Topic: The Creative Writing/Literature Topic

Well as I said @themcnoisy she is a human otherwise just with hyena ears and a tail.

Though I'm a touch confused... Are you suggesting we actually write a story?

A vegetable soup with noodles @RogerRoger if you must know

Awww thanks @RogerRoger 😊

Considering most of our posts are usually 3 lines or so it certainly makes it a memorable ocassion whenever I introduce another character.

Plus as you said there's the engaging, interacting element with roleplaying & I feel it's rather unfair if I say "Melody whips out her pistol and shoots Hunter" as a post if they don't know about it in the first place.

Here's the best I could find at the moment for a visual reference

I haven't read much of the source material, it's quite confusing and uses a lot of links, pics, gifs, videos, chat logs along with regular text to convey the story.

Also there's 7000 pages to it so... It's quite daunting and the MSPaint artwork is a bit... eh for the most part 😅

@themcnoisy Cheers mate! (no refunds by the way)

@Foxy-Goddess-Scotchy great work. I've only just had the chance to read it fully just now. Amazing. I'm serious about asking you to help on a Sci fi bunch of characters, I am in the process of making a proper game. It may not be the best thing ever but I could build the characters in dreams and create some short videos. I'm unsure if you have seen my videos but I would love to have some fleshed out characters to have a go at!

It would be a pity to not make use of such a talent in that capacity. Your builds are exactly what I am looking for ie) It was a flintlock pistol, most of the gun being ebony, with an assortment of clockwork like aesthetics round the trigger and barrel made from mythril... this gun only being able to shoot once before it needed to be reloaded from the looks of things, and brand new judging from it's pristine condition.

I could build that for sure!

Oh jeez I wasn't expecting that @themcnoisy 😁

I am back at work next week (And have to go in tomorrow about the new curriculum) so if you're needing it soon as possible I'd have to pass.

If there's no immeadiate timeframe though I could work on something like that... I can't promise it'll be as good though!

And I haven't seen your videos no, I'll have to give them a look sometime

Oh boy... That sounds a touch obnoxious with that much detail @RogerRoger ! 😅

@Foxy-Goddess-Scotchy Wow, I like the arsenal Ox is hauling around. What’s the release date of the video game? 😉
I can imagine a pretty sweet move set for combat where Ox can elbow people in the chest and sever their jugular with a well-placed headbutt.

Ha ha ha I wish

Thanks though @Th3solution I assume that's your approval of my writing

He's actually a bit of a softie despite the brutish appearance... It's more for intimidation then anything so I don't think he'd be able to do that without throwing up or at least dry heaving 😅

Creative writing is extremely fun. Before I started working here, I used to write short stories and other bits and pieces. It's a great outlet, no question.

It's something I want to get back into. I always have ideas, but rarely find time to get it all out.

Well... You could always spend maybe five/ten minutes writing before you head to bed @Quintumply ? S'what I did before I began this roleplaying I've been doing that's lasted a year now

There's a few good tips over the pages as well... I may've been the only one to share anything yet but it's been a pretty positive reception so far

@Foxy-Goddess-Scotchy

I like to imagine "fudging poppycock" is brutally intense profanity over there in Mary Poppins Land.

Suggestions? I'd probably tighten up the writing a bit.

For example, I'd take:
"Of course taking a few seconds to look over, properly adjusting and take in what she was seeing Hunter would realise that it wasn't just metal. But armour. Thick heavy platemail littered the stocky, but muscular, frame of the 8ft leader of Hunter's Fortune."

...and revise it like so:
"After a few seconds, Hunter realized it was armour. Thick, heavy platemail hung over the stocky yet muscular frame of the eight-foot leader of Hunter's Fortune."

(Now imagine if I was similarly concise in those rambling reviews I post on here )

If I was writing it, I'd probably rein in the use of ellipses a bit, too.

With that said, concise writing isn't important in an online RP. Detail, passion, and imagination are. And you certainly seem to have those down!

D'awww thanks @Ralizah 😊

I'm very well aware of my elipses problem. I can't seem to help putting them in abundence in whatever I write.

The other one I had up (Dunno if you saw before I deleted it) was just as bad with those little dots. I even mentioned beforehand that it's a minor problem of mine lol

@Foxy-Goddess-Scotchy Oh, did you delete an earlier post of yours?

I'm pretty bad about opening threads and only reading the last couple of replies, so if I say something that has already been addressed, feel free to ignore it. Well, feel free to ignore it anyway. I'm no authority on the English language.

It takes guts to post snippets of your own work online. It's very exposing.

My biggest issue is that it's difficult for me to silence the inner editor as I'm writing, which is problematic, as this makes it more difficult for me to enter a state of flow and also gives me less to work with later on when I come back later on to mercilessly butcher my precious but entirely too verbose sentences.

Just a teeeensy bit paranoid @Ralizah so I deleted it just in case anyone took it... I'm weird lol 😅

And that's fine I don't mind you saying something already said, in fact it would confirm it was a problem if I didn't already know about it!

@Foxy-Goddess-Scotchy The use of ellipses is more restrained here. Anyway, that's quite a character portrait!

I guess I'll post an excerpt from a... piece I've never quite known what to do with.

.
.
.

Death is lonely.

Crushingly so.

Becoming aware of yourself, you'll realize your own inherent incompleteness. Humans are born fragmented by design, and we were both humans... once. I know it's en vogue to say that the only person you need is yourself, but that's not true. Not really. Other people are what give us meaning in this universe. They're what compel us to act, and we define ourselves in relation to them. In a universe where you're the only form with any defined shape, the concept of a shape ceases to be intelligible at all.

And, as far as I can tell, it'll stay this way forever. The flesh rots away. Metal rusts. Matter expands, contracts, comes together, breaks apart, and eventually disintegrates in the fullness of time.

But spirit stuff is eternal.

We'll persist in the frigid depths of eternity, as countless ancient fires whisper their last secrets to our stupefied ears.

We'll be here to attest to the gross absurdity of it all.

Holy sh- @Ralizah ! 👏

That's a great little piece! I don't really know what else to say other then I thoroughly enjoyed it

How'd you come about writing it if I may ask? Just came to you? I can't seem to do anything neat like that... more of a dialogue and description kinda writer if you didn't already guess

@Foxy-Goddess-Scotchy Since you seemed to enjoy it, I decided to post the full thing. Edited it into the part of the post where the snippet originally was. I won't leave it up forever, but I am curious of your thoughts in the context of the full piece.

Anyway, I wrote it after a meditation session. It was originally more of a vignette, but I changed it to actually encompass a narrative of sorts. I'm a through-and-through physicalist, but I wanted to do a thought experiment about what it might be like to maintain a sense of consciousness after death.

I think it's very well done and for a thought experiment & short story/narrative you accomplished what you set out to do quite well @Ralizah , especially with your more thought provoking style

I do quite like that paragraph you showed me first the best if I were to judge them all seperately

... Also the Hello Meatbag at the beginning reminded me of Bender from Futurama and I may have read it with that voice in my head just a little 😅

@Foxy-Goddess-Scotchy Thanks! It's actually my favorite section of the piece as well, which is why it's the part I posted initially.

I do dialogue reasonably well, I think, and monologues, which is all this really is, but my weakness tends to be the area you seem to do well in: descriptions. I don't particularly care about evoking a sense of place or a mental image of a character. For me, the strength of literature is its ability to wrestle with complex ideas. Otherwise, I think painting and cinema are better mediums for exploring imagery and/or tapping the emotions. I also think gaming has an important role to play insofar as it allows you to create art that interacts with the player. In that sense, it's a bit more like an evolving and dynamic art form such as improv comedy or interactive theater as opposed to something static like cinema or literature.

At the same time, all art should be entertaining and/or engaging, and navel-gazing doesn't exactly lean into those areas for most people, so a balance has to be struck.

Anyway, thanks for the impressions. In terms of the tone, I probably had Notes from Underground in the back of my mind, but I can totally see Bender saying some of this stuff as well.

Honestly watching the D&D show Critical Role helped a lot for my descriptions @Ralizah . Matt Mercer is a pretty damn good DM and has some wonderfully vivid imagery that inspired me to just get better

And as you said yourself... Just practice.

The rp i'm in has gone on for a year and I'm better now then I was then... The Ox piece for example is actually a part of a set of 7 that introduced 4 new characters, 2 older characters got vastly updated descriptions and there was a giant 50ft monster too.

Took me a day to do it all but I was pretty chuffed by the end of it

@Foxy-Goddess-Scotchy There's no more satisfying feeling in the world than sitting down and just pounding out something complete.

But yeah, the past year or so I've been experimenting with flash fiction, as I find it to be incredibly hard to write fiction that short well... which means working on it is good practice.

I might try my hand at descriptions, too. Even if I never end up adopting a descriptive writing style in general, it's good to confront one's weaknesses.