked in the story's favor as it was from Chrom's perspective and he was depicted as absolutely clueless about what exactly was going wrong or going through Sumia's head.

1 hour ago, Shoblongoo said:



@Jotari

Perfection. I'm in awe and at a loss for words. This is beautiful.

The choice to format the as a series of support chains was a risky run--but wow--you masterfully made it work.  

The thing about formatting a story as a support chain is that the only thing you're putting out is character dialogue--you have nothing else to fallback upon or hide behind--so your ability to get into character and understand how the characters you're working with think and speak and write dialogue that comes across as organic to the way they would hold a conversation has to be absolutely perfect. Or you've got nothing, and the entire premise fails. (relating back to the issues I had with Nyx and Leo's dialogue in Roxas's submission last round)

You understood your characters and nailed their mannerisms perfectly.  And at the end of the day, that's what made this work.

Your love of the fandom and investment in the Jugdral setting really shone through here. Bravo.

A+
 

Oh wow, that's such high praise. You have me feeling sheepish. I thought I didn't quite capture what I was trying to get at precisely for the reasons you mentioned. But I guess I did, at least in your eyes. Really glad you enjoyed it.

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2 hours ago, Shoblongoo said:

@SoulWeaver
You know what went wrong here and said it yourself--I don't have to tell ya. Poor time managment; you got hit with the deadline crunch and wrote the whole thing in 4 hours. 

The premise is fine and its an impressive work for the time you put into it, but its not as thought out or polished as it could have been. (It's also unfortunate that its a Jugdral piece in the same round where Jotari also wrote a Jugdral piece and hit a home-run) 

Even on a timer though--at least space out your paragraphs.

Everything being smushed together like that makes for a difficult rread.
 

Actually I think it was R0xas who burned his out in 4 hours. Mine took maybe 4 hours of actual effort due to procrastination, yeah, but it was spread out over a couple weeks since I first thought of the idea last round.

15 hours ago, Otts486 said:

So I've read through all of them. Normally I would give feedback but I haven't the brain capacity right because finals are coming up. Seriously physics is just mind numbing. Anyway I'll cast my vote and be on my way.

What? Now we all wanna know what you were gonna say! You gotta at least let us know if you get time to put your thoughts together later.

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4 hours ago, Shoblongoo said:

You got hit with the deadline crunch and wrote the whole thing in 4 hours. 

↓

2 hours ago, SoulWeaver said:

Actually I think it was R0xas who burned his out in 4 hours.

Yeah, that was me. Although to say I burned it out in four hours is a little disingenuous. For one I had spent the weeks before hand crafting the general idea and plot of the story, along with a few special moments. I also spent this time reading their supports, and I actually quoted a few lines from some supports in there, or took general sentence structure from them. While it seemed a little lazy to me, by doing so it made characterization better. It's just that I didn't start writing it until the deadline crunch came in and I thought I should do it. It's good my idea was kinda a small one, as both are minor characters, so a smaller piece would work.

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7 hours ago, Shoblongoo said:

I have read all the entries and made a tiebreaker vote. I have some comments:

@TheSilentChloey This is probably the strongest work we've seen you put out so far. What you wrote was good--but there's a missing element.

We have that Chrom and Sumia started out happily married. 

We have that there's been a breakdown of marital relations and that the marriage has become an unhappy one. 

What we don't have is any sense of what went wrong and how we got to that point, where things have frayed so badly that if Chrom stays late for work the first place Sumia's mind goes is he must be having an affair. How did we get here? What in this relationship went wrong? That's the missing element.  

I've noticed you have a habit of putting your stories out right away when no one else has even come close to finishing, and there's still days left to hit the deadline.

I would recommend in future installments maybe taking a little extra time to go back, revisit what you wrote, and fill in those extra details to make it pop. 

@Jotari

Perfection. I'm in awe and at a loss for words. This is beautiful.

The choice to format this as a series of support chains was a risky run--but wow--you masterfully made it work.  

The thing about formatting a story as a support chain is that the only thing you're putting out is character dialogue--you have nothing else to fallback upon or hide behind--so your ability to get into character and understand how the characters you're working with think and speak and write dialogue that comes across as organic to the way they would hold a conversation has to be absolutely perfect. Or you've got nothing, and the entire premise fails. (relating back to the issues I had with Nyx and Leo's dialogue in Roxas's submission last round)

You understood your characters and nailed their mannerisms perfectly.  And at the end of the day, that's what made this work.

Your love of the fandom and investment in the Jugdral setting really shone through here. Bravo.

A+

@SoulWeaver

You know what went wrong here and said it yourself--I don't have to tell ya. Poor time managment; you got hit with the deadline crunch and wrote the whole thing in 4 hours. 

The premise is fine and its an impressive work for the time you put into it, but its not as thought out or polished as it could have been. (It's also unfortunate that its a Jugdral piece in the same round where Jotari also wrote a Jugdral piece and hit a home-run) 

Even on a timer though--at least space out your paragraphs.

Everything being smushed together like that makes for a difficult rread.


@DarthR0xas

Much better than last round. I really, really, really liked this one. You did something artful and clever here that I want to draw attention to.

"But Saizo’s mind wasn’t on the mission, it was something else far more important. His relationship with Kagero."

" Yet, her mind couldn’t focus on this important task, and instead it kept coming back to Saizo."

^^^
The juxtaposition between these two lines tells us so much with so little, and without any further elaboration lets the reader know why the relationship failed:

-In Saizo's PoV, the mission is distracting him from the importance of his relationship with Kagero.

-In Kagero's PoV, the relationship with Saizo is distracting her from the importance of the mission.


That just tells us everything we need to know--the disconnect. The different priorities. These are two individuals who obviously care deeply about each other, but who are operating on two entirely separate wavelengths.

Its entirely believable the way you framed this that there was a romantic spark and a relationship here--but that it all fell apart because they couldn't make it work.

I like it. You noticeably showed more attention and finesse  to your characterizations after last round's critique.

I don't have anything bad to say about this one or any reason why I wouldn't vote for it, other than that Jotari just hit it out-of-the-park and out-wrote you by a hair. (the extra attention to dialogue and perfect use of his characters is what earns him in the win, imo)  

____________

Not a whole lot submissions this round, but great work from everybody.

i feel like the longer this goes on, the more comfortable people are getting with their writing and the more we're seeing the quality of the work presented take off.

Looking forward to Round #5.
  



 

And you proceeded to miss the entire plot and POV of the story.  Good one, you are as dense as Chrom. :P:

 

Sarcasm aside, as I have said before, OTHER PROJECTS TAKE PRECEDENCE.  They are massive and more time consuming.

This is a side project to be done in the quickest amount of time because I DO NOT want to miss deadlines because I'm working on my other stuff.  Also not my best writing.  They never are.  I don't do PG13.  I am an M author simply because I prefer the darker subject matter to remain M.  Which is why I made the entry shorter by default and didn't go where it ultimately ended up going.  Had you paid attention and read between the lines you would have known that.

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1 hour ago, TheSilentChloey said:

I DO NOT want to miss deadlines because I'm working on my other stuff.

Ok, ok, I get it, lol! I was going to do some today but then the gorgeous Whitewing cards got revealed and I was busy freaking out. Tomorrow's my day off, I should be able to burn out a fair chunk and hopefully get caught back up.

6 hours ago, Shoblongoo said:

Any particular reason why you didn't space your paragraphs?

In this instance I was just glad to get it done and threw it up without really paying attention to the spacing. Paragraph breaks have been my bane for a long time, actually - I'd offer to let you see some of my even older stuff, but I've only had one person make it through more than one of those without asking me what ills I was trying to inflict upon humanity. I'm definitely better than I used to be for most of my stuff, as Chloey can attest since she's read a fair bit of my writing due to Shadow Tactician and was around during the timeframe for the mentioned writing I linked to to compare, but I do slip from time to time. In this instance, I was also attempting to test out doing dialogue without accompanying text making mention of who said exactly which lines, which I almost never do for good reason. Judging from the responses, it's not something I should repeat, so hopefully if I enter in a later round it'll be less difficult to read.
EDIT! I went back and looked, and apparently it didn't keep the Forums' normal Enter spacing, keeping Docs' normal line spacing instead. That would probably be the other reason it looked so smushed.

Edited by SoulWeaver
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Hmmm... I guess I checked here a bit too late, I just realized this morning I have a short story plan that would have fit pretty neatly into the prompt given- assuming, of course, that original work is accepted? The rules look like it depends on what the person deciding the prompt chooses.

I will write my idea anyway, though I won't post it here, of course. And I'd be happy to enter the next round to make up for my slight disappointment. 

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On 29/11/2018 at 11:54 AM, SoulWeaver said:

Ok, ok, I get it, lol! I was going to do some today but then the gorgeous Whitewing cards got revealed and I was busy freaking out. Tomorrow's my day off, I should be able to burn out a fair chunk and hopefully get caught back up.

In this instance I was just glad to get it done and threw it up without really paying attention to the spacing. Paragraph breaks have been my bane for a long time, actually - I'd offer to let you see some of my even older stuff, but I've only had one person make it through more than one of those without asking me what ills I was trying to inflict upon humanity. I'm definitely better than I used to be for most of my stuff, as Chloey can attest since she's read a fair bit of my writing due to Shadow Tactician and was around during the timeframe for the mentioned writing I linked to to compare, but I do slip from time to time. In this instance, I was also attempting to test out doing dialogue without accompanying text making mention of who said exactly which lines, which I almost never do for good reason. Judging from the responses, it's not something I should repeat, so hopefully if I enter in a later round it'll be less difficult to read.
EDIT! I went back and looked, and apparently it didn't keep the Forums' normal Enter spacing, keeping Docs' normal line spacing instead. That would probably be the other reason it looked so smushed.

I'm just teasing lol!

 

Though I am being brutally honest about that not being my best work.  Shorts like the one I did never will be better than my longer stories.

 

So @Jotari congratulations!

 

A bit late but here are my thoughts on everyone's stories, take with a grain of salt:

Spoiler

Jotari your story was a bit hard to follow, likely because of the format.  It wasn't exactly bad persay, I just found it difficult to follow.

 

That said I don't know Jugdral so that probably hampered me further since I wasn't really invested in the characters as much as I could have been.  For me it was "Oh pretty lady loves the guy with the moral grey ground and doesn't like the 'good guy' because reasons."

Spoiler

Darth, yours was Fates...and to cap it off two of my least favourite characters to boot.  Least favourite game and characters is not something I hold against the story, but it did hamper my enjoyment a fair bit.

 

But the story itself...a good set up, nice and short and to the point.  If only summerising Saizo and Kagero's supports.

Spoiler

Soul, I actually liked yours the best out of the stories.  And I don't even really know the game!  So kudos to you XD I really felt for Ishtar as she struggled.  It felt more like the previous theme but I could feel the cracks and strains showing in the relationship.

 

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Sorry for the delay, guys. I got tangled up with my studies + work and it seemed that I'd also get a cold, so today was the only day I was available, pretty much.

Anyway, congratulations, @Jotari, you're the winner of this round! Please come up with a prompt for Round 5.

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5 hours ago, TheSilentChloey said:

I'm just teasing lol!

 

Though I am being brutally honest about that not being my best work.  Shorts like the one I did never will be better than my longer stories.

 

So @Jotari congratulations!

 

A bit late but here are my thoughts on everyone's stories, take with a grain of salt:

  Hide contents

Jotari your story was a bit hard to follow, likely because of the format.  It wasn't exactly bad persay, I just found it difficult to follow.

 

That said I don't know Jugdral so that probably hampered me further since I wasn't really invested in the characters as much as I could have been.  For me it was "Oh pretty lady loves the guy with the moral grey ground and doesn't like the 'good guy' because reasons."

  Hide contents

Darth, yours was Fates...and to cap it off two of my least favourite characters to boot.  Least favourite game and characters is not something I hold against the story, but it did hamper my enjoyment a fair bit.

 

But the story itself...a good set up, nice and short and to the point.  If only summerising Saizo and Kagero's supports.

  Hide contents

Soul, I actually liked yours the best out of the stories.  And I don't even really know the game!  So kudos to you XD I really felt for Ishtar as she struggled.  It felt more like the previous theme but I could feel the cracks and strains showing in the relationship.

 

Yeah I was a bit concerned it would only really work for people familiar with Jugdral to appreciate, but it looks like there was enough of them to put me in the lead.

5 hours ago, Rapier said:

Sorry for the delay, guys. I got tangled up with my studies + work and it seemed that I'd also get a cold, so today was the only day I was available, pretty much.

Anyway, congratulations, @Jotari, you're the winner of this round! Please come up with a prompt for Round 5.

I'll make the prompt for this round a single word. Everyone can interpret the meaning and scope of it how they want. 

Round 5's prompt is Mercy.

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Hmmm vague but workable. Though I might have to sit on this one for a day or two. You know let my mind wander a bit

Edited by Otts486
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